This dissertation is about African Americans’ transnational rhetorical and literate social practices of reclaiming Black humanity. To this end, it asks: How is the humanity of African Americans rhetorically constituted in relation to Ghana? To reclaim Black humanity, what do African Americans do down the ground and to what end? For those who turn to Ghana to reclaim their humanity, what do they say they need to learn, and need to unlearn in the process of re-education? What does this re-education make possible? Where do they locate (if any) healing in this process of re-education? Currently, people, including those of African descent, are moving across transnational borders at a rate never seen before. In response, scholars in transnational rhetorical studies such as Rebecca Dingo and Blake Scott have challenged the field to account for the workings of “vectors of power” – colonial histories, nation-state power, and the operations of global capital—in people’s lives (Dingo and Blake 524). In relation to such movement among people of African descent, leaders in Global Black Rhetorics, Ronisha Browdy and Esther Milu, direct special attention to matters of healing, re-education, and the reclamation of Black humanity. Given its own experiences of brutal colonial histories of chattel slavery, resource exploitation, and current economic challenges, the nation-state of Ghana has become a contested transnational site to theorize African Americans’ inventive practices of negotiating these globalized forces which continue to dehumanize them in multiple ways. Heeding the call of cultural icons including W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou to “return home” to Ghana, the participants in this study enact everyday rhetorical and literate social practices such as taking Indigenous Ghanaian names, wearing Indigenous clothing, and engaging in somatic practices at contested historic sites. This dissertation has sought to honor these difficult and yet necessary rhetorical and literate social practices that African Americans deploy on-the-ground in Ghana to achieve their purposes of making a homeplace conducive for their humanity, honoring their ancestral heritage, re-educating themselves, and healing from epistemic and ontological harm as feats towards reclaiming Black humanity. In honoring these rhetorical and literate social practices of African Americans returning home to Ghana, I invoked bell hooks’ concept of homeplace and African philosophical and epistemic concepts of Ubuntu relationality and Sankofa. And yet the call to return home is not without its challenges–challenges that underscore the contributions of participatory rhetorical research in such transnationally complex domains.

This study investigates the uses of English in advertising in Brazil and the attitudes of Brazilians towards the use of different difficulty levels of English in advertising. Using a two part, mixed-methods approach, drawing from quantitative and qualitative methods, I utilized a corpus study to examine English uses in Brazilian magazines and a survey to investigate the difficulty of English slogans as a determinant for people's attitudes towards English in advertising. For the first part, three major Brazilian news magazines, Veja, Época, and ISTOÉ were used. From three issues of each magazine, results showed that 57% of the advertisements in all nine magazines contained English in different parts of the advertisements, with most occurrences in the product name, followed by the body copy, headline, subheadline, and slogan. English was used to advertise a number of different product types, but was especially used for advertising cars, electronics, events, and banks. It was also found that the majority of English was used for its symbolic representations of modernity, prestige, globalization, and reliability. Using a survey for the second part of the study, I investigated how Brazilian participants judged four advertisements that featured English slogans that were comparable to slogans judged to be easy or difficult to understand in a similar study conducted by Hornikx, van Meurs, and de Boer (2010). Participants were offered attitudinal choices to mark off on a 4-point Likert scale, where they indicated their attitudes towards the English slogans provided. They were also asked to determine if they understood the slogans and to translate them to indicate their actual understanding of the slogans. Participants showed more positive attitudes towards the uses of English than negative attitudes. The survey provided evidence that with the very low numbers of correctly translated slogans, many participants believed they understood the slogans, which could prove to be more of an indicator of positive attitudes than their actual understanding of the slogans. This project provides an example from one Expanding Circle context touched by the far-reaching influences of World Englishes.