Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace

n their recent article on Importing Composition: Teaching and Researching Academic Writing Beyond North America, Mary N. Muchiri and her co-authors challenge our assumptions that composition is universal in its uses and applications, and that writing instructors and writing students do not occupy particular geographic locations. Muchiri et al. remind readers that composition is very much a product of North America and of capitalism and illustrate what happens to composition research when it is exported-how it changes in a different, de-localized context of its origination. Importing Composition highlights some of the assumptions that form the basis of U.S. research on academic writing-assumptions that sometimes seem bizarre in a new context (176). In our limited notions of