Reviewed by: Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric by Adela C. Licona Jenna Vinson Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric Adela C. Licona Albany: SUNY P, 2012. 207pp. In her 2011 review of rhetorician Adela C. Licona’s documentary work, Marianna Grohowski hoped readers of the Community Literacy Journal would be inspired by Licona’s efforts to make visible non-academic community literacies while also performing multimodal, community-relevant composition. Readers of the CLJ will be happy to learn that Licona’s latest publication continues to emphasize the value and impact of community literacies. Her book, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric, provides activists, researchers, and educators with 1) a new theoretical framework through which to analyze community literacies and coalitional practices and 2) a vibrant genre to consider for community literacy projects and rhetorical analysis: zines. Zines are self-published and often locally-circulated booklets that are made up of words and images. The term “zine” derives from magazines and fanzines. However, as Licona explains, zines are a distinct genre characterized by content that challenges societal norms and dominant ways of thinking. In addition, the authors of zines—or zinesters—refuse “to wait for permission or acceptance” to write, publish, or circulate these texts (20). In conducting research for this book, Licona analyzed zines from the 1980s and 1990s that were donated to the Sallie Bingham Center Special Collections Library at Duke University. In her book, Licona argues for the value of third-space zines as sites for rhetorical study, coalitional community building, and the “hopeful potential” of social change. “Third space” is a tricky concept that Licona describes as “the abyss beyond dualisms” (8). Licona explains that third space can reference a physical location (e.g., a place in-between two other places such as a borderland), a methodology (i.e., a way of reading a text to look for ambiguities or challenges to established dichotomies), and a practice (i.e., being conscious of both/and possibilities as opposed to either/or distinctions). Licona asserts that the tactics, or borderlands rhetorics, of third-space zinesters move us past marginalizing and reductive binaries to [End Page 92] both/and consciousness and productive ambiguities. Zines potentially resist dominant dichotomies, build coalition, share lived knowledge, and promote grassroots literacies. The book includes five chapters. In the first chapter, “Borderlands Rhetorics and Third-Space Sites,” Licona introduces readers to zines and carefully delimits the scope of her study. She explains that she searched the Duke University collection for zines that were collaboratively authored by what she calls third-space subjects—authors who are feminist, queer, and/or of-color and who use the genre to articulate shared goals for egalitarian social change. By focusing on third-space print zines, Licona writes that she can analyze the spatialized literacy practices of people collectively working toward social justice in the specific areas where the zines circulate. Then, Licona sets up the theoretical framework of her study, drawing from the critical terms and insights of Chicana scholars Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Emma Pérez as well as feminist cultural geographer Doreen Massey. Scholars who similarly seek to assess the contributions and strategies of marginalized rhetorics will appreciate Licona’s distinctions between criticism and coalitional consciousness, dichotomies and third space, and homogeneity and community. In the second chapter, “The Role of Imagination in Challenging Everyday Dominations,” Licona builds on Chandra Mohanty and Gloria Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the importance of imagination as a coalition-building tool. She examines how zinesters imagine new ways they (and others in their communities) can connect via lived experience, shared knowledges, and collective resistance to social injustice. Licona illustrates different strategies zinesters use to invite and inspire coalitional activism including visual/discursive interventions in issues that readers across lines of difference would find upsetting (e.g., Nike’s exploitation of Vietnamese laborers). Licona describes how zinesters’ explicit calls for multi-racial collaboration on an issue or action and code switching practices allow multiply literate readers to engage. Readers of CLJ will especially enjoy the section “Community Scribes: Lived and Relational Knowledges and Community Literacies” as Licona powerfully and persuasively demonstrates...