ABSTRACT This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract surplus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.

ABSTRACT Socrates is an oddity. This past decade has seen both his radical contextualization through archeological efforts to locate him in the public spaces of his native Athens and his radical decontextualization through studies of his reception in later times and places. What unifies those seemingly divergent investigations of Socrates is a fascination with discovering and discerning where Socrates belongs. Socrates’ own contemporaries called him “atopos” (odd, literally, out-of-place), and our contemporary attempts to locate him seem to oppose this displacement, on the one hand, and capitalize upon it, on the other. By seeking Socrates in his own time and place, we may come to understand better how his very movements marked him as out of step with Athenian norms and how such a demarcation affects how we map rhetoric’s borders during that formative time. By seeking Socrates in other times and places, we learn that Socrates himself is a rhetorical topos returned to again and again by people who find or think themselves similarly marked as odd, inappropriate, unbelonging, or out of place. This location work matters for Rhetoric because Socrates is such an atopic (odd) figure in our history.

ABSTRACT As the popular narrative has it, the modern speech discipline in the United States was born out of a concern for democracy and reason. However, this story occludes other, decidedly undemocratic, foundational ideas that were at the heart of rhetoric and oratory during the first half of the twentieth century. Given contemporary concerns with both deliberative democracy and affect theory, rhetoricians and speech teachers would benefit today from a fuller understanding of some of the undemocratic ideas that influenced the modern rhetorical renaissance. This article helps accomplish this by focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, whose concern with persuasion and the masses was influential on early scholars of rhetorical oratory, including James Winans, William Brigance, and James O’Neill. Indeed, it was Gustave Le Bon who popularized the notion that the masses were like a psychological crowd devoid of reason and the ability to deliberate.

ABSTRACT Taking seriously Kenneth Burke's claim that identification follows property's logic discloses identification's rootedness not only in nonsymbolic motion but also in attitudinal sensation, that midway realm between sheer motion and symbolic action. Burke's key distinction is among three terms, not two—implying consubstantial (not antithetical) relations between pure persuasion and identification. Thus understood, these relations have implications for the New Rhetoric, in particular for how it frames the question of justice.

ABSTRACT The research projects upon which Hallenbeck, Olson, Solberg, and Wang reflect raise challenging questions about the location of and boundaries around their archival sources. The authors' reflections prompt my inquiry into how access to these sources might be affected by the socioeconomic and technological developments that are reshaping academe.

ABSTRACT This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

Abstract This study features the activist rhetoric of early African American clergyman Richard Allen. Through chronological analyses of four late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, we explore how Allen establishes individual and corporate agency and furthers an African American community consciousness. Allen's rhetoric, we argue, demonstrates the ways material and rhetorical opportunities affect textual production that, in turn, enables freedom and community to emerge. Paying particular attention to the strategy of the narrative account, we demonstrate how Allen's advocacy, which both works within and challenges the limitations imposed by white society, reflects and develops his identity as a black community leader.