ABSTRACT This essay examines the role of “rhetorical silence” as a part of the theorizing about character in the early American republic. The case study concerns James Madison’s deliberate and continuous rhetorical silences about the comprehensive notes he took at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. I argue that Madison’s rhetorical silences regarding his notes illustrate the shifting discourses of republican and liberal notions of virtue in the early-national period of the American republic.

In his book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano makes several important contributions to rhetorical, communication, and Latinx, race and ethnic studies, and social-movements scholarship. Among those contributions is his detailed historical study of the Young Lords as a social-movement group, which had been, until his study, barely (if at all) mentioned in communication literature. Additionally, his study of the Puerto Rican diaspora, specifically Nuyorican culture, identity, and politics within communication literature, is groundbreaking. And, his thorough, detailed, meticulous historical study of the Young Lords’ rhetoric provides a model of contemporary rhetorical scholarship that should be read and then modeled.The contribution I wish to focus on for this commentary is his theoretical contribution to rhetorical scholarship. Work within the field has studied colonialism through critiques of rhetorics of colonialism (Endres; Parameswaran; Stevens; Stuckey and Murphy) and empire (Abbott; Hartnett and Mercieca; Owen and Ehrenhaus; Perez; Pollini; Sandoval; Spurr), postcolonial critique (Dora; Hegde; Gajjala; Hasian; Jarratt; Kavoori; Kelly; Olson and Worsham; Parameswaran; Schwartz-DuPre; Shome; Wang), and neocolonial critique (Ayotte and Husain; Black; Buescher; Kuswa and Ayotte; McKinnon; Ono; Ranachan and Parmett; Rogers; Vats and Nishime) lenses. Moreover, critiques of colonialism have often been approached as what McKerrow calls “critiques of domination.”Wanzer-Serrano’s book offers a theory of rhetoric and decolonization, distinguished from postcolonial scholarship. Not only does Wanzer-Serrano offer a theory of decoloniality, but he also suggests that the Young Lords challenged decolonization in important ways. He argues, “In this book, I make the case that the New York Young Lords’ enactment of differential consciousness pushes the boundaries of decolonial theory. Through critical performances of border thinking, epistemic disobedience, and delinking, the Young Lords crafted a decolonial praxis that resisted ideological oversimplification and generated new possibilities and spaces for activism in their immediate contexts and beyond” (7).The main chapters of the book detail the history of the organization, its revolutionary nationalism, the role of women in the Young Lords, the organization’s neighborhood garbage campaign, and its campaign to reform the ideas and role of the church. A foundational book about Puerto Rican diasporic rhetoric, the book is attentive to historical nuance in its study of the New York Young Lords. It discusses their emergence and formation as a group, their political platform, their social work, and their decolonial orientation. Gaining expertise and knowledge about the Young Lords and Puerto Rican American rhetoric and culture in New York is a substantial undertaking, and the maturity and sophistication of Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s work is evident on the subject.Wanzer-Serrano comes to the study of the Young Lords as a “decolonial liberation movement” (149). He argues that “the Young Lords’ rhetoric of ‘the people’ embarks on an ‘ideologizing of ideology’ that reworked the people through a decolonial lens and for a decolonial function” (150). As part of their decolonial project, the Young Lords “delink from modernity/coloniality in theory and practice” (11). He captures the significance of delinking perhaps most poignantly in his discussion of the Young Lords’ church offensive, during which they occupied and took over the First Spanish Methodist Church and renamed it “The People’s Church.” There, he argues, “I try to enact and locate ‘an other thinking’ in their rhetoric—a delinking double critique functioning within both Anglo-American and Latin@ traditions and simultaneously ‘from neither of them,’ a critique ‘located at the border of coloniality’ that overcomes the ‘monotopic epistemology of modernity’ and ‘releases knowledges that have become subalternized’ by the coloniality in/of modern social imaginaries” (150). Building on the work of Bernadette Calafell and Michelle Holling, who develop the idea of Latin@ vernacular discourse, Wanzer Serrano adds his analysis that “a defining characteristic of decoloniality is a critical delinking that offers pluriversal alternatives to modern coloniality. Such alternatives can coalesce in challenges to ideographs like ‘the people’ but must also include broader epistemic shifts privileging geopolitical location and the body politics of knowledge in contradistinction to the dominant social imaginary” (164). Delinking from modernity also means delinking conceptually from liberal democracy, which he says “means turning toward a differential consciousness (a la Chela Sandoval) to map the connecting strands that can help us ‘change gears’ and envision a revised conception of democracy not dependent on a modern/colonial ethic of nonbeing’” (177). He advocates thinking of democracy as “fugitive—constantly in flight, marked by multiplicity, unbounded, and contingent.” In this way, he suggests, “Such openness, multiplicity, and constitutive antiracism provides a robust starting point from which to launch fugitive, democratic heterogeneities that can challenge homogenizing racial neoliberalism (177–178).Professor Wanzer-Serrano has made a significant contribution to scholarship through his book. His sophisticated discussions of theory and praxis, his bold move to challenge contemporary conceptions of coloniality, and his detailed case study, which (even without the theoretical framework) significantly adds to what we know about the important, yet understudied, social movement group called The Young Lords render this not only a book worth reading, but also one that becomes part of the canon of rhetorical studies, a hallmark of the best work rhetoric has to offer. This kind of contribution, once realized by others, will have longevity. In short, I would say that it is now not possible to talk about race, otherness, marginality, or power seriously in rhetorical studies without having to confront Wanzer-Serrano’s suggested optic of decoloniality.

“In the end, Luciano triumphantly asserted, ‘We’re building our own community. Don’t fuck with us. It’s as simple as that.’”—Wanzer-Serrano 131The epigraph—a quotation buried deep within chapter 4—belies the complexity and richness of Wanzer-Serrano’s project about the Young Lords and their rhetoric of “community control.” Although the quotation asserts a simple act of building community, Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals how difficult it is to reimagine what community is and can be in light of colonial histories and a neoliberal present. Indeed, the concept of “community” is not without its difficulties. It can deny difference by positing togetherness as the ideal and often devalues temporal and spatial differences (Young 7). Yet, even as community is conceived differently, “radical theorists and activists appeal to an ideal of community” (Young 1). From a definition based in the neighborhood to one spanning borders, “community” carries connotations of race, ethnicity, nationality, and, importantly, identity. Narrated by Wanzer-Serrano to convey the affective force and empowerment-via-liberatory politics, the quotation in the headnote reminds the reader of community’s centrality to the Young Lords and their rhetoric but also to their imagining as a people. In this response, I tease out how the trope of “community” functions within the book as part of the discourse of community control. In doing so, I posit that Wanzer-Serrano’s work reveals tensions about community as it is negotiated within the politics of academia, our scholarship, and our relations to the communities we identify with and/or study.The meaning of the term “community” as it is used in the book reflects the tensions about the term. Wanzer-Serrano revels in and unpacks these tensions. Chapters 1 and 2 historicize the Puerto Rican community’s presence in the United States as Puerto Ricans reconcile their distance from the island and histories that led to their present conditions. Although Wanzer-Serrano is the scholar researching from outside, he provides the Young Lords equal positioning as experts to provide a perspective and account born of direct experience. Thus, chapter 1 is “both a history of the Young Lords and a history from the Young Lords” and elucidates a Puerto Rican history informed by the Young Lords’ concern with coloniality (Wanzer-Serrano 34). Chapter 2 attends to the Young Lords’ revolutionary nationalism delinked from coloniality and instead connected with decoloniality. These two chapters contextualize the various ideologies underpinning the Puerto Rican relationship with the dominant United States. In this account, the Puerto Rican community exists and asserts itself in the face of assimilationist discourses while it simultaneously carves out a space for the development of the Young Lords’ revolutionary politics. Although the Puerto Rican people were operating and surviving within the residual structures of community imposed by coloniality, Wanzer-Serrano elucidates how the Young Lords reimagine the possibilities of what a Puerto Rican people (and their community) can be and look like when situated in the mainland of empire and modernity.Chapters 3–5 reveal how an organization is reshaped by a decolonial ethic. Chapter 3 centers women’s voices within the Young Lords’ organization. Chapter 4 focuses on the neighborhood and their needs through the “garbage offensive.” Chapter 5 foregrounds the idea of a shared people—both the neighborhood and marginalized voices within it—through the church offensive. While he does not explicitly state it, Wanzer-Serrano implies that a decolonial ethic of love functions as an ideal mode of building and sustaining community with liberation and justice in mind. An ethic of love, informed by an intersectional “decolonial Third World protofeminist critique,” provides an avenue to reshape and re-form itself as needed to serve the community (Wanzer-Serrano 93). Decolonial love also functions to listen and respond to the needs of a community to address the coloniality’s commonplace oppression, as evidenced in the Young Lords’ “garbage offensive.” Finally, a decolonial orientation allows for a reconceptualization of “people” outside of the “hegemonic constructions of a liberal/Western people” and toward one of a “pluriversal collective, demanding material and epistemological liberation” (Wanzer-Serrano 146). If the people can be reimagined in this way, their community and its social relations with place and others can also be reimagined in a way delinked from coloniality.Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals the very tensions of community and the multiple communities one identifies with, participates in, and is burdened by when traversing the spaces of academia, fieldwork, archive, and the neighborhood. Wanzer-Serrano’s critical self-reflections and revelations of positionality are peppered throughout the book but most evident in the introduction and conclusion. In a decade-long project spanning graduate-school experiences, Wanzer-Serrano’s initial theory building was first related to radical democratic theory, using the Young Lords as a case study. However, he later reoriented his project to focus on the Young Lords’ decolonial practice. In doing so and reflecting on this process, Wanzer-Serrano reveals the stakes of engaging in a decolonial project that requires a reexamination of one’s own epistemology, the education that led to it, and the scholarship that reinforces and circulates it. For Wanzer-Serrano, to build theory from the canon and to impose it on his subjects would inflict epistemic harm to his non-scholarly community in the name of solidifying one’s place within an academic community. Yet, to conceptualize a decolonial perspective in an ethical way requires time, energy, and commitment.Wanzer-Serrano’s book subtly reveals the stakes for academics of color and other marginalized communities. These scholars (myself included) often engage in research in these very communities and demonstrate the productive possibilities of theorizing from the ground up, not wholly disconnecting from the community in the name of securing “scholarly distance.” These academics identify with, and participate and live in, multiple communities, even as their work can serve and sever “community” in an effort to succeed within a neoliberal university model that is increasingly consumer-driven, instrumentally focused, and starved of community input. Yet, as the Young Lords illustrate, the rhetoric of “community control” foregrounds community as it operates from a decolonial orientation. Much in line with such scholars as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and la paperson, Wanzer-Serrano illustrates decoloniality’s power and alludes to the possibilities of the university as a decolonial force. While all rhetorical scholars may not take a decolonial orientation, Wanzer-Serrano’s book beckons us to consider it and to weigh the stakes of not recognizing the world-making value and potential of it.

The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.

ABSTRACT With this essay, I present an argument about the performative and perceptual nature of prudence. I support my argument through a case study in which I examine Barack Obama’s response to Edward Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures about NSA surveillance programs as a way to observe prudence in practice. In my analysis, I identify three ways in which Obama performed prudence. First, he established his image as a prudent and informed leader. Second, he established surveillance as a prudent and historically effective practice ensuring national security. Third, he established the contemporary policy of surveillance as a prudent and deliberate choice reached through discussion and participation by all citizens.

ABSTRACT Historical study of teachers and students reveals how rhetorical theories influence writers (McClish 2015). This case study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose considers the nineteenth-century rhetorical teachings of Samuel Phillips Newman, Hawthorne’s professor at Bowdoin College, a student of Blair, and a proponent of rhetorical taste. Using Newman’s 1827 A Practical System of Rhetoric and Hawthorne’s 1832 travel sketches, we analyze Newman’s influences on Hawthorne—particularly taste and the sublime and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne as a writer in the travel sketch genre. We consider Newman’s influences on Hawthorne as evidenced by writing practices that Newman had recommended or disapproved. In particular, we examine Newman’s explanation of taste and its complementary construct of sublimity and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne. We argue that Hawthorne both wrote within the paradigm of rhetorical taste as Newman taught it and struggled against its constraints to find his own perceptions. Furthermore, we see this struggle happening within the context of Hawthorne’s exposure to Newman’s American-inflected belletrism that emphasized both a discriminatory principle of taste and the growing body of American literature.

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

ABSTRACTThis longitudinal case study about the political rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—prime minister of Hungary between 1998 and 2002, and since 2010, respectively—demonstrates that the first, remarkable personal experiences in public communication may have a major impact (“imprinting”) on the future behavior of political actors. Orbán gave a memorably radical talk on June 16, 1989, urging Hungary’s democratic transition from Communism. The study uses critical discourse analysis and links it to media scholarship on live media events to show that Orbán became hostage of his own rhetoric and speech situation for the two decades that followed his 1989 entry.

ABSTRACT Recently, scholars have explored the empowering potential of epistemic privilege, a concept that refers to knowledge acquired through oppression as a privilege. Advancing these conversations, this article considers epistemic privilege as a rhetorical strategy. To explore the strategy’s potential and limits, this article turns to public letters exchanged between suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, in which the mother–daughter pair deliberated over the voting rights of the immigrant and working classes. Through this case study, this article finds that a rhetoric of epistemic privilege can work to empower multiple oppressed groups and yet reify power relationships.

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between rhetoric and judicial activism. A term first coined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1947, the charge of judicial activism has become ubiquitous in modern political and legal discourse, frequently leveled at judicial opinions with which one disagrees. Despite focused attention from legal scholars in recent years, the term continues to defy easy definition. After surveying the relevant legal scholarship on judicial activism, this article considers a widely decried example of activism in action. Taking the 2003 case of Hillary Goodridge v. Department of Public Health as a case study, the authors examine the five judicial opinions, paying particular attention to how each justice justifies his or her decision with recourse to one of three rhetorical forms (legal analysis, the discourse of science, and public consensus). We conclude that the legitimacy of judicial activism is a function of particular rhetorical forms (and not others).

Abstract A case study of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, can inform nineteenth-century North American rhetorical history by exposing the interplay of rhetorical theory and practice in an educational setting during the antebellum period. Evidence of this interplay emerges in the subject matter of students' quarterly exhibition and commencement orations and of their literary society presentations from 1823 to 1845. When considered as a curricular whole, this evidence suggests a symbiotic relationship between the primarily moralistic and belletristic discourse favored by the college's curriculum and the more broadly civic judicial and deliberative discourse favored by its literary societies.

Research Article| January 01 2004 Black Power: A Case Study of the Relationship Between Rhetoric and Society Cynthia P. King Cynthia P. King American University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2004) 7 (1): 221–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2004.10557237 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cynthia P. King; Black Power: A Case Study of the Relationship Between Rhetoric and Society. Advances in the History of Rhetoric 1 January 2004; 7 (1): 221–228. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2004.10557237 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressJournal for the History of Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2004 by the American Society for the History of Rhetoric2004the American Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: III. COLLOCUTIO You do not currently have access to this content.