Abstract Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument Address, delivered on April 14, 1876, at the unveiling of a monument to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC, was a complex and extraordinary rhetorical act. This essay argues that Douglass's address created a measured memory of Lincoln by moving the audience through a cycle of experiences that allowed multiple, often conflicting, sentiments to meaningfully coexist. The essay begins with an account of key contextual elements about Douglass, Lincoln, and the events that shaped the address. The next section turns to the text of the Freedmen's Monument Address, showing how Douglass's use of a ring composition served to memorialize both Black Americans and Lincoln in complex ways. The essay concludes with observations about how the address was received, which illustrates the difficulty of maintaining rhetorical complexity in acts of memorialization.

Abstract This article investigates an event in which the crew of Apollo 8 read the first verses of the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, 1968, to a television audience of half a billion people. Drawing from letters from a NASA official who provided detailed rhetorical advice for the event, letters to the editor and op-eds in local newspapers, and an interview with one of the crew, it examines how the planners and the public assessed the appropriateness of the reading. While many different ways existed to interpret the occasion of the broadcast, we argue that the decorousness of the reading was understood as a function of the magnitude of the mission and the sublime “God's eye” view it afforded.

In The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity across Alabama, the United Kingdom and South Africa, author Cole Manley contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the Montgomery bus boycott. The author acknowledges that there continues to be numerous studies on how the boycott influenced the course of the civil rights movement as well as the implications of the boycott on domestic and civil politics (15). However, insufficient attention has been paid to the boycott's international impact. Manley emphasizes that his book does not reiterate the well-established timeline of the boycott or situate it within context of the federal government; rather, it “explores the critical organizing by the Women's Political Council (WPC) during the late 1940s and early 1950s and links this work to the transnational ramifications of the Montgomery boycott” (24). Specifically, Manley contends that the Montgomery bus boycott represented a global and local struggle due to two contributing factors. First, the pacifist advisors of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizers of Montgomery connected the boycott to social and resistance movements overseas. Second, the boycott became an international media event which initiated coverage from both international news organizations and independent activist groups.To begin, Manley contextualizes the political and social organizing in Montgomery within a post-war era. The author divides the book chronologically into two sections, each covering an international bus boycott to show the influence of the Montgomery bus boycott on social movements overseas. In the first section titled, “Gandhi, Montgomery, and the FOR Comic Book,” he provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which Gandhian nonviolence and decolonization influenced public perceptions of the boycott organizers. Manley focuses particular attention on Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, and Dr. Lawrence Reddick and their awareness and articulation of Gandhian nonviolence.Further, Manley acknowledges the influence of the FOR in promoting the Montgomery bus boycott overseas. In 1957, the FOR published a comic book to affirm the movement's theological and nonviolent principles. In this comic book, the FOR strategically and explicitly positioned the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “Gandhian hero” (53). As Manley writes, “Like Gandhi, King recognized that social movements could transform struggles in faraway places. In his sermons and speeches, King often referenced an interconnected and interdependent world, explaining that out of this ‘world house’ there could emerge a ‘beloved community’” (42–43). Thus, the objective of the FOR's comic book was to provide global activists and nonviolent organizers a handbook to articulate King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance and the social gospel. For Manley, “the global distribution of the comic book is one way of tracing social movements across the Atlantic . . . [and] clearly [seeing] how Montgomery became a reference point for anti-apartheid activists” (57–59).Intended for broad dissemination, Manley reasons, “the comic book created a mythology of the Montgomery boycott that shaped perceptions of King and the United States civil rights movement” (57). By 1958, the comic book began to circulate throughout South Africa, and Manley draws a parallel between the Montgomery bus boycott and the South African Alexandra bus boycott. He argues that, “Like in Montgomery, Black South Africans had, through sheer determination, won concessions despite brutal state violence” (59). However, Manley is cautious to draw similarities between the two bus boycotts as South Africans used the Alexandra bus boycott as a means of both nonviolence and violent resistance, which contrasts with King's nonviolent philosophy. To conclude the first section, Manley acknowledges that Montgomery and South Africa not only aligned through the Black press, but civil rights leaders united themselves with the continued growth of the anti-apartheid movement.In the second section of his book, “Montgomery and Bristol's Transnational Ties,” Manley analyzes the 1963 Bristol bus boycott to exemplify how citizens of other countries interpreted the boycott in Montgomery. To introduce his analysis, Manley draws upon the similarities between Montgomery and Bristol. For example, both cities were tied to transatlantic slavery. By the mid to late 1800s, Alabama had become one of largest slave-owning states with at least four slave depots operating in Montgomery (63). Additionally, throughout the nineteenth century, Bristol ships transported over five hundred thousand slaves from Africa to the Americas (64). Although Manley acknowledges commonalties between the movements, he also recognizes the differences. For instance, the 1963 Bristol bus boycott resulted from the failure of bus management companies to hire Black drivers and negotiations with protesters proceeded without the involvement of courts and legal representation. Additionally, the Bristol bus boycott did not gain broad cultural support or mass participation but gained appeal from white city leaders. However, despite the contrasts between the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts, Manley highlights the global influence of media networks on transnational organizing. The transnational Black press reported on the boycott in Montgomery for activists and readers in the United Kingdom.To conclude, Manley poses questions about the public and collective memory of freedom struggles as forms of social movements. Although Manley cautions that the “stories should [not] be entirely removed from the political context in which they are written” (16), he argues that the lessons from the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts can offer an account of what a globally unified social movement can achieve in a postwar era (16). Manley contends, “Revisiting the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts can help modern-day participants in social movements understand how freedom struggles connect and relate to each other during a political moment” (25).Manley's analysis of the Montgomery bus boycott's international impact in South Africa and the United Kingdom allows for a closer examination of King's nonviolent philosophy throughout his career. As Manley argues, King's nonviolent philosophy serves a unique rhetorical function because of its historical and global context. The origins of King's nonviolent philosophy within and beyond his speeches allow for a wider and global context for examination. However, Manley acknowledges the lack of research correlating Montgomery and transnational boycott events.Manley's analysis carefully articulates the ways in which King's theology was motivated by transnational politics. He reasons, “Anticolonialism and liberation theology inspired King's global thinking and encouraged him to align his public addresses on the [Montgomery] boycott with independence movements overseas. . . . As King understood it, the social gospel was a borderless and transnational concept that could be adapted to interpret political events ranging from the Montgomery boycott to anticolonial wars of liberation” (42–44). Thus, Manley offers justification for how, through the FOR comic book, Montgomery became a reference point for anti-apartheid activists. His book provides a nuanced understanding of how King's theology and philosophical assumptions connect divine power and human agency for the purposes of social change.However, Manley is cautious not to over emphasize a universal claim of King's theology and nonviolent philosophy with the correlation between the Montgomery boycott and the protests overseas. Particularly, he faults the FOR for making King the center of the Montgomery boycott. Apart from a reference to Rosa Parks, there was no mention by the FOR of Jo Ann Robinson and the influential role of the WPC in publicizing the boycott. Manley acknowledges, however, that Jo Ann Robinson insisted that the whole world would be watching (62).Manley's attention to King's nonviolent philosophy and theological teachings throughout the civil rights movement helps him as he attempts to account for King's importance in transnational social movements without overstating his role in the Montgomery boycott. This articulate balance reflects Manley's acknowledgement of King's nonviolent philosophy as well as its expansive presence beyond Montgomery. For “The connections and disconnections between civil rights struggles in the United States and in the United Kingdom, as well as ties between these movements and the anti-apartheid struggle, suggest a complex web of social movements” (86).The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity across Alabama, the United Kingdom and South Africa benefits most from the emphasis on King's nonviolent philosophy and theological teachings. Manley's strategic use of the social gospel as well as a detailed contextual history strengthen his argument that the Montgomery bus boycott represented both global and local struggle. Although Manley acknowledges that research continues on how the boycott influenced the course of the civil rights movement, as well as the implications of the boycott on domestic and civil politics, he shifts to examine the effect of Montgomery within a transnational context. The greatest contribution of Manley's book is its articulation and theorization of how social movement research transcends transnational boundaries. Although Manley notes the limits of his research, the book serves to initiate future studies and theorize the ways in which the Montgomery bus boycott influenced global social change.

Abstract In 1906, Eugene V. Debs published the most infamous editorial of his career, entitled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Addressing the murder charges against prominent Western Federation of Miners leadership, Debs mobilized threats and rhetorical violence to provoke attention to reportedly unjust legal practices. “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” remains something of a puzzling outlier in Debs's rhetorical canon. Despite his established legacy of peaceful protest and his preference for education toward gradual change, he announced a bold plan in the editorial for violent revolt and immediate upheaval. Through an analysis of “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” in context, I argue Debs invoked rhetorical violence in the service of ultimately peaceful outcomes, suggesting a theory of rhetorical violence geared toward nonviolent social change. This study contributes a recovery of the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone murder controversy for rhetorical scholars, while providing an expanded theoretical understanding of rhetorical violence to explain Debs's puzzling but successful navigation of an uncharacteristic rhetorical strategy.

In Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, political theorist Heather Pool offers a theory of “political mourning” in which publics respond to a highly visible death (or deaths) in ways that challenge the existing meaning of citizenship and the nation's responsibilities towards disenfranchised groups. In the introduction, Pool states, “I define political mourning as an affective communal response to a loss that threatens (or is perceived to threaten) the historical narrative, present expression, or future possibility of the political community and/or the ideals that sustain that political community” (17). While political mourning could be associated with any identity group in the United States, Pool specifically examines the role of racial identity formation. In addition to centering racial identity in the political mourning concept, Pool narrows the focus of her work to the deaths of “everyday people” rather than public figures such as politicians or martyred activists.This book contributes to political theory by building upon past scholarship on mourning and trauma studies. In the introduction, Pool argues, “It is the central claim of this book that the deaths of everyday citizens, at particular moments and in the wake of a contingent process by which these deaths are made political, can move the living to political action” (10). Pool then delineates between three forms of “mourning” in chapter one, including “private mourning,” “public mourning,” and “political mourning” (14–21). The conception of “political mourning” draws from John Dewey's publics and the “barriers to creative democracy.” These barriers—“apathy”, “indirect effects”, “the problem of presentation,” and “development of judgment” (19)—provide the framework in the analysis chapters of Political Mourning. Pool states, “Considering Dewey's focus on mobilizing citizens out of apathy, widely visible losses that prompt discussions of responsibility can be seen as moments when publics are formed. In response to visible losses, citizens and political leaders often propose specific institutional reforms” (20). Additionally, Pool extends theories regarding death and politics, including works by Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler's “mortalist humanism” concept, and Simon Stow's book, American Mourning (21–22). The author traces the political process of “how mourning becomes political by examining several instances where death served as the justification for political calls for change” (33, original emphasis). In Pool's “processual theory of political mourning,” scholars should consider five aspects of a highly publicized death, including: “context”; “visibility”; “agents”; “responsibility”; and “political change” (7–8).The analysis chapters include the following four examples of political mourning in the United States: The Triangle Fire of 1911; the murder of Emmett Till; the September 11 attacks; and the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter two examines the political mourning surrounding the Triangle Fire, which involved the deaths of 146 young women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This chapter critiques the ways in which white racial identity transformed, in part, due to the mourning process and memorials in honor of deceased workers who were mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Prior to the Triangle Fire, “white identity” was reserved almost exclusively for Anglo-Saxons (47). When workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory held a labor strike less than two years before the fire, although “non-white” workers received a lot of press coverage, their efforts to unionize failed. According to Pool, the political mourning following the fire motivated the public to support increased worker protections. Pool states, “Before the fire, the immigrant, not-quite-white striking workers were perceived by political elites as attacking American values and cherished ideals of self-sufficiency at the heart of American identity. . . . However, the power and the outpouring of public sympathy after the fire recast the now-dead workers as victims of politically enabled negligence and racialized exclusion” (49). Additionally, she claims that the dead workers’ “youth, femaleness, and ambiguous racial status” transformed them into sympathetic figures in the public's imagination (49). Although factory fires were common during this period, Pool argues that the earlier news coverage of the Triangle Factory workers’ strike created a “visibility” that made the public “predisposed to care about the workers in this factory” after the fire (56–57, original emphasis). Pool claims that the widespread mourning in New York City following the Triangle Fire, including a “March of Mourning” with nearly 400,000 marchers and onlookers, mobilized the public to care for “non-white” laborers (59) and adjusted the public's understanding of non-Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” Pool claims, “Triangle was a moment when intra-white racial differences were muted, and one of many moments in the long process of reconceptualizing the threat to Americanness as originating not from hordes of immigrants but from blackness” (66). The public began to view the mostly Italian and Jewish victims of the Triangle Fire in New York as “innocent victims,” and their victimhood and status as working-class immigrants “laid the groundwork for a shift from hostile race relations toward friendly ethnic rivalries that helped pave the way to full citizenship for white workers within a racialized democracy” (67).Chapter three explores the political mourning surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. Pool provides a detailed overview of the scene of the murder in Mississippi, the funeral procession in Chicago, and the deep South location for the trial of Till's killers. In this chapter, Pool discusses the primary agent of this political mourning, Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Bradley (more commonly known as Mamie Till-Mobley). Pool argues that Till-Bradley's claim “I know the whole United States is mourning with me” was, in Pool's words, “a powerful rhetorical construction,” that extended a mother's private mourning of her son to a collective mourning for Americans of all races (80–81). Additionally, the author connects the death of Emmett Till and the subsequent failure of the Mississippi court to convict his two murders to sociopolitical contexts, including the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Pool claims that the unjust verdict of “not guilty” for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who later confessed to Till's murder) helped propel political change by getting Northern liberal whites to recognize the extreme harms of white supremacy. She states, “A politics of mourning over Till's death gave white American liberals—who had apparently come to accept the Jim Crow status quo—a clear instance to reflect on the calls of the nascent civil rights movement for racial justice and to see how the reality of Jim Crow violated aspirations to actual American democracy” (72–73). Similar to the author's finding in the chapter on the Triangle Fire, some white Americans became motivated to see a racialized community differently once a tragic death received widespread media coverage. This chapter of Political Mourning provides one of the most insightful applications of the political mourning concept that rhetorical critics could use with other civil rights case studies. As Pool states, “Without understanding the politics of mourning, it is difficult to make sense of why some deaths lead to political change while others do not” (90).In chapter four, Pool argues that the United States adopted a skewed version of political mourning following the September 11 terrorist attacks, what she terms “sovereign mourning.” In contrast to the other cases, the author claims that, following 9/11, the American government did not take any responsibility for the events that could have motivated the terrorists, including US military interventions and political intrusions in the Middle East. Furthermore, the news coverage of 9/11 focused on images of planes flying into the Twin Towers and burning images of the Pentagon rather than bodies of the deceased. In the analysis chapters on the Triangle Fire, Emmett Till, and Black Lives Matter, there are detailed descriptions of how images of the dead served pivotal roles in rallying the public toward political change. And finally, the majority of the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were white Americans, primarily upper-class white men in the financial industry. These victims were honored along with the New York City firefighters and police officers who responded to the attack on the Twin Towers. Meanwhile, the racialized groups of Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Arabs were constructed as an “Arab Muslim enemy” that could fill the country's need for an external target following the end of the Cold War (97–99). Pool, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers first-hand, provided a compelling description of the context preceding 9/11. This chapter departs in some ways from Pool's theorization of political mourning. It may have been beneficial for readers to learn more about how the patriotism following 9/11 helped draw white racial groups together, compared to other racial groups.Finally, chapter five centers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the impact of Trayvon Martin's and Mike Brown's deaths. Pool states that while many social media users adopted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to push for political change regarding police brutality, the alternative #AllLivesMatter became a backlash against centering blackness. As the author argues, “If, as the data seem to indicate, those using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter are generally white and pro-law-enforcement, #AllLivesMatter seeks to equalize the risk of being a police officer with being a black citizen. . . . It also disregards the long history of law enforcement's purpose: to protect both property and whiteness” (139). It is important to note that both Martin and Brown were killed by individuals who were white-appearing and serving in roles to protect the state. Since Political Mourning was published in 2021 and completed in the spring of 2020, there are only brief mentions of George Floyd's death by strangulation. However, in the case of George Zimmerman (who killed Martin) and Officer Darren Wilson (who shot Brown during a traffic stop), neither of the killers were convicted of a crime. Chapter five instructively synthesizes past studies on the forms of dialogue that social media users engaged in with either hashtag. As the BLM movement is ongoing, Heather Pool's connection of the political mourning concept to this activism could help scholars studying other deaths that have been commemorated by BLM. Pool claims, “The public whose interests the state reflects and whose interactions become predictably ‘canalized’ is a white public, who has rejected both logical and emotive calls to recognize the humanity of blacks and other people of color in the United States. And yet blacks (and other excluded groups) regularly challenge the undemocratic institutional arrangements that define our white democracy” (143, original emphasis).Pool concludes by considering the outcomes of political mourning, whether it will “serve as a powerful resource to demand Deweyan democracy” or “lead the polity down dark roads of xenophobia and the denial of our own role in shaping the world” (153). These two possibilities are reflected in the four case studies. While “political mourning” could help scholars studying public memory, affect, rhetorical history, media theory, and publicity surrounding deaths and tragedies, the concept may be too broad, or stretched to its limits, aligning the aftermath of murders with the aftermath of terrorism and deadly fires.

According to professional correspondence from Harvard, the spring 2024 anti-war and Palestine solidarity protests on campus were “disruptive.”1 UCLA similarly claimed that their students’ encampment was “a focal point for serious violence.”2 Despite these assertions, independent non-profit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project analyzed 533 US campus demonstrations from that spring and found that 97 percent were uneventful.3 Journalist Steven W. Thrasher spent time at four camps and describes these as “beautiful” encounters.4 CNN examined “the role professors have played in the demonstrations,” a facet of the protests that “received comparatively little attention.”5 At my own institution's protest—Virginia Commonwealth University—I watched students set up food and medical stations, deliberate, and intermittently chant at a volume slightly higher than the towering, middle-aged white man who, almost every week, projects a monologue about hell outside the library.When it comes to student-driven political activity on college campuses, charged and widespread commentary often clashes with far more banal and contradictory perspectives. One of John McWhorter's New York Times op-eds, for instance, calls the 2024 student protests “a form of abuse.”6 Online comments on this piece display a range of assumptions about US higher education: someone writes that people with humanities and social science degrees graduate “with zero knowledge.” Another person maintains that the protests “are purely performative.” What I hear in these comments and in the broader narrativizing around college students are resonances of truisms that Bradford Vivian's vital book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education would categorize as, indeed, misinformation7. To Vivian, such truisms coalesce into an farfetched worldview where college students “crave confirmation” to the extent that they “frequently shut down campus events and even assume power over entire universities,” rendering an alternative reality where college is a breeding ground for extremism.8 As Vivian argues, this implausible perspective grows out of “fixations on the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces,”9 the circulation of which produces reactionary doctrines like “viewpoint diversity.” These doctrines perform propagandistic moves such as proliferating data to mimic scientific or theological argumentation and appealing to feelings like cynicism as expertise. Vivian emphasizes that casting doubt on the legitimacy of universities “is common in periods of rising authoritarian sentiment.”10 A year after the publication of Campus Misinformation, Donald J. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate—the same man who in 2021 delivered a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” for the National Conservatism Conference.11Kendall Gerdes's compelling Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism is a smart analysis of how such misinformation forms. Gerdes's book unpacks public critiques of (over)sensitivity to show how those critiques fuel misinformation about college students and higher ed more generally. Gerdes argues that critiques of sensitivity mark an “ideological discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action” (4). Even though misinformation does not persuade on a purely intellectual level, language is still reduced to mere correspondence. If words are just words, then college students are too sensitive about what texts they're asked to read, what visitors are paid to speak on campus, how violations are managed, and so on. But if words are more than just words—if language is perlocutionary—then language initiates a sensitivity that resonates in far more collective ways than previously realized. As Gerdes articulates, “the sensitivity of rhetorical subjects is a generalized condition of possibility for rhetorical affection” (51). Universities and colleges pose a threat because they reveal how vulnerable or exposed we really are, together, within language.Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity is revelatory: with each site of inquiry—trigger warnings, sexual misconduct policy, Black student activism, and campus carry policies in Texas—rhetoricity itself is resignified. The book articulates that it is one thing to think of sensitivity as a weakness—it is an entirely different thing to think of sensitivity as “an irremissible exposedness.” “Before symbolic persuasion,” Gerdes writes, “before thinking and knowing, even before the experience of being, a rhetorical sensitivity obtains, opening us to existence as rhetorical subjects” (91). This conception transforms many of rhetoric's givens. If sensitivity is a mutual condition “of one's constitution in language” (38), then “vulnerability and exposedness” are not “simply matters of individual agentive choice” (51). Rather, vulnerability is a radical openness to being addressed. At all times, to be rhetorical existents is to sit in the potential for language to affect.Readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs will be interested in how Gerdes demonstrates that public critiques of sensitivity enlist the topos of academic freedom, often misunderstood as adjacent to free speech. Academic freedom is supposed “to provide insulation for those with less rhetorical power,” since the production of knowledge should be free from hegemonic pressures (9). Still, academic freedom is a baggy topos. In 2025, I think we are more aware than ever that appeals to academic freedom do not always protect against “harassment campaigns” and remain contingent on the governor's board of visitors (9). Infrastructurally, academic freedom is often a tool or gauge of rhetorical power. As Gerdes points out, arguments about curricular changes and practices even put academic freedom in opposition to students. When “trigger warnings” were constructed as a talking point—cherry-picked from isolated contexts—academic freedom was simultaneously turned into an exigence. Gerdes refers to a 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education article that used trigger warnings as evidence of an existential threat to the university (25). Many such opinion pieces not only amplify suspicion of students but also “pit the rights of instructors against the rights of students” (26). I think most rhetoricians would be wary of that dynamic. All told, Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity provides a nuanced reading of trigger warnings as advocacy for accessibility given that trauma modulates bodily response.Gerdes's third chapter argues that college campuses do not feel safe for historically disenfranchised students. Most campuses, Gerdes argues, are defined by what Louis M. Maraj references as “white institutional defensiveness, policies, and practices that posture tentatively (often in racially colorblind ways) so as to avoid causing racial stress for white individuals.”12 Black student activism that demands “safe spaces,” such as the productive 2015 occupation of the Carnahan Quad on the University of Missouri's campus, is always resistant to Diane Lynn Gusa's conception of “white institutional presence,” which is another example where Gerdes shows how rhetorical sensitivity can be a transformative tactic for invention (63).Sensitive Rhetorics not only takes student activism seriously as institutional critique, but it also implies that college students are uniquely attuned to our shared openness. The issues that college students raise make explicit the “power of language to injure, wound, or harm” (4), implying that the practice of learning sensitizes you, making the address of others more salient and available while you yourself grow more responsive. In this way, Gerdes communicates what many lifelong learners feel: the simultaneous heaviness of beginning to notice differently—notice more—while beginning to feel slightly more responsible. College students are not fragile or self-absorbed. In their quest for trigger warnings and safe spaces, students are practicing ethical sociality. Activism mobilized by sensitivity is not whimsy nor idiosyncrasy—it's an active negotiation with what it feels like to become more responsible for yourself with others.In the book's composition, it is inspiring to witness Gerdes pulling from sensitivity as a resource. If vulnerability is distributed, as Sensitive Rhetorics argues, then even experts on sensitivity are themselves drained, prickled, and agitated, with or without personal permission. While Gerdes shows remarkable restraint referencing egregious arguments as well as questionable decisions to platform speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos outside of “peer review and shared governance” (31), every so often Gerdes delivers a biting critique. In the book's rundown of how students pursuing the Title IX process to address abuses are demeaned, Gerdes writes: “It's worth noting when scholars complain about students acting like consumers but appeal to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a justification for academic freedom, as if the metaphor of an intellectual marketplace should only extend to those it figures as merchants, as if the responsibility for rhetorical engagement amounts to something like ‘buyer beware”’ (49). In response to misinformation about trigger warnings, Gerdes sneaks in some fair snark: “This claim implies that the potential for trauma is so regularly inflicted on students that to advise them about it in advance would halt the day-to-day activities of teaching” (35).This book sensitized me. The first chapter on trigger warnings is a tour-de-force and the arrangement of the book is incredibly smart. I'm now wondering what “ambient norms” my pedagogical and professional choices perpetuate (29). I'm struck by what it means to be unendingly affected by others. I'm spinning stories of rhetoric where sensitivity is “a rhetorical term of art” (3). I'm listening for fallacies of false dilemmas or those moments when higher ed values serve misinformation. My antenna is up, I'm reminded of precious commitments, and it's all due to the “uncloseable openness” of Sensitive Rhetorics (4).

In The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, Jenna N. Hanchey delves into the intricate and often contradictory world of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), focusing on their operations in Tanzania. Blending decolonial and psychoanalytic theory, Hanchey explores the political and social forces that govern the operations of NGOs in Africa. Hanchey's central theoretical contributions are, first, the concept of “liquid agency,” which refers to the fluid ability of individuals to act in varying contexts (17). Such an ability project serves as an interconnection between personal agency, external influences, and environmental circumstances that could cause human agency to shift. Second, the concept of “liquid organizing” refers to the flexible and adaptive approach NGOs take to prioritize relationships with Indigenous people beyond rigid engagement structures (21). This focuses on the collaboration and spontaneity of Western donors to respond to the needs of stakeholders. Hanchey, in weaving the threads of these theoretical ideologies and proving their practicalities, draws on rhetorical fieldwork, ethnography, and rhetorical criticism to examine how Tanzanian NGO workers and communities navigate and resist colonial systems, frequently creating their own “fluid” response to the inflexibility they encounter.The book is made up of two sections. In Part I, comprising the first three chapters, Hanchey explores the theoretical foundations of Western subjectivities, mainly how leaders and volunteers participate in “haunted reflexivity,” as defined by Hanchey (31, 56). This idea draws attention to the struggle between the volunteers’ attempts to distance themselves from neocolonialism and their awareness of their involvement. These silent conflicts demand the volunteers’ acknowledgment of “hauntings” or lingering issues, especially those that unsettle the sense of self or familiar systems of control. Part II, also divided into three chapters, turns to the NGO itself, discussing the conflict between Western organizational theories and the more flexible, relational organizing styles of the Tanzanian people. The chapters examine leadership and land ownership tensions and conclude that when the NGO “falls apart,” the collapse creates new opportunities. The book's primary metaphor—the “center cannot hold”—indicates how neocolonial and decolonial ideas are incommensurate. However, the transformational and adaptive potential that arises from the NGOs’ disintegration, what Hanchey calls “fluidity,” becomes the unifying theme of the conversations across the book.Hanchey's critical examination of how a Tanzanian community was made to embrace modernization principles prompts NGOs to recognize and be mindful of presenting programs that reflect a Westernized gaze. She argues that Western donors provide incentives that eventually lead aid workers to adhere to ideas of altruism and use irony or detachment to avoid responsibility and a confrontation with structural problems. Hanchey states that international aid “offers the opportunity to resecure masculinity through neocolonial relationship” (34). Thus, the core of the first chapter exposes readers to how international aid not only assists but also functions as a means of maintaining power, reinforcing gender hierarchies, and perpetuating unequal relationships between the Global North and South. The rhetoric of help also affirms the provider's sense of masculinity, tied to dominance and control. According to Hanchey, Western subjects—men in particular—reproduce hierarchies under the impression of beneficence. Through the second chapter, Hanchey calls readers to think of how the “subjectivity of Western volunteers is constructed through foreclosure of the neocolonial self” (60) and “how white supremacist and neocolonial attitudes underlie the fantasy of white saviorism counterintuitively providing grounds for volunteers to avoid recognizing themselves as partakers of fantasy” (73). Thus, Hanchey examines how white volunteers perpetuate colonial power dynamics while avoiding self-awareness or accountability. To avoid culpability, these volunteers use denial, which is discussed in subsequent chapters as a means of maintaining subjective coherence.Chapter three concentrates on the haunted reflexivity that leads to the internal change of Western subjects, and focuses on how Tanzanian NGO staff members implement flexible organizing techniques within the inflexible frameworks. Hanchey poses critical questions that challenge “what being reflexive means” (89). By doing this, she compares the effect of colonialism on both the colonized and colonizer: “Haunted reflexivity requires choosing not to turn away, choosing subjective dismemberment over a reprisal of fantasy, choosing to give up the fiction of control” (101). This means that there is a necessary “haunted reflexivity” to be faced due to the abhorrent legacy of colonialism for both the colonized and the colonizer. Hanchey argues that the erasure and pain imposed on their identities must be faced by the colonized, and they must resist the need to romanticize their victimization or pre-colonial pasts. Conversely, the colonizer has to give up moral and political superiority and acknowledge their past and present involvement in oppressive regimes. To do this, Hanchey states that both must relinquish illusions of control or innocence, embrace the discomfort of unresolved histories, and take on the challenge of reevaluating authority, identity, and responsibility.The Center Cannot Hold makes evident that Tanzanian employees are already managing significant inconsistencies through liquid organization, while Western volunteers are “haunted” by their conflicts. The fractures in organizational structures are similar to the breakdown of cohesive Westernization in Tanzania. Hanchey underscores the necessity of these fractures for decolonial transformation in chapters three and four, whether in organizational structures or subjectivity. She alludes to the lack of understanding among the Western organization and Tanzanians, noting that, “without understanding, donors would continually be unable to apprehend how their ideas for the project and control of funds lead to atrophied” relations and disaster (139). Thus, the cracks created by misunderstanding cause foreign organizations to realize the weaknesses of their top-down approach to communication with Indigenous people.Hanchey narrates how the NGO's collapse brings colonialism's fluidity to a logical end. Here, she uses the term “fluidity of colonialism” to describe how the effects of colonialism endure and evolve into other forms, such as neocolonialism, in which outside forces—typically Western governments or organizations—continue to impact former colonies. It might be noteworthy, however, that in grasping liquid agency, Africans have to realize that colonialism's “epistemic injustice is much deeper” than what academics or methods of inquiry have proven (143–5). On this note, Hanchey invites readers to reflect on how colonization has not only disoriented African political, economic, and social structures but also affected Indigenous ways of knowing, appreciating Indigenous practices, and epistemic autonomy. The reflexivity of the NGO presented in chapters four and five serves as a means of negotiating colonial structures that propel the NGO's demise in chapter six. To Hanchey, for “marginalized subjects,” “solidity cannot be trusted” (169). Instead, “organizational ruination figures the possibility for decolonial transformation” (177). In this possibility lies the impetus to create entirely new forms of organization independent of colonial and imperial power dynamics. Hanchey's approach asks readers to view organizational collapse as an opportunity rather than a failure. The collapse of NGOs allows local Tanzanian workers to redefine their positions, reject extra-organizational control, and set a new course in line with their needs, priorities, and values.The Center Cannot Hold's last section explores how “decolonial dreamwork” becomes possible when Western subjectivities and organizational structures finally collapse. As part of this dreamwork, Hanchey argues that “Youth Leaders Tanzania is the product of decolonial dreamwork, and it desires a future where the spark of decolonial dreamwork lights innumerable fires—fires that catch, spread, and change the face of the future” (193). In this, Hanchey highlights the potential of Youth Leaders Tanzania as part of a larger movement towards decolonization, one that envisions a radically different, more inclusive, and more just world. She urges readers to envision and construct previously unthinkable futures due to colonial structures. Thus, Tanzanians need to imagine and actively create alternative realities and systems of existence that colonialism made impossible or suppressed. This is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refers to as “decolonizing the mind,” which emphasizes the necessity of dismantling colonial ideologies (52).1These ideologies include gender binaries, racial hierarchies, and patriarchal governance structures that limit how people imagine their lives, relationships, and identities. Ultimately, Hanchey calls for non-Western societies to uphold their Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices to reshape social norms.Regarding the power tension between Western actors and Tanzanian peoples in particular, The Center Cannot Hold offers an extensive and original perspective on the operational difficulties faced by NGOs in postcolonial contexts. Hanchey's work is stimulating, provocative, and timely, as it challenges the underlying assumptions of the role of NGOs in post-colonial societies. It critically explores the dynamics and weak connections between non-governmental organizations and Indigenous societies. Hanchey contributes to growing scholarship on decolonization and empowerment within various sectors, including development and humanitarian aid, especially in Africa. She draws attention to the fact that, although not all NGOs contribute meaningfully to postcolonial societies, they must undergo a decolonial transformation. This involves moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach and fostering genuine partnerships that elevate Indigenous voices, cultures, and knowledge systems.Readers unfamiliar with the decolonial and psychoanalytic theories used by Hanchey may appreciate the book's theoretical richness, which is easy to understand, especially considering how Hanchey infused these frameworks in her analysis to critique the operation of Western NGOs in Tanzania. Hanchey navigates complex territory as a scholar doing valuable work in an understudied African country. Her reflexivity is an advantage as it enables her to expose the hypocrisy of Western benevolence. This self-reflection allows her to critically engage the power dynamics that she encounters in the operations of the NGOs. While she spotlights local and Indigenous perspectives, Hanchey's positionality enables her to critique the Westernized exploitation of African development narratives without obscuring African people's ingenuity and ability to build and sustain the continent. In this way, Hanchey opens a space for vital conversation about the potential for decolonial transformation within the development sector, encouraging readers to reimagine the possibilities of a future untethered from colonial systems of power. The book encourages practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to reconsider traditional paradigms and explore innovative models prioritizing Indigenous agency, sustainable partnerships, and community-driven outcomes.

Abstract Bolivia captured international headlines (and a bit of notoriety) in 2014 when it became the first country in the world to relegalize child labor for ten-year-olds. Originally, the legislature was going to raise the minimum age for child labor from fourteen to sixteen to align with the International Labour Organization's recommendations, but as the Parliament deliberated, they encountered seemingly unlikely opposition, child workers themselves. Child workers led what the New York Timeslabeled the “first ever demonstration by child laborers in Bolivia,” and their advocacy shifted Parliament's trajectory and secured legislative change. This article examines their activism, paying attention to children's voices that are frequently ignored. By examining discourse from the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers, local Bolivian news outlets, and international media coverage, I argue that Bolivian child workers privileged their rhetorical agency by redefining childhood, a construct that traditionally denies their voice. They accomplished the redefinition by using dissociation to carve out space for nuance and to combat the incompatibilities mapped onto their position as child speakers. Through their strategy, the child workers recast an Andean childhood in relationship to a Western childhood around the notions of practical needs, work, protection, and education. Their dissociations moved childhood from a temporal frame tied to an individual's age into a cultural frame rooted in place, relationships, and community.

American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion by Richard Benjamin Crosby speaks to multiple areas within rhetorical studies, particularly for researchers interested in U.S. religion and politics, spatial rhetorics, presidential rhetoric, and kairos as a multilayered concept.Crosby is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has published extensively on race, politics, and religion. American Kairos fits well within his previous work analyzing Mormon, presidential, priestly, prophetic, and civil religious discourse. As he mentions in the preface, some of the archival research for this book took place during his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.Rather than a straightforward rhetorical history or close reading of the cathedral, American Kairos analyzes several rhetorical dimensions of the building's relationship to civil religion in the United States. The book's attention is thus split between two theses. As Crosby states early on, “The main argument of this book is that American Civil Religion, the implicit system of values, ideals, rituals, traditions, and symbols that lend shape and meaning to our citizenship, has never been properly imagined, and that, as a consequence, the nation's past is haunted by ghosts that presently grow louder and more violent” (xii). This set of claims sits alongside what this reader takes to be the overarching rhetorical claim of the book, which appears in the introductory chapter: “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—also variously named the Cathedral at Washington, Washington Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, or the National Cathedral—is one the of the great, unknown rhetorical triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship” (6). The two lines of argument surface in each chapter in some form, although they do not fully overlap.American Kairos is structured in an unorthodox manner. It is comprised of eight chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion, and split into two main sections. The first section explores the history and idea of the cathedral as it was conceptualized by prominent figures in its development, including Pierre L'Enfant, Henry Yates Satterlee, Francis B. Syre, and Mariann Edgar Budde. The second section examines the cathedral's “public space,” that is, its most well-known speeches and symbolic artifacts. This section begins with a close reading analysis of the cathedral's symbolism and spatial rhetorics by drawing on the theologically driven architectural vision of Philip Hubert Frohman, who served as the cathedral's principal architect from 1921 to 1972. It then moves into three chapters dedicated to major speeches delivered at the cathedral. The first analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” given five days before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next contrasts the speeches of George H. W. Bush, who dedicated the cathedral in 1990, and George W. Bush, who offered pulpit remarks for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Closing the trilogy is a chapter dedicated to the 2014 address of Cameron Partridge, an openly transgender Episcopal chaplain, and the 2018 interring of Matthew Shepard's remains within the cathedral, each highlighting the institution's role in promoting LGBTQ+ causes.Drawing liberally from the chapter on Dr. King, Crosby links various elements of the National Cathedral's rhetorical life to the concept of kairos. Building on James L. Kinneavy's theological work, Crosby defines kairos as “not just a moment; it is . . . an opening into what is truly real” (23). For Crosby, American kairos comprises “a sacred space wherein citizens could be moved by their experience of the country's heroes, deeds, and ideals, a space wherein citizenship becomes a holy practice” (23). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not offer precise definitions for these constituent terms—holy, religion, sacred, etc.—and thus does not fully articulate what separates “civil religion” from “religion” proper. By drawing on a wider and more critical literature on the intersection of faith, politics, religion, and society via the work of thinkers like Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Kyle Harper, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Neuhaus, Charles Taylor, or Joseph Massad, the book's claims regarding kairos and the cathedral might have delineated those concepts more sharply. Regardless, Crosby robustly identifies fractures and inconsistencies within American civil religion and shows how those divisions manifested within the cathedral's rhetorical career, concluding the book with a call for the United States “to imagine itself at the helm of something unique . . . by throwing out all notions that we are a nation with a distinct religious or ethnic past. From there, we will find that we remain as rich as ever in the raw materials of civil-religious potential” (233).Along the way, the book makes several notable academic contributions. First, it provides a first-rate close reading of the National Cathedral itself. Chapter Five, which synthesizes scholarship on spatial rhetorics with Frohman's “fourth dimension” approach to ecclesial architecture that prioritizes “an experience in which the worshipper loses all sense of time and space and becomes co-present with God,” is a major contribution of the book (144). It offers a useful guide for scholars who seek to understand the sacred as it intersects the rhetoric of space and place. Second, the first section of the book offers a fascinating history of the National Cathedral as a rhetorical site, perhaps providing a roadmap for future scholarship that seeks to perform a similar diachronic rhetorical analysis of a specific monument, building, or public space. Third, Crosby's meditations on kairos, particularly in the preface and introduction, offer an insightful and interdisciplinary take on an oft invoked and potentially ambiguous rhetorical concept. Additionally, the book does a good job of situating its criticism of the chosen rhetorical artifacts within their articulatory and civil religious contexts by referencing the cathedral archives and other primary sources. American Kairos is, if nothing else, a work of patient and extensive research that models the best practices of public address scholarship.That said, the book has several areas where it could be stronger. First, the overall structure confused this reader. Perhaps because of its patient composition, the chapter sequencing can jump across historical eras and arguments, making important throughlines between chapters difficult to identify beyond general themes. While beginning with L'Enfant's dream of a national church makes sense chronologically, the result is that the book begins with a detailed, contested history of a rhetorical institution across multiple chapters without fully establishing from the start the rhetorical dimensions of that institution. One of the casualties of this organizational design is that a sustained rhetorical analysis of the National Cathedral's relationship to other spaces in the District of Columbia as they exist today is not provided. This absence seems all the more striking given Chapter Three's focus on anti-Catholic attitudes among nineteenth century Protestants. This chapter could have been expanded by discussing the proximity of the National Cathedral to a major center of Catholic life in the United States—Maryland and northeast Washington D.C.—epitomized by the Catholic University of America (established 1887), which boasts its own cathedral on a rival hill a mere five miles away (The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, consecrated in 1920). That this information is left out seems like a missed opportunity.Second, the wide-ranging organizational structure leads to an attenuated sense of context at times across the book. For example, Chapter Four's discussion of Mariann Edgar Budde, the cathedral bishop since 2011, references several controversies related to President Donald Trump along with McCarthyism, xenophobia, immigration, and standards of civic dignity over the span of three pages. Chapter Three does not reference any anti-Catholic invective from Protestant pulpits prior to the nineteenth century or any of the significant criticisms of liberalism, democracy, and the United States offered by the Vatican during this era. Chapter One describes L'Enfant's vision of a “Great Church for National Purposes” that would be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination, but equally open to all” (48–49). Crosby returns to this description in later chapters, even asking, “Was L'Enfant's church supposed to be Christian?” (122). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough explanation of what a non-Christian church would look like and what would differentiate it from another kind of religious gathering. As these brief examples illustrate, while the book ably analyzes the rhetorical figures it selects, it sometimes struggles to capture key elements and the full complexity of the broader context, which may in part reflect the book's ambitious scope.Finally, a main contention of American Kairos is the polemic assertion that “we have never had a coherent civil religion” (230). Likening the National Cathedral's attempt to embody American civil religion to “a charioteer holding the reigns of wrangling horses” (143), Crosby laments the cathedral's serpentine history and mishmash of iconography as “brilliant but unsettling and perhaps nonsensical” (163). Crosby proposes a view of the National Cathedral as an embodiment of a new civil religion: I imagine his [L'Enfant's] church as a place of ritual and memorial, yes, but also a great center of civic education where students and citizens come to study, debate, and celebrate the rights, responsibilities, and implications of their citizenship, including the responsibility to atone for past sins. To this end, such a church might also host schools and libraries, symposia and debates, artists and scholars in residence, and of course great speeches and civil-religious sermons (229).To this reader, this description sounds a lot like a university—an educational institution with many departments that is focused much more on here than the hereafter—and less like a church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. An alternative reading of the “incoherence” of American civil religion as embodied within the life of the Washington National Cathedral might find that its contradictions reflect democracy, in all its messiness, itself. In that sense, it would be difficult to find a building that more perfectly encapsulates the full range of the American experiment than the National Cathedral in northwest Washington D.C.In conclusion, American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion is an insightful book that deserves to be on the shelf of any serious scholar of political rhetoric, civil religion, and religious discourse in the United States. It merits a readership that, like the cathedral itself, seeks to chart a path forward in divisive times.

Abstract This essay turns to an early 1920s controversy over a proposed Lost Cause Mammy monument to examine how Black activists crafted their collective commemorative authority over Mammy and her memory. It uses 15 letters and editorials published across several Black press publications to argue activists deployed a complex series of dissociations to displace dominant memory of Mammy and craft their commemorative authority. Activists split the singular, powerful memory of Mammy reified by Lost Cause mythology at several points to uncover a critical alternative, a vision of her in accord with Black freedom. This essay extends existing scholarship on critical memory by inflecting it with an emphasis on authority and revealing how traditionally subaltern stories of the past can gain public influence. Additionally, this case offers lessons for modern activists seeking to discredit renewed white supremacist histories.

How does America feel? We could ask introspectively—how does it feel to identify with, think about, and generally be proximate to America—or haptically—how does this imperialistic nation-state feel when it impacts different bodies? In American Magnitude, Christa Olson answers both versions of the question: she parses affects associated with American pretenses towards grandeur and reflects on the material consequences of America's inflated public feelings. The book deserves attention from anyone whose work encompasses affective publics, visual rhetorics, borders/borderlands, and the practices and legacies of American colonialism.Olson contends that, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, “US Americans looking from the United States into the ‘other’ Americas to the south created, sustained, and circulated the United States as America through appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence” (6). Each of her chapters takes up a case study in the causes and consequences of the United States’ hegemony in relation to its neighbors. As her focus ranges across visual media from lithographs to animated films, she charts how public feelings accumulate, circulate in personal and national stories, and reinforce the self-importance of American self-representation. She also keeps an eye on the fragility of American self-aggrandizement and its failure to get non-U.S. audiences to take it seriously. The book not only carefully analyzes claims to national significance in rhetorical practice but also models how to write about hegemonic rhetorical patterns while decentering those pattern's own claims of importance.The introduction starts with Olson's “central assumptions”: that “American scenes” teach U.S. audiences the “contours and responsibilities of being American,” and that “becoming American . . . required looking not only within but also beyond US borders” (6). She develops those assumptions with three key terms: hemisphere, magnitude, and feeling. Describing her work as not strictly decolonial in practice, but as an investigation of how colonizing power functions, she focuses on “the history and consequence” (12) of U.S. habits of viewing the hemisphere as space to be controlled for gain. Magnitude names the rhetorical engine behind those habits and thus is the conceptual heart of the book. Magnitude, she argues, inheres in a variety of rhetorical practices for establishing importance and so appears in different guises across historical contexts. After defining its “close links to the sublime” (13), she rounds out the introduction by reminding readers that magnitude “rushes through a seeing-feeling body” (19). Locating magnitude in sensoria leads her to the final keyword, feeling. Magnitude's “normative common sense” is not an intangible idea but the lived reality in publics “formed through intensity of feeling and a need to monitor bodily borders both literal and symbolic” (23). Feeling, to Olson, constitutes publicness as such, as it keeps vivid the visceral qualities of what it is like to be in public. Magnitude, we might say, is not just a way of viewing, but a way of life.Chapter one offers both an origin story of hemispheric magnitude in American history and an innovative contribution to theories of visual circulation and public feeling. In it, Olson stories a wealth of archival material left behind by U.S. Americans trying to make sense of the Mexican-American war. She surveys the letters and lithographs through which the “war's implications—its aims, its triumphs, its costs—were before their eyes” (31). She theorizes “accumulation” to explicate why that archival material mattered, defining accumulation as “circulation's necessary counterpart,” involving “the buildup of material over time” regarding ideas and arguments, the slow gathering of “the stuff that sticks around and creates significance” (43). Accumulation innovates within extant disciplinary vocabularies of circulation and affect in that it allows Olson to discern affect mattering in moments when it moves too slowly to influence individual rhetorical encounters. Accumulation also lets her take a unique perspective on grandeur, describing it not as a single strike of sublime intensity but something that can gather too slowly to be noticed. American magnitude, she argues, did not occur overnight to Americans visualizing the Mexican-American war; it sedimented over time and across thousands of letters and ephemera of visual and material culture, and, like a mountain range, grew up gradually. Addressing why Americans accepted hemispheric hegemony as a dominant frame for viewing their place in the world, Olson claims that they acquiesced “to the precise shape of the nation as inevitable, as destined, and as exceptional” (65) largely by virtue of learning to take that shape for granted.The next chapter tells six stories about Frederic Church, the painter whose landscapes colored how Americans imagined “their” hemisphere. Trying to “defamiliarize the presumption of whiteness and [U.S.] Americanness that suffuses Church's paintings,” Olson tells “story and counterstory” (70) in a chapter that could have focused only on visual rhetorics. Expanding readers’ perspective on nostalgic paintings, the stories she tells contextualize, undercut, and complicate “the American stories” (71) and the landscapes of Church's that told them, that treat hemispheric hegemony as received fact. The chapter thus highlights the incongruity between magnitude's fictional “true American [white, Northern, masculine]” (81) and the character of the painter whose journeys south “left him gasping, itching, sweating, and shivering” (89). We get a picture of Church hiding his travails in tropical climates behind a more palatable painting of “placidity and tranquility” (87) that other white men could fantasize about conquering. Olson summarizes that “painting, in this retrospective, is colonization by another name” (99).Chapter three focuses on an irony of American magnitude: in an effort to be bigger than the rest of the world, American magnitude cannot recognize epistemologies other than its own, so it relies on tropes of “discovery, invention, and revelation” (105) to frame other cultures’ materials as spectacles for American eyes. Machu Picchu is the chapter's case in point for such rhetorical operations of “revealing discovery” (136). It follows Hiram Bingham, a mercenary adventurer dressed as a scientist, as he “went looking for greatness” to project to American viewers and “primed his methods to ensure he found it” (114). The chapter highlights not only how rhetorics of grand discovery “make the things that they bring to light” (137), but also how magnitude ignores entire epistemologies in framing the world as the measure of Americans’ greatness. Olson ends the chapter dwelling on the “opacity” of Bingham's “refusal to be held accountable by or to his Peruvian counterparts” (136), which Olson calls innate to rhetorics of grand discovery as such: “revelation, by necessity, hides” the “other possible understandings” (137–138) of what is being “revealed” as a discovery.The fourth chapter further develops the theme of magnitude's opacity, here from the perspective of people “looking askance” (171) at nationalistic paternalism. Olson investigates the Walt Disney Company's filmmaking work for the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a unit meant to sell America's image to people in Latin America through pseudo-educational films that, in truth, barely passed as bad propaganda: “a bad gift,” in Olson's words, “presented as charity” (142). Comparing the U.S. American intent behind, and reception of, Disney films to the films’ reception in Latin America, Olson emphasizes magnitude's fragility. International audiences always viewed the tropes of “normative white, settler vision” with justified derision, in the process “pulling [American magnitude] off-course and making use of it slantwise” (178). This kind of humbling claim—that adherents to American magnitude who presumed their point of view to be “the unquestioned center of America” were “imagining things” (145)—winds down Olson's content chapters with a detailed example of how American magnitude has often failed to spur any usable rhetorical invention at all, let alone to compel actually existing hemispheric audiences to take it seriously.The concluding fifth chapter offers advice about how to resist magnitude's claims. Olson advocates a turn to “post-magnitude rhetorical history, theory, and criticism,” a disciplinary future where rhetoricians have learned “to sit with limitedness” (188). Identifying magnitude's impetus towards grandeur with the American academy's need for scholarship to be big, important, and, yes, grand, Olson refuses sweeping statements about what rhetoric beyond nationalistic magnitudes must be and instead offers advice about where such rhetorics would start. Specifically, she councils us to “be partial . . . keep a messy slate . . . do the hard work of connection [and] care” (188–193). It's a fitting way to conclude. The book models how to deal with authorial positionality in the face of an archive of harm. Olson weaves different modes of narrative, sometimes traditionally foregrounding a historical event explicated by the expert author, and at other times writing transparently about her access to, and affective response in the face of, various archives of magnitude. The book rewards close readings that pay attention to when it speaks in first-person and when it speaks as an authorial expert. Which, again, means that the conclusion is fitting: if we take Olson's call for post-magnitude rhetoric seriously, there was no serious way to end this book in the authoritative, as opposed to self-reflective, voice.One question lingers for this reviewer: Does Olson give magnitude too much credit? She seems to treat magnitude like a problem inherent in claims about significance as such, and not a problem specific to U.S. American nationalism. Olson would probably, if asked, dissociate magnitude from other forms for signifying importance, significance, and/or worth, and stress that magnitude is a particularly American place from which to evaluate something. But there are moments in the text where the distinction does not appear, and she considers magnitude like an unavoidable status quo, or even a feature of any claim about significance by default. I wonder if saying we need to be “post” magnitude gives too much credence to American magnitude's own aspirations toward perfection. Put another way: non-magnitudinous rhetorics only look limited and partial from magnitude's own point of view. Do we, by calling for new disciplinary paradigms to get beyond magnitude, accidentally reify its impact and, in the process, hide how some scholars, writers, and activists all along have been beyond magnitude—and have, in fact, never had the luxury of taking magnitude seriously?Olson has written an attentive and meaningful book, a clinic in the writing of palpable history. American Magnitude accounts for how magnitude matters materially, in bodies and maps, in felt distance and implied relation. It steadily innovates in approach to common theoretical concerns—circulation, sublimity, and so on—helping our discipline continue to shift focus from the sudden effects of rhetorical genius to the gradual accretion of norms, values, and forms. It is one of several recent landmark books in rhetorical studies (think of Emerson Cram's Violent Inheritance or Catalina M. de Onís's Energy Islands) that reject sweeping conclusions in favor of much more locally focused and self-reflective answers to problems of baffling scope and duration. It therefore communicates a sense of the fragility of magnitude: the light touch of the conclusion resonates with a fact Olson demonstrates from the introduction, namely that all visions of grandeur contain the conditions of their own diminution. In its scope and balance, it is clearly a book, like her research subject, that sedimented over time, accruing layers, eroding jagged edges, building gradually. The care with which Olson balances theoretical nuance, detailed case studies, methodological rigor, and self-reflection evokes the steady grace of the landscapes her book's subjects inhabit. The highest compliment we could pay it is to imagine all the ecosystems of research beyond magnitude—critical of U.S. American hegemony, attentive to flows of movement and immobility across and between borders, breathing in various formal and informal archives—to which it will surely contribute.

Communicating the Other Across Cultures by intercultural communication scholar Dr. Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager is a compelling read about how master narratives perpetuate cultural othering discursively, visually, and materially. The author notes that the crux of cultural othering is a systemic and reoccurring process of prioritizing histories with a “capital H,” “written and communicated by the powerful of the world” (e.g., colonizers, enslavers); this, in turn, socially constructs the Other (5). In these, the Other is routinely shown “as unworthy, primitive, barbaric, threatening, even subhuman” (2). In response to such master narratives, the latter half of the book examines how minoritized groups employ resistive rhetoric, specifically through exposure and empowerment, to disrupt oppressive systems and foster social change. The author refers to this process as “communicating other/wise,” which she coins as a “discursive strategy against Master Narratives that perpetuate cultural othering and an alternative epistemology of learning with and from the Other, of gaining awareness and eventually wisdom with regard to Self and Other” (14). Tracing types of rhetorical othering through case studies in the United States, Russia, and Western European countries, the author utilizes a cross-cultural approach and Kenneth Burke's concept of “equipment for living,” which Khrebtan-Hörhager extends to visual and material rhetoric.Communicating the Other Across Cultures is divided into two parts: “Cultural Othering as Equipment for Living” and “Communicating Other/Wise.” The first three chapters demonstrate the embedded nature of cultural othering through verbal, visual, and material artifacts, showcasing how cultural othering is a communicative phenomenon that has no borders. The last three chapters focus on how communicating other/wise is a powerful, subversive tool for the Other to tell alternative stories and conclude by pointing to the necessity of studying cultural othering across disciplines.Chapter 1 offers a comparative study of verbal othering in master narratives through different geopolitical locations. The author argues that the Other is discursively constructed, maintained, and normalized in literary works through binaries, which often endorse Eurocentric values and whiteness. An example of this is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the racialized good and evil binary emerges as Finn “thinks of himself as a sinner who will go to hell for his choice of not betraying fugitive slave Jim” (25). Twain's characters point to the idea that Finn should not care for Jim's wellbeing, furthering the justification of slavery and colonialism as a U.S. master narrative. Ultimately, this institutionalizes stigmas and reifies oppressive binaries. The Other is characterized as nonhuman and undeserving of inclusion and equality.Chapter 2 focuses on how visual culture transcends certain discursive boundaries, contending that images are powerful as they “demonstrate to us who matters, who does not, who exists in the center, and who struggles on the margins” (67). A significant component of visual othering is through cinematography, which greatly contributed to Nazi Germany's propaganda, supported the National Socialist regime, and justified the Holocaust. For example, the famous 1940 documentary Der Ewige Jude (The External Jew) portrays Jews as an unsanitary pest and “compares them [Jews] to rats, and reminds the audience that rats need to be killed for reasons of public health and safety” (106). Such visuals have the potency to intensify othering of Semitic peoples across geopolitical locations, solidifying ideological and national understandings of the Other.Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between material rhetoric—such as monuments, architecture, and memorials—and cultural othering. The author underscores the importance of attending to artifacts as they “contribute to the creation of a certain worldview that includes our national identities, our heroes, our role models, and our aspirations,” resulting in the lack of representation and even misrepresentation of the Other (111). The nationalist narrative is evident in the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which celebrates several of America's Founding Fathers, communicates a superior national identity, and upholds patriotism. Mount Rushmore National Memorial especially ignores the United States’ involvement in Indigenous genocide and displacement by depicting the American Dream and freedom as available to all. The author argues that this is a form of strategic othering, a “convenient ideology of the (non-[w]hite, non-Christian, non-male, non-European, non-powerful) Other” (123). Utilizing material artifacts to distort history absolves white guilt and upholds white supremacy.In chapter 4, Khrebtan-Hörhager highlights a collection of alternative stories across the United States, Russia, and Europe that does not reify master narratives but instead exposes and empowers the voices of the Other. Prominent Russian writer, poet, and critic Nikolay Nekrasov, for example, used his works to critique war and suffering—an opposition to Russia's worldview and imperial expansion. As the author posits, writing Other/wise “is about listening to and learning from Other narratives, even if they clash with our existing worldviews and discredit our heroes and role models” (164). Communicating other/wise is a critical tool for reimagining spaces that include perspectives of the voices often silenced, erased, and hidden.Chapter 5 explores visuality through the lens of the Other. A striking example is the artwork Cloud Madonna, which shows a woman of color carefully and intimately carrying a melon while carrying water on the top of her head. The author posits that this portrayal is supposed to contrast Indigenous women's innate and generative connection to the land with a Christian nationalist perspective of the white madonna, who is “primarily defined through her relationship to baby Jesus” (223). Visualizing the Other is rooted in critiquing essentialized identities created by master narratives, which “teach us to see things differently; provide a new look on beliefs, norms, and values; and gradually change our culture” (219).Chapter 6 models communicating other/wise through materiality. The author explains that materiality (e.g., monuments, memorials, museums) crafts and tells our histories, which, in turn, communicates and informs our present and “the future of our children” (261). Because many forms of materiality are told through a homogenous, colonized lens, the goal for this chapter aims “to ‘un-set’ history and culture that is ‘in stone’ and to introduce alternative, culturally sensitive, and inclusive pieces of material rhetoric” (263–264). Khrebtan-Hörhager introduces several examples of how exposure and empowerment are imperative for disrupting homogenous narratives often curated by those in power. One example is the act of literally removing monuments that commemorate a nation's ideological regime. For example, Poles have removed certain monuments that commemorate the Red Army for freeing Poland from Nazi fascism. The author notes that “the removal of such Soviet monuments [is] not only natural but highly necessary as it avoids communicating wrong ideological values and grants Poland a much-overdue chance to achieve its own national and cultural definition as a free European democracy” (279). Materiality can be an especially rich mode for communicating other/wise, as it is often strikingly present even in the most mundane public spaces.Communicating the Other Across Cultures concludes by restating the pervasiveness of cultural othering in verbal, visual, and material forms and their ideological implications. With inspiration from Audre Lorde, communicating others/wise is a strategy for disrupting oppression and, thus, necessary for creating new realities. As the author hopefully asserts, “although othering is still omnipresent, it does not have to remain omnipotent, but the power to change the status quo starts with the critical social self-reflexivity and cultural self-diagnostics” (312). The question, “Whose voices are being prioritized?” is necessary for the unraveling of master narratives. This can be especially useful for undoing hegemonic educational curriculums, instead bringing in alternative histories and voices, such as Toni Morrison, as the classroom is often a formative space for shaping new perspectives and realities. Communicating the Other Across Cultures is extraordinary, grounded in cultural richness with exhaustive examples; it also highlights the voices of Other scholars and showcases the importance of studying cultural othering beyond communication and rhetoric. While the book demonstrates that cultural othering is systemic across cultures and recognizes the destructive patterns of master narratives, it also reminds readers of their agency to listen to the Other, learn from the stories of the Other, and invent ways of living Other/Wise.

Abstract This essay analyses wilderness debates in the Utah Public Lands Initiative (PLI). From 2012–2016, the PLI sought to answer the “question of wilderness” through a holistic, state-centric public lands bill. The effort was spearheaded by former Utah Representative Rob Bishop who argued that the state could achieve “certainty” through “compromise,” or that the state's problems with wilderness and public lands could be resolved by reaching consensus on how best to use those lands. Bishop sought input from seven Utah counties, who would submit their own proposals for how best to resolve pressing land-use issues in their respective counties. I examine public discourse about one proposal, from Grand County, analyzing county documents, newspaper reports, and citizen comment letters. Following work in rhetorical studies on wilderness, my analysis demonstrates how local communities construct wilderness and its meanings in a particular cultural moment. Reading the county's PLI rhetorics for how citizens valued wilderness and their relationships to public lands, I argue that the county had difficulty attaining compromise and certainty because citizens could not agree on the meanings of “wilderness.”

Abstract Bayard Rustin influenced the trajectory of Black political rhetoric in the post-civil rights era. In this essay, I offer a rhetorical recovery of this neglected figure, focusing on the centrality of his emphasis on coalitional politics to the Black freedom struggle while noting that his stress on economics as the basis for coalition building shaped a rhetorical strategy tradition that I call “the rhetoric of race-neutral coalitional politics.” I also examine the legacy of this rhetorical strategy, against the backdrop of the Obama era, arguing that it silences dissent, de-emphasizes the policy priorities of Black communities, and reinforces the white gaze in Black political rhetoric and thought. I conclude that success in the Black freedom struggle depends on the community's ability to develop rhetorical strategies that position it as an equal partner in political coalitions rather than a captive participant.

Abstract This essay analyzes the redemptive rhetoric found in Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III's sermon “Redeeming Deserted Places.” I argue that Brown's rhetoric of redemption serves as a powerful rhetorical tool for critiquing whiteness, anti-Black racism, and justice-based movements. Through my analysis, I reach three key findings. First, Brown radically redefines the starting point for rhetorics of redemption. While Burke suggests that redemptive rhetoric's origin begins with the roles of the victim, Brown suggests that the starting point of redemption can also stem from the liberator. Second, Brown defines redemption as a form of liberation. Following in the footsteps of Cone's Black liberation theology, Brown argues that redemption plays a role in the process of liberating Black communities from anti-Black racism. Finally, Brown's use of the rhetoric of redemption centers on Black subjectivity while de-centering whiteness. By insisting that Black communities redeem themselves from white supremacy, Brown contends that redemption is a catalyst for actively implementing anti-racist policy and preserving marginalized Black communities rather than a tool for forgiving white supremacy.

Multimedia platforms have become living archives for spectacle and normalized cruelty, inviting audiences to watch and watch again. What does it mean to consume media that is despicable in both content and form? What are the impacts of doing so repetitively? What is the appeal of public revelation? In his book Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment, Casey Ryan Kelly unpacks the role of spectatorship and consumption related to obscene enjoyment. Paying attention to manners of disclosure, Kelly uses psychoanalytic theory to work through how public revelations speak to racist and misogynistic underpinnings of whiteness. Through case studies on public freak out videos, leaked audio files, and viral sex-tapes, Kelly explores the perpetual feedback loop of grandiose public revelation to achieve post-racialism. This critique shifts accountability from an individual issue to a structural consequence of white-masculine power.Kelly's introduction, “On Obscene Enjoyment,” contextualizes the role of the viewer by outlining the variables of his analysis. Speaking in conversation with traditional notions of secrecy and surveillance by scholars such as Jodi Dean and Douglas Kellner, Kelly centers the appeal of a public matter that was initially private. Disclosure itself creates the perception of an authentic reality behind closed doors. The spectatorship involved reflects a particular perversion wherein the viewer knows it is wrong to look yet looks anyway. It is from this perspective that Kelly introduces Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically the role of jouissance, to address satisfaction that is sought out by the subject through unattainable means. This “lack” in the self moves the subject toward desire. Watching and listening to publicized privacies creates a moment of significance, of forbidden enjoyment, which scapegoats structural inequity with the individual outburst to unconsciously assure the white subject that their power “still exists” (18). Drawing a throughline between the spectator, white masculinity, and lethal jouissance, Kelly presents a theoretical framework to prepare the reader for what's to come.In Chapter 1, Kelly measures whether “publicized exposure” of obscene behavior ends up stopping white masculine violence (30). Analyzing a leaked tape of a sexually violent tirade by director Mel Gibson, a public outburst by former Seinfeld star Mike Richards, and a racist sex-tape by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, this chapter examines the double movement of public obscenity as it relates to whiteness. First, these artifacts create the illusion of an instance that has been overcome, playing further into the fantasy of post racialism. Secondly, the instance is also experienced as an ongoing threat. These archived obscenities reinforce white anxiety, demonstrating that racism is “embedded in the white racial unconscious” (43). From this perspective, racism and misogyny are acts of obscene enjoyment, where white desire is projected onto the subjugated Other. Gibson, Richards, and Hogan display how the white imaginary influences dominance throughout the population from “knowledge of racial complicity” (33). This is not to excuse it but rather to understand the depth in which primal fantasies control white masculinity. Understanding the dependence whiteness has on the racialized other becomes crucial to contextualizing the spectator's role in this process.Chapter 2 explores the depths of white anxiety through discourses surrounding Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, and his girlfriend at the time, V. Stiviano. Unlike the blatantly racial epithets of the first case study, Sterling scapegoats his internalized racism with an argument of culture. After Stiviano, a Black and Latina woman, had been spending time at an NBA game with Black friends, Sterling demanded that she stop “broadcasting” her association with Black people (56). Despite being the owner of a predominantly Black team and dating a Black woman, Sterling felt “there was a culture” he, and Stiviano by association, needed to abide by in public. This culture, Kelly argues, normalizes plantation culture to mask white men's phobic response to racialized bodies (56). Using the frame of Lacanian anxiety, Kelly discusses both racial capital and white denialism as essential subjects to understanding how white power becomes more associated with humanness than other racial identities. The broadcasting of Sterling's private racism reveals a white anxiety regarding people of color occupying traditionally white environments. Kelly uses the language of contamination to conceptualize the reality of what Sterling's logics were trying to convey. While Sterling blames culture for his racist claims, he fails to acknowledge consequences of the role he plays in maintaining it.In Chapter 3, Kelly investigates the particular gratifications that occur from viewing and circulating public racist meltdowns. Charting his digital ethnographic analysis of YouTube's algorithm, Kelly demonstrates how the excessive publication and viewership of racist freak out compilations reveal a racist jouissance, allowing white viewers to experience the pleasure of the irruption of hysterical behavior while simultaneously shielding them from their own complicity. Working closely with the work of Joshua Gunn, Kelly turns to aesthetics of pornography and fantasy to explain the disidentification that results from such content. He reveals that the “repeated viewing of people of color subjected to humiliation is ultimately the benefit of the spectator rather than the victims of hate speech” (101). Kelly applies this conclusion across all four case studies to account for the obscene pleasure associated with repetitive absolution.The final case study, Chapter 4, spotlights the rhetoric around the Access Hollywood hot-mic tape leaked during Donald Trump's first presidential campaign. The conversation features a violent and sexually explicit conversation between two men, discussing their entitlement to a woman's body. Kelly connects this to Freud's myth of the primal horde, a parable involving a totem representing a dead father as the end to excess enjoyment for the paternal figure and renewed enjoyment for those who saw the totem thereafter. Trump's election represents a “logical extension of the decline of the paternal signifier” (105). When Trump makes the claim that “when you are a celebrity, they let you [grab ‘em by the pussy],” he is declaring a form of political power and celebrity that is grounded in a state of exception. His role as the primal father fosters the “passive masochistic attitude” that “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” (108). In combination with the fact that this tape is audio only, Trump's statements become demands for his own desire: How can we please him? From this position of power, his statements function as a test of loyalty to listeners—the dynamic conditions his audience to divert agency to him. For this reason, the Access Hollywood tape is not an embarrassing exposure but rather one that revealed the truth of Trump's ideology as it related to political power. Trump's statements invite audiences to be the object of desire as the politician ruthlessly sought out his own.Kelly ends the book with an Epilogue titled “On Pointless Enjoyment.” In these final pages, Kelly notes that media spectatorship will always exist from unconscious desire. It is not just what is caught on tape and then publicly viewed but instead the compulsion that is fed through repetitive viewing. Kelly offers this as his entry point into rhetorical criticism, explaining that people are hailed into viewership that feeds into one's desire. His objective is to make sense of “what white masculinity discloses about itself” and the audience dynamics created through simultaneous public and private admission (127).Kelly offers a solution: a “defense of accountability that starts with the subject's avowal of desire” (133). In other words, we need to separate white masculinity from the death drive so that white victimhood may be curtailed in relation to oppressive or violent actions. Shifting accountability to the self moves the impulse the spectator feels toward the Other and “traverses the narcissism of liberal fantasy” by further understanding the lack that seeks fulfillment (131). Moments of obscene enjoyment are the result of a lack of a lack—a pursuit of satisfaction that results in pushing blame onto the Other. The shift Kelly is calling for toward accountability reverses the direction of lack back to the self, demanding self-reflection in a body that is often understood as victimless.Kelly's careful analysis of the digital shift from private to public is crucial for scholars in rhetorical studies as we grapple with complacency in everyday consumption. Expanding on his previous book, Apocalypse Man, Kelly deftly guides readers through psychoanalytic theory toward the intersections of imagined fantasy and obscene reality to understand the influence that viewership has on the self and the Object. This charge ultimately centers concern for accountability, sharing with readers the powers of acknowledgment. While readers might question the extent to which acknowledgment can foster significant change, Kelly claims that we must understand the fantasy to unravel it. He masterfully crafts a vision of the intangible to bring forward the function it has in our conscious reality. The research is deep and unapologetic, emphasizing the simplicity of the obscure. While I wish this call toward accountability were expanded upon in each chapter rather than the epilogue alone, Kelly's argument still prompts questions of change, rather than within the Other, within ourselves.Caught on Tape brings forward the importance of understanding our own consciousness and consumption patterns as they pertain to the systemic violence of whiteness. It indicates that voyeurism is never passive and repetition never coincidental. The invisible tethers of hegemony continue to command power in moments both immediately and after-the-fact. The excruciating pleasure we encounter in the process is what keeps us tied in the meantime. Kelly's manuscript is a crucial read for scholars at the intersections of digital rhetoric, whiteness, and surveillance, as we posit answers to continuously pressing questions of ideology, ethics, and technology.

The emergence of populist politicians internationally in the past twenty years is remarkable. This phenomenon has prompted voluminous academic analyses: scholars from political science, political theory, and media studies have analyzed populism in books, articles, and edited collections. Rhetoric as a discipline has been relatively quiet. Populist Rhetorics: Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition proposes to address the dearth of work in disciplinary rhetoric not by inviting scholars identified with rhetorical studies exclusively (though some are) to analyze populism but by asking all the contributors to take a “rhetorical approach” in analyzing the discourse of a populist politician. The editors associate a rhetorical approach with, especially, close readings, and each contributor analyzes at least one text of a populist politician to see how the text works to persuade the audience the text invokes. This disciplined (in both senses of the word) approach marks this volume as important for readers of Rhetoric and Public Affairs and gives the volume a unity that many collections lack, further advanced by the apparent agreement among the contributors to raise fundamental questions concerning how to understand populism; to wit, should populism be thought of as an ideology or as a style? Since the chapters include populists from both the left and from the right, and since the contributors are committed to a rhetorical approach, it is not surprising that the authors individually and collectively conclude that populism is performative, not ideological. Finally, this volume gives witness to what is truly remarkable (some might say scary) about our particular moment: that populism is international. The case studies examine the rhetoric of populists from Britain, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Venezuela, and the United States.The object of Paul Elliot Johnson's analysis in “Populist Melancholy” is the Republican Platform of 2016, adopted by the party without change in 2020. That the party decided to reproduce the same platform in 2020 following the Trump presidency suggests to Johnson that the grievances that the platform identifies could not be addressed by political action; otherwise, why weren't at least some of the grievances ameliorated while Trump was in office? On Johnson's reading, the “people” of the Republican imaginary see themselves as weak and powerless—victims. He argues that Freud's analysis of melancholia captures well both the feeling of loss that the Trump base experiences and its inability to articulate a positive path to addressing this loss—thus, on his analysis, the pathology of the current American right. In defining Republican populism in psychological terms, Johnson's thesis recalls Richard Hofstadter's argument that populism is fueled by status grievance and resentment, rather than material conditions.In “Voltagabbana Rhetorics: Turncoating as a Populist Strategy in Pandemic Times,” Pamela Pietrucci notes a propensity of populists to practice a voltagabbana, a turncoat or flip-flopping rhetoric. She notes that Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and Matteo Salvini—all identified as right-wing populists—changed both their positions and their practice with regard to masking during the Covid pandemic; none attempted to reconcile the contradictions in their advice or practice. Pietrucci examines in detail the voltagabbana rhetoric of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League and the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy in 2019. As is typical of populists, Salvini lacks an historical connection to a consistent ideology; he began his career as a Communist while at present his politics are right-wing. According to Pietrucci, the positions Salvini advances are based on the analysis produced by “The Beast,” a search engine that identifies the terms, themes, and memes most prevalent in Internet computer searches. If “hydroxychloroquine” is trending well, then presumably Salvini would endorse it as an effective Covid cure that “bureaucrats” are keeping from the public. On Pietrucci's analysis, Salvini has no ideology. He might be labeled a populist of “algorithmic” opportunism (73). Ultimately, the politics that Salvini practices, she concludes, is one of disavowal, whose inconsistency is in the service of deniability (75–76).In “Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos,” Alan Finlayson maintains that populism should be understood more as a political style or performance than an ideology, drawing extensively on work in rhetorical studies to make his case. Finlayson argues that ethos is central to populist rhetoric, not merely its premise but also its conclusion (86). The populist appeals to voters to become “the people” that they already are, he maintains. The object of his analysis is the YouTube video, “The Truth About Brexit,” created by the popular conspiracy-theorist Paul Joseph Watson, which had nearly a million views during the Brexit debate. Finlayson's analysis is attentive to the effective use that Watson makes of the affordances of YouTube as a medium as well as the discursive contradictions in Watson's narrative.In “Populism and the Rise of the AFD in Germany,” Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till report the rise of populist movements from the right, especially the AFD (Alternative for Germany), that have gained prominence via the use of a rhetoric of provocation suited to online broadcast. The authors maintain that new media create spaces for provocateurs to perform an identity and identification with “the people.” The authors offer close readings of speeches by Björn Höcke, a prominent member of the New Right, and by Alice Weidel, co-chair of AFD. The Höcke speech, broadcast live on YouTube, employs rhetorical devices typical of demagoguery: breaking taboos, stoking indignation, and inspiring negative emotions (122), all with an intention to provoke. To this end, Höcke identified the “‘true victims’” of World War II as the inhabitants of Dresden killed in the allied bombing in February 1945 (125). Weidel is similarly provocative in her characterization of immigration as a “Great Replacement” strategy that installs fertile “‘headscarf girls’” and “‘knife men’” as the basis for a new majority (130). The racists metonymies are made for circulation as memes, the authors argue.Sophia Hatzisavvidou analyzes the populist rhetoric of socialist Alexis Tsipras who became prime minister of Greece in 2015. As a result of the 2007–08 world-wide recession, Greece's debt was staggering. The European Union, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank conditioned a bailout on Greece's enacting of severe austerity measures. But round after round of tax increases, while producing much general suffering, seemed to make economic matters worse; thus, “the crisis” of 2015. Hatzisavvidou analyzes Tsipras's campaign of resistance to the austerity measures, characterizing Tsipras's rhetoric as a moralizing discourse that contrasted “the people” as morally superior—more genuine than the technocratic elites. The technocrats’ austerity program failed on its own economic terms, Tsipras maintains, but succeeded in creating a resistant people with a “‘purity’” (156), who want “to take their lives into their own hands,” and who stand up to “‘blind conservative forces’” (157). Drawing on Aristotle's three types of rhetoric, Hatzisavvidou characterizes Tsipras's speeches, surprisingly, as epideictic rather than deliberative, surprising because, like deliberative rhetoric for Aristotle, Tsipras's speeches advocate a future-oriented solution to a political problem. Still, the speeches are indeed epideictic because the audience addressed lacks the power to solve the problem: the bureaucrats held the purse strings, and Greece had no choice but to accede to the bankers’ demands.Viktor Orbán can credibly claim to be the model for the contemporary populist-right nationalist leader. His rhetoric is the subject of Miklós Sükösd's “Victorious Victimization: Orbán the Orator—Deep Securitization and State Populism in Hungary's Propaganda State.” Sükösd finds the template for Orban's subsequent rhetoric in his speech at Heroes Square, attacking Soviet occupation in 1989; at the time, Orban was the leader of the leftist Fidesz party. The speech set the pattern for speeches that Orban gave annually since his election as prime minister in 2010. On Sükösd's analysis, in Orban's case a populist rhetoric served first a liberal and then an illiberal politics. Drawing on a content analysis of forty-one of these speeches, Sükösd's argues that Orban's rhetoric is especially notable for fear-mongering: Orban exaggerates threats to Hungary's sovereignty and national character from EU bureaucrats and immigrants. If the Hungarian voter is especially vulnerable to such threats, the history of Hungary can explain why: Hungary was dominated by the Hapsburgs in the eighteenth century, followed by the Russians, then, in the twentieth century first by the Nazis and then the Soviets. Sükösd's essay is notable for giving a relatively rich account of how populist appeals are rooted in national character. He writes, “Themes of fear, suffering and gloom occupy central places in Hungarian national identity and culture” (179). Hungary sees itself as “ever the guiltless victim of contempt, assault and injury perpetrated by others” (179).” Sükösd's analysis shows in a compelling way how perceived victimhood and its attendant resentments are fertile ground for the populist.Pierre Ostiguy identifies his analysis specifically as rhetorical in his chapter, “The Voice and Message of Hugo Chávez: A Rhetorical Analysis.” By a rhetorical approach, he appears to mean not only an analysis that features close readings but also an analysis of “relational-performative” elements, more traditionally the fourth canon, actio. Ostiguy identifies a number of features of Hugo Chávez's rhetoric that mark his brand of populism as unusual and extreme. The speeches are uniquely characterized by expressions of passionate love: for fatherland (la patria), for the flag, and for Christ, reflecting values that are more typically associated with right-wing politics. Famously aligning himself and his movement with Símon Bolívar, Chávez claims to be less an heir to that original revolution than its re-incarnation and extension, as if he and his movement were pre-ordained to bring about its messianic completion. Furthermore, Chávez would not merely represent the Venezuelan people but embody them. Chávez, Ostiguy writes, “is the people.”Like other populists Chávez also shares a penchant for “the low,” an important idea that Ostiguy advanced in earlier work. “The low” manifests as a general vulgarity that is intended to shock, especially in coarse, personal insults. Ostiguy notes as exemplary a Chávez speech in March 2006, in which he “unloaded” on George Bush (following the invasion of Iraq) with personal insults, including calling Bush a donkey, a genocider, a drunk, a sicko, a coward and worse. Equally important is Chávez's actio. Speaking without a manuscript or teleprompter, Chávez exhibits an apparent spontaneity but delivers with cadence and rhythm, in a deep baritone, punctuated by an expressive arm waving.This is an excellent, well-conceived collection. Each of the chapters reviews the literature on populism and offers a taxonomy for classifying and understanding it. Each also critically analyzes at least one work that bears the populist label. The chapters demonstrate the value of a rhetorical take on populist rhetoric. It invites rhetoric scholars to take a seat at the table. We should heed that invitation.

When we think of the civil rights movement, imagery of the mass meeting almost immediately comes to mind. We imagine the immense crowds at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, where more than a quarter million people assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Reflecting on the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., we might also think of the religious and liturgical quality that marked these mass meetings. Yet, despite their influence and importance, the use of religious genres at civil rights mass meetings remains an often-overlooked aspect of the movement. Elizabeth Ellis Miller's Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting provides a rhetorical history of the mass meeting by examining how these meetings drew upon ritual liturgies to facilitate collective political action. Miller's primary argument throughout the book is that the mass meeting drew upon the genres of prayer, song, and testimony to provide attendees rhetorical scaffolding for political participation. The book shifts attention from the speakers and speeches of the mass meeting, about which there exists a wealth of scholarship, to the constituent members of the mass meeting themselves: ordinary Black Americans. The book offers an important theoretical contribution by moving scholarly attention beyond the bounds of normative deliberation toward the rhetorical role of religious practices. As a result, the book will not only interest those who study public and religious rhetoric but also those interested in affect and deliberation.In the first of six chapters, Miller lays out the rhetorical concept of “liturgy of change” and grounds it in genre theory to facilitate her goal of examining how the mass meeting transformed “audience members in seats to activists” (106). The next three chapters include analyses of three genres that typified the mass meeting: song, prayer, and testimony. Miller draws on archival research to reconstruct the mass meeting, including notes and schedules, first-person accounts, and interviews. The chapter progression of the book is designed to reflect the order in which liturgies would be performed in the Black church. The fifth chapter explores the rhetorical significance of the liturgies by examining the frequent presence of counter protestors at mass meetings. This complication of the rhetorical situation highlights the mass meeting as a “watched, visible space,” specifically how activists responded with a radical pacifism made possible through liturgical enactment (130). The concluding chapter turns to the contemporary use and limits of liturgy as activism.Chapter two, “Sounding Civic Identity: Freedom Song Invention at the Mass Meeting,” attends to activist song as an example of genre invention and, at the same time, the rhetorical potential of sound “as a constitutive resource” (50). Freedom songs required the leader to engage in “selection, adaption, and performance” (50). Miller explains how these songs articulated a collective identity often in the very spaces where this identity was denied (50). Thus, songs like “Woke Up this Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom” and “This Little Light of Mine” demonstrate the constitutive potential of sound for configuring collective identities and establishing an activist ethos of radical pacifism. In chapter three, Miller turns to “activist prayer,” arguing that it contained a “paradox of peace and the unruly” (79). Miller argues that, while prayer remains an overlooked genre of the movement due to it being “not obviously activist” (77), collective prayer had an important rhetorical function that allowed activists to simultaneously “display peace” and engage in protest in public and segregated spaces (77). Here, Miller examines both directed and pedagogic prayers, with the former defined as prayer led by a speaker and the latter as the collective teaching of activist prayers. Thus, through “genre, gesture, and theology” (79), participants collectively “crafted [a] reverent resistant identity and posture” and, in doing so, “constituted themselves as a peaceful group insistent on change” (78). Drawing on Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt's notion of “unruly genres,” Miller defines prayer as “unruly” because it “violated racialized norms regarding what spaces Black bodies should inhabit” and “unsettled religious norms for where prayer should occur” (79).The fourth chapter explores the use of testimony at the mass meeting. Drawing on the scholarship of Geneva Smitherman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Rhea Estelle Lathan, Miller suggests that testimony provided participants a flexible genre with which to “testify” to their lived experience of racism and to “take the first steps into collective participation and rhetorical performance” (101). The overarching claim of the book, that the mass meeting enabled rhetorical participation and moved attendees toward democratic ends, is most clearly illustrated in this chapter. Miller explains how the “fuzzy” liturgical genre of testimony was “both sacred and free-form,” which allowed participants to articulate their experiences, connecting their individual stories to a collective account of racial justice (102). The fifth chapter contextualizes how the three genres were situated within the broader landscape of radical pacifism. Examining the “external engagement dimension” of the civil rights mass meeting, Miller argues that “faithful genres” were used as rhetorical strategies to respond at mass meetings to the disruptive presence of counter protestors. The genres from the previous three chapters—prayer, song, and testimony—were used to respond kairotically before audiences that included segregationists and law enforcement (146).The final chapter, “Faith, Racial Justice, and Rhetorical Activism in the Twenty-First Century,” turns to the contemporary “limits of liturgy” for activism. Miller distinguishes between Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement, paying specific attention to three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement. Miller argues that comparing the two movements serves to “deepen our appreciation of the intellectual and sociopolitical vision of BLM, while also pointing toward the limits of liturgy as an animating concept in the movement for Black freedom” (151). The three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement are as follows. First, the mass meeting, while ostensibly egalitarian, was still beholden to a “gendered vision of freedom and citizenship” and “circumscribed the participation of women along with queer young activists” (151). Second, leaders of the era acted in ways that were antithetical to the Christian morals and values of the movement, particularly when it came to sexual ethics. Third, the movement was plagued by a frequent misalignment of the movement's leaders’ vision and the issues affecting ordinary Black people. Miller notes how BLM, founded by three queer Black women, has responded to these issues in its adoption of a restorative justice framework and attention to a range of social justice issues, including exploitative capitalism and criminal justice reform (156). In the final few pages of the book, Miller outlines recent examples of liturgy as activism to challenge the “decline narrative” of religious activism in rhetorical studies. Specific examples here include Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, a book that borrows from Black church liturgies and orders of service for its structure, as well as President Barack Obama's eulogy following the mass shooting at Emmanuel Baptist Church, which concluded with the hymn “Amazing Grace.”This concluding chapter seems at odds with the argument that Miller makes in the rest of the book. While the book explores liturgy as collective action through ordinary Black participants, the concluding chapter turns to organizational critique, comparing the leadership and ethos of BLM with that of the civil rights movement. This disjunction between the rhetorical affordances of collective action and a concluding chapter that focuses instead on leaders and organizational structure detracts from Miller's primary argument as I understood it: that the rhetorical power of a radical pacifism was made actionable through the collective enactment of “liturgies of change.” The concluding chapter not only seems inconsistent with the book's argument but potentially overlooks interesting theoretical questions and tensions, such as the relationship between genre and affect within the mass meeting and the broad implications of liturgy and radical pacifism for rhetorical theory. And while Miller attempts to confront the “decline narrative” of religious activism, her examples largely focus on speakers and leaders rather than collective action. Earlier in the book, Miller illustrates how liturgy has unique rhetorical capacities—to reconcile contradictions, to embody radical pacifism in the face of hostility, and to do constitutive work in forming collective identities. Exploring how such genres and practices could be adapted for the present might not only shed light on liturgy's continued rhetorical potential for activism but also open lines of inquiry consistent with the book's premise.The primary contribution of Liturgy of Change is its attention to religious genres as activist rhetorical strategies. Miller calls attention to the mass meeting as a constitutive event, one that was embodied and relied on the affective potential of these genres and their attendant practices: gesture, movement, song, prayer, and testimony. By providing participants with genres of rhetorical participation familiar to the Black church, the mass meeting moved those assembled to political action. Miller's attention to the rhetoricity of religious liturgies and the mass meeting as a constitutive space joins a growing body of scholarship that examines nondiscursive rhetorics that has long been overlooked in favor of the ostensibly rational and explicitly discursive. From a methodological perspective, Miller's book is useful in demonstrating, through its archival research and reconstruction of events, how this kind of scholarship might be done. Liturgy of Change thus succeeds in offering new theoretical trajectories and objects for rhetorical inquiry while providing a methodological approach for studying them. And, as the book encourages us to consider, increased attention to the relationship between religious rhetorics and social movements might indicate new paths for rhetorical engagement, working toward a more just future through genres and practices that show “moral vision, creativity, perseverance, and urgency” (162).

Abstract This article critically examines how the term diversity rhetorically functions in progressive white parents’ school choice discourse. I draw from interview and focus group data with white, politically progressive, socioeconomically advantaged parents of K12 school-aged children living in the Madison, Wisconsin area. I demonstrate the significance of the racialized contexts in which the polysemous term diversity circulates to suggest how diversity produces contradictory “both/and” meanings. I argue that emphasizing the privileged positioning of white rhetors illustrates how diversity functions both to celebrate multiculturalism and to maintain whiteness as center. My analysis explores how parents position diversity in relation to their school choice decisions as threat, as distant other, as capital, and as commonplace. In doing so, I demonstrate the varying degrees to which diversity functioned to reinforce whiteness's dominance. Through troubling how parents engaged the term in uncritical ways, this paper contributes a nuanced and complex interpretation of how diversity rhetorically functions in polysemous ways within white progressive parents’ school choice discourse to produce paradoxical meanings.

Abstract This essay contextualizes and reads Albert Jeremiah Beveridge's “Government for Porto Rico” in order to discern the ways in which he crafts a rhetoric of Americanity in the Senate debate over the 1900 Foraker Act relating to Puerto Rico. Drawing from textual and archival sources, I argue that Beveridge (operating within a complex political and personal context) crafts a vision of Americanity that articulates social Darwinist commitments to Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy, a reinvigoration of Manifest Destiny, and a unique elucidation of American civil religion. Beveridge draws from familiar tropes in his earlier, and more famous, speeches to argue for a logic of possession that would see Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans owned by the United States but not part of the nation, because such integration would contaminate the body politic.

Abstract On April 7, 1989, on the north side of Taipei, magazine editor, free speech activist, and democracy advocate Nylon Cheng ignited himself on fire, defying the authoritarian KMT's attempt to arrest him. The immolation rocked Taiwan and triggered waves of revulsion against the Chiang dynasty, helping to move the nation toward freedom. Thirty-plus years later, Nylon is immortalized in the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation Memorial Museum, a site that merges history, activism, and myth-making. Situating our analysis within the Communication sub-fields of museum studies and memory activism, and celebrating Taiwan's transition from authoritarianism to democracy, we argue that Nylon's sacrifice shaped Taiwan's national identity and evolving democratic habits. We approach Nylon's contested legacy by addressing the representational complications driving questions about the roles of free speech and communication in political advocacy, the ways power is embedded in different notions of bravery, how the living co-opt the actions of the dead, how postcolonial legacies impact contemporary Taiwan, and how memory activism perpetuates necessary myths in the name of social justice. While tackling these questions about the representational challenges of memory activism, we introduce Nylon to western readers, for we believe he deserves inclusion in the pantheon of global activists working for justice.

As national parks saw a significant uptick in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, so too has scholarly attention to these public symbols increased. The Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands by Mary E. Stuckey offers a complex understanding of how America's national parks and public lands do “political work” (22). By evaluating how American presidents have rhetorically positioned public lands, Stuckey argues that these spaces invite specific discursive lenses to national identity, citizenship, patriotism, and stewardship. She interweaves criticism of presidential rhetoric with case studies of policies involving lands run by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS).For the Enjoyment of the People opens with the story of Mount Rushmore: land stolen from Indigenous peoples and quite literally carved up. Stuckey calls attention to this harm while noting that the NPS has been attempting (although not particularly well) to negotiate their harmful past actions by working with Indigenous people when interpreting the parks. This narrative sets the tone for the rest of the book, pointing “to the importance of rhetoric in understanding the nature and implications of these interpretive struggles” and positioning conflicts about identity—Indigenous identities especially but not exclusively—at the center (1). This book emphasizes how Indigenous voices are neglected within U.S. national narratives. Throughout For the Enjoyment of the People, Stuckey revisits conflicts surrounding Indigenous representation. She emphasizes the importance of using Indigenous-preferred names for places, despite each artifact's clear centering of white settler colonial perspectives. Overall, Stuckey's newest work leans on ideological analyses of American presidential rhetoric, interspersed with criticisms of discourse found within the spaces themselves, to illuminate how America's public lands discursively negotiate national identity. In doing so, Stuckey has crafted a thorough, thoughtful, and deliberately critical guidebook for rhetorical scholars and the American public generally to recognize how the nation's lands perpetuate certain American identities and values.Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of national identity as it is discursively manifested within American public lands. The first chapter explores the erasure of colonialism as seen in overseas national parks: the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa. In “Establishing National Origins: Erasure, Dispossession, and American Empire,” Stuckey discusses how time and space intersect to form explanations and accommodations of identity by examining how U.S. policies regulated Indigenous people and their lands. For instance, by grouping all Indigenous peoples together as “Indians,” white settler-colonists conflated space and time; they applied policies generally to vastly different Indigenous communities across decades despite their unique locales and histories. Political discourse erased Indigenous communities from their lands through erasure by discovery, entitlement, visibility, and interpretation. Stuckey weaves this history with two contemporary case studies. Colonialism is both erased and displayed in the U.S. Virgin Islands as the park is portrayed as scenic and economically beneficial. Colonialism is negotiated in American Samoa as the park is naturally wonderful and contains “pure culture worth preserving” (48). Stuckey presents a thoughtful evaluation of the NPS's interpretations, recognizing that their efforts to improve are “embedded in a colonialist web of historical and cultural interpretation from which it cannot be completely disentangled without foregrounding that colonial history” (42). The first chapter clearly depicts how American public lands were founded on colonial white supremacy and how these effects still resonate. This theme lingers with the reader for the remainder of the book.Chapter Two, “Claiming a National Past: Patriotism and Citizenship,” reveals how patriotism and citizenship are negotiated at Gettysburg National Historic Park, Gateway National Park (formerly known as Jefferson National Expansion Memorial), and Manzanar National Historic Site. Stuckey discusses how these become “places of considerable contestation over what constitutes American patriotism” (55). The chapter brings together theories about citizenship, rhetoric, place, and memory, evaluating how these memorial sites portray authenticity. Each example shows the complex discursive negotiation performed within and around places with shameful pasts, like Manzanar's Japanese American internment camp. At Manzanar, the NPS makes specific interpretive choices, such as whether to freeze oppression in the nation's past or encourage the visitors to relate with the victims.The third chapter asks how history is preserved and interpreted and narrated in NPS museums. Stuckey focuses the entirety of “Asserting a Singular National Narrative: Whose History and Whose Heritage?” on Mesa Verde National Park and on how its museum appropriates, displays, and memorializes antiquities. The evaluation of park museums is complemented by criticisms of the park's advertising, which portrays Mesa Verde—and thus both contemporary and ancient Indigenous peoples—as either primitive or romantic. The chapter concludes with critique of how the NPS interprets marginalized communities, arguing that the federal agency might be “doing better,” but their efforts also expose ongoing conflicts about recontextualizing national history and the accessibility of Indigenous cultures (114).Chapter Four, “Protecting Natural Resources: Citizen Stewards and the Nation's Future,” evaluates how the NPS's education and park management construct visitors as citizens and stewards of American lands. When evaluating Everglades National Park and the public lands of the California desert, Stuckey notes how the NPS educates through park interpretation and how the parks themselves are oriented to establish visitors as citizen stewards (119). As the first park to be set aside primarily for wildlife preservation, Everglades NP exemplifies the debate around what land deserves to be “preserved.” The discourse around the California Desert Protection Act shows how policies can affect American citizenship and stewardship of public lands. Finally, in “Measuring Value: Entitlement in the Land of Opportunity,” Stuckey considers Bears Ears National Monument and Alaskan public lands, noting how “public” lands are valued and their rightful ownership discursively assigned as entitlement. Stuckey links political decision making, land “ownership,” and citizenship through case studies. “Measuring Value” draws attention to the complicated debate around land value and entitlement.While For the Enjoyment of the People is far from the only scholarship about American public lands, its methodology sets it apart. Stuckey skillfully joins rhetorical criticism of presidential discourse about American public lands, evaluations of policy debates about expanding or reducing the lands, textual analysis of the NPS's interpretations of the lands, and rich descriptions of their historical contexts. Rooted in a political rhetorical tradition, this book spans disciplines in its methods and applications. Unlike recent works in rhetorical field methods, For the Enjoyment of the People is far more discursive than material in its approach to space. While this work contributes to the discipline as a rhetorical criticism, embodied work is also needed to investigate these spaces further.This book provides a much-needed update to the literature on parks and public lands as it is intentionally critical of American institutions like the NPS. Multiple chapters are devoted to how the NPS has repeatedly neglected Indigenous voices in park interpretation. Stuckey offers attentive and serious criticisms of the NPS, arguing that “Based in dispossession and erasure on one hand and displacement on the other, [the NPS] remains mired in the rhetoric and other practices of colonialism despite interpretive efforts to overcome those legacies” (53). This criticism recognizes the context of the contemporary moment when American federal agencies are asked to reckon with their colonial legacies. Stuckey concludes with clear calls to the NPS, emphasizing the need for action. Stuckey recommends that the NPS include this complex discourse in their interpretations rather than pretending parks are apolitical. Stuckey also calls for the NPS to position Indigenous voices as contemporary and not just histories, to “include consistent and clear interpretations that speak to Indigenous presence, removal, genocide, and contemporary lives . . . become foregrounded and made manifest in the present” (179). The reader is left with a deeper understanding of how America's parks function politically and, imperatively, with precise calls to public action.For the Enjoyment of the People interrogates identity in a way that is accessible to a public audience. America's national parks, monuments, memorials, and public lands are often depicted as non-controversial symbols of national unity. Quite the opposite is true, as Stuckey reveals, and their history and continued interpretation have profound implications on broader conceptions of what it means to be “American.” Stuckey's engaging style, in-depth case studies, and comprehensible analyses of complex policies and presidential rhetorics make this book eminently readable. For the Enjoyment of the People could serve as a helpful textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses about a variety of topics, from presidential discourse to environmental communication. Alternatively, Stuckey's political-rhetorical lens provides a contemporary perspective on the ongoing conversation surrounding identity and place, an important addition to the cross-disciplinary literature linking political power, space, and identity.

Abstract This essay uses affect theory to argue that Greta Thunberg's gestures, rather than the representational content of her speeches, innervates intense responses of admiration and contempt. In this essay, we depict these gestures, which includes Thunberg's school strike, speeches, and her refusal to fly, as shaming gestures. We then illustrate how Thunberg negotiates the rhetorical limits established by the affective dynamics of shame. Specifically, shaming demands rhetoric that is at once preeminently social but also individualizing or particularizing, since shame entails criticizing an individual for violation of a social norm or expectation. Shaming explains both the widespread identification and contagion Thunberg produces, as well as the heated contempt of detractors—both of which are common responses to shame. We conclude by discussing the limits and potentiality of shame, as well as gestures more generally, contending gestures become essential for social movements in a digital media ecology.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

Abstract Indigenous feminist voices have been long used as sources of inspiration for feminist movements, environmental justice movements, and other public facing work. When taken out of context, these voices can easily become clips and accessories to decorate other work. However, Indigenous women's voices have been central to change for Indigenous people and beyond. This essay focuses on the leadership of Zitkala-Ša, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and Deb Haaland in their advocacy for systematic change while discussing how their locality and connection to their ancestral lands remains central to their rhetorical choices. By existing in what many Indigenous people describe as walking in two worlds, these three women serve as bridges through their Indigenous rhetorical choices helping show that Indigenous women have always been political and will not be silenced.

Abstract In 2014, Elaine Brown evoked “legacy leadership,” a form of leadership that supports Black liberation. Legacy leadership is a version of leadership that both lauds and laments a legacy to persuade audience members to fight for liberation in the present. In her 2014 lecture at the University of Georgia titled, “Education for Liberation,” Brown leaned on the highs and lows of Black Panther Party history to persuade her audience that they should commit their lives to the struggle for Black freedom. In turning to Brown's “Education for Liberation,” this essay extends contemporary rhetorical understandings of leadership by revealing how reflecting on previous ideological commitments, recharacterizing concrete conditions, and inspiring individuals to act immediately can produce a form of leadership that serves liberation.

In Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation, Gillespie examines human organ debates to critique neoliberalism's predominance in and preemption of public moral deliberation. Although organ sales have been previously analyzed by economists and philosophers, Gillespie employs a unique rhetorical lens to discern the positions, justifications, and typical lines of argument representative of each camp. This distinction allows Gillespie to hone in on the argumentative dynamics of public advocates and construct a thorough overview of the debate. The rhetorical landscape is positioned as an exchange between two main camps: the market advocates, who rely on the “autonomy, efficiency, and consistency” allotted by markets, and the altruism advocates, who insist that “virtue, justice, and civic community” are better norms with which to guide the exchange of organs (196–197). This debate is framed in the terms of neoliberalism, a political theory that “asserts the centrality and priority of individual rights, marketization, and free markets in human well-being.” (18) Gillespie argues that the expansion and resonance of neoliberal rhetoric weaken public morality by shrinking the civic duty to deliberate, relegating moral deliberation entirely to supposedly neutral, amoral market forces.In Sections 1 and 2, Gillespie outlines the current organ donation policy and conducts a rhetorical analysis of the main arguments, tropes, keywords, testimonials, horror stories, and urban legends that each camp deploys. The altruistic camp, whose position is reflected in current U.S. law, argues that altruism is “inspirational,” “enacts justice,” and “promotes and performs civic community” (59). The case for the altruistic system is undergirded by an emphasis on civic virtue, an “attitude” that needs to be cultivated and publicized to increase organ supply (55). Official stories, like those on OrganDonor.gov, feature testimonials of organ recipients and public service announcements meant to inspire others to donate. Celebrity organ recipient testimonials, such as those of Alonzo Mourning, Steve Jobs, and Tracy Morgan, give voice to the altruistic system and tend to garner more mainstream attention. Fictional accounts, including films, television shows, and novels, also contribute, albeit in artistic or dramatized ways, to the organ debate. Social media campaigns, either for publicity or crowdfunding, play a similar role in characterizing donors and recipients. These various forms coalesce into a rhetoric of altruism that promotes “a particular view of the virtuous citizen,” who contributes to the organ deficit through the selfless act of donation (51).Market advocates, whom Gillespie contrasts with the altruists, seek to persuade the public that financial compensation for human organs, either through a regulated market or through incentivization, “is rational, efficient, and consistent with public values” (60). Here too, Gillespie conducts a rhetorical analysis of the prominent stories told and language used by market advocates. The horror stories of botched black-market surgeries and deceitful medical malpractice are used ubiquitously by market advocates, implying that a regulated, transparent market would eliminate illicit sales (60, 66). Market advocates also argue that the altruistic system is already undermined by an otherwise thriving market in body parts—like sperm, ova, and plasma—and in the thousands of dollars paid to doctors and medical personnel for transplants. Stories of willing buyers in the United States and of desperate sellers in economically impoverished areas testify to the existence of a market, ostensibly whether altruism advocates like it or not. These arguments, often oriented toward “choice” and “transparency,” make the case for an organ market on the neoliberal premise that it would maintain autonomy, efficiency, and consistency with current practices (83).In Sections 3 and 4, Gillespie crystallizes his critique of neoliberalism, first by providing an overview of the pluralistic dilemma of liberal democracy. Pluralistic democracy demands that “ethically diverse” members of society reconcile their moral doctrines through public deliberation, a perpetual “tension” emblematic of the “cooperative search” for the good life (214). For Gillespie, the quality of contemporary public discourse regarding the morality of the sale of human organs resembles a limp rope rather than a tension. The reason, he argues, is that the supposedly neutral market has become a “default” setting that preempts moral deliberation altogether (177). The neoliberal predominance of the “Civic Restraint Principle,” best known by the colloquial maxim “You do you, and I'll do me,” centers individualism as the essential ethic (99).Dumping the burden of moral deliberation onto the Civic Restraint Principle does not make us principled, Gillespie argues; it makes us pragmatic. This is not to say that neoliberalism is necessarily immoral. Gillespie writes to reinvigorate a public deliberation that “argues about morality—even if those arguments are fierce and at some level intractable,” rather than resigning to individualistic relativism (205). He argues that neoliberalism shouldn't be defaulted to without proper consideration of the ethics of organ sales. If total individualism is taken as an ethic, it effectively opts out of important moral disputes. When “bracketing” is taken as an ethic in itself, the result is a vacancy of any ethic. In this way, neoliberal rhetoric “hijacks the very practice of and space for public moral deliberation,” conceiving it strictly as an individualized affair (201).Gillespie maintains that tolerance is a virtue, albeit a flimsy ethic on its own. Indeed, Gillespie concedes, “the liberal virtue of tolerance is vital” given the dilemmas of pluralism (152). In a healthy democracy, however, citizens owe much more to each other. Moral deliberation cannot be minimized to individualism. In Michael Sandel's words, “‘moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor’” (16). Moral disputes, which are often categorical, must be justified in the public sphere, given normativity through good reasons. The weighing of reasons is done rhetorically; the stories, characters, and language that make up public moral deliberation have rhetorical force that persuades deliberative participants to make judgments about which reasons matter most. Gillespie sums up his deliberative theory unambiguously: “The search for moral truth, to be codified under law, is collective and procedurally intersubjective, but morality itself is not” (152).Ultimately, whether “dignity is or is not violated by organ sales” represents a key turning point in the organ market debate (158). Markets, even regulated ones, can exploit vulnerable and socioeconomically exploited populations. If a kidney or a piece of liver were worth fifty-thousand dollars, “a struggling low-income person would, ostensibly, be unable to turn down such an offer” (172). The asymmetrical nature of the exchange suggests to status quo altruists that a certain degree of exploitation is taking place. They insist that market mechanisms are blind to the “background condition that makes the actual contractual engagement—even if undertaken voluntarily—morally suspect” (169). Gillespie notes, however, that “the need for an organ by a person in dire straits and facing death is not exactly an empowering situation either” (172).Market advocates use the concept of dignity differently. They consider the blindness of market mechanisms to be a form of fairness and neutrality from the moral paternalism of the allegedly dignified majority, or worse, the state. Dignity, in neoliberal logics, inheres in the freedom to choose whether selling an organ coincides or conflicts with one's own moral compass. Restricting this choice would be to impose a bourgeois definition of dignity on less privileged classes. What dignity means, market advocates argue, may be established by the tyranny of the majority, and thus should remain an individualized, privatized concern.Gillespie ends with a short self-reflection, wherein he acknowledges that, even after gauging the moral complexity of the question of the organ market and criticizing the lethargy with which neoliberalism addresses it, it would make sense, under certain circumstances, to buy an organ. Readers should not look to Gillespie for an answer to the moral question of organ procurement. He insists, rather, on a revitalization of public deliberation on the matter. Public deliberation cannot be reliant on a neoliberal, marketized principle of civic restraint in place of affirmative moral considerations (101–102). Students and scholars of the rhetoric of science, bioethics, and political theory, particularly in the areas of discourse theory and pluralism, would benefit from Gillespie's exploration of the moral deliberation surrounding organ sales.

Abstract In this essay, we respond to claims made about so-called leaderless social movements, which tend to overstate the organizing abilities of their membership. Like many Indigenous, feminist, and activist scholars, however, we contend that many so-called leaderless social movements are land-based and rely on cultivating human connection to land or, in some cases, severing human connection to land. This essay re-centers land and land-based leadership in a conceptualization of rhetorical leadership that accounts for social movements mediated through shared space. Then, the essay draws from a case where social movements described as leaderless draw direction from a relationship to place, what we call land-led politics: the enduring Syrian revolution. We show how a land-led politics is impelled not only by the severing of people from their subsistence base and the expropriation of their lands but by an ontological relation that draws leadership from the land. Hence, the land as theopanic influences social actor subjectivities and how they manage their conduct in relation to land. Emphasizing the amorphous, symbiotic, and rhizomatic relationships social actors have with land brings to light the land's political power and agentic qualities. As such, land-led politics demonstrates the limits of a leader-centric approach, which reproduces colonial understandings of power by failing to account for the political valence of land in realizing visions of a transformed landscape.

Abstract Developments in teleconferencing, necessitated by the COVID pandemic, have changed the ways that Indigenous and marginalized communities participate in development planning. In this paper I examine digital artifacts (recorded Zoom meetings and digital data stories) to uncover the rhetorical leadership strategies of Indigenous and minority population leaders as they reach international audiences. I ask if presentation of data stories and participation in international development meetings facilitated by teleconferencing have become a way to resist dominant social narratives that have been produced by mainstream media with little grounding in or for the community. To answer this question, I examine the use of emplaced rhetoric and the ways that leaders have negotiated the presentation of community data in these new digital spaces. I focus on one moment of conflict—the eviction of 8,000 Kenyans from Kariobangi North in May of 2020. I examine how this community, which has been historically excluded from decision making, negotiated the unique rhetorical constraints and opportunities afforded by digital storytelling and teleconferencing to establish their own for rhetorical leadership that successfully stopped future evictions.

My grandpa was a doomsday prepper. In 1962 he purchased fifty-four acres of land in a remote part of Oregon, which he planned to put to good use growing trees to log every fifty years or so. But that was not the primary motivation for his purchase. He had chosen this specific spot between San Francisco and Seattle after setting his engineering skills to calculating where atomic fallout would least likely circulate after those two cities were obliterated in the coming nuclear apocalypse. In my grandpa's fantasy, everyone would die but for his clan, who would survive in a postapocalyptic Eden. To me, my grandpa's logic seems backwards. Who would want to live in this postapocalyptic nightmare world? Why would I prepare for contingencies that did not also account for the safety and survival of my neighbors, friends, and colleagues? How could I live on knowing that I had done only enough to save myself? What if this self-centered thinking is precisely what precludes the human altruism necessary to stave off a nuclear war? Patriotic courage is typically epitomized by soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice for their country—is not doomsday prepping precisely the opposite, a manifestation of a selfish sort of mega-cowardice? It seems to me that if everyone thought like my grandpa did, that would perversely guarantee nuclear war. He who builds an ark, thirsts for the flood. From my perspective, if there were a nuclear holocaust or some world-ending event, then I agree with Mark Harwell's assessment in the final pages of his book Nuclear Winter: “The optimal location to be . . . may well be at some ground zero.”1Understanding the psyche of my apocalyptic prepper grandpa and people like him is why I picked up Casey Ryan Kelly's prescient book, Apocalypse Man. Kelly's exploration expands well beyond the narrow category of doomsday preppers, which is the subject of the first chapter. Kelly identifies doomsday preppers as belonging to a greater category, the “apocalyptic male” (Introduction), which includes “red pill” subscribers (Chapter 2), “incels” (short for “involuntary celibates”) (Chapter 3), open carry proponents (Chapter 4), the followers of former President Donald Trump, and what Kelly calls Trump's “rhetoric of aggrievement” (Chapter 5). Rather than dismiss the apocalyptic male as an aberration or the ramblings of a lunatic (as I might have before reading this book), Kelly dedicates serious time, attention, close reading, and criticism to understanding the apocalyptic male's psychological profile and politics. This deviant profile is especially dangerous to the extent that it is becoming more and more prevalent. As evinced by a never-ending and ever-increasing succession of terrorist activity in America since 9/11 (archived by NewAmerica.org) and the publication of Kelly's book, the apocalyptic male is becoming normalized. Just what constitutes the apocalyptic male?The paradox at the center of the apocalyptic male mentality as Kelly defines it is the belief in the rightful supremacy of the heterosexual white male and, simultaneously, the unjust victimhood that aggrieves him and prevents him from achieving “the good life.” These narratives of victimization are wide-ranging, resulting in groups of like-minded aggrieved . . . white men [who] have been emasculated by the family court system, affirmative action programs, man-hating feminists, gold-digging ex-wives, political correctness, job-taking immigrants, the social acceptance of queer intimacy, and even television situation comedies that satirize oafish working-class fathers. Popular articulations of wounded white masculinity reflect the rise of a reactionary politics of white male resentment that seizes tropes of victimhood and marginalization even as it celebrates white male primacy (2).Kelly shows how doomsday preppers, as seen on the popular eponymous series broadcasted on National Geographic, are not merely cosplaying the apocalypse; rather, they are longing for the coming of some sort of catastrophe which will return the white male to his proper place in a postapocalyptic hunter-gatherer world. “Red-pillers” and incels partake in the fetishization of their perceived victimhood, which Kelly grounds in the language of Freudian psychology. These are people who perversely take sadomasochistic pleasure in the act of bearing their wounds to one another and commiserating in online discussion board communities where they fantasize together about subsequent “righteous violence” (27). The incel sees himself as blameless. The problem lies not with himself, but with all women (if not all womankind) who fail to recognize the incel's natural superiority and desirability. The apocalyptic male takes no responsibility for his lot; it is always the world that is wrong. As Kelly argues: Abject white masculinity is underwritten by a powerful script of victimization that blames feminism and multiculturalism for white men's dwindling social and economic privileges. When one lives a life of entitlement, even the most modest demands for equality can be perceived as an assault (7).Kelly explains the effectiveness of the Trump campaign slogan “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” noting that it appeals to nostalgia for an imagined past in which these forces (immigrant caravans, feminists, non-white people, women, etc.) have not “penetrated” the victimized white male. The white male is returned to his rightful place as the apex predator of civilization (139). The dog whistle of MAGA is an implied answer to an implied question: Great for whom? To return the apocalyptic male to power would indeed require an apocalypse for everyone else.Kelly leads his reader through example after example of various manifestations of the category of apocalypse man. “Open Carry” laws are the subject of Chapter 4, which considers the pernicious logic of Second Amendment rhetoric. Kelly places this fantasy of the “good guy with a gun,” who might protect us (which us?) from an oppressive state, within the context of apocalyptic rhetoric. The overlap between “Open Carry” and incels in particular is seen in the overtly sexual language of guns “blowing,” “shooting a load,” “firing blanks,” in which the feelings of impotence, aggrievement, and disempowerment can be displaced and redeemed. “Open Carry” discourses depend on a phallocentric object (a gun) that promises the redemption of the apocalyptic male via righteous violence against a perceived—and often overtly coded Black—other (107–109).My copy of Apocalypse Man has found a spot on the bookshelf next to some topical company. I have shelved it aside Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, a book that adds to Kelly's discussion of a particular flavor of misogynist nostalgia.2Cruel Optimism (2011) also leans against Kelly's book, in which Lauren Berlant describes the injurious sort of optimism that fantasizes an impossible future.3 Such optimism undergirds the fantasies of the apocalyptic male who dreams of a future in which patriarchy is restored by violence. In pursuing this impossible fantasy, this violent cruel optimism, the apocalyptic male is himself precluded from any possible “good life.” Another work in conversation with Apocalypse Man is Donna Zuckerberg's analysis of the use of classical allusion in misogynist and supremacist hate speech in Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.4 These books agree with and strengthen Kelly's psychological taxonomy of the apocalyptic male; no doubt more critical discussion will be necessary given recent targeted persecution of the trans community by the conservative right.If one wanted to stare deeply into the abyss of fragile white supremacist misogyny, Kelly's category might expand to accommodate communities that have gained significant power and notoriety in recent months: QAnon followers, Boogaloo Boys, Three Percenters, and the like. Fittingly, Kelly begins and ends his book with vignettes of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA. Were Kelly to re-write this book today, he just as well could have begun and ended the book with the January 6th Capitol Insurrection. Whether or not Donald Trump manages to win another term in office in 2024, apocalypse men will be legion. The ramifications of their aggrieved worldview will continue to have deadly consequences. And that fact is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Kelly's horrifyingly relevant book.

Allison Rowland's Zoetropes and The Politics of Humanhood is about rhetorics of humanhood or how some come to be counted as human while others do not. It considers how hierarchies of humanhood are generated, sustained, and reordered, examining the discursive patterns by which movements along the scale of human valuation occur. The majority of the book is devoted to three case studies, each of which focuses on a distinct contemporary site: the American Gut Project's public information regarding the gut microbiome, the National Memorial for the Unborn's memorializations of aborted fetuses, and the gym scene in Boulder, Colorado. It is an eclectic set of cases, yet one that coheres in Rowland's conceptual framework and in its focus on health and body related issues: guts, abortion, and fitness.The book's title comes from the term “zoe,” which Rowland explains is “pronounced zoh-eh; rhymes with ‘no way’” (2). She gestures toward Giorgio Agamben in her use of the term but is clear that her usage is not the same as his notion of bare life. She appends “zoe” to “rhetorics” to identify the range of discursive moves by which life is valued and devalued across the spectrum of humanhood. As such, the book is very much about biopolitics and also, she takes care to emphasize, necropolitics. Citing Achille Mbembe's work, she stresses that when it comes to the hierarchies across which humanhood is ascribed, devaluations are an inevitable counterpart to elevations. She uses the term “transvaluation” to capture both forms of movement and their interconnectedness. And across case studies the book remains attentive to the dynamic by which humanhood's hierarchies produce both beneficiaries and casualties. As a whole, it convincingly illustrates the sort of insights that rhetoric, as field of study, brings to scholarly conversations around biopolitics and necropolitics.Rowland's book is firmly anchored in the rhetorical tradition. She aims to equip readers with a language for identifying and discussing the rhetorical patterns by which transvaluations occur. The term “zoerhetorics” is thematic, referencing modes of discursive transvaluation in general. But more specifically, Rowland is concerned with a specific iteration of zoerhetorics, zoetropes, or the figurative devices by which valuations along the hierarchy are enacted. For this, she draws from the deep well of rhetorical tropes, engaging long-standing—but now somewhat obscure—concepts like antonomasia and somatopeia to discern modes of figurative transvaluation. Her hope, she notes with a wry nod to its unlikely realization, is that even journalists or citizens might pick up this language and use it as a resource for naming and thereby more effectively addressing problematic zoerhetorics.It is fitting that Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood begins with the description of a classroom exercise the author uses to introduce students to some of the book's core ideas. Well-suited to adoption in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course, the book explains key ideas and concepts in lucid and straightforward fashion and deploys specialized terminology judiciously. In addition, one of the book's notable strengths is its thoughtful self-reflexiveness. Rowland does not construe rhetorical analysis as a disembodied process but as one in which a positioned, sometimes personally-invested, self participates. For example, in a chapter on fitness culture in Boulder, Colorado that examines how certain privileged, fit bodies become valorized while others are cast as lesser-than, Rowland acknowledges her own participation in that culture. She describes some of her time at Boulder gyms, reflecting on the experience of complicity in that particular zoerhetoric. This is a candid illustration of what it looks like to critique rhetoric while not entirely exempt from that critique oneself.Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the one focused on pro-life fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn. Rowland examines the myriad ways the memorial ascribes human status to the fetus, through memorial plaques inscribed with individual names, for example. In doing so, she engages in highly positioned rhetorical analysis. For example, she describes first encountering the memorial via a weblink: “I remember sitting up a little at my desk . . . —how interesting, I thought; this fetal memorialization stuff is a bigger deal than I thought” (81). Later she recounts taking a research trip to the National Memorial on Mother's Day, only to be surprised to find no one else there. She also acknowledges the difficulties of doing research in the pro-life community as someone who is herself pro-choice. The chapter offers a lesson in how we might communicate about our research process in a way that acknowledges personal context. And for students, it is a helpful illustration of the messiness of academic work in which a researcher might at times be intrigued, conflicted, disappointed, etcetera and must grapple with various challenges while making adjustments during the unpredictable research process.The zoerhetorics that determine who gets counted as human and who doesn't underwrite much tragedy throughout human history, legacies of oppression and violence, and misery wrought against those deemed less than others. Rowland's arguments meaningfully intersect with long-standing scholarly conversations around the rhetorics of race, class, and gender concerned with the same. And while her case studies arguably avoid the most horrific sites of zoerhetorical consequence, she attends to their terrible potential throughout the book. In Chapter One, she elaborates at some length on the Great Chain of Being as a foundational zoerhetoric, one that still structures, often implicitly, assumptions about who counts as most and least human. As an enduring Western hierarchization, it has facilitated no small amount of subjection throughout history. Her case study on the American Gut Project addresses how communication around gut microbes sometimes draws on paternalistic and colonial rhetorics in which racial hierarchization is also involved. At the same time, one can imagine other case studies that grapple with even darker material, which dwell more fully on the horrific consequence of casting some out of the realm of perceived humanhood.Given Zoetropes’ self-reflexive approach to research questions, methods, and findings, it is no surprise that the book has a more narrative quality than many monographs in rhetorical studies. Rowland tells the stories of her research process, while also convincingly demonstrating its results. Consequently, the book is engaging to read, well-positioned to hold the interest of a broad readership. At the same time, the book also systematically details various discursive moves by which zoerhetorics are enacted. Rowland includes a mini-glossary of key terms at the end of the introductory chapter and, in the conclusion, outlines what she calls “zoerhetorical theory's propositions,” an encapsulation of the book's key arguments across case studies.Zoetropes equips its readers with tools with which to name, conceptualize, and potentially dismantle hierarchies of valuation. The stakes are high. As Rowland argues throughout the book, zoetropic hierarchies determine which lives come to matter or not, with life-or-death consequence. It is a sign of the book's merit that readers will want to take its productive conceptual frameworks elsewhere. The book effectively beckons past itself, inviting us to apply Rowland's critical tools to cases beyond her own. It is an invitation worth accepting.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

Abstract This essay examines the ways in which Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico and Homelands, creates and reifies rhetorical leadership by championing the hybrid identity he possesses as a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American journalist working across literal and metaphorical borders, including the challenges he has faced and the vulnerabilities experienced in the pursuit of being a journalist. A significant figure in contemporary media as one of the most prominent Mexican American journalists in the United States, Corchado still publishes articles on the United States/Mexico border, immigration, and on Mexico. The essay considers Corchado and the way he discusses resilience, both expressively and as a rhetorical guide for audiences. The essay uses the two books to highlight Corchado's arguments for the power of journalism and the significance of rhetorical accessibility and the expansion of his writing to Mexican American audiences who might appreciate his standpoint in a richer fashion.

Abstract To describe what rhetorical leadership looks like in Critical Mexican Studies, my area of study, I analyze Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta's “Speech Commemorating the 65th Anniversary of the PRI at the Monument to the Revolution,” known colloquially as the “I See a Mexico” speech. One of the fundamental texts of Mexico's 1994, “Yo Veo un México” is regarded as the speech that led to Colosio's assassination—an event that set off a series of misfortunes Mexico continues to correct. By employing the lens of metanoia, the temporal missed opportunity that leads to transformation through regret, I first describe the theoretical relationship between metanoia and pessimism. Then, I describe the sociopolitical conditions that demanded a speech that communicated a break in political tradition. Finally, I unpack the rhetorical strategies that, in aiming to create a vision of progress, shed light on previously obscure realities. Colosio asserts himself as the only leader with the proper vision to lead Mexico through the arrival of neoliberalism by evoking pessimistic images that resonated with public concerns. His speech catapulted him to Mexico's presidency while simultaneously threatening his life. Colosio offered a series of fleeting opportunities Mexico must capitalize on to enter a new stage in democratic possibility. I conclude by discussing how Colosio's haunting rhetoric continues to inform presidential campaigns.

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

Abstract Queer rhetorical leadership describes performances of leadership with a queer disposition. As an idea, it exceeds the doing of traditional models of rhetorical leadership by queer rhetors for queer audiences on matters of queer concerns. Rather, queer rhetorical leadership subverts, inverts, and reconceptualizes many of the most common assumptions about how to do “good” leadership in order to lead others in the construction of more queer worlds. This essay explores the notion of queer rhetorical leadership by investigating the discourses of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton in their influential text, The Ethical Slut (1997). In particular, the essay notes how the rhetors use radical revisioning, transformational vulgarities, and cultivating comfort in irresolution to lead readers toward a queerer world via the practice of polyamory.

Abstract This article examines the case of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant house in Oakland, California as an attempt to advance a human right to housing. It argues that the U.S. penchant for rights discrimination, the idea that one must choose between whose and which rights matter, contributes to the need for a rhetorical strategy of rights-blurring. Building on previous scholarship that establishes a history of Black women connecting civil rights to human rights as a rhetorical strategy in the United States, this article explains how rights-blurring actually operates. It also demonstrates how this strategy functions in conversations about property rights in the United States and in the context of a twenty-first century direct-action protest.

Abstract This essay outlines the rhetorical elements and discursive strategies used to perpetuate cultural racism, or ethnicism, in contemporary political discourse. Using Marine Le Pen's Islamophobic discourse as a case study, this essay demonstrates how Le Pen deploys ethno-nationalist rhetoric to highlight the dangers that she believes Muslim terrorists pose to French national identity. She portrays Muslim terrorists as rootless wanderers capable of causing irreparable damage to France, which enables her to craft herself as a protector of the French home using populist reasoning. In doing so, Le Pen's discourse stokes fears of clandestine terrorists hiding among the French Muslim and migrant populace, which constitutes the Muslim terrorist—and by extension, all Muslims—as major security and cultural threats to the nation. Consequently, Le Pen portrays French national identity as incompatible with all forms of Islam.

In this timely book, Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women's Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Coretta M. Pittman skillfully reveals how the “hidden voices” of the Women's Era and the New Negro Era found agency through creative expression. Pittman covers a diverse array of texts (essays, speeches, plays, blues songs, novellas, etc.) and carefully traces the literary techniques utilized by Black women to demonstrate the importance of literacy for the advancement of Black people during this time. Unlike other scholars of this period, who have primarily focused on middle-class and elite Black women, Pittman instead concentrates on the Black women “hidden in plain sight.” According to Pittman, the Black women hidden in plain sight were “struggling to reconcile the promises offered by literacy and education over the stark realities of their racialized experiences” (xix). For these Black women, literacy was an important political act. In chronological order, Pittman synthesizes the literary contributions of Black women across genre as well as the theoretical contributions of their work.In order to control the influx of immigrants, mass public education at the turn of the twentieth century was implemented as a form of social control. Drawing on Harvey J. Graff's work, Pittman brilliantly explicates the entanglement of literature and citizenship during this period. Literacy helped enact moral codes intended to unify a heterogenous nation. However, the circulating literature contained harmful and stereotypical messages about Black Americans. While white middle-class mothers used literature to impart morals to their children, Black mothers were concerned about representations of Black people in popular literature. Advocates during the Woman's Era, such as Cooper and Matthews, believed literacy was integral to Black Americans’ social advancement and their perception of society.Pittman begins by analyzing Anna Julia Cooper's essay “The Negro as Presented in American Literature” and Victoria Earle Matthew's speech “The Value of Race Literature,” both exhorting Black people to pick up the pen to respond discursively to the circulating public discourse of Black Americans as inferior. Cooper makes the compelling argument that for American literature to encompass all facets of the nation, it must prominently feature Black subjects in a truthful light. Cooper mocks white authors for their negative portrayals of Black Americans and explains how they fail to capture Blackness. As a corrective, Cooper urges Black Americans to write about their own experiences to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of the Black experience. While Cooper admonished white authors, Victoria Earle Matthews attempted to expand the prominent understanding of race literature. In her speech, Matthews includes “histories, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers” (23). Furthermore, Matthews argued that any work created by a Black American ought to be included in the category of race literature instead of merely works by white people written about Black Americans. Matthews believed broadening the scope of what constituted race literature was essential for Black Americans to write through the trauma of enslavement. And, as Pittman demonstrates, Cooper and Matthews believed that literature about Black Americans could exercise transformational power in the “hope to transform [readers'] state of being personally, communally, and materially” (xxi). This message was primarily disseminated to Black clubwomen, whose transformative literary practices enabled Black women to craft new realities outside of their oppressive conditions.Katherine D. C. Tillman and Pauline E. Hopkins published novellas showcasing how education could transform the status of Black Americans with the proper context. Tillman's novella Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of an Afro-American Girl's Life imagines the life of Beryl Weston, whose endless pursuit of education elevates her status and uplifts her entire community. Tillman's novella participates in the idealization of Black Americans, forming “a middle-class cultural ethos,” more contemporaneously “respectability politics” (47). In contrast, Tillman's novel Clancy Street presents an alternative perspective on how the lack of education of formerly enslaved persons made them “underprepared for citizenship” (49). The Waters family in Clancy Street is a working-class Black family who financially struggles post-emancipation and engages in immoral behavior. Throughout the novel, the Waters family gains literacy and education that helps them embody the civic ideal of the time. Even though Tillman's novellas dramatize the lives of Black families of different class backgrounds, both publications ultimately reinforce the aim to achieve a Black middle-class ethos. Literacy would increase knowledge of the community and the self and family to transform society.Similarly, in Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, Ruel Briggs, a white-passing Harvard medical student, draws on his mystical powers to revive the dead. Ruel embarks on an expedition to Ethiopia, where he finds that his royal roots enable his powers and creates an ideal society wherein Black people rule themselves. The novel's overall theme is how Black people must not only use education to improve their social status but also to achieve self-actualization. Tillman and Hopkins's works participate in the idea of the transformative power of literacy, which yearns for Black people to achieve middle-class status while also serving as a rejection of the circulating retrogression theories that post-emancipation Black men would return to their “naturally bestial selves” (45). Authors in the New Negro Era would change the general approach to dispel these racist theories through literature.As Pittman chronicles, the New Negro Era saw a marked shift in Black women's perception of the capacity of literacy to address oppression in the United States. Unlike transformational literacy advocates of the Woman's Era, who sought validation from white people, the literature produced during the New Negro Era recognized the limitations of Black Americans’ literacy. Pittman argues that creative expression no longer focused on “domesticity and sentimentalism” but instead explored “despair and realism” (74). She attributes the New Negro Era's emergence to Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel. In Rachel, the Loving family moves North to escape the rampant threat of lynching in the South, only to realize that despite their educated status, they struggle to secure employment and remain vulnerable to racial violence. This play highlights the struggles of the emerging Black professional class, who realized that education was insufficient to overcome the systemic racism enshrined into law post-Reconstruction via Jim Crow legislation. Pittman argues that Grimké’s play illustrates how racism leaves a long-lasting psychological effect on individuals and communities. Grimké challenged the belief that Black women engaging in middle-class domesticity would resolve racism and railed against the racist white forces keeping Black Americans in a second-class status. Jessie Redmont Fauset's novel Comedy: American Style is a satirical novel criticizing the idea that racial uplift was a “zero-sum game” (113). The novel's protagonist Olivia only increases her status in society through the denial of her Blackness by embracing her ability to pass as white. According to Pittman, Olivia's insistence on passing is the “result of a nation unwilling to let go of its racist ideals” (135). Fauset's novel is a form of what Pittman terms “transactional” literacy, as the characters do not interrogate the looming societal conditions from which their oppression originates. Transactional literacy is defined as gaining “advanced literacy skills to accrue social and material capital sometimes intraracially and/or other times interracially” (xxi). In contrast, Pittman analyzes Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, to showcase how Hurston gave Black working-class souls “form as fully realized characters” (150). Hurston's novel grapples with competing theories of the best avenue for formerly enslaved people to participate in society: vocational school or higher education. Through the characters of John and Lucy, Hurston works through the critical debate of the time between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the value of education. Overall, these literary forms depart from notions of respectability and investigate Black life in all its complexities in an era of significant racial violence.Pittman expands on existing scholarship discussing Black women in Blues by arguing that Blues offered an opportunity for Black women to divest from middle-class ideals (such as motherhood and domesticity) and move along a path towards liberation. Even though Blues has been widely studied by musicologists, historians, anthropologists, and so on, Pittman demonstrates the necessity for its incorporation into literary and rhetorical studies. Most notably, Pittman argues that Blues participates in a specular form of literacy. Specular literacy “is the practice of reflecting back properties (e.g., writing conventions and styles, dialects, values, traditions) of one's racial and class community” (xxii). Pittman examines Mamie Smith's song “Crazy Blues,” which describes the life of a jilted female lover and how she reacts to the betrayal. Smith's hit led to a drastic increase in Black women Blues singers being recorded. These works reflect alternative perspectives on Black women's options for endurance during this period: “turn inward and forsake desire and family obligations” or “turn outward and seek revenge” (xii). Similarly, Ma Rainey's songs demonstrated that the “love and sensual lives of Black people also needed to be attended to” (143). In Ma Rainey's songs, a rejection of white normativity was connected to sexual queerness, expressed publicly through art. Steve Goodson argues that Ma Rainey “would assert her dignity, her autonomy, and her humanity through her music and lyrics, all while tactically encouraging her listeners to do the same” (146). Blues, Pittman argues, gave singers the agency to address taboo subjects, articulate Black experience, and validate working-class Black American life.A notable strength of Pittman's work is the careful tracing of concepts over time. For example, Pittman makes evident Anna Julia Cooper's influence on the creation of the term intersectionality when she covers the lineage of the concept (xxii–xxvii). Cooper repeatedly discussed how race and gender influence the plight of Black women, which inspired Pauli Murray to create the term “Jane Crow.” Kimberlé Crenshaw later expanded on Murray's Jane Crow to develop a legal framework for intersectionality as a lens and resource for intervention. While this book has many strengths, one weakness is that Pittman does not truly define agency. Pittman mentions the concept with repeated reference to how literature and music could increase Black women's agency but does not provide an in-depth discussion of Black women's relationship to agency. Given the popularity of the term agency in the field, future scholars could use Pittman's work to craft an account of Black women's agency across time.This book is an excellent read for those interested in the intersection of African American literature and feminist public address. Tracing the theoretical importance of Black women's literary productions, Pittman expertly demonstrates how scholars can use close textual analysis to understand more fully the past lives of Black women. For example, students could examine how Anna Julia Cooper's public addresses incorporated “parable, analogy, derision, and humor” to communicate to nationwide audiences (14). Students could also conduct a rhetorical analysis of how the form of Blues “relies on verbal play, repetition, indirection, and subversion as vernacular modes of expression” (95). The summaries included by Pittman not only assist the reader's comprehension but also make apparent the injustices against which the authors were writing. This book contributes to the ongoing project of tracing Black women's literary contributions, who, to varying degrees, believed that literature could remedy racial tension and violence.

The morning I picked up Disorder in the Court: Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense, news was spreading about the Michigan State University shooting. While preparing this review, there were several more mass shootings. Such tragic events (re)shape our lives. The Aurora, Colorado shooting profoundly redrew the social boundaries of my own life, and it is no coincidence that the Aurora shooting is where Andrea Alden begins her illuminating book. Disorder in the Court uses “mass shooting” as a visible marker of mental illness and a productive opening for a study of the rhetorical shifts in the insanity defense.From the outset, Alden explores humanity's desire to reason with madness, highlighting society's perpetual search for the origin of mental illness. Her deep historical and close textual work demonstrates the constitutive nature of language in relation to fields of expertise, like law and medicine, that require a facade of stability in exchange for the public's faith. Disorder in the Court highlights three rhetorical moments in the legal and medical responses over time, mapped by shifts in the insanity defense. Alden then turns to analyze the high-profile trial of John Hinckley, Jr., and, finally, summarizes the current state of the insanity defense in the United States, ruminating on biomedical advances. Alden posits this book not as a solution to problems of madness and malice, but rather as a chance to “untangle the complexities of the rhetoric of sanism,” or as she defines it: the “irrational fear of mental illness and people who suffer from it” (4, 5). Disorder in the Court unpacks the historical realities at the intersection of law and medicine, identifying both the explicit and implicit tropes of sanism, such as shared fate, the law as (failed) deterrence, and pandemonium.Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the hegemonic rhetoric of sanism and its history. From medical advances to reforms in evidentiary standards, Disorder in the Court emphasizes that a rhetorical study of textual evidence can expose the shortcomings of ideological discourses. This detailed textual work is bolstered by the inclusion of the primary texts at the end of the volume, signaling a strong appreciation for the text itself. Identifying the danger inherent in a rhetoric of sanism, Alden reminds us that the anxiety that “I, too, may become mad” does not result in compassion; it results in segregation and the asylum mentality of the early 1800s. Or, to borrow the Platonic perspective of sanism: “Madmen are not to be free” (24).Chapter 2, “A Brief History of Western Thought on Mental Illness and Its Relevance to the Law,” is a masterclass in condensing a long timeline into digestible material without sacrificing details. Alden extensively covers the dialectic of rationality/irrationality from fourth and fifth-century perceptions of “madness,” through Greek and Roman civilizations’ emphasis on reason, and into the moral panic of the Middle Ages, before landing at the humanitarian turn of the Enlightenment era, when the body and the brain were regarded as intertwined. By weaving textual evidence from Plato and Aristotle, from St. Augustine, and from John Locke and Renee Descartes, Alden maps the evolution of thought through these discourses with authority and interest.In Chapters 3 through 5, Alden shifts to analyzing specific cases that have reshaped the insanity defense. She begins with an 1843 political assassination trial, where defendant Daniel McNaughtan asserted paranoid delusions as the cause of his violent actions. Alden describes the burgeoning field of psychiatry, where conceptions of “madness” were shifting from a moral (religious) failure to a modern medical defect. Swift and public backlash to McNaughtan's acquittal included tropes of pandemonium, fakery, and (medical) illegitimacy, ultimately resulting in a verdict of “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect,” a phrase still recognizable to a modern audience. The eponymous McNaughtan Rules require a defendant to be unaware of the “nature or quality of the act . . . [and] not know it was wrong” (46).Chapter 4 introduces readers to the reforms in mental health care in the nineteenth century, eventually focusing on two cases, Parsons and Davis. Alden argues that as the field of psychiatry moved away from harsh methods of patient confinement (led by reformers like Dorthea Dix), legal questions shifted toward tests for impulse control. Alden first investigates the impacts of the appeal in Parsons, where Alabama Supreme Court Justice Somerville reversed a jury verdict. Sommerville's opinion argued that judicial authority should consider a defendant's ability to control their actions, elevating the discipline of psychiatry by adopting the reformist position of compassion and not assuming a defendant's moral failure. A few years after Parsons, the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion in Davis v. United States (1895) that extended the same approach, a “control test,” as the legal standard: Could the defendant resist their “irresistible impulse” at the time of the crime? Alden argues that, although scant, the media coverage of both Parsons and Davis relied on tropes of sanism. Not unlike more contemporary debates, public reaction to these cases was dismay about the law as a criminal deterrent, challenging the idea that momentary loss of self-control mitigated legal culpability.By the time Durham v. United States was decided in 1954, the publication of the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) was only a year away. In Chapter 5, we learn that the field of psychiatry had been reshaped by the influences of neurologists like Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, and the psychiatric field was continually revising categories of mental illness and treatments. To illustrate the last major rhetorical shift in the insanity defense, Alden recounts the fate of Monty Durham—a recidivist's tale of petty crimes, institutionalizations, and temporary release into unstable housing. By the time of his appeal in 1954, the system was shifting blame for Durham, arguing about the likelihood of future criminality. Alden writes: “Nobody knew what to do with him, and nobody wanted to be responsible for him or his actions, so they just shuffled him back and forth between jail and the hospital” (68).Readers will surely recognize the deflection of blame in this modern rhetorical cycle, and while Alden details the trial and its misgivings, this reader couldn't help but return to the opening example of mass shootings and the pervasive anxieties about the inadequacy of law. And indeed, Disorder in the Court promptly brings Durham into conversation with McNaughtan, Parsons, and Davis. Alden rounds out Chapter 5 by examining the wide-ranging, written opinion from Circuit Judge Bazelon, who argued that all prior standards for legal insanity were insufficient. Bazelon's opinion historicized the medical and legal debates before moving to establish a new effects-based “product test,” meant to consider updated medical discourses concerning mental disease; this replaces the presumption of a lack of impulse control with the idea that a defendant's mental state might influence planning, decision-making, and execution of a crime (as is the case in schizophrenia or paranoid delusions). It was contrary to the previous position that legal insanity would be characterized by an inability to plan or execute actions with intent or purpose. Despite the potential importance the Durham opinion could have had, this new legal framework did not become the standard. Alden contextualizes Bazelon's opinion in relation to its reception and effects.Chapter 6 applies Alden's framework to the criminality and culpability of John Hinckley, Jr. in his trial following an assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan. The trial arguments referred to categories laid out in the DSM-III, revisions to which had heralded the biomedical turn in psychiatry as the “triumph of science over clinical ideology” (78). Alden lays out the particulars of the Hinckley case, from his cross-country travel to contact Jodie Foster (whom he relentlessly stalked) to his attempts to conceal the actions he planned to take against government officials. Alden explains that the trial and media coverage focused on questions of rationality, mainly Hinckley's actions and his travel. Was Hinckley's meticulous behavior the cold-calculating choice of a determined killer or the obsessive, single-minded mania of a raving lunatic?The moral outrage that followed Hinckley's acquittal relies on the tropes of sanism that Alden identifies throughout the book. Because she includes explicit and implicit examples of the tropes, readers have a framework to understand how Hinckley's “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict was received by the public. Lambasted as a miscarriage of justice, as encouraging criminal action, and as proof that experts-for-hire pervert the criminal justice system, the Hinckley trial's response illustrates sanism's pervasiveness. Following the trial, Congress passed the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act (IDRA), and some states adopted alternative verdicts (such as “guilty but mentally ill”) or eliminated the insanity defense altogether, though most still employ some form of the McNaughtan Rules. Alden explains that legal standards lag behind the current understanding of psychiatric medicine and further highlights that, like other legal questions, laws and punishments differ across states.She concludes the book by arguing that the pervasive rhetoric of sanism has ideological staying power; it outlasts the material shifts of case details and medical progress. Moreover, the legal standard of insanity remains the same: “Here we are, back in England in 1843,” Alden writes (97). The legal landscape is, in effect, unchanged. She concludes this masterful book with a careful proposal for how to rethink discourses: first by acknowledging they are, in fact, rhetorical; second by tapping into the nature versus nurture debate. Exploring newer, technologically-driven medical advances, Alden leaves her readers with this consideration: “anti-social behavior is the result of both biology and socialization, nature and nature” (99). Alden argues that rhetoric helps us “untangle the knots” of a one-size-fits-all approach to law and psychiatry (100). As she concludes, she reminds readers that hers is a study of competing discourses, an attempt to “shore up their boundaries” and smooth “over the narrative ruptures always threatening to break through” (95). In other words, when analyzed as rhetorical discourses, the ideological faultlines of law and medicine become clear. Rhetoric, Alden writes, “allows us to see more clearly why” there are still problems at the intersection of law and medicine in the insanity defense (102).So while we constantly fear the next mass shooting and struggle somewhere between the Platonic ideal of locking madness away and empathy towards those suffering with mental illness, it is evident that Alden has given us a reference point for understanding the intersection of legal and medical discourses in the insanity defense. Identifying the tropes that shortchange meaningful engagement with mental health opens the possibility for a both/and approach to law and psychiatry. While scientific discovery sorts out how our nurture affects our nature (and vice versa), rhetorical scholars might continue to consider where science interacts with social and cultural constructions, like the law, to promote nuanced understanding of mental illness.

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores three trans and queer Asian American archives to ask, how can homing as a form of storytelling assist in situating trans and queer Asian Americans (QTAPI) in the United States’ broader narrative of belonging?Throughout the book, V. Jo Hsu conceptualizes and works with the following key terms: homing, a critical approach to storytelling that situates individual experiences in relevant histories and events (9); constellation, the plotting of individual narratives into a network that has the capacity to hold a multitude of relationships and responsibilities (11); diasporic listening, the act of critically attuning oneself to reciprocities ignored or obscured by normative frames (11); and lastly, commonplaces, storylines upon which common understanding can be found, similar to Aristotle's topoi (26).Hsu begins by situating the reader in a brief overview of Asian American history in the United States. Back to the exploitation of Chinese railroad laborers, Hsu traces the evolution of the spaces of “belonging” wherein Asian Americans have been conceptualized via public imagination—from yellow peril as diseased and hypersexualized beings to the model minority of assimilation, and back to anti-Asian hate during and beyond the age of COVID-19. By drawing upon homing as method, Hsu argues that individual stories from trans and queer Asian American individuals can be placed within a larger history and narrative of control. “Listening diasporically to this history exposes the entanglements of yellow peril/model minority with other controlling narratives of U.S. history,” Hsu writes (21). Each chapter explores an archive of oral histories, photography, community work, and storytelling by and for QTAPI, challenging the model minority myth in their respective ways. How do such stories work in tandem, Hsu asks, to interpret and invent Asian America's past and future?Chapter 1, titled love, showcases the Dragon Fruit Project, an intergenerational oral history project that connects younger QTAPI volunteers with older QTAPI activists to record stories about love, family, and community (27). The project was created by historian Amy Sueyoshi upon finding that only two out of 702 entries in the GLBT Historical Society's archive were voices of Asian and Pacific Islander women. Sueyoshi passed the project along to API Equality—Northern California (APIENC) to expand and maintain (39). Love, when constricted by capitalist logics to the idea of the heterosexual productive nuclear family, has scripted the racialization of Asian Americans who, at times, were projected to defy said logics in relation to whiteness (38). The Dragon Fruit Project illustrates alternate intimacies and belongings, challenging normative scripts of love by means of constellating various individual stories into an interconnected narrative (39).Chapter 2, titled resilience, examines the Visibility Project, an archive of photographs that place empowerment in the context of community, pushing against neoliberal, individualist understandings of resilience (74). The Visibility Project reconstructs the commonplace to critique racialized, gendered, and ableist constructions of resilience. Photographer, activist, and archivist Mia Nakano photographed over two hundred queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming Asian Americans, making this the largest collection focusing specifically on this population (86). Photos are displayed along with annotations of how individuals self-identified in terms of gender and ethnicity. As Hsu writes, “the subjects in the Visibility Project renounce the desire for belonging on normative terms, whether through U.S. citizenship or through inclusion in the majoritarian story of Asian America” (90). The Visibility Project also includes a digital history tour of Bay Area Queer Asian Pacific American History and a storytelling and performance workshop built upon archival material (84–85). Ultimately, the Visibility Project reframes Asian American resilience as a “communal empathy” that “channels individual stories into negotiations of communal needs,” empowering QTAPI as “co-conspirators at the fore of a transformational American story” (107).Chapter 3, titled ancestry, features the Queer Ancestors Project, a printmaking and writing workshop for LGBTQ+ youth. Given the complicated experiences of family that queer diasporic subjects often have, the Queer Ancestors Project ensconces students within queer family and encourages them to “listen for submerged relations and story them into far-reaching genealogies” and tend to their chosen familial bonds (111). Ancestry may be understood here as “an array of stories through which QTAPI place themselves in longer traditions of resistance, courage, and care,” connecting them to past and future trans and queer kin (111). Hsu identifies the Queer Ancestors Project's workshop anthologies as a form of kuaer pedagogy. This combines critical pedagogy and queer theory by drawing upon E. Patrick Johnson's quare studies, which center race and class in experiences of gender and sexuality, and Wenshu Lee's subsequent kuaer theory, which takes quare studies through a transnational, transcultural turn across borders.1 Identification goes beyond genetic ancestry tests and “scientific racism”—ancestors can be chosen via shared struggle and resistance, “reaching across timelines and geographies for sturdy, imaginative family formations” (121–122).Chapter 4 centers Hsu themself within the themes of love, resilience, and ancestry, as well as proposing the bodymind as a form of archive that records experiences and stories. Hsu constellates their own personal experiences within their parents’ stories and histories, their experiences of resilience within pain and disability in the academy. To connect bodyminds to homing, Hsu writes that if “our bodyminds archive the experiences we encounter, then homing not only assigns meaning to those archives, but channels that meaning into new ways of encountering ourselves and one another” (183). Homing can be a writing praxis, a way for diasporic subjects to reinterpret their places of origin, creating new connections of belonging and theorizing how we survive together (146). Especially for diasporic subjects, homing is a verb in actively shaping spaces into those of belonging and community for their own selves (183).As a diasporic subject myself who found herself resonating with many of Hsu's stories, I found Hsu's concepts and frameworks to be imaginative and generative. Hsu's work is particularly helpful for scholars looking for frameworks to situate a seemingly disparate scattering of individual narratives and stories within a larger constellation, making meaning out of many. It is also bound to be helpful for scholars looking for methods that center subjects’ active meaning-making in their worlds, their own definitions of belonging, of family—of homing. Hsu's in-depth research into each of these queer and trans Asian American archives is an invaluable piece of critical scholarship.

Abstract Control of time is critical to the maintenance of settler colonial states. In the United States, which relies on linear conceptions of time, time is treated as moving forward, which implies a specific view of the national past. It also moves backward, which proscribes a particular understanding of future possibilities. In both cases, time is mobilized to produce political stasis, rendering it very difficult to question settler colonialist ideologies and possession of land. Unsettling the U.S. settler colonial state requires a different conception of time and different temporalities.

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Jennifer Mercieca's Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump arrived at a crucial historical juncture. Published in the summer of 2020, during Donald Trump's presidential reelection campaign, the book provides a comprehensive study of Trump's rhetoric during his former presidential election campaign from June 2015 to November 2016. It is a testament to the book's insights that they feel timely even after Trump's failed reelection bid in 2020 and its politically corrosive fallout. Indeed, in reviewing Demagogue for President in 2024, I am struck by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny: in her incisive analysis of Trump's rhetoric, Mercieca provides readers with a powerful conceptual framework not only for understanding the success of Trump's 2016 election campaign but also for making sense of U.S. political discourse in the years after the book was published.Kairotic moments punctuate the book as a whole. As she recounts in the preface, Mercieca found herself in the limelight after being quoted in a December 6, 2015 New York Times cover story about Trump's rhetoric, an experience that catalyzed a series of high-profile media engagements and ultimately resulted in her writing Demagogue for President. This exigency gave Mercieca the opportunity to follow Trump's presidential campaign in exhaustive detail; as she describes it, “I've studied Trump relentlessly, in order to be able to explain his rhetorical strategies clearly” (xi). That dogged pursuit of Trump's public discourse makes for an engrossing reading experience as Mercieca guides us through Trump's many campaign rallies, interviews, media appearances, and social media posts.Demagogue for President opens by arguing that Trump is a demagogue whose rhetoric harms democracy in the United States. The author shows that making this classification is trickier than we might think. After all, the term “demagogue” is often indiscriminately applied to populist political candidates, obscuring the word's meaning, and Trump consistently positions himself as an outsider, a “fearless truth teller” who speaks back to a corrupt political establishment (7). Mercieca intervenes here by returning to the ancient Greek origins of demagoguery, moving us beyond a perception of populism “unduly influenced by antidemocratic writers” such as Plato (12). Thinking through this context, Mercieca distinguishes two kinds of demagogues on the basis of accountability: “heroic demagogues” hold themselves accountable to the democratic process and use their populist rhetoric to persuade, whereas “dangerous demagogues” avoid political accountability and misuse their populism as a “weaponized rhetoric” to undermine democracy (11–14). Evaluated in these terms, Trump clearly qualifies as a dangerous demagogue and, moreover, “probably the most successful demagogue in American history” (21).On my reading, the author makes two major claims about Trump's demagogic rhetoric. The first is that Trump is a “demagogue of the spectacle—part entertainer, part authoritarian” (210), a tactical performance designed to amuse his audience while manipulating them. Central to that spectacle, Mercieca argues, are three “unifying strategies” (15–17) Trump uses to align himself with his supporters: argumentum ad populum (appeals to crowd wisdom), American exceptionalism, and paralipsis (ironic twists of “I'm not saying; I'm just saying” (16)). Likewise, the author identifies three “dividing strategies” Trump uses to isolate his supporters from their perceived enemies: argument ad hominem (attacks on personal character), argument ad baculum (aggressive threats), and reification (17–20). Mercieca contends that Trump deploys these six rhetorical strategies to “gain compliance” from his audience, which in turn “prevent people from holding him accountable for weaponizing rhetoric” (14). The book's second major claim is that Trump's rhetoric was kairotic: Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election because his campaign successfully harnessed the “rhetorical possibilities inherent in a nation in crisis” (204), which Mercieca characterizes as “a distrusting electorate, a polarized electorate, and a frustrated electorate” (20). These distinct yet intersecting contexts, Mercieca argues, supplied Trump with the suasory resources needed to secure the Republican party nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.Structurally, Demagogue for President is divided into eighteen concise body chapters, each of which offers a case study of Trump using one of his six major rhetorical strategies. Mercieca thus provides three separate analyses of each strategy, illustrating how they function in the three cultural contexts that serve as the book's major subsections: “Trump and the Distrusting Electorate,” “Trump and the Polarized Electorate,” and “Trump and the Frustrated Electorate.” Organized in this way, the author's argument gains both range and nuance. The shorter chapters allow Mercieca to analyze an impressive number of examples, and by examining each strategy in three different settings, Mercieca draws out the subtleties of Trump's rhetoric throughout his presidential campaign.Scholarly readers may be surprised to find minimal engagement with academic research in the case study chapters, but this choice serves Mercieca's goal of reaching a wider audience (21). In place of academic citations, the author catalogues Trump's rhetoric through meticulous endnotes of his campaign rallies, media appearances, social media posts, and other popular sources. Trump is quoted extensively, giving readers ample evidence of the six rhetorical strategies Mercieca analyzes. Choosing not to provide literature reviews or other trappings of the traditional academic monograph keeps the case studies accessible and brief; accordingly, any of them would make excellent syllabi material for a variety of rhetoric and communication courses.Some of the book's strongest moments occur when Mercieca pinpoints when and how Trump's rhetoric changed. For example, in a chapter on reification, the strategy of “treating people as objects” (19), Mercieca traces how Trump deliberately altered his campaign messaging about Syrian refugees to align with narratives on Breitbart and InfoWars. In early September 2015 Trump showed sympathy for the refugees’ plight and offered to help (44–45); but, just one month later, Trump began describing the Syrian refugees as a grave threat to the United States, “the ultimate Trojan horse,” to whom he would no longer be willing to offer political asylum (47). Trump even adjusted his signature campaign slogans and witticisms based on audience reactions, as Mercieca carefully documents. Trump's “Low-Energy Jeb” joke, for instance, was in fact Trump's third attempt at an effective ad hominem for Jeb Bush after “the reluctant warrior” and “Jeb Bust” failed to catch on with his supporters (82–83). In moments like these, Mercieca shows how deeply calculated Trump's rhetoric was throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, refuting Trump's claim to be someone who merely and spontaneously calls it like it is.Perhaps the most prescient case study is the final chapter on American exceptionalism, where the author dissects Trump's authoritarian rhetoric and tracks the emergence of his “Stop the Steal” narrative. Remarkably, this book published in 2020 seems to anticipate the January 6th, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, a fulfillment of the anti-democratic rhetoric that Trump has peddled for years. As Mercieca explains, Trump's campaign team crafted its “Stop the Steal” messaging in the summer before the 2016 presidential election. Trump advisor Roger Stone first raised the specter of Hillary Clinton stealing the election the day after she accepted the Democratic Party nomination in July and created a “Stop the Steal” website to circulate these election fraud claims (195–196). More ominously, in an August 1st appearance on Alex Jones's show InfoWars, Stone suggested how Trump should react if he were to lose the upcoming election: “Challenge her being sworn in. I will have my people march on Washington and we will block your inauguration” (196). Of course, Trump's supporters did march on Washington years later to stop Trump's loss to Joe Biden, eerily confirming Mercieca's observation that Trump used American exceptionalism in his campaign to “appeal specifically to authoritarian voters” (191).Demagogue for President ends by returning to the question of accountability: If Trump avoids being held responsible for his demagogic rhetoric, how do we curtail the political damage he inflicts? Mercieca makes two key recommendations here. The first is to bolster public instruction in rhetoric and critical thinking, as doing so is “perhaps the best way to neutralize a dangerous demagogue” like Trump (208). Although a familiar refrain, Mercieca's call for cultivating democracy through pedagogy is particularly relevant when it comes to Trump, who excels at overwhelming the public with his discourse (212). Taking time to unpack Trump's rhetorical strategies, as Mercieca does in this book, might help citizens regain their bearings amid Trump's onslaught of egregious claims.The author's second and far more ambitious recommendation points to a future imaginary: What if our society changed in ways that made demagoguery ineffective? Mercieca only speculates on this possibility, and it would be unreasonable to expect much more than that from the monograph. But I see much promise in Mercieca's “spectacular demagogue” framework, which helps cut through discursive deadlock of whether Trump is “really” an authoritarian or simply playing the part for political gain. As Mercieca persuasively argues, the distinction does not matter. The more important reality is that both authoritarianism and spectacle are “antidemocratic” performances that “deny consent and use rhetoric as a strategic means to an end” (213). Seeing Trump's rhetoric for what it is, perhaps we might begin to answer Mercieca's clarion call to revitalize democracy in the United States.Deep in analysis and sweeping in scope, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump makes a significant, lasting contribution to rhetorical studies. The author's insights have only become more salient since 2020, and Jennifer Mercieca is to be commended for writing a book so intellectually rich yet eminently readable. Demagogue for President proves a reliable lodestar for reckoning with the aftermath of Trump's presidency, a book that scholars and citizens will revisit for years to come.

Abstract This article forwards the concept of affective inertia to understand how caucasity, or emboldened whiteness, motivates rhetorical (in)action. Specifically looking at the viral case of “BBQ Becky,” I argue the historic momentum of both settler colonialism and anti-Blackness propel contemporary performances of emboldened white femininity. The videoed interactions between Jennifer Schulte (Becky) and Michelle Dione Snider (videographer) illustrate how scenarios of property afford white cisgender women particular roles of constrained privilege when in public spaces. Turning to the dynamics of white feminine caucasity, I position Snider's performance of “race traitor” as one equal and opposite to Schulte's “damsel in distress,” thus interrupting Schulte's inertia. Of importance is how the women perform to divergent ends while being capacitated by the same affective inertia.

This is an excellent, well-constructed set of essays focused on the intersection of decoloniality, the posthuman, and new materialist rhetoric. While each essay focuses on different topics, the central themes are consistently covered throughout, making this a more unified set of contributions than one might otherwise find in an edited volume. The text includes a Foreword, an introductory essay by the co-editors, and eight individual essays. The authors are primarily from English rhetoric and writing programs; several have backgrounds as Indigenous scholars and/or a focus on including Indigenous voices in their work. The importance of this text—especially for those of us fully ensconced within interconnected colonial worlds from our campus to the community and on to the nation and beyond—cannot be underestimated. The continued dismissal of Indigenous voices remains a critical issue and one this text addresses in a provocative and compelling manner. The co-editors recognize that two limitations of the volume are a focus on North America as the primary geography from which issues are taken and that Black scholars are not represented.The Foreword, by Joyce Rain Anderson, a founding member of the CCCC American Indian Caucus, sets the stage for an argument that resonates throughout the text: the need to move from a dominant “settler colonialism” mind-set that ignores Indigenous voices, to an embracement of “Indigenous ways of knowing” (xi) that allows for a de-colonizing perspective to take hold.1 A key move is to “delink” from colonial practices and engage with a perspective that promotes universal relationality between the human and the non-human. The co-editors’ introductory essay further elaborates this argument. A Eurocentric view devalues or dismisses any role for the non-human and posits a view in which animals, plants, and nature in general have no role in the construction of knowledge. To re-engage a more diverse set of voices, including what the non-human might tell us if we were to listen, is a challenge that requires a willingness to move out of our comfort zone and recognize that white, heteronormative voices represent only one vision of reality and our place within it.The first essay, “The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities,” by Robert Lestón, begins by denoting what ‘decoloniality’ represents—neither a research area nor a discipline. It is the “struggle” those who have lived under colonization endure (22). Lestón presents two primary issues—that as educators we have the possibility of bringing excluded knowledges to the surface so their influence can be felt, and that the content of our own classes be transformed by the inclusion of “ancestral, border and non-Western cultural knowledges” (23). He presents a trenchant critique of “posthumanism”: it “still works within a tradition that is founded on a humanism that is part and parcel of modernity, and a humanity that is anything but humane” (29–30). He notes it yet may have a positive role, but it needs to question its own grounding in a worldview that excludes significant others. His first extended example is the Zapatista movement—it succeeded in establishing a different reality for people long oppressed by the State by reversing the leader/people position: “it is the people who lead and the leaders who obey” (35). The second extended example considers revisions to the Ecuadorian constitution by a coalition of Indigenous people who re-establish a sense of “living well” that incorporates a commitment to basic social rights [Buen Vivir] such as housing, education, etcetera, as well as a recognition that nature has rights that must be appreciated and maintained (38–39).The second essay, “Performing Complex Recognitions,” by Kelly Medina López and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, brings “Western theories of complexity . . . into conversation with . . . Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial projects” (57). The authors focus attention on “recognition” and “misrecognition” in mentoring relationships—who gets mentoring in order to further their ability to be recognized via a demonstration of their “fitness” to be a recognized part of an academic setting (59). From an Indigenous perspective, what is missing in colonial recognition is a sense of relationality, not just between humans, but with respect to the non-human as well. Their story revolving around “misrecognition” concerns an “Indigenous Maya Guatemalan” student who was taking Chicanx courses but did not see herself in those classes, yet was recognized as Chicanx. Her “research interests were (mis)recognized” as she was seen in “institutional terms,” where Chicanx was a “catchall for relations among the Americas” (49).Essay number three, “Listening Otherwise,” by Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder & Shannon Kelly, proposes that we expand our listening practices beyond normal communication expectations and engage in an “arboreal rhetoric,” listening for what trees might tell us. Their review of current research that argues against the dismissal of “plant rhetorics” is well done. Accepting non-human rhetorical influences is a move that may be difficult for some to embrace as it challenges conventional thinking on human communication. The argument in this essay, to “listen otherwise,” is one well worth the time.Christina Cedillo's essay (#4), “Smoke and Mirrors,” argues convincingly that reminding “whitestream activists that the dominant culture ignores Indigenous ecological wisdom to its own detriment” (92) is a critically important task. The essay focuses on a mythic story (Tezcatlipoca) that frames the discussion of a petrochemical explosion in Houston, Texas, and the resulting failure to meet the needs of both human and non-human in response to the crisis. A. I. Ramirez's essay (#5), “Perpetual (In)Securities,” examines the “global border industrial complex” (GBIC) (115) as it is exemplified in the border murals on the U.S./Mexico border. She applies conceptual framing drawn from Gloria Anzaldúa's “theory of la facultad” plus a pluri-versal theory of ‘facultades serpentinas’ in discussing the impact of the murals. Her application of a ‘serpentine’ method of analysis works well as does her ‘sensing the skin’ of the wall. As she notes, “Embodied knowledge, learning through the skin, through the body, is an ancient or traditional knowledge that has long been ignored” (125). Seeing the murals “as sensual and sensational rhetorics” (127) challenges the dominant approach taken by the “GBIC.”“Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent through ‘Seeds of Resistance’” (#6) by Matthew Whitaker focuses attention on social movement rhetoric and protest assemblage in resistance to the projected XI pipeline. The only reservation a reader might have about this essay is that the pipeline project was abandoned in early June 2021. That, however, does not diminish the reasons for objecting to its potential existence. To begin, the essay focuses on the Cowboy Indian Alliance and its members’ act of resistance in planting corn where the pipeline was projected to be built. Since 2014, the Alliance has convened in a “Seeds of Resistance” ceremony that “is a deeply rhetorical event that brings together plants, people, soil and sky” (148) to remind people of what the pipeline could represent.In “Top Down, Bottom Up” (#7), Judy Holiday & Elizabeth Lowry focus attention on the possibility of granting legal “personhood” to non-human objects. The Deep Green Resistance environmental group filed a suit that sought to “confer personhood on the Colorado River ecosystem” (181). While the suit was dismissed, it raised awareness of the issue. As the authors note, New Zealand conferred personhood on the Whanganui River. They examine the human/nonhuman interaction and present, from a feminist perspective, the possibilities for embracing an Indigenous understanding of the co-relationship between living and ‘non-living’ entities.The final chapter is, in my view, one of the best in the text. Andrea Riley Mukavetz and Malea Powell's “Becoming Relations” uses a narrative approach in “Building an Indigenous Manifesto.” The authors utilize the role of ‘braiding sweetgrass’ as integral to their story of how Indigenous knowledge is created as “constellated, relational, and nonhierarchical” (195). The authors move away from Western/Eurocentric perspective of knowledge that is to be found someplace else toward a sense of knowledge as built on relations between human and non-human, including the role of plants. A key phrase encompasses a consistent theme throughout the text: “all our relations.”While much more could be said about each contribution, Decolonial Conversations reminds us that we are, all of us, interconnected via our relations, and that means giving respect and space to both Indigenous and Western/Eurocentric voices at one and the same time. As such, the edited collection is vitally important in bringing awareness to the presence and significance of Indigenous voices. It would be an excellent addition to any course that serves to review material rhetorics.

Rhetorical critics have often explored the dualism present in identification. Namely, that identification is intimately linked to division. Coming together involves some undoing of the previous identity; the creation of new material and symbolic connections. While identification has been theorized in the past by Burke, Black, and Ratcliffe, today's scholars of national identity and identification include Khan, Engels, Mercieca, and Stuckey (plus, so many more!). Lee and Atchison enter this conversation on the side of separation and division. We are Not One People: Succession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776 by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison provides a necessary challenge to theories of identification by underscoring the rhetorical work of division within U.S. politics. We are Not One People is a fascinating interrogation of secession as such practices have appeared diachronically across historical contexts from the nation's founding to the present. This book offers readers an astute understanding of the rhetorical tactics that anticipate, desire, and/or negotiate separatism.The structure of We are Not One People is far-reaching in scope and discussion. This is a comparative volume, a long durée historical analysis that offers global insights both within and across rhetorical discourses and practices of secession. In a prologue along with seven chapters, Lee and Atchison walk us through practices of secession and union across U.S. history. The volume begins its analysis chapters with libertarians who “opted out,” or created a separate community, followed by a chapter on Confederate secessionists. Later chapters include discussions of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, lesbian separatist communities of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as Mormon exodus during the early-to-mid 1800s. Insights gleaned from this volume demonstrate the paradoxical relationships between secession and union; separation and division. We are Not One People is a wonderful contribution to how political communication scholars understand political division and identification in and through the lens of rhetoric.One of the most prominent features of this volume is that Lee and Atchison offer rich histories of separatist rhetorics within each content chapter. For instance, the chapter on lesbian separatism incorporates work on engineered communities of the period, as well as broad-ranging historical discourses that may have inspired or guided actors in the 1970s and 1980s. The range of discourses supplied in this volume offers readers an accessible chart of how efforts to build communities are predicated on removal of existing communities. For instance, chapter two, on libertarian opt out, is a sweeping history of libertarian thought as such philosophy applies to community building. Yet, Lee and Atchison do not allow libertarian thought to be presented without a necessary corrective: that when libertarian idealism is challenged on principle, attempts to “opt out” reveal an unstated desire to oppress and/or enslave minoritized populations. Lee and Atchison both explain the rhetorical tactics that libertarians use to demonstrate their resistance to authority, while also elaborating on an exceptionalism founded on brutality. Lee and Atchison continue that line of reasoning to demonstrate how contemporary island homes engineered by Silicon Valley libertarian ideologues are efforts to ignore federal law and power, to escape the destruction wrought by climate change. The work of resisting authority within the confines of the state is fully actualized as an extra-juridical, rhetorical maneuver, an ongoing set of escapes rather than a singular action.Rich histories of secession are connected tightly to the political and rhetorical maneuvers of division and identification. We have long been a nation of separatism, imagined as a necessary condition for distinctions between groups and the basis of personhood and citizenship. Even the Declaration of Independence was understood as a paradoxical document—with beliefs that espouse both a rejection of taxation and state authority, as well as an embrace of the nation to come. The dualism, even dialectic, relationship between separation and union, is at the heart of this volume. Lee and Atchison weave the nature of this dualistic relationship throughout the text, highlighting how the desire for separation co-emerges alongside the desire to connect with others. Carefully engaging each of the case studies, this volume neither praises nor blames separatists but rather analyzes the rhetorical maneuvers of separatist discourses within the political motivations of the times. In this way, Lee and Atchison study both the contextual reasons that motivated secession and the larger political contexts that suggest how exit plans were predicated on exceptional exit. The exceptional exit is to create a selective utopia after decimating shared resources and habitats. This book offers a powerful way of engaging with rhetorical tactics of separation and exceptionalism.This volume presents useful critical approaches for scholars to follow. For instance, one way to extend the arguments presented in this book is to consider how the relationships between union and secession may also be constitutive of certain historical erasures. That is, there are moments in this book, where—if Lee and Atchison had an infinite number of pages (unlikely)—they might have had time to extend their argument that rhetorical devotion to utopia is based in dystopia. In chapter six, on the numerous exoduses of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (CLDS), Lee and Atchison analyze records from the Council of Fifty from the 1840s. In these documents, the Mormon church debated where the community might find safe harbor after genocide in Missouri, murder in Illinois, and wars in Utah. In We are Not One People these debates are focused on theocracy, with Mormon leaders, or Saints, arguing that the Kingdom of God needed separation from the United States of America as an enemy nation. Undoubtedly, the Mormon leaders of the Council of Fifty desired the Kingdom of God on earth as—Lee and Atchison demonstrate—the CLDS, like many other religious communities in the nineteenth century, believed that Jesus would eminently return. The Saints needed to be ready, spiritually but also tactically if they were to live. Lee and Atchison provide exceptional history and rhetorical analysis of these documents.Yet, the Council of Fifty documents are also a vision of utopia that does not simply imagine a future but also manufactures a CLDS history that erases and devalues broader church histories. Lee and Atchison write that Council of Fifty documents show a church built on Joseph Smith and his legacy. Smith, often worshipped as a utopian visionary, eventually became corrupt and demanded the community capitulate to his whims. Lee and Atchison highlight that Smith would, in his final decades, encourage church members to submit their wives and children to him. Smith wielded sweeping power over the church. Smith's unwavering authority derives from a discovery he made on September 22, 1827. On that day, Joseph Smith was said to have arrived on Hill Cumorah where he received a set of golden plates, telling him of Jesus's arrival in the Americas and the inspiration for a new church. In all of church lore, that discovery is announced as Joseph's alone. Such a singular position was fully realized by 1844, when the Council was convened. Yet, Smith was not alone in his discovery. His future bride, Emma Hale, was often with him. She relished in his discovery and helped Smith translate the Book of Mormon. Emma was also an early Saint. Yet, Emma's place in church history is a hotly contested topic. The official history created by the Council of Fifty elides a much more foundational violence. In this history, the Saints claim all the glory, and their children and wives are written out of this narrative. It is this erasure of others that allows Smith, Young, and others to create a utopian vision for CLDS.The utopian/dystopian dualism demonstrates the wealth of ways We are Not One People can inform rhetorical methods. Using the theocratic principles enunciated by the Council of Fifty allows Lee and Atchison to explicate a double movement: First, there is the erasure of much of the content of upon which Mormon belief is based, namely that Joseph Smith had been guided by the angel Maroni, who was described as Indigenous, and told him about the golden plates. Maroni is the one who tells Smith that Jesus had appeared in the Americas. In response to these revelations, Smith expended huge efforts to unsuccessfully minister to First Nations, who immediately recognized that Smith wanted to “save them” as they were “red sons of Israel.” By 1857, Mormon poisonings and murders of native peoples demonstrated the nastiness of the Saints exceptionalism—that if Indigenous peoples did not capitulate to the one true faith, violence was justified.Second, as a function of the Council's theocratic principles, women were erased from their part in church history and made explicitly subservient within the structures of the church. Emma Smith was present at many of Joseph's significant revelations—or later shared in those discoveries—but the power of women to receive the eucharist, to be a Saint, is fully denied in church structure. Saints are men, and women are allowed access to the Priesthood of belief only through their fathers, their husbands, or their Elders. It is the submission of women—to marry whomever she is told, to bare as many children as possible, and to do whatever her Priesthood holder commands—that allows the church to grow throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mormon adoption of women's lack of access to God—to a literal divorce of women from their heavenly father—is how Saints create their theocratic future. For the Saints to march into Zion, they demand full authority over those seen as lesser members of the community and against the peoples who do not adopt Maroni's vision of the new Israel.This brief example is meant to show the dexterity of We are Not One People. Its method's portability enables this volume to be exceptionally useful. We are Not One People is accessible for seniors, graduate students, faculty, and readers of popular press political communication scholarship. Readers will discover that the concepts in this book and the careful nuances supplied by the authors allow for extension and commentary. Indeed, some of the topics are so rich that, on their own, they merit full elaboration and present significant opportunities for further research. We are Not One People should be assigned reading for scholars invested in political communication, polarization, identity politics, U.S. politics, and national identity. Lee and Atchison are in conversation with the work of Paul Elliott Johnson, Mary Stuckey, Kevin Musgrave, E. Cram, Joshua Trey Barnett, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Christian Lundberg, and so many others. Lee and Atchison generate deep and wide understandings of national identity as already imbricated in division and secession. As founders dream of the utopian future, Lee and Atchison take care to show how idealistic visions and initiatives are necessarily based on divisive, often violent, actions. Here is where the method of rhetorical history illuminates the intricacies of secessionist motivations. Whereas Confederate secessionists were motivated by greed and avarice, Marcus Garvey's motivations were based on survival and the need for Black futures. Lee and Atchison draw attention to these distinctions and their rhetorical and political functions. Being able to read secession as a dualistic rhetorical action is what enables such flexibility. Identification and division remain a central paradox that actors must nevertheless negotiate.

Abstract Attuning to a significant, yet understudied, thread of early 1970s gay rights advocacy, this essay analyzes William R. Johnson's ordination rhetoric. Johnson became the first openly gay individual to become ordained in a mainline denomination in the United States, and his rhetoric represents a landmark example of queer Christian advocacy. During his ordination process, Johnson used proleptic apologia to minimize his sexuality as he developed an argumentative framework that enabled his ordination committee to affirm his sexuality and ordain him as a minister. Johnson's proleptic apologia invokes salient religious and social justice themes in explicit contexts that carve a space within his denomination for queer individuals. The essay shows how rhetors can respond to already-articulated criticisms while maintaining proactive arguments in favor of change.

Abstract This essay examines Ta-Nehisi Coates's article “The Case for Reparations” to illuminate how he uses inventive temporal strategies to transform the grounds of the reparations debate. I argue, Coates engages in a process of temporal tampering that involves meddling with dominant temporal structures (conceptions of time that serve white supremacy) to accommodate the excessiveness of anti-Black violence. Through tactics of timeline jumping and a rhetoric of repair, Coates draws on articulations of time as a resource to sabotage anti-reparations temporalities. Instead of approaching the reparations debate through stale discursive entry points, such as financial logistics, I reveal how Coates draws upon conceptions of time to reposition reparations as a mode of worldbuilding and social transformation.