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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Abstract The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates victims of lynching in a three-part experience featuring 800 coffin-size monuments that appear to be suspended in the air. While providing a space for Black grieving, the memorial's design also creates an experience that invites white Americans to feel-with Black grief-yet-hope. This felt experience may produce discomfort for white visitors, as well as white acknowledgement of generations of white supremacist violence against Black Americans. Such an experience is possible because the memorial generates rhetorical quiet or the creative, artful, and public expression of interiority—an attempt to share that which is deeply felt but which often eludes efforts to be adequately communicated through traditional rhetorical/verbal forms.

In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie Martin asks the mind-boggling question of the 2016 election: How did Donald Trump secure the evangelical voting bloc that catapulted him to victory? After the release of the recordings of Trump admitting to sexual violence and assault against women, his candidacy was presumed to be doomed. However, as Martin indicates, Trump won the presidency largely because of the evangelical vote. The evangelical church body, which prides itself on strong morals and family values, supported a twice divorced philanderer who admitted to sexually assaulting women. In the wake of the 2016 election, many were confounded by this reality.To wrestle this issue, Martin conducts a “digital rhetorical ethnography” on the narratives of the evangelical church. She analyzes recorded online sermons from across the nation, transporting herself into church pews via the internet. What Martin discovers is a remarkably consistent and persuasive rhetoric of emotional narratives that allowed Trump to become the unspoken yet preferred nominee of the evangelical church. Further, Martin's research gives voice to a new, eXvangelical movement that has distinctly feminist roots rising out of the church post-2016.In her initial chapters, Martin develops a baseline for understanding the evangelical lens. This starting point includes founders’ rhetoric, the “Great Commission,” and the rhetoric of former President Ronald Reagan, all of which are leveraged to create a sense of evangelical Christian nationalism. Founders’ rhetoric follows the logic that founding fathers were Christian; therefore, God is and should always be at the center of the American experience. This God-centered-in-country belief, combined with the Great Commission (the Biblical command to “Go and make disciples of all nations”) empowers evangelicals to declare themselves rightful heirs to the blessings of America as intended by the founding fathers. Converting others to faith is thus the path to the American promised land and ultimately eternal life.Martin also discusses the church's use of the rhetoric of Reagan, whose message of protecting liberty, promoting hard work and family values, and maintaining a small government seemingly aligns with the founders’ rhetoric of God-centered-country and blessings. The pastors’ use of Reagan's claims evoked a sense of crisis, that the nation was on a dangerous path, and that Christians must fight to maintain the nation's greatness and prosperity while preventing moral decline. This message generated a longing for better times, for the ideal and imagined past state of static gender roles where race was subdued or even hidden. It created a deep desire to return to the family values that were believed to have been eroded by the civil rights movement and the old-fashioned morals that were believed to have been corrupted by Hollywood. This rhetoric also created a longing for evangelicals’ celestial home, where there would be no more sin, pain, or loss. Martin explains how such messaging helped solidify the intertwining of the founders’ rhetoric and the Great Commission, encouraging Christians to fight for their embattled church, their rightful American blessings, and their heavenly home.Martin claims that this foundational narrative creates an “esprit de finesse” that pastors repeatedly used in their sermons to inspire “true” believers to action, laying the foundation for the battle cry to “Make America Great Again.” Martin is careful to emphasize that no churches explicitly demonstrated support for either candidate or party; many of the pastors provided disclaimers such as, “I'm not going to tell you who to vote for . . . ” (80), or simply encouraged an “open embrace for political open-mindedness” (107), while using the pulpit as a platform to advance a moral-national ideology. Martin identifies distinct themes in these sermons: American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism.Throughout the sermons, Martin explores the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the church's embrace of America as the promised land. In their stories, pastors reinforce that simply existing in America is a blessing, and this birthright blessing requires good stewardship of your American bounty, including congregants’ time, talents, and treasures. Martin discusses how this storyline frames good Christians as those who make good choices and, in turn, make good Americans. To expound, good Christians are hard workers who live responsibly in a land of unlimited opportunity. This romanticization of hard work, frugality, and personal responsibility offers great reward both on earth and in heaven. It also sets up a distinct “other” against which good Christians (good Americans) must battle. This “other” is a group of lazy, fraudulent, non-Christians who abuse the system and take handouts from the government, thus stealing from the pot of American riches that belong to deserving Christians. This framework, without explicitly using the words, rhetorically aligns with the GOP's theoretical support of small businesses, personal responsibility, small government, and American opportunity for those who deserve it. By preaching this philosophy, pastors tacitly endorsed the Republican nominee as the presidential candidate.Martin also highlights the concept of nostalgia, specifically noting that pastors invoked the rhetoric of Reagan to remind white, low to middle class congregants of perceived better times. Martin recalls how Barack Obama's presidency, which inspired hope and change, was largely rejected by evangelicals. To evangelicals, gay marriage, protests against police brutality, and Hollywood's support of the liberal agenda were all signs of the nation's loss of Christian values. Martin describes how stories told in sermons framed recent decades as a period of slow social and moral decline: the 50s sustained a loss of innocence; the 60s a loss of authority; the 70s a loss of the meaning of love; the 80s a loss of values; the 90s a loss of faith; and with the Great Recession, the 00s brought a loss of security (90). Leading up to the 2016 election, pastors of megachurches invoked a rhetoric of nostalgia while telling stories that vilified hope and change and created a desire for a return to the safety of the past. A genuine loss of financial security, along with the narrative of moral decline and a call to return to better times created a sermonic storyline that America somehow needed to be made “Great Again.”The final rhetorical concept Martin analyzes perhaps provides the most insight. She calls this concept “active passivism.” In its simplest terms, active passivism can be described as a call to vote (active) while not worrying about the results (passivism). Martin writes how pastors used this frame to encourage voting as a civic duty and moral responsibility. Voting was situated as honoring the nation and those who have fought for freedom (a nod to the military, to Christian martyrs, and to Jesus Christ, himself). She shares how pastors acknowledged dislike for both candidates yet encouraged thorough review of the party platform in preparation to vote in alignment with one's faith. None of the pastors suggested that their rhetoric created a pre-disposition to one party over the other; all the pastors, instead, echoed that God is in control, so ultimately the election outcome does not matter. A phrase commonly used across the sermons told parishioners that they are in the world, but not of it, indicating that America matters, but not as much as heaven, their true home. This messaging gave congregants permission to vote for Trump, while explicitly denying the church's support for either candidate. Martin explains that, through active passivism, evangelicals were encouraged to actively use their agency by participating in the election, while effectively telling them to be passive about the results of their collective vote. This rhetoric ultimately absolved Christians from any responsibility for their voting decision.In her final chapter, Martin recalls the last weeks of the 2016 campaign when the notorious tapes that revealed Trump's bragging about physical violence and sexual assault were released (147). She notes that in response to these tapes, most churches in her study stayed relatively quiet or merely suggested forgiveness since the incident had happened in the distant past. The church's failure to address the GOP nominee's admitted assault prompted an unexpected response from a different pulpit that gave voice to a group within the church in a new and distinct way. Martin outlines how prominent Christian women such as Rachel Held Evans, Jen Hatmaker, and Beth Moore began to call out the immorality of the Republican nominee's character and the lack of courage shown by the pastors of the evangelical church by their obvious rhetorical silence.Martin provides examples of the messaging from the Christian women's platforms: Rachel Held Evans, a speaker and blogger, specifically targeted Trump's rhetoric against the oppressed and his exploitation of evangelicals to advance his own self-interests and personal gain.1 Jen Hatmaker, a well-known speaker and author, went beyond targeting Trump and directly labeled evangelical men as complicit in perpetuating sexual abuse by refusing to denounce it.2 Beth Moore, a Bible studies author, pushed further still by publicly demanding accountability for the transgressions of the church.3 In contrast to their rhetorical silence, Moore asked male church leaders to be forthright about structures and systems within the church that allowed for potential abuses, including “a culture that allowed women to be demeaned in the name of submission and abused in the name of obedience” (151).While Christian women leaders had previously exercised contained agency within the constructs of the church, women like Evans, Hatmaker, and Moore stepped outside of their lanes to bring new truth to the conversation. As Martin shares, their courage in explicitly denouncing evangelical systems and messages of misogyny disrupted the privilege of the church and the leaders within it. In addition, Martin points out how their bravery prompted social media discussions about sexual abuse both within and outside the church. Through their discourse, a new storyline emerged, that of suffering at the hands of patriarchy. Martin credits Hannah Paasch and Emily Joy as launching the #ChurchToo movement on social media, a movement that gave permission to those who experienced sexual assault within the church to share their stories. The sharing of these stories generated unification around a once-silent suffering, effectively challenging the evangelical misogyny deeply coded within the Christian church. Women online began to amplify the voices of those who had previously been voiceless—and not just the unborn—sparking what is now being called the eXvangelical movement, where women are driving a new rhetorical narrative while reclaiming, or renouncing, their faith.Telling the story of the collective message of the digital church leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Martin describes both the thematic pastoral rhetoric that has carried the evangelical church over the last fifty years and the emergence of an evolving narrative of evangelical feminism. She deftly synthesizes how the carefully crafted megachurch messaging moved congregants toward the Republican party without explicit partisanship. She illuminates how pastors both relied upon and exploited the beliefs of evangelicals by framing their messages in American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism. This layered rhetoric encouraged a faith-based unified calling to return the nation to its moral standing no matter the cost. It absolved evangelical Christians from their moral electoral responsibility, effectively bringing theology into the ballot box. Yet, as Martin uncovers, when asked to stand alongside Christian women who vocally condemned the Republican party nominee and his admission of sexual assault, the church stayed silent. This silence gave birth to a progressive feminism that emerged from the fray of the evangelical church. This feminism, born largely of the voices of women who courageously used their agency to move beyond the confinements of active passivism and act for the greater good, has sparked a movement that will continue to challenge not only the misogyny deeply coded within the evangelical church, but also the Trump-era rhetoric of the “alt-right.”4

Abstract The 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs provides an example of what I call “sport spectacle.” I define “sport spectacle” as a staged encounter in which the institutions of sports and media conjoin with the activities of individual athletes and the gaze of interested audiences to co-produce narratives in which athletic endeavors reflect, shape, or intervene upon social will in material and symbolic ways. Sport spectacle involves a contested co-production of meaning about a sporting event's social importance that occurs before, during, and—through the rhetorical processes of public memory—after the sporting event. I analyze how King and Riggs understood the match within women's movement discourse and the cultural evolution of tennis, in addition to how King and others have treated the match as a cultural touchstone that can be redeployed in public memory. Recent films When Billie Beat Bobby (2001) and The Battle of the Sexes (2017) offer very different characterizations of King's role as a social movement actor and the Battle of the Sexes as a social movement act. While When Billie Beat Bobby credits King with wide-ranging transformation of women's lives in a universe largely devoid of political context, The Battle of the Sexes anachronistically champions King as a closeted LGBTQ+ icon with a more nuanced understanding of sport spectacle as a transformational gathering that prepares spectators for political contestation. This case study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that attends to the nuanced rhetorical dimensions and political contexts of spectacle.

Abstract With Trump's election in 2016 prompting us to reflect on what qualifies one to the U.S. presidency, I turn to the 1928 election to consider the only other candidate who became president without having held elected office or a military position: Herbert Hoover. I argue that Hoover was able to establish his presidential qualifications by articulating a vision of “rugged individualism” as an American value, one that was not linked to traditional political experience but instead to a distinctively American character that combined past myths of the frontier and the “self-made man.” In so doing, Hoover adapted “individualism” into a “rugged individualism” connected to twentieth-century conservative economic policies. Through this discourse, Hoover was able to establish himself as the heir to previous Republican presidents while pushing the boundaries of presidential qualifications and the use of individualism as a rhetorical appeal. Beyond providing the first article-length critique of Hoover's 1928 campaign, my analysis adds to the scholarship on the use of rugged individualism as a rhetorical appeal, one that foreshadows the Republican response to the Great Depression and later conservative economic rhetoric.

Abstract In 1954, the Ford Foundation, new to international grant-giving, administered a small grant to a U.S.-educated Tehran native, Najmeh Najafi, to begin a development program for “village women” in rural Iran. Development was fast becoming a central transnational discourse of the post-war decolonization period and the early Cold War, and Najafi appears as a unique contributor to this discourse, as investment in women and women's programs would not become commonplace in international philanthropy until the early 1970s. But rather than a mere footnote, Najafi's case represents an important example of Ford's surveillance and increasingly “projectized” approach to development processes in strategic areas of the world, even as Najafi evaded Ford's attempts to make her “legible” in their global philanthropic system. This essay offers a rhetorical history of Najafi's negotiations with Ford and the tensions that arose between them around the binaries of North/South, East/West, developed/developing, and masculine/feminine. Using a lens of “scalar geopolitics” to emphasizes linkages between the local, national, and global, the article mines both Najafi's memoirs and Ford's grant archives in order to reflect on the complex ways development and philanthropy were framed and constituted during a tumultuous era in Iran and beyond.

Abstract This essay offers a rhetorical reading of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings to make sense of how widespread outrage over replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a conservative idealogue was resolved through the invocation of postfeminist motherhood. I argue that GOP Senators and Barrett herself positioned her nomination as the achievement of feminist goals, justified through rhetorics of choice and the idealization of (white) motherhood. These strategies cement Barrett as the logical and defensible successor to both Ginsburg's seat and her legacy of feminist work. I conclude with the implications of this circulation of postfeminist motherhood, with focus on political movements for equality and treatment of women.

Abstract President Barack Obama faced very difficult electoral prospects in the summer of 2011. A slow economic recovery, along with Republican efforts to block his agenda, had undercut his message of hope and change. Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas has been widely recognized as a crucial moment in his successful 2012 campaign. Obama's speech was important not because he supported new policies but because it corrected a major flaw in the community-oriented narrative at the core of his message. Obama reenergized his retelling of the American Dream by shifting the villain in his narrative from partisanship to the greedy rich.

Abstract At the 2017 Women's March, Shepard Fairey's We The People posters generated a great deal of excitement for their patriotic depiction of a diverse “people.” But the posters’ success exists in tension with the broader critiques of the Women's March. This essay argues that our current understanding of constitutive rhetoric is ill-equipped to explain this tension. Using the ideas of Danielle Allen and feminist scholars Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Karma Chávez, and Alyssa A. Samek, I perform several readings of the posters to explicate the fractures within our theories of constitutive rhetoric. I demonstrate that our current understanding of “the people” through oneness is hampered by a unity/difference binary that limits our ability to understand heterogenous collectives. Instead, I argue that an approach of wholeness better captures the complex collective life of contemporary coalitions and better attunes scholars to the intricate ways “the people” come into being. I argue that shifting the key terms of constitutive rhetoric to solidarity, vision, and health can help critics develop a more nuanced understanding of diverse coalitions. Overall, this essay offers scholars an opportunity to rethink our theories of “the people” to better account for the emerging strategies, needs, and values of contemporary collectives.

Abstract Antilynching activists in the United States have agitated to establish criminal civil rights violations for lynching for more than a century. Ida B. Wells, a renowned antilynching activist, tapped into and expanded upon existing transnational advocacy networks to mainstream antilynching rhetorics across borders in the late nineteenth century. This essay analyzes Wells's dispatches to the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean during her 1894 transatlantic antilynching tour. I argue that Wells provides an example of how rhetors can mainstream social justice issues through transnational advocacy networks by refuting and recirculating key arguments, which in turn amplifies them to exert pressure on potential change agents. As activists work to stem modern-day violence that persists with frightening similarities to the lynching violence of the 1890s, Wells's strategy of amplification provides further insight into transnational rhetorical movement and efforts to mainstream social justice issues across borders.

Focusing on the rich biographies of five influential figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Paul Stob's Intellectual Populism argues for renewed attention to a distinctive kind of populist rhetoric. In times of widespread corruption and social upheaval that he argues parallel our own, Stob identifies the “Great Agnostic” lecturer Robert Ingersoll, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, philosopher Thomas Davidson, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington, and writer, speaker, and activist Zitkála-Šá as salient examples of a “mode of inquiry” focused on connecting ordinary people around anti-establishment sentiments with intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, appeals (xv). Stob shows how each of these figures used their available means of persuasion to claim a voice among unfriendly and unlikely audiences. This, he argues, could be an approach for contemporary academics as we advocate for higher education in an age when our work is dismissed as, at best, irrelevant due to the Internet and new technologies and, at worst, the destructive and out-of-touch machinations of liberal elitism.Intellectual populism, Stob claims, is a means by which “populism and intellectualism can work together to enhance our knowledge of the world” (xv). While populism is often characterized as anti-intellectual, Stob argues that there are parameters in populist thought, taken up by intellectuals in the past, that have been constructive to democratic processes and engaged diverse audiences, inspiring them to think critically about how together they might change the established order. It is this coming together as a “new intellectual movement” that Stob hopes to enliven with a populist model of education incorporating broad notions of teaching and learning among those currently excluded from, or hostile to, higher education (227). However, it is important to note that it is the “fight,” not the “complete victory,” of the intellectual populist figure that Stob wants to highlight (208). As the concept itself elicits, intellectual populist rhetorical strategies engage a certain degree of irony and impossibility in their undertaking.As a case in point, Robert Ingersoll, the first figure profiled in the book, uses perspective by incongruity to call into question religious authorities and affirm agnostic beliefs. Described as a speaker able to make even the police sent to arrest him for blasphemy laugh and praise him, Ingersoll ultimately affirms religious ideals by turning them on their head. This is what Stob characterizes as the core of intellectual populism, “criticizing the established order to strengthen that which the order is trying to serve” (16). Even as Ingersoll attacks religion, the crowds that he drew found that he “enlivened religious inquiry. He brought religious questions into the marketplace of ideas, which strengthened religion by showing what was real in it” (34). Ingersoll appealed widely to audiences that shared various religious beliefs and would agree with him that their own renewal of these values was worthy of investigation. At the same time, Stob points out that “Ingersoll battled a religious establishment that not only survived the assault of free-thought advocates but also created a fundamentalist power structure that continues to this day,” thus showing how even the most successful rhetorical strategies are constrained by situation (208). However, Stob suggests, this could still be an adept strategy for academics: by affirming critiques that the university is out of touch with “the people,” academics could join critics in order to energize a “new intellectual movement” that would ultimately forward the mission of higher learning by broadening its reach, not overthrowing its aims (227).The next figure analyzed in Intellectual Populism is Mary Baker Eddy, the controversial founder of Christian Science. At its height, Christian Science lectures brought together large audiences of converts, interested listeners, and a wide swath of critics. Eddy's lecturers made the case to the public that Christian Science works because it is a science wherein personal experiences of healing prove that believers do not need medicine or the church. However, to Stob's surprise, Christian Science orators did not provide evidence of healing in their lectures, creating a void to be filled with ordinary people's personal testimonies. Stob asserts that this method of unsound syllogistic reasoning instead sought to empower listeners to reclaim their own agency and expertise, previously the domain of experts in religious and medical fields. Stob characterizes this on one hand as a dangerous rhetorical strategy, “duping lecture-goers into believing that Christian Science could accomplish something it never could accomplish” (73). By framing an individual listener's personal experience as “unimpeachably scientific” it makes personal truth “truer, fuller, more absolute than any deductive proof, any rationalist logic . . . any counter argument,” thus denigrating scientific evidence that would allow one to question or change those beliefs (71). This intellectual populist argument strategy therefore either fails with “listeners with an ear for scientific argumentation” (68) or makes receptive individuals resistant to scientific evidence based in logic and expertise that could “enhance our knowledge of the world” to shape a more democratic society (xv). This critique finds renewed importance in our current era of anti-vax movements that draw upon similar argument structures. However, instead of tossing out Eddy's arguments wholesale, Stob constructively points out that the vast power of religious inquiry continues to serve as touchstone of American public discourse. Instead of dismissing religion and personal experience as antithetical to intellectual thought, Stob suggests we think of these are “potent symbolic resources” to start, instead of stop, public conversations about science and expertise (226).The next figure Stob focuses on is Thomas Davidson, a savant Scottish philosopher who spent most of his life building intellectual communities for refined society. However, in his later years, Davidson created the Breadwinner's College, a “People's University” where he taught philosophy to Jewish factory workers from the Lower Eastside of New York City. Davidson initially undertook a series of public lectures in the neighborhood, where he framed philosophical inquiry as a form of labor that factory workers were apt to pursue. This “fell on deaf ears” and angered the workers, who argued that there was nowhere for them to study in their tenement houses, and thus the idea for the Breadwinner's College was formed (106). Davidson envisioned it as the first in a branch of many spaces where workers could gather and engage in Socratic exchange on curriculum that would give those without educational opportunities a “‘bird's-eye view of the scene and course of human evolution’” (109). Stob states that “Davidson's fundamental contribution to intellectual populism was his reconfiguration of speech and space—his grasp of the way words and ideas relate to the geography in which they emerge and through which they move” (118). However, “the irony was that Davidson wrote [much of this intellectual populist mission] . . . from Glenmore [his retreat center in the Adirondacks] . . . [where] Davidson's intellectual populism came from a position physically removed from the community he worked to empower” (117). This irony, Stob concludes, demonstrates that “Empowering the people needed to happen in the spaces that defined their lives;” Davidson in many ways failed to do this (118).In contrast, Stob's chapter on Booker T. Washington illustrates how he successfully provided educational opportunities for poor African Americans in the rural South. In his career as a public lecturer and educator, Washington argued that work itself was a rhetorical process that “communicated, influenced, and persuaded as effectively as words” (121). Washington used various success stories of Black Americans to show how dignified labor “did the suasory work that words and pages tried to do, and it was far more successful than any oration could be” (144). Stob describes this as ironic considering that Washington delivered this message through the medium of oratory and made a career of such words and arguments. However, Stob spends much of the chapter analyzing Washington's many accomplishments as the first President of the Tuskegee Institute, exemplifying through alumni letters how Washington's legacy was to “elevat[e] . . . labor to an intellectual practice” and help students “use their labor to control their lives” (160). While largely an appreciative read of Washington's legacy, Stob also points to ironies within Washington's approach which schooled students in “the politics of respectability . . . [that] emphasized moral reform and reconfiguration of self” and may have “eschewed the demand for structural change” needed by African Americans (150). Both the Davidson and Washington models for populist education support Stob's argument that spaces of higher learning must adapt to the communities they seek to reach by being more reflexive about modes and spaces of engagement. Furthermore, as Stob argues in the conclusion of the book, both rhetors exemplify the importance of education as a “maker's movement,” where students are the co-creators of ideas and communities. Instead of simply transmitting specialized knowledge, we must rethink how higher education might contribute to “putting people in a position to think and inquire for themselves” (223).The final figure featured in Intellectual Populism is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous American writer, speaker and activist. The least documented of the figures, Stob characterizes the limited archive of Zitkála-Šá’s speeches as strategically ironic, working to secure what influence she could within the constraints of a white man's world. Zitkála-Šá was critiqued in her time for accommodating or even affirming white stereotypes of Indigenous communities. Throughout her career she wore stereotypical costumes, opted not to correct inaccurate assumptions about her identity, and espoused the overwrought metaphor of the “national teepee” as a unifying vision for the pan-Indian movement. However, Stob notes that these strategies helped Zitkála-Šá in gaining legitimacy for the pan-Indian movement and attention from various white and Indigenous American audiences that had previously dismissed her vision for civil rights. Through an appreciative read of her rhetorical strategies, Stob beautifully captures how Zitkála-Šá’s “performances invited other American Indians to identify their grievances with hers to join her in a strong, broad coalition that could secure Native lives in the twentieth century” (166). Distinguishing Zitkála-Šá’s work from a wider constellation of her Indigenous contemporaries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the ways that disenfranchised people's intellectual movements can upend the status quo. In her speeches, Zitkála-Šá repurposed white stereotypes about Indigenous Americans through Americanisms such as “God, freedom, peace, and equality” that she showed were more astutely demonstrated by the first Americans—Indigenous Americans—than by white settlers (188). While just one example of Zitkála-Šá’s rhetorical brilliance, this final chapter distills the numerous ways that intellectual populist rhetoric can encompass “the people” far beyond the narrow confides of “the people” often evoked in populist rhetoric in the United States today.Overall, Stob illuminates five different historic figures who, through intellectual populist rhetorical strategies, made compelling critiques of powerful establishments to divided audiences in their time. While looking to achieve different goals, Stob convincingly argues that it is unfair to measure these rhetors’ contributions only by their unrealized visions to change the establishments they attacked. Stob instead contours these complex characters as sometimes flawed, sometimes successful, rhetorical actors whose work forms a broad lineage of American thinkers who attempted to give “ordinary individuals a sense of agency in the pursuit of knowledge” (229). This, Stob argues, “can make a difference, even if it doesn't change the world” (229). Intellectual Populism concludes with a set of lessons intended for academics to enliven debate around the state of higher learning institutions. At the top of Stob's list of lessons is a call for academics to build broader coalitions with communities in “physical spaces” and “face-to-face assemblages,” urging us not to “stay isolated on the carefully manicured lawns of college campuses” (222). Stob's words, ironically published mere weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, continue to serve as an important reminder to all of us, and our institutions, that our siloed intellectual communities must continue to adapt, diversify, and expand in order to serve the many and not just the few.

Abstract The rhetoric of any academic discipline can involve epistemic distortions and blind spots, including a tendency to obscure systemic racism. The doctrine of political realism from the discipline of International Relations is an influential example. Realism relies on several rhetorical devices, including a structural distinction between rhetoric and reality, a modality of abstraction, and the trope of anarchy/hierarchy. These provide both a compelling theoretical framework and a discursive program that obscures race and racism. Realist discourse operates further through several dimensions of rhetorical salience that are modulated by changes in context. Foreground, background, ambient, and ontic salience provide multiple registers for inscribing realism. Realism's lack of reflexivity in disciplinary, governmental, and public arenas adds to its power and its defects. Exposing the rhetorical constitution of realism and its architecture of non-knowing raises challenges not only for realism but also for rhetoric. These include avoiding the inscription of realism and racism within rhetorical inquiry and avoiding epistemic hubris in the self-definition of rhetoric as a discipline.

Abstract This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist ritual among many others, and its capacity to induce affective investment from consuming publics, just as surely as the killer himself, is a function of what I am calling sadistic form. To clarify this argument, the essay reads serial killer Ted Bundy's many crimes as ritualistic enactments of sadistic form, as well as the varied responses during his 1989 execution. In so doing, I illustrate how different rituals function to obscure or amplify the sadism to which they give expression.

Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

Abstract Even though gun suicides account for well over half of all U.S. gun deaths each year, they largely are absent from collective attention, policy discussion, and rhetorical study. Using stories about gun suicide from Everytown for Gun Safety's website, “Moments That Survive,” this essay examines how the authors depict gun suicide as a public problem and a gun problem rather than as a private problem limited only to the individual gun user. In so doing, these stories revise three of the gun debate's key terms: collective grief, character, and agency. More than simply drawing attention to gun suicide, these stories critique the dominant narrative of protection (protection from “them”) and urge readers to reimagine suicide, protection, and gun violence.

Abstract This essay examines the cybernetic rhetoric of Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a cybernetician and prominent Mexican intellectual. Published in a journal reaffirming Mexico's political image in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, his essay offered a counter to one of the government's rationales for the violence enacted against the movimiento estudiantil at Tlatelolco—the influence of el extranjero. Rosenblueth's essay evinced a mediating path between complete disavowal of Mexico's statist tendencies and support for the Mexican state in post-Tlatelolco Mexico. Yet, in invoking cybernetics as a rhetoric for public intervention in this moment of crisis, I argue that Rosenblueth's use of cybernetics both empowered his proposals calling for an adjustment to perceptions of el extranjero and supported the survival of a strong Mexican state enacting violence against it. I conclude from my reading of Rosenblueth's essay that the political possibilities of cybernetic rhetoric lie not only on the cybernetician's ideological commitments or political context(s) but by a plasticity constitutive of cybernetics.

With precise phrasing and dramatic flourish, Laura Mielke's Provocative Eloquence1 invites us into the performance cultures of the late antebellum era, showcasing the interplay between theater and oratory, politics and entertainment, ethical imperative and prevailing opinion. Violence suffused culture, language, and everyday experience in a time that found melodrama, minstrelsy, and spectacle in the ascendant, racial hierarchies and American slavery at the epicenter of political debates and popular culture, and a troubled white masculinity asserting its heroism. Mielke's book documents anti-Black oppressions of the antebellum stage and oratorical platform, and it also takes a fresh perspective: Mielke argues persuasively that theatrical forms offered strategic resources for abolitionist argument, that oratorical provocations permeated the stage, and that the theater and the rostrum provided sites for antebellum Americans to think together about the power of words and the justifications for force in the cause of freedom.This nuanced argument challenges assumptions that form is conjoined to stable ideologies and instead highlights creative adaptation, recitation, revision, and “political portability.”2 Drawing evidence from a wide variety of source material, Mielke develops compelling, intricate case studies of print and performance that instruct and surprise. Before turning primary attention to the late 1850s, she sets the stage two decades earlier with Edwin Forrest, entertainingly described as a “theatrical star and noted egomaniac”3 best known for “yoking articulacy to brawn.”4 A deft, deeply contextualized analysis of Forrest's calm, reasoned 1838 Fourth of July address at New York's Broadway Tabernacle shows the intertextual and interperformative dimensions of Forrest's Democratic partisanship, available for audience interpretation in light of his heroic, explosive roles like Spartacus, Metamora, and Macbeth. The orator recommended deliberation and gradualism; the actor regularly linked speech to revolt. Forrest's varied performances probed free expression, white working-class populism, and militancy in word and deed, while they resonated with staged rebellions, Romantic poetry, and defiance of all sorts. Mielke asks of the “stubbornly elusive”5 Forrest and of U.S. performance cultures more broadly: “Does one who speaks of liberty for all necessarily attack slavery, even if inadvertently?”6With the stage thus set—with an analytic focus on paradox and opposition and an analytic method characterized by deep historicization and sophisticated, imaginative readings across genres—Mielke moves on to the 1850s. The dramatic readings of Mary Webb and William Wells Brown highlight the suasory potentials of African American performance in what Mielke elucidates as the “rhetorically strategic recasting of the antislavery lecture into the drama.”7 In an increasingly menacing political climate, performers like Webb and Wells Brown began to signal the potential for physical resistance to slavery. As they vocalized a range of tragic or comedic characters—enslaved captives, cruel slaveholders, or overwrought white abolitionists—these artists adapted popular caricature and imitative form to their own ends while exemplifying control, decorum, and performative skill. Mielke compellingly shows how the form of the dramatic reading created conditions for the presentation of highly incendiary words while deflecting physical threat.The viciousness of proslavery political argument crystallized in 1856 when Preston Brooks took a cane to Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate the day after Sumner's “Crime against Kansas” speech had maligned proslavery argument and proslavery senator Andrew Butler, Brooks's cousin. The famous lithograph of this scene by John Magee, which Mielke aptly identifies as a theatrical tableau, efficiently encapsulates a drama of violent villainy and oratorical martyrdom. Building from this scene—reproduced on the book's cover—Mielke analyzes the political oratory of Sumner and Butler before turning attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred and its stage adaptations. Whereas the senators drew analogies and interpretative frameworks from dramatic literature, Stowe's novel incorporates a significant amount of public speaking, “from school recitation and revival preaching to courtroom address and lynch mob inducement,”8 in service of a wide array of perspectives on slavery and violence. The stagings of Dred, whether they reinforce calls to action or suppress radical potential, whether they play for laughs or highlight prophetic voice, embody the oxymoron of a slaveholding democracy.John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry grounds Mielke's investigation of legal discourse as the nation pressed ever forward toward war. Dexterously combining Portia's ironic eloquence in Merchant of Venice with abolitionist argument and nineteenth-century racial melodramas like Neighbor Jackwood and The Octoroon, Mielke shows how Portia's “redirection of legal violence and challenge to the contractual claim on another's flesh”9 were adapted in the late antebellum period to interpret physical violence, from armed revolt to capital punishment. Readily available in educational texts of the time, Merchant's trial scene offered the possibility that eloquence in the courtroom might conquer opponents without bloodshed. This theatrical form, whether explicitly cited or only presented in “family resemblance,”10 offered scripts for thinking through speech and violence even as battle beckoned.Mielke's concluding chapter is less a conventional summation than a final act, rehearsing key questions and arguments presented throughout the book and then comparing instances of theater and oratory that responded to Brown's raid, trial, and execution, climactic scenes in the drama of word and violence of the 1850s. Developing an interpretive framework through analysis of statements of Brown's detractors and defenders, Mielke explores themes of oath-taking, vengeance, aggression, and martyrdom in Kate Edwards Swayze's play Ossawattomie Brown and Henry David Thoreau's speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Here, again, forms like the theatrical tableau and the speech of moral principle occur in multiple genres, and when they recur, revised and recited, they help to constitute a performance culture and a basis for belief and action.Mielke's Provocative Eloquence will be of abiding interest to scholars of rhetoric and performance as it offers compelling insights into the ways that cultures are created, maintained, and changed in and through performance practices and as it centers the fraught histories of eloquence and violence in the deeply racialized context of U.S. history. Mielke's analytic perspective offers instruction for scholars and students since her book enacts an adroit blending of history, theory, and practice as simultaneously text and context. The comparative analysis of Forrest's theatrical and oratorical productions, the thoughtfully imagined presentation of Mary Webb's polyvocal dramatic readings, and the demonstration that Portia's irony haunts so much nineteenth-century public commentary on the law—these were favorite sections of mine, although I learned much from every chapter. Mielke's book, engagingly written and filled with dramatic historical nuggets, provides foundational arguments and analytic methods, and it prompts further reflection on topics like the scope of an identifiable theatrical (or rhetorical) form and on the range of spectatorial response. Reading this book will also inspire questions about continuity and change in the enactments of eloquence and violence up to our own time, in the persistent struggles to realize the hope of Black freedom and democratic equality. Mielke asks, “Can a true distinction be maintained between rhetoric and force? Can words alone provoke or justify violence, and under what conditions and for whom?”11 Such questions, pertinent to the 1850s, reverberate today.

Abstract This essay analyzes arguments regarding race and U.S. felon disenfranchisement laws. In response to the denial of the vote to 6.1 million Americans in 2016, voting rights advocacy has helped spur a range of liberalizing reforms in states across the country. The essay attributes such policy victories to activists’ success in redefining felon disenfranchisement as a racial justice rather than criminal justice issue. It argues, however, that U.S. public discourse still does not reflect a clear or coherent understanding of how and why race matters in the context of felon disenfranchisement. Through a rhetorical frame analysis of media coverage in four newspapers over a twenty-year period, the essay identifies and evaluates the three most common racial frames, arguing that each adheres to prevailing logics of racial liberalism. While this adherence lends the frames some degree of persuasive power, this essay argues that it also causes dominant publics to misunderstand the racial character of felon disenfranchisement. The essay concludes that more substantial reform hinges on the ability of activists to transform public meanings to reflect their preferred understanding of the causes and consequences of racial inequality.

AbstractThis essay examines Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for President John F. Kennedy to issue a second emancipation proclamation, which involved a series of public speeches delivered across the nation from 1961 through 1963 as well as a 60-page Appeal memorandum composed for Kennedy by Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyers. King challenged Kennedy’s conservative, accommodating understanding of prudence by harnessing the inventional resources of Civil War centennial commemoration, folding together the past and present to offer a vision of audacious presidential leadership. Examination of this historical moment provides insight into how commemoration creates kairotic opportunities for advocates of social change to renegotiate prudence and call forth new, bolder forms of political action.

Abstract Public address scholars trained in U.S. communication departments have tended not to study rhetoric created by people with disabilities as much as they do other social movements. Here I attribute this relative lack to two ableist assumptions associated with communication’s emphasis on winning arguments: the presumed disqualification of people with disabilities from public argument itself and the normalization of this disqualification based on biases related to rhetorical performance and capability. Overall, I argue this disqualification is the product of how communication scholars have understood and reconstructed the role of the ideal arguer in public affairs and call for more expansive views.

AbstractIn 1925, Herbert Wichelns published The Literary Criticism of Oratory. By many accounts, the essay would become the founding document of the academic study of rhetoric and public address. However, in that same year, historian Carter G. Woodson published Negro Orators and Their Orations, which focused on the study of the African American oratorical tradition. In this essay, by way of speculative history and using my sanctified imagination, I wonder what an alternative or speculative history would look like if we can conceive Woodson as challenging the dominant (exclusively white) notions of public address and rhetorical praxis. By paying particular attention to Woodson’s introduction in Negro Orators and Their Orations, I submit that not only would we have been introduced to the richness and power of the African American public address tradition earlier but, more importantly, who we start to see as scholars and what we call scholarship would be different as well.I examine this by first, offering an examination of Woodson’s text, paying close attention to the introduction, where Woodson develops his theory of oratory. Second, I examine the African American rhetoric and public address scholarship between 1925 and 1960. Finally, I offer a speculative history of what could have been and what we can still do if we would include some of these voices and their scholarship in the public address canon.

AbstractDrs. Ersula J. Ore and Bernadette Marie Calafell were invited to discuss their experiences with activism in the academy. They discuss what’s at stake and the costs (both emotional and financial) as well as issues of trauma and burnout.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

Abstract We have been asked to engage in a conversation about the current role of ideology—as critique, as rhetoric, as a framework within which academics operate. Our approach will not seek to write the history of rhetorical critique from an ideological perspective, nor work from extant literature as one might in a traditional research essay. Still, we reference ideas emanating from that literature; instead of the normal “source citation in text,” we will list references at the end. Our ideas do not exist in a vacuum—they are stimulated by our own reading/writing in the area of ideology critique— from the original “ideological turn” to the present day. Hence it seems appropriate to acknowledge where ideas, especially about missing elements or future trajectories in research, come from. This conversation touches on the Cold War afterlife of the public as an ideological force, whiteness’s role in gatekeeping the field, and how political liberalism and those interpellated by it constrain the field’s future(s).

Abstract In this article, the authors draw on their personal experiences as mid-career administrators and scholars of color to consider both the structures that limit, and opportunities for equity and social justice in, academic institutions. Although the primary logics that shape academic institutions serve to marginalize certain types of scholars and scholarship, they argue that institutions also contain gaps and contradictions where resistance is possible and from which alternative structures can be built. They identify and define three critical practices—storytelling, structural transformation, and allyship—that administrators can use to create a more equitable academy. The authors discuss why they believe it is important to invest in administrative and professional association service, where they have witnessed the gaps that make transformation possible, and how they have implemented critical administrative praxes.

Book Review| June 01 2020 A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump. Edited by Ryan Skinnell. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2018; pp. iii + 200. $29.90 paper.The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age: Insiders and Outsiders in Democratic Politics. By Mark Rolfe Singapore: Springer, 2016; pp. x + 259. $109.99 cloth; $109.99 paper.Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It). By Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018; pp. xi + 208. $79.95 cloth; $32.95 paper. Devin Scott Devin Scott Devin Scott is a Ph.D. student studying Rhetoric and Political Culture in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (2): 367–379. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Devin Scott; A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2020; 23 (2): 367–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Algorithms have never been more influential, yet our collective understanding of how they transform massive networks of cultural power has not kept pace. This is especially true when it comes to economic algorithms, which operate as black boxes largely inaccessible to the majority of citizens whose worlds they continuously reshape. This essay offers a rhetorical approach to reading algorithms—not only to challenge the positivism and mathematical realism that naïvely apotheosizes algorithms and algorithmic culture but more importantly to become critical informants, scholars who can open up these black boxes for fellow citizens, examine the hidden assumptions therein, and study how they actively transform our social-material worlds. The essay’s exemplar is the 2008 financial crisis and a little-known algorithm called the Li Guassian copula, which played a major role in the spread of subprime mortgages. I argue that this copula puts on spectacular display the power of algorithms as principles of composition—actants that materially expand our social collectives even as they marginalize human agency and practical judgment with forms of technological rationality that, in the case of the Li copula, concentrated the networks of structured finance around a single decision apparatus, rendering those networks both larger and, contra conventional wisdom, more fragile.

Abstract The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of “failed leadership” that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an ethos-based relationship between public health expert and public. Because any leader’s public ethos is dependent on the cultural ethos of audiences who promote them to leadership, this essay combines the Aristotelian topoi for ethos (goodsense, goodwill, goodness) and contemporary redefinitions of ethos as cultural-level phenomena (either “dwelling places,” ideologies, or ethical and cultural codes) to conceptualize ethos as the activation, rebuilding, or maintenance of relationships among different social positions: publics and institutions. The complexities of the Ebola epidemic—with its national and international dimensions and its partially faulty scientific grounding—make visible the predisposition toward positional gaps between publics and public experts regarding interests (eunoia) and goods (arête), with concomitant difficulties for the sharing of practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristotle was correct that such gaps cannot be bridged by logos, and the pervasive insistence on more logos as corrective therefore may contribute to public mistrust of all expertise.

AbstractThough rhetorical critics have been very attentive to John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric during the 1960 campaign, less attention has been paid to that of his conservative Protestant antagonists. To address the omission, this essay considers W. A. Criswell’s July 3, 1960 address, “George Truett and Religious Liberty,” portions of which were reprinted and widely distributed as a pamphlet titled Religious Freedom, the Church, the State, and Senator Kennedy. These texts, we argue, are exemplary of a larger Protestant strategy during the 1960 race. Because Kennedy’s candidacy had prompted fierce vitriol from the anti-Catholic Right, conservative Protestant leaders from across the denominational spectrum tempered their attacks so as not to alienate centrist voters. Their measured adoption of religious freedom arguments allowed them to occupy the respectable middle, assailing Kennedy’s Catholicism while parrying charges of religious bigotry. In Criswell’s rhetoric, we find a pure distillation of this strategy, identifying it as a species of respectability politics with enduring appeal—this time from the Right.

AbstractIn this essay, we analyze the public communication debacle before the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake that led to the infamous trial of the “L’Aquila Seven.” Examining the trial transcripts to extract norms regarding the proper role of scientists in society, we conclude that the first verdict interpellated the figure of the responsible scientist citizen who is expected to perform rhetorical citizenship when communicating with a lay public, while the second assumed a distinction between public and technical spheres that absolves scientists from responsibility to their fellow citizens and reduces their role to performance of an expertise divorced from rhetoric. Tracing the civic outcomes of these conflicting norms, we identify three missed opportunities during the prequake discourse in which the scientists failed to correct statements that they, and only they, knew to be flawed. To prevent future communicative debacles that arise from a dangerous separation of scientists and laypeople, we argue that scientists need to come to see themselves as scientist citizens, experts who take on the civic responsibility of clearly communicating their knowledge to their fellow citizens when such sharing is necessary to the public good.

AbstractIn the rhetoric of contemporary federal education reform, public school teachers are often blamed for and championed as solutions to educational problems. Representations of teachers as heroic and blameworthy are an integral component of a neoliberal rationality apparent in education reform since the publication of the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, as they allow political actors to promote individual solutions to systemic issues that affect student achievement. After briefly exploring the rhetoric of reform, this essay focuses on the ways teachers negotiate the discourses that implicate their profession. To do so, I analyze a corpus of 18 open letters written and published online by current and former public school teachers in protest of policy and/or specific political actors. I argue that authors of these open letters leverage their professional identities to protest and articulate alternatives to seemingly pervasive neoliberal logics inherent in contemporary education reform. In turn, I maintain that analyzing vernacular exchanges, such as teachers’ protest discourse, is imperative to understanding the material consequences of education policy as well as the full discursive space of policymaking.

Abstract A significant ideological shift has occurred in jurisprudential understanding of the social contract. Reading a landmark opinion from Justice Rehnquist—Paul v. Davis (1976)—as a pivot point for this shift, I identify a specific form of parsimonious judgment that has shaped the contemporary relationship between the individual and the state. Three markers of this form of judgment emerge from the opinion: (1) a claim about risks to state bureaucracy as a significant constitutional interest; (2) a slippery slope argument about institutional competence to discipline linguistic ambiguity; and (3) an interpretive practice that resolves this anxiety by binding precedent around a clear principle. This form of judgment has both ideological and normative significance. The opinion justifies a world of risk management that elevates economic liberty claims to exalted status. It disavows traditional markers of classical prudence, such as reverence for tradition, inflection of personal style as moral character, and orientation toward practical aspects of particular cases. Justifying its authority by performing its own rationale, Rehnquist’s opinion is significant for understanding how strategic invention can alter a democratic culture’s understanding of judgment, including its ethical dimensions.

Abstract During the World War II era, a time of civilizational uncertainty, globalism emerged as a rhetorical alternative both to the isolationism predominant before the war and to the Cold War bipolarity that would replace it. A primary advocate for globalism was Wendell Willkie, the failed 1940 Republican presidential candidate who went on to cooperate with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as his former rival’s proxy and personal representative in two famous overseas trips. While scholarship in rhetorical studies has accounted for the Roosevelt presidency and other forces shaping public discourse during the war and early Cold War, it has generally overlooked the importance of Willkie’s globalism in providing a bipartisan vocabulary with which Americans could describe a postwar peace sustained by interpersonal economics of free trade, global human rights, and burgeoning domestic civil rights. Using Willkie’s 1943 book One World as well as materials from his archives at Indiana University, this essay reads a popular figure and his influential ideas back into our historical narrative, demonstrating how he established what Kenneth Burke termed identification through the use of the related rhetorical strategies of proximity, presence, and ethos, inviting ordinary Americans to imagine a globally interdependent postwar peace.

Abstract In 1951, the Bowman Gum company released a collectible card set, sold with bubblegum, entitled The Children’s Crusade Against Communism: Fight the Red Menace. As a consumer item, the cards drew boys into a burgeoning form of American citizenship, but their overtly military tone also links this citizenship to ideas about national security. The narrative of the cards broadly reflects the tenets of the Truman Doctrine: that it is the duty of the United States to uphold global freedom; that communism must be contained; and that national security depends on nuclear power, a strong military, and civilian preparedness to mobilize in defense of peace. The molding of such political content in the cards to appeal to a young audience allows us to understand how such an audience was conceived of in ideological terms. A picture can be conjured of how the audience was imagined to look, what kinds of cues were deemed to be appropriate to such an audience, and how the audience was expected to respond to those cues. An analysis of the cards as they operated within the rhetorical and visual culture of the period reveals that they excluded certain groups from the narrative of American history and, thereby, certain children from the goal of becoming ideal American future citizens, citizens bearing an identity defined by a militarism and a nationalist exceptionalism predicated on pious certitude and righteous superiority.

Research Article| December 01 2017 Obama, Trump, and Reflections on the Rhetoric of Political Change Denise M. Bostdorff Denise M. Bostdorff Denise M. Bostdorff is Professor of Communication at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (4): 695–706. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.4.0695 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Denise M. Bostdorff; Obama, Trump, and Reflections on the Rhetoric of Political Change. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2017; 20 (4): 695–706. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.4.0695 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLES You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay argues that President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address used a perfected and condensed form of ultimate definition consisting of an ideological argument, an underlying mythic narrative, and a value system. These three components served to redefine the American Dream and to reinforce the limited role of government, placing the responsibility for curing America’s ills on the individual rather than the federal government.

Abstract Conventional wisdom states that leftover frustrations from World War I necessitated an incremental rhetorical strategy for interventionists in the buildup to World War II. However, such considerations often miss another factor that bolstered American isolationism: anti-Semitism. In the interwar period, America saw a sharp uptick in anti-Semitic organizations that preached a vehement isolationist message. Because of this environment, interventionist rhetors, particularly Jewish rhetors, were denied access to traditional rhetorical resources. In response, one group turned to one of the few outlets available: comic books. Through allegory, a rhetorical form that combines an entertaining surface narrative with a strong but hidden ideological argument, these rhetors were able to reach broad audiences with interventionist messages from behind the veil of comic book adventures. This essay examines the ways in which one of those comic book characters, Captain America, was purposefully constructed to be an allegorical argument for intervention. Through a careful interplay of visuals and narrative themes, his creators made a compelling case for America’s involvement in the war.

Abstract The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States Navy has dominated the area, but that hegemony is now in question as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes more assertive as a rising power. In efforts to justify their clashing claims over the region, the United States and the PRC have launched campaigns against each other, producing a rhetorical crisis that may foreshadow war. To try to make sense of the rhetoric driving this crisis, the first part of this essay unpacks some of the colorful history of the South China Sea—its legacy of rogues, pirates, opium wars, and so on—to argue that it has always been less of a governed and ordered place and more of a transitory and heterodox space crisscrossed by overlapping intentions, designs, and dreams. From this perspective, any nation’s claims to sovereignty are fictions that aspire to be constitutive, albeit by erasing the constitutive claims of others. The second section of the essay then addresses the PRC’s use of “traumatized nationalism” to advocate for its rights in the South China Sea, while the third section tackles the United States’ use of “belligerent humanitarianism” to justify its actions. The essay concludes with an appeal for a postnational version of shared governance, called for in the name of defending the global commons from the militarized encroachments of nation-states.

Book Review| March 01 2017 Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. By John Oddo. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014; pp. xii + 369. $39.95 paper. Mark A. Thompson Mark A. Thompson San José State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (1): 183–186. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.1.0183 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark A. Thompson; Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2017; 20 (1): 183–186. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.1.0183 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.