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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Based on the premise alone, Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen by political communication and mass media scholar Roderick P. Hart confronts an inconvenient truth that many U.S. academics are reluctant to acknowledge—Americans, a whole lot of them, like Donald Trump. As Hart explains, Trump and Us was written to help the left-leaning, academic crowd make sense of the 2016 presidential election, and since its publication in 2020, the book has only increased in relevance. Hart offers important takeaways for anyone interested in preserving American democracy, asking, “How could 62 million Americans—half the nation (or at least half of those who voted)—vote for Donald Trump?” (4). As Hart notes, this is essentially the same question at the center of Hillary Clinton's 2017 memoir What Happened, but Clinton's book offers a more personal, behind-the-scenes account of the leadup and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. By comparison, Hart zooms out to gain understanding of the cultural environment from which a Trump presidency emerged. Rather than an investigation into what Trump's words led people to think about him, Hart focuses on how Trump made people—especially those who voted for him—feel and what those feelings mean for American politics.For those familiar with Hart's work, it is no surprise that he turns to computer-aided analysis of a large corpus of political texts to dissect and compare Trump's words to those of other political figures. With the help of the programs DICTION 7.0, WordSmith, and AntConc, Hart situates Trump's rhetoric in reference to a database of 70,000 U.S. texts including “speeches, debates, ads, print coverage, broadcast transcripts letters to the editor, polling interviews, and social media exchanges” (27). The book presents his findings organized around six public “feelings”: conflicted, ignored, trapped, besieged, tired, and resolute. For example, in the section “Feeling Conflicted,” Hart describes the 2016 campaign as being fairly normal, if not better than average, in terms of democratic engagement. At first glance, Trump may appear to be “the least mysterious political candidate in human history” (11). However, Hart explains that to dismiss Trump as a political anomaly is to miss something critical to the American electorate and by extension its democracy—something that politicians like Hillary Clinton do not seem to understand. But Trump? He gets it. Americans, particularly those attracted to Trump's rhetoric, appreciate candor. And for the same reason that many find Trump farcical—his lack of decorum, his unfiltered communications, and his incoherent strategy—nearly just as many find him refreshing. Hart calls him an “emotional revolutionary” in his willingness to put his own feelings on display and take seriously the feelings of his supporters. Trump puts words to emotions, or, to put it in current meme-speak, Trump “says the quiet part out loud.” For many Americans in 2016, this out-loud emoting was at least entertaining and, ultimately, persuasive.Hart's second section on “Feeling Ignored” expands on the theme of Trump's ability to engage an audience through simple language and a performative populism. By comparing word size, word variety, words-per-speech, and self-references, Hart finds Trump to be verbose, using more words-per-speech than other candidates. Yet the words he uses are short, simple, and all about himself. The result is a unique rhetorical style that generates feelings of energy, simplicity, and dominance; these were compelling for many voters who previously felt unheard and unnoticed. The same rhetorical characteristics that cause many academics to cringe—his rejection of facts and accountability in favor of anecdotes and hearsay—made many voters identify with Trump, feeling like he was one of them. Through his simple and unfiltered communication style, Trump connected with voters who were put off by the more nuanced, academic, and comparatively elitist rhetoric of the political left. By focusing on “Trump-the-empath” rather than “Trump-the-man,” Hart demonstrates how Trump-the-showman turned feelings into votes. In the latter chapters, Hart details and analyzes how Trump used stories, novelty, and spontaneity to arouse voters’ passions and manipulate the media.While this reviewer found it convincing, some traditional rhetoricians might take issue with Hart's methods. Social scientists of political communication, on the other hand, are likely to embrace his quantitative approach. Either way, one should not overlook his contributions to rhetorical and political theory as well as to the less formal discourse that occurs within the halls of academia. What Hart's work tells us is that Trump is using a presidential style that, whether we find it appealing or abhorrent, resonates with many because it makes them feel important, included, and excited about politics. If the 2022 midterm elections are any indication, it does seem as though former supporters are beginning to distance themselves from Trump (the man), but Trumpism as a rhetorical strategy may have staying power. Trump's peculiar brand of rhetorical inclusion has proven to be an effective tool for building a community of loyal followers and will no doubt be used by future rhetors to do the same. It is critical that we, both as academics and citizens, understand these strategies and employ them to better ends.In the first pages of the book, Hart presents his most important claim: Trump is iconically American. While he may be grandiose, insecure, devoid of aesthetic taste, historically illiterate, and ethically dodgy, to label and dismiss him as anti-American is to misunderstand something about ourselves. Trump may not be the best of us, but he represents the part of our collective identity that we must grapple with if we want to progress as a democracy. Trump and Us is a self-analysis of sorts, raising important questions about who we are as a country and what will be necessary for the survival of American democracy. Unfortunately, Hart offers few recommendations for a path forward. Although he calls for journalists to hold themselves to higher standards and for voters to learn to listen better, Hart admits this book is only meant to be a first step. So, perhaps this is where other scholars and strategists must pick up the baton. Political strategists might ask how candidates can begin to use some of the positive aspects of Trump's rhetoric to be more inclusive, for instance. Critical cultural scholars and political philosophers might weigh in on how to do so ethically and with an eye toward social justice. Scholars of psychology and religious studies may see overlap in terms of groupthink or cult formation; and educators can find ways to increase our capacity for listening.Hart has rekindled a critical conversation to which all academics interested in politics, communication, public address, and indeed the future of American democracy have a duty to contribute. What Trump and Us reveals is our collective American identity reflected in Trump's words. Whether we choose to see beyond the cracks in our self-image or focus only on the good is up to each of us. Either choice will have collective consequences regardless of future White House occupants.

Kevin Musgrave's Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology breaks novel ground in rhetorical studies by unspooling the historical evolution and contemporary significance of a phenomenon so seemingly worldly as corporate personhood. This robust transdisciplinary conversation on economic theology is suasive in arraying its theoretical and methodological provisions for discerning how notions of the sacred are vouchsafed in the secular formations of modern economic life. And too, Persons of the Market is cogent in advancing the claim that by attuning to political economy's theological inheritances, critics can enter into a generative grappling with Western capitalist and racial power in the era of juridical personality.Corporations are people too. If this provocative, vexatious, and even baffling refrain of the neoliberal public sphere is an obvious exigence for this study, then Musgrave pierces its roots by using personhood to rethink historical relations among Christian theology and liberal capitalism. Departing from a common account of political economy, which looks to secularization to explain how an economic order founded on market rationality displaced the sovereign and divine right of kings, his hermeneutics traces “the gradual process of the emergence of a new social imaginary that occurs in and through theological grammars, not against them” (xiv). When we discern how such grammars historically authorize the capitalist order, we discover new relations of persons—between the person of Christian theology and that of political economy; between human and corporate personhood; among the person and an array of human and nonhuman, racialized, social and political, earthly and divine bodies; and more. To re-see political economy as relation rather than negation of theological thought, Musgrave situates the contending legacies of economic theology by taking Foucaultian biopolitics as a theoretical vocabulary for critiquing political liberalisms from within; then repairs against Foucault's atheistic framing with Agamben's reinstatement of the theological; then, finally, works from the current consensus in humanities studies that, one way or another, economic theology must inform political economic critique. Enfolding rhetorical dispositions—Black's cognizance of subjectivity, Burke's socioanagogical sensitivity—within a genealogical approach inflected by Nietzsche as well as Foucault, he offers economic theology as a register of meaning-making. It bears noting that this attunement does not seek “a unified and clear development of its conceptual basis in the teleological or dialectical unfolding of capitalist logic or in the concerted efforts of a unified bourgeois stratum” (xvi). Rather, by accenting rhetoric's ontological and material dimensions, it strives to grasp how notions of corporate personhood are seeded theoretically, supported juridically, and sustained politically in complex, even haphazard rhetorical dances between the theological and the secular, the religious and the rational.How do corporations become persons? In a quick synopsis: When courts rule that for legal purposes they are persons, and social and political worlds fall in line. Prior to, within, and beyond juridical decision-making, the bizarre corporation-to-person becoming has discursive and intellectual co-requisites. Before anything, corporate personhood incubates in the fecund environs of liberal political and economic thought, ripening in rhetorical traditions that—from Roman slave law to Trinitarian doctrine, from Adam Smith to Roberto Esposito—gradually economize the theological heredity of personhood with the recombinant genetics of self-ownership as a contractual right. From this mutative embryonic nurturing, a corporation assays to capture in studied succession the key thematic attributes of personhood: a Body, a Soul, a Voice, and a Conscience. Locating each acquisition at a chaotic yet formative juncture of U.S. political economic history, Musgrave narrates something like the four-stage tour of a body snatcher, the piecemeal making of a Frankenstein, but in this case, the suturing of the animate form strangely does not yield a monster. Quite the contrary, it refigures an entity “once understood as a monster of capital, an alien, and even a worm in the entrails of the nation” (45) as a normative model of personhood so elegant that corporeal persons can only aspire.The Body is, first, seized from the conflicted terrain of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the mid-late nineteenth century. The corporation wrested embodiment from the incorporation conflicts that, emerging around the development of commerce and the amalgamation of actual corpora in the body public, claimed the Chinese laborer as embodied host for rising racio-economic anxiety: “If the nation was civilized, Christian, prosperous, and pure—that is to say, white, in all of its coded language—how could it incorporate a people that was deemed biologically incapable of reaching these statuses?” (29). Musgrave's impressively detailed analysis shows how the corporation, once anathema in Jacksonian democratic sentiments, sails to legal protection thanks in large measure to the theologically-soaked rhetoric of one eventual Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field. Through two cases that laid jurisprudential ground for the landmark 1886 Waite Court ruling that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, Field liberalized corporate law vis-à-vis the right of Chinese laborers. To be clear, these rulings were far less about protecting the laborer's right to safe and legal working conditions and far more about preserving the industry's right to exploit their productive capacities for profit. How are we not surprised? No synthetic fabrication, corporate corporealization requires the appropriation and expenditure of the actual material bodies of racialized persons. By marking the Chinese worker as “the racial other of the corporation” (51), these legalities stood the corporation as an embodied symbol of white Western capitalist rationality, securing its ascendancy through the symbolic hierarchies of personhood.The Soul is next, as early twentieth century Progressive activism placed the corporation in need of salvation. Musgrave's theologically-attuned economic rhetorical analysis finds early masters of mass communication turning to the cultural power of advertising not only to promote the corporation's commercial products but also to “personalize” the corporation itself. Merging Protestant convictions with free markets ideals, the new discourse of evangelical capital mobilized the “great parables of advertising” within secularized versions of Christian spiritual themes—shepherd and flock, confession, transformation, redemption—to renew the corporation as a “benevolent shepherd” (63), which could minister a lost public to salvation. Then it's Voice, as political antagonism toward the New Deal and the affects of the Cold War vitalized godly libertarian businessmen to better align Christianity with capitalism, launching a new wave of jurisprudential activity that granted the corporation legal voice.Lastly, Musgrave offers Conscience, as the nearly-personified corporation forges from the evangelical neoliberalism of Reagan, to the paleoconservative backlash, to Trump's successful rallying of conservatives around key issues of conscience—that is, “freedom from a godless and all-powerful state apparatus that polices language through a soft totalitarian discourse of political correctness on the one hand, and mandates that companies abandon their religious convictions in the name of state-sanctioned multiculturalism on the other” (140). With each successive acquisition, the corporation more fully realizes personhood, even as personhood is itself flattened and recast as “a mask that never fully adheres to the face that wears it” (3), reordered as a dispositif of techniques and technologies for systematizing biopolitical bodies.The operative claim of this book is that our best hopes for resistance against neoliberalism do not lie with rational persuasion. Rather, they depend on our capacity to enter onto an existential plane where we may query our theological commitments and convictions about human personhood. Rhetorical readers of many persuasions will appreciate this book's potential to incline critique and analysis in various directions, not least into further discussion of the intriguing possibility with which the book closes: the potential for rhetorical thinking on economic theology to instantiate more humane and democratic configurations of personhood by adopting a post-human humanist orientation to life as a gift. If “the cosmic and existential levels of economic theology” (175), as Musgrave argues, suffuse our public and political worlds, then scholars of communications and rhetoric indeed stand to gain by engaging them—as do scholars of economic theology, arguably, by inviting the contributions of communications and rhetoric. What new future may emerge for a rhetorical critique of economy that better apperceives how sacred and secular understandings of the person share affinity? What might economic rhetorical inquiry discover when it looks both at and beyond the clear-cut theologies of evangelical capital discourses? How might theological attunements that surpass Judeo-Christian adherences to also account for non-Western, non-white, and non-dominant belief systems open rhetorical studies to more diversely cultural knowledges of moral and market order, and thus better equip them for critique? Persons of the Market poses these questions; they are ours now to answer.

This edited collection offers an array of essays forwarding the rhetorical work constituting the political activity of and concerning Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although scholars have certainly interrogated Latin American experiences in the United States and across the Western Hemisphere (some of whom have contributed to this volume), I can think of no other collection in rhetorical studies that supplies the kind of birds-eye-view of Latin America and its political landscape(s) as a whole. The edited volume is unabashedly transnational in its case studies, although not each individual case study is transnationally oriented, and the authors invited by the editors claim homes across the Western Hemisphere (e.g., the United States, Columbia, Argentina). In short, this book embodies and takes care to fulfill its commitment to presenting “rhetorics of democracy in the Americas.”Although it is customary to provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters in a book review, the chapter summaries provided by the editors in the collection's Introduction are superbly written and need not be replicated here. I would encourage those interested in their summaries to access the “Introduction,” which is made available through the publisher's website.1 The book follows, flexibly, a conventional Part I “theory” and Part II “case study” structure that readers can navigate easily and according to their own needs. Each chapter stands alone quite well. Even so, in what follows I retrace the chapters and articulate what I think are the major questions the collection and each essay provokes. For, while this book is commendable for initiating a conversation, it would be a mistake to treat this volume as more than an entry into the exploration of “rhetoric of democracy in the Americas.” Thus, I provide a bridge between the entry point that I think the collection offers and further lines of inquiry that I believe it spurs.One of the collection's strengths, as I have stated, lies in its focus on the “Americas.” Given this focus, readers wishing to find how the notion of an “America” informs rhetorical or democratic theory must reflect on how they might extend the work provided by these chapters. For example, editors claim a “constitutive” notion of rhetoric over an “instrumental” view in the Introduction (15), but I find that most case studies adopt the language of “instrumental” rhetoric in their examinations (e.g., chapter six's discussion of “strategies”). Though readers might not care too much about whether one adopts an instrumental or constitutive view of rhetoric, I point out this feature to highlight that the collection's presumption of this distinction evinces its reliance upon conventional rhetorical theory. That most case studies interrogate “rhetoric” as a “tool” or “device” to be leveraged to some end underscores how these case studies recontextualize traditional rhetorical theory within Latin American spaces rather than spurring retheorizations of rhetorical inquiry. Similar presumptions about “democracy” and its supposed “ideal” also become manifest in each essay when trying to define democracy. The “Introduction” certainly provides some guidance by claiming democracy as “among the vital concepts in rhetorical studies” (5), and as a governmental form offering citizens a “promise” of “good things” (5–6). The collection's case studies, nonetheless, do not furnish much about what “democracy” entails or how democracy in Latin America differs from, in content and form, that in the United States or anywhere else. Democracy is presumed as a context for each study and an ideal in which rhetoric flourishes.Such presumptions, though not misguided or wrong, highlight not a problem with the collection as much as they illuminate opportunities for other scholars to take up. Christa Olson's chapter, as I read it, articulates a notion of the telluric in contrast to the traditional topos to encourage readers to consider new material stakes in rhetorical discourse—a materialism based in “ideas” of Latin America. Though gesturing toward the operationalization of the telluric in her beautifully written essay, Olson's proposal demonstrates how we might interrupt the conventional reliance on the “commonplace” for studying rhetoric in América. Cortez's essay does something similar to Olson in that he encourages a departure from a familiar concept—subalternity. Though offering the most philosophically minded take in the collection, his take-down of the “decolonial imaginary” underscores how studies involving Latin America pose a complex and inescapable problematic, namely, how to conceptualize Latin America without reproducing the very colonial structure rendering it, in the words of Walter Mignolo and other decolonial scholars, a fiction. While I personally remain skeptical that “rhetoric” is capable of resolving the issues Cortez raises, given the imperial stakes “rhetoric” qua art implicates, Cortez's argument that the terms we use to characterize and study “Latin America” cannot be presumed to give it a voice spurs scholars to reflect on the classifications used to identify non-dominant rhetorics.Although Part I begins with theoretical explorations, its remaining chapters take on a more practical tone. Chapters 3–5 address a different subject related to but not limited to U.S. relationships with Latin America(ns). De los Santos's chapter tackles the rhetorical contributions of migrants, a work that he is curiously committed to distance from prior work on citizenship despite suturing his study to “ancient Greece” (84). I find De los Santos's work to be quite similar to, for example, Josue David Cisneros's for its emphasis on a discursively constructed yet politically imagined citizenship. Nevertheless, perhaps the most surprising theme—or not, depending on the reader—was the prevalence of former President Donald Trump. I say surprising because, while President Donald Trump has had quite an influence on recent rhetorical studies, Trump's relationship to Latin America is not any more appalling, xenophobic, sly, or even pretentious than past U.S. presidents. I am not denying that this former President might have altered the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere during his administration, but I think that the ways in which chapters center Trump's influence suggest that his actions are an aberration. Still, while these scholars view more dissonance than coherence in U.S.-Latin American relations, I think that the essays foster inquiry along its opposing line, namely, answering the question of how consistently presidencies have negotiated and enforced a power imbalance between the United States and Latin America.The chapters encourage not necessarily a complete reassessment of “migrants,” “immigration,” or even “American Exceptionalism” as much as they compel revisitations of what we might call “familiar” rhetorics to impart a peculiarity to otherwise recognizable themes. That peculiarity is important, for, recalling Olson and Cortez, the ways in which we critically interrogate “rhetoric” in and through Latin America cannot be presumed to simply reinscribe what we already know about “rhetoric” or “democracy.” Indeed, as Butterworth underscores, “American Exceptionalism” takes a particular form when Cuba is involved, and it takes on a peculiar form when it involves relations with Latin America. Viewed thus, each of the chapters in Part 1 encourages scholars to come back to familiar rhetorics to “question the narratives of democracy” that we take for granted and presume to be universally operative.Part II takes up the theme of “Problematizing and Reconstructing Democracy in Latin America,” with each chapter proffering not only a unique perspective on politics in Latin America but a discrete take on “rhetorical” study within politically resonant moments. Privileging as it does not only Latin American regions but Latin American scholars, this section showcases what scholarship done in and through Latin America might look like for future scholars across the Western Hemisphere. More concretely, these essays magnify senses of rhetoric and rhetorical study that scholars interested in prioritizing Latin America might assume in their own work. Focused on a variety of politically rich subjects such as corruption (chapter 6), rhetorical agency (chapter 7), the religious right (chapter 8), presidential rhetoric (chapters 9 and 10), and, finally, crisis (chapter 11), these case studies diversify the subjects with which rhetoricians can—and should—grapple. At the same time, they underscore how these subjects might be theorized in and through Latin America. This is not to say that the subjects are exclusive to Latin America or that certain themes need to be relegated to Latin America. Rather, if I consider how many studies have been written on “corruption” in the United States, I might have to consider alternative vocabularies (e.g., racism, bureaucracy, morality, etc.) to expand my inquiry, since there are simply too few studies of U.S. political corruption outside of Bruce Gronbeck's 1978 essay—an essay nearly fifty years old! Studying rhetoric in Latin America is, these essays suggest, productive of the kinds of questions that rhetoric scholars across the Americas must consider. For, what happens in Latin America cannot be presumed to be exclusive to Latin America.Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas challenges scholars to take on two distinct but related tasks. First, the collection urges us (U.S.-based scholars) to consider how we might employ familiar tools to study rhetorics in Latin America. No longer can or should we view rhetoric in Latin America as a uniquely Latin American operation in need of new tools. Even though calls from Olson and De los Santos to consider Latin America in “Américan” rhetoric creep toward a decade old (!), this collection encourages us not to provide comprehensive work but responsible work in interrogating relationships between politics and rhetoric in “the Americas.” U.S.-based scholars (of which I am one) must begin to view themselves as Américan scholars.Second, if U.S.-based scholars assume the identity of an “Américan scholar,” this collection encourages us to deploy and harness Latin American histories to theorize “rhetoric” and “democratic” politics across the Americas—including the United States. In what sense must we alter our rhetorical theories and vocabularies in light of the way persuasive communication is enacted and performed in Latin American spaces? How might we conceptualize rhetoric's relationship to “democracy” in light of the ways in which Latin American rhetorics engage with the United States? With other Latin American nations? With their own histories and traditions? Alejandra Vitale's essay (chapter 10), I suggest, demonstrates this concretely by revisiting how our conception of ēthos might be transformed when considering the rhetorical work accomplished through an Argentinian presidential farewell address. As readers will see, Vitale is no stranger to U.S.-based rhetorical scholarship, nor a stranger to Argentinian scholarship and culture. In the essay, Vitale demonstrates how conventional understandings of ēthos, a rhetorical concept that U.S.-based scholars might cringe at for its neo-Aristotelian status, might be disrupted and expanded by prioritizing a uniquely Latin American political context.The collection edited by Drs. Angel, Butterworth, and Gómez shows paths of inquiry that I think hold promise for graduate students looking to integrate more transnational approaches to their study or those wishing to study politics outside of U.S. borders. It is an exhibition in how to overcome theoretical challenges to the study of Latin American rhetorics, as well as how to problematize conventional understandings of rhetoric in light of having studied and taken seriously Latin American politics. Moreover, I think that The Pennsylvania State University Press deserves credit for expanding the repertoire of Latinx rhetorical inquiries with both the 24th volume and this 25th volume in the “Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation” series. That a couple of this press's latest volumes have focused on scholarship related to Latinx politics highlights how now is the time to strike the anvil and continue to pursue such a rich scholarly endeavor.

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples’ experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as “an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation.”1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, “Reconciliation as a way of Seeing,” Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, “Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle,” Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors’ memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, “Conceal,” “Desire,” “Grateful,” “Attempt and Remain,” and “Purchase, Wealthy” (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, “Images of Contact,” Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of “everydayness” in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of “looking past,” Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might “challenge how images have been assigned meaning” (58). This act of resignification is a kind of “sifting” through collective memory for “colonial debris” which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of “contact” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the “before and after,” depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the “before” pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is “The Long Goodbye.” Deploying the “civic skill” of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person “I” throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A “rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation,” this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, “Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter,” Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the “colonial debris” of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a “palimpsest, layered and textured by memory” (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and “unsettle” colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or “milieux de memoire” (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of “dancing with ghosts” to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as “a beating heart of episodes,” physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.

On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old white gunman murdered ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.1 In a rampage that appeared racially motivated, the gunman targeted victims in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The attack provoked outrage and prompted a familiar rhetorical refrain among Black Americans, in which many questioned their future in a country that seems irreparably anti-Black. “America is inherently violent,” said Zeneta Everhart, the mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, at a House Oversight Committee meeting. “My ancestors, brought to America through the slave trade, were the first currency of America,” she explained, “I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans and as a nation. Hear me clearly: This is exactly who we are.”2 Everhart's criticism of race and violence in the United States—her articulation of America as an anti-Black colonial project beyond redemption—is a recent installment in a long history of Black rhetorical pessimism. Author Andre E. Johnson convincingly genealogizes this persistent, critical skepticism about the American racial character in his book No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.Johnson traces Black rhetorical pessimism to Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a leading Black spokesperson in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Turner was distinctive in his combination of stature and scolding. As a Georgia state representative and senior bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), his political prophecy warned against a future for Black people in the United States. In a notable rhetorical maturation, which Johnson thoroughly elaborates, Turner abandoned the “sacredness and divine mission of America” for the “sacredness and sacred character of God” (13). Turner ultimately advocated for Black emigration to Africa, prefiguring the political projects of both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. “Such being the barbarous condition of the United States,” Turner once wrote, “and the low order of civilization which controls its institutions where right and justice should sit enthroned, I see nothing for the Negro to attain unto in this country” (7). In his analysis of Turner's rhetorical negativity, Johnson contends that pessimism, a prominent though misunderstood practice in African American rhetoric, is a productive and culturally sustaining discourse in response to persistent, entrenched racism.Upon Turner's death in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois remarked that Turner's life had been that of “a man of tremendous force and indomitable courage” (173). Turner was born emancipated in South Carolina in 1834. Regarded as a talented, exceptional youth, yet barred from formal education, Turner was schooled in his early years by family, local attorneys, and most significantly, the Methodist Church (7–8). He eventually became a Methodist preacher but chose membership in the AME, as the Methodist Episcopal Church would not, on the basis of race, permit him to become a bishop. As a member of the AME, Turner's career flourished. He preached in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., wrote for the Christian Recorder newspaper, and became a vocal supporter of the Union during the Civil War when he worked also to influence Congress and recruit soldiers. A Union victory inspired Turner's belief that the United States could become a “multiracial democracy” (8). After the Civil War, however, the Southern political powers unmade much of the progress of Reconstruction. Namely, Turner himself was expelled from office, following election to the Georgia legislature (8). At the same time, violence and disenfranchisement against Black Americans increased—a development that hardened Turner's political and theological outlook, thereby inspiring Turner's signature pessimism and Johnson's titular object of study.No Future in This Country consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 details Turner's criticism of the Supreme Court (an “abominable enclave of negro hating demons”) in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation (39). Chapter 2 explains how Turner developed a Black nationalist theology (“Negroes should worship a God who is a Negro”) (57). Chapter 3 charts Turner's opposition to the Spanish-American War (“The Negro has no flag to defend”) (81). Chapter 4 shows how Turner assailed Black post-Civil War allegiance to the Republican Party (“Negro devotees believe that the Republican Party is first and God is next”) (111). Chapter 5 articulates Turner's emigration rhetoric (“. . . why waste our time in trying to stay here?”) (125). Finally, Chapter 6 encapsulates the final stage of Turner's rhetorical pessimism (“I am as near a rebel to this Government as any Negro ever got to be”) (155). With each step in Turner's rhetorical and political development, Johnson illustrates not only how Turner used pessimism to persuade Black audiences toward action but also how Turner's productive pessimism anticipated major Black rhetoricians of the Civil Rights Movement.Among his most prominent interventions, Johnson establishes Turner's rhetorical and theological pessimism as an opportunity to expand the genre of prophetic rhetoric. Johnson defines prophetic rhetoric as “discourse grounded in the sacred and rooted in a community experience that offers a critique of existing communities and traditions by charging and challenging society to live up to the ideals espoused” (9). From Johnson's perspective, scholars heretofore have not effectively articulated prophetic rhetoric, in part because they have not extensively explored its development and application within African American rhetoric. Historically, for example, scholars have emphasized the rhetoric of American Puritans. Johnson, as an extension, proposes that prophetic rhetoric is “located on the margins of society” and “intends to lift the people to an ethical conception of whatever the people deem as sacred by adopting, at times, a controversial style of speaking” (9). From this standpoint, Johnson argues that the African American Prophetic Tradition (AAPT) provides scholars a new, third conceptual distinction within prophetic rhetoric—the first being “apocalyptic” and the second being the “jeremiad.”In apocalyptic rhetoric, speakers appeal to their audiences by revealing that current, exigent circumstances are part of a larger, cosmic plan that requires pivotal action. The jeremiad argues that, despite difficult and disorienting times, “chosen ones” must and are especially primed to actualize a righteous reality in line with a higher calling. Johnson reads AAPT against these two traditional strains of prophetic rhetoric by suggesting AAPT “has its origins not in freedom, but in slavery” (11). Accordingly, African American rhetoric has, occasionally, questioned a cosmic plan (i.e., the apocalyptic), asking instead “Where in the hell is God?” (11). Likewise, many Black rhetors have rejected the burden of being “chosen” and “did not have confidence or think that ‘the covenant’ would work for them” (11). From this perspective, Johnson argues Turner provides a gateway to an underappreciated avenue of rhetorical practice—“a pessimistic prophetic persona”—which contended that African Americans had no future in the United States and therefore emigration was the best option (14). In Johnson's view, this argument is prophetic in that it is both hopeful and revelatory, but it is also pessimistic in that it rejects traditional premises of redemption and covenant.No Future in This Country is more than a rhetorical analysis of Turner's speeches and writings. Framed as “a sequel of sorts” to Johnson's own The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), this work offers a practice in rhetorical history, which Johnson defines as the “historical study of rhetorical events and the study from a rhetorical perspective of historical forces, trends, processes, and events” (14). In his methodology, Johnson illustrates how rhetorical practice and historical developments influence one another in a dialectical relationship. Rhetoric, as both constrained and enabled by speakers’ and audiences’ realities, provides a lens with which we can evaluate Johnson's analysis. Specifically, Turner's rhetorical pessimism (which operated at the margins of both rhetoric and society) sheds light on the analytical potential at the intersections of rhetoric and critical race studies.In particular, Johnson's reading of Turner urges further exploration into Afropessimism, a strain of critical race studies that seeks to highlight inherent anti-Blackness within traditional political and critical discourses. Johnson conceives of Afropessimism as “attempts to find space for voice and agency, to find recognition and inclusion in society will only result in more death” (17). Johnson argues that “much of Turner's work would also echo these sentiments,” since for “at least Black folks in America, there was no hope of achieving any notable and positive status, because not only would white people not allow it but anti-Black ideology shaped the American ethos” (17). While Johnson concludes that Turner's underlying belief in Black agency is not explicitly Afropessimist, this rhetorical history is nonetheless a provocative case study in the ideological and racial constraints that shape rhetorical practice (176).No Future in This Country asks rhetoricians to reconsider what agency looks and sounds like when hope is or seems lost. In a 1907 speech, Turner lamented that Black Americans were “‘tying their children's children’ to the ‘wheels of degradation for a hundred years to come’” (167). “God and nature,” he said, however, “help those who help themselves.” Over one hundred years later, Zeneta Everhart, mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, told Congress, “After centuries of waiting for White majorities to overturn white supremacy . . . it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. . . . And I stand at the ready.”3 With his book, Andre E. Johnson reveals that with the works and words of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Zeneta and many others may stand more solidly “at the ready.”

Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World are models for bringing feminist rhetorical studies to bear on the current turbulent political and cultural times. As we write this review, we are experiencing an ongoing global pandemic; an extension of Cold War hostilities that are breaking down global trade—causing increased food insecurity and scarcity across the globe; attacks on women's rights in the United States; continued danger of asylum-seeking at borders in the United States and abroad; and violent attacks on racialized groups worldwide. These books offer glimpses of how rhetors carve out possibility within seemingly impossible situations. Read together, they can help rhetorical scholars theorize new forms of agency, coalition, belonging, and hope. While Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope traces hope and belonging in U.S. national contexts, and is especially situated in higher education, How to Belong focuses on patterns of agency and coalition-building transnationally. These books provide a better understanding of feminist rhetorical practices within and beyond nation state borders. Likewise, together, they show how rhetorical agency and coalition-building can explicitly respond to the uneven structures of power that frame all rhetorical action.Glenn's and Southard's monographs resonate with recent conversations in the field that take up how to do rhetorical work as we continue to navigate legacies of injustice and unprecedented instability. For example, as demonstrated in Rhetoric Review's most recent “Octalog IV,” considering how current instability has shifted how we all teach, research, study, and “do rhetoric” requires new approaches that are, like the ones Glenn offers, anchored in hope. Yet as the authors in the Octalog make clear, the urgency of our time requires us to question our taken-for-granted and established knowledge (see Martinez and Rois), expand beyond the academy (see Skinnel), and imagine new texts and methods (see Epps-Robertson and Van Haitsma).1 Like these authors, Glenn and Southard offer a hopeful glimpse of how rhetorical scholars can find unique forms of belonging and connection, even during seemingly hopeless situations. In response to Glenn's and Southard's monographs, we ask rhetorical scholars to consider how they might engage with hope and coalitions in their scholarship and teaching during fraught times.In Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope, Glenn forwards what she calls “rhetorical feminism” (4). She develops her theory of rhetorical feminism by tracing key feminist rhetorical practices, including those of women from outside of Western culture. The goal of the book is to equip the field with a new feminist lens that brings forth dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration. Through these practices, she theorizes alternative means of persuasion—a questioning of traditional rhetorical practices and attention to silence and listening. Throughout the book, she offers grounded instances of rhetorical feminism and hope for a new and open field of rhetorical studies.Examples of this hopeful rhetorical analysis begin in the first chapter. Glenn identifies “Sister Rhetors,” such as Maria W. Miller Stewart, Angelina Grimké, and Sojourner Truth, who exemplify how feminist rhetoric can be used to pursue the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, “the greatest good for all human beings” (5). Modeling agentive rhetorical action, she analyzes how these Sister Rhetors’ public speeches advocated for suffrage, expanding theories of rhetorical feminism. While identifying how individual exemplars’ rhetorical practices can broaden understandings of rhetoric as Glenn shows, the focus on individuals means that the book omits an extended analysis of the ruptures in the suffragist movement, caused by the virulent racism of white suffragists. This choice is significant given Glenn's focus on how rhetorical feminists can reach across difference. Nevertheless, the chapter “Activism” provides historical examples of how rhetorical feminism can guide activist movements, which Glenn further explores in chapter two, “Identities.”The chapter “Identities” focuses on rhetorical feminism's connection to lived experience and difference. With historical examples, Glenn demonstrates how coalitional work across difference is difficult. She analyzes an infamous public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. Glenn takes the lesson that white feminists must acknowledge their privilege by practicing “silence and listening to Others” (42). While this focus on lived experience and listening are indeed important points for scholars of feminist rhetoric, this chapter does not address what this complicated, important work of dwelling in difference requires, most notably attending to histories of racial, ethnic, and gendered inequalities and violence. This dovetails with broader conversations in the field, particularly from Karma Chávez and Sharon Yam, scholars we return to later who address how coalitions can productively form across difference. Glenn's focus on rhetorical feminism gestures towards the possibility of coalition built on shared hopes. For example, in the chapter “Teaching,” Glenn explores how feminist teachers can honor their own and their students’ different lived experiences. This sort of rhetorical feminism, Glenn suggests, can help students cultivate the rhetorical awareness needed to navigate and intervene in structural injustices, including patriarchy.Likewise, in “Mentoring” and “(Writing Program) Administration,” Glenn critiques the “masculinist models’’ of mentoring that are used as gatekeeping mechanisms in academia to create exclusionary spaces (150). Glenn encourages rhetorical feminists to work on “disidentifying” from these norms and instead use familiar feminist rhetorical practices such as “dialogue, silence, and listening” to create relationships that are non-hierarchical, mutual, and networked (150). With these tools, feminist mentors can make room for more women and feminists in academia and begin to change the structures of the academy altogether. In fact, Glenn sees how on-the-ground academic administration can be a place where mentoring and coalition-building can happen. The final chapter, “This Thing Called Hope,” returns in time and space to the consequences of the Trump presidency. Glenn reflects on how rhetorical feminism should guide political action but spends much of the chapter pondering the academic successes of rhetorical feminism. For Glenn, the continued challenge of the Trump presidency (and now legacy) is why we need “this thing called hope” to guide us in working together (212). Like the scholars in the Octalog IV referenced above, Glenn demonstrates hope and new methods of bringing rhetorical feminism to bear on precarity in academic institutions. Extending Glenn's political commitments beyond the United States, Southard brings this sort of rhetorical analysis to global political contexts in How To Belong.In How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World, Southard explores how contemporary women leaders curated forms of belonging and agency that “[n]egotiated gendered and geographic boundaries” across “transnational flows of political and economic power” to move beyond citizenship and nation-state inclusion (3). She defines agency as a person's “can-do-ness” and, as such, considers how contemporary power relations might affect a rhetor's ability to be an agent of change (7). Southard looks to women leaders globally, turning most prominently to West Africa to better understand how women's agency has been constrained or enabled by political upheaval. Importantly, these leaders articulated belonging based on gendered violence and displacements by factional and national conflicts. Southard's observation extends work by transnational feminist rhetorical scholars who over a decade-and-a-half ago noted how “with few exceptions, scholars in rhetoric . . . have not systematically engaged the complex material and rhetorical dynamics of transnationality or questioned the nation state as a unit of analysis.”2 Her project does precisely this: shows how women denizens actively demonstrated the limits of the nation state.The book begins by examining the rhetorical practices of West African women who rearticulated notions of belonging based not on citizenship but instead through their relationships as “denizens of homes, landscapes, peace conferences, and politics” (Southard 18). Southard argues that these women redefined belonging and demonstrated how they, as rhetorical actors, were central to creating functioning peaceful communities. Southard highlights “dwelling practices,” such as seemingly powerless women forcing themselves into peace talks organized by men who are political leaders, establishing alliances between Christians and Muslims, and protesting when formal peace talks ignored them. While Southard situates her analysis in the recent political upheavals of West African nations in the 1990s, she does not address the longer history of European colonization in the area. Given Southard's project of engaging transnational work that decenters the nation-state, it would be productive to address this colonial history, which is responsible for the conceptualization of the nation-state as it currently exists in West Africa.3 As readers, we were drawn to thinking about how women denizens were engaging a decolonial project through their organizing.Southard moves on to examine how these women made it possible for Liberia to elect their first woman president. Southard reads Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's autobiography and public addresses to demonstrate how Sirleaf articulated women's national leadership as a necessary part of membership in a global community by normalizing women's rights within supranational and regional governing bodies, advocating for a national policy that protected women educators from sexual assault and crafting Liberian women's agency as a national and cosmopolitan ideal. While Southard demonstrates how Sirleaf and others became agentive rhetors, this focus on individual women who are empowered by existing political structures is complicated. We see the individualized nature of agency as similar to Glenn's discussion of this concept, a pattern that we discuss further below.Towards the end of the book, Southard presents the outcomes of African women's rhetorical agency, namely the success of creating a security resolution mandating that women be part of and protected in any peace talks. Yet, as Southard importantly points out in relation to the formation of UN Women 2010, this resolution did little to address the ways that supranational organizations privilege First World understandings of what it means to enact feminist change. Southard traces how the rhetorics of belonging espoused by Michelle Bachelet, the first Executive Director, reshaped the power relationships among global elites and the women they claimed to represent.As these brief summaries demonstrate, the ways that Glenn and Southard address the concepts of rhetorical agency and coalition-building productively shift scholars’ attention to how rhetors enact change on local and global scales. They offer ways to place the role of identity formation, agency, and hope within historical and contemporary feminist intentions. Glenn's theory of hope as a way to create more feminist futures and Southard's vision for rhetorical agency as “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” are places where feminist rhetors and activists build understandings of belonging and power (Southard 10).Questions of agency form the backbone of both Rhetorical Feminism and How to Belong. For both writers, agency is fundamentally linked to claiming a voice, working together, and taking action. According to Glenn, agency is “the power to take efficacious action” (4). She elaborates that agency “is always contingent . . . adopted strategically,” and can be used “to redefine rhetorical history, theory, and praxis” (4). This orientation could “represent more ethically and accurately the dominant and the marginalized alike (even as we rethink this metaphor); and . . . prepare the next generations of rhetorically empowered scholars, feminists, teachers, and citizens” (Glenn 4). Thus, agency is how we enact hope.Agency, for Glenn, is not just the ability to act but to imagine the radical possibilities of new social orders. Through a transnational lens, Southard adds that agency is “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” (10). Put simply, rhetorical agency is “what enables one to do rhetoric and how, where, and when one can do rhetoric” (Southard 7). Like Glenn, Southard links agency to “embodied social praxis” that is possible amid the constraints of the institutions and hierarchies we live in (12). Southard explains, “rhetorical agency [is] a negotiation between a rhetor's choices and their discursive contexts, such that interventional strategies are thought to shape and be shaped by transnational flows of political and economic power” (84–85). While Glenn's of agency at the of in to take action, Southard is particularly with how structures of power shape rhetorical Southard's of agency adds to Glenn's is a understanding of how women to together, such as through their shared of coalitions how different feminist have up agency in her of in rhetorical feminist thinking in chapter For example, in the of scholars such as who have for lived experience as a of Glenn and and into agency, a of or instead voice, even As scholars, we should the of the of and question how colonial structures that women were and from of Glenn agency, or the as a between silence or for individual She and rhetorical to agency in this of her which us such a does not that agency is both and this of agency as a means of claiming on a global is by the examples of agency by For example, in her chapter on as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Southard explores how Sirleaf redefined national in to address women's as on women's of and Southard how Sirleaf adopted at transnational conferences, such as the World on that as change of supranational and national Southard traces how a public as a for rhetorical agency to but women Glenn and Southard to understand rhetorical agency as and in social to focus on individual rhetors it for to understand the and networked nature of We see this between individual agency and attention to and transnational economic structures as a project that more rhetorical scholars might take In we that both Southard's and Glenn's understandings of agency as within an individual who is empowered by their within political that can agency to individuals who are outside these one form of rhetorical We how agency is what we as agency in contexts not be agentive for Extending Glenn's discussion of the that what agentive for white not for to in the of rhetoric should be of the histories of and an awareness can Southard and Glenn's work to consider how agency is in legacies that forms of Glenn's of agency legacies of for why this has been made impossible across different and demonstrates awareness of new forms of rhetorical agency when she shows how West African women in legacies of power by forms of belonging that outside the concept of the The of belonging by the Liberian Women's and as Southard identifies who used rhetoric to create “dwelling both discursive and where they could with and their as of to with different for are unique and In this focus on the of rhetorical Southard for the ways that these peace women the of men and women by networked and with leaders to within Liberia as a and made space within public places to and for on these women's rhetorical Southard practices can places and nations from the or of the into places and nations where the marginalized and the can their We find this of agency in that existing political make it impossible to agency to rhetors can move and these to take action. Glenn focuses on to an existing Southard is how agency for these denizens outside of the colonial nation-state This networked and contingent understanding of agency not coalitions but it to change an of we in our on agency, of how feminist can form coalitions through both Glenn's and Southard's Glenn's understanding of rhetorical feminism is grounded in an that lived shape their to rhetoric and In her of rhetorical feminism as a theory and Glenn approaches this as a of identity is such that they an who are to consider in Glenn how rhetors can work productively across identity to form agentive In she a few different rhetorical strategies for including concept of and Glenn returns to historical examples to demonstrate how this coalitional work can be For example, she points out the of identity in U.S. feminism by the public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre an open a feminist for her to for all were constrained by her and the experience and of women and marginalized Glenn takes the lesson that all feminists must do the work “to open up across difference and that white feminists in need to consider their and in to Glenn's of the limits of feminist is Yet feminist on a coalition that the of is In her book, The with from a of feminist thought including and critiques feminism” for on within a and that must be in with for racial, and and to be by those most by these of working in coalition with through the question of how coalitions can form when we take identity difference as a of Glenn rhetoric and rhetorical listening as strategies for understanding and political focus on listening to lived experience is indeed an important for scholars of feminist this of listening of the complicated, necessary work of dwelling with an awareness of relations of power and to the between and Glenn provides an of what when coalitions form the hierarchies in Glenn does not offer a where rhetorical feminists used these listening strategies to form coalitions that used their networked, agency to change. While listening is an important of coalition with those who are marginalized about of power is for feminist This is that Southard focuses on her book and, in chapter as Michelle Transnational this chapter, Southard how Michelle used rhetorical agency as of UN Women to the of possibility for transnational and and as rhetorical While the transnational Southard looks at in this chapter are in a by at the that through UN and by leaders like Bachelet, Southard points to the coalitions that women across national borders and hierarchies through these This is where Southard's understanding of agency as and out in to Southard shows, for example, how address to the on the of Women made space for women's rhetorical For example, that must be by the local and lived of of and state violence the space for others to their in at the UN (Southard Glenn and Southard the of rhetorical silence and but Southard points to the power of listening as a form of for rhetorical scholars might as in this book are the strategies Southard points to for which for transnational and action, even as the book the local contexts of rhetorical and lived experiences. This is the of connection that can make transnational and change concepts of belonging and hope both We that these are and that can in our We these concepts as we for how rhetorical scholars can enact these in our Glenn identifies hope as a feminist way to us through of activist change. Rhetorical scholars across can from Glenn's of hope as a for activist research, and Glenn that the most feminist teachers are those who students to with analysis of the hierarchies and structures of power they move through in their Glenn identifies practices that must be in this of such as which frame students’ approaches to understandings of and agency, and action in response to this provides a hopeful at transnational feminism most rhetorical scholars in this at constraints on rhetorical agency, Southard looks at new for belonging rhetorical practices . . . in ways that and national As we Southard focuses on women as transnational who new ways of belonging as through and within transnational These forms of belonging help us the agency and rhetorical of those who outside and in between the of and the and of rhetors who are the rights of we are drawn to in Southard's book is that the goal of agency is not to within the structures of citizenship but instead in alternative institutions by women with shared and for the Southard and Glenn us to see hopeful of community within and outside of and together, Glenn and Southard show us that hope is and for to build belonging across difference. from what Glenn and Southard offer us in their monographs, hope and belonging should respond to existing structures of power and us to work and them. These books us with How do we form coalitions to pursue hopeful How can we transnational forms of belonging that in the of different lived of local can rhetorical scholars from these monographs and take up in their own research, and through Glenn and Southard's we how hope and belonging could create possibilities for change in our current While their on agency and coalition the field of rhetoric and to these the examples Glenn and Southard use to their of these could be For example, Southard's of agency as this as a of individual The way that transnational relations and these rhetorical possibilities is that scholars in the field have productively as we have above, Glenn's of agency and coalition, at difference and does not for the ways that different lived and within histories of white and we Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World with scholars who are work on agency and coalition, such as recent work by Karma Chávez and Sharon scholarship provides a of how different and groups form coalitional with one even For example, of it possible to build fraught colonial histories and creating the for relations and across in the possibility for agency and rhetorical action, both and outside established of political this understanding of coalition reads into the relationships between and In a recent given at the of extended her of coalitional possibility to address the most recent in and the transnational of with the and Likewise, what Karma work on coalition adds to this is an understanding of as always to and nation-state of Southard and Glenn's notions of agency to about how the rhetorical of are always marginalized necessary coalitional among the marginalized Chávez coalition the of the the the activist and to demonstrate how U.S. policy has to citizenship for the need for belonging outside of nation-state The book how working these violent and structures made possible of Glenn and Southard's texts can help scholars to the conversations about what agency and coalition can or should like in our local spaces and within in a fraught books demonstrate hope and scholarship work is working to coalition and belonging, these texts can help us cultivate new of in our work and our We scholars, as transnational feminist scholars and feminists of have called to rhetorical agency as always and

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.

The late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor, compared the discourses that govern the affairs of this world to the stickiness of chameleon remains. For Awoonor, when one steps into the chameleon's gluey byproduct, it is difficult to wipe it off.1 This imagery represents the rhetorical potency of capitalism, its affective circulation, and how its influence over our lives makes it challenging to emancipate ourselves from the grips of market forces. For Catherine Chaput, the market is a powerful rhetorical force. The market's inherent trait to habituate our experiences means when “we place our faith in this all-knowing construct, we displace our own agentive powers” (2). In Market Affect, Chaput critiques capitalism with the conviction that other anticapitalist critiques could not dislocate the “affective circuits” of capitalism (18). Taking on Michael McGee's challenge to rhetoricians to investigate the link between rhetoric and social theory, Chaput rethinks affect to explain how we might unmask, demystify, and challenge capitalism by reclaiming human rhetorical agency.Since market forces obscure the exploitative powers of capital and have “fused with the energetic power of affect . . . thinking and acting,” anticapitalist discourses, Chaput asserts, constantly find themselves trapped and subsumed by procapitalist discourses (29). Chaput believes scholars are increasingly frustrated with the impotence of prevailing ideological analyses that sought to help us avert the influence of capitalist instincts in our lives (28). Chaput presents affective rhetorical critique as a paradigm in this endeavor. Affective critique, Chaput argues, empowers scholars to locate the “agentive capacity in our traditional rhetorical theories, enhance it with contemporary materialist perspectives, and develop a practice through which to glimpse, and later engage, the affective sensibilities” (18-19). Affect operates as an “organic power” (29); it is not a “theoretical abstraction or an illuminating metaphor, but a concrete, physiological force circulating into, and out of bodies through their sensuous interaction in the world” (30). Through affective critique, Chaput offers scholars new ways of discerning liberatory strategies against the aegis of capitalism.Chaput explains how procapitalists exploit the potency of affective desires to illustrate how capitalism operates and its ramifications for society. For Chaput, in the same way capitalism became an impregnable force, so is the principle that could derail its strategic maneuvers. Chaput rereads the rhetorical traditions of the classical, medieval, and enlightenment periods and exposes how forces of enlightenment crippled the affective resonances of rhetoric. In recovering this lost rhetorical power, according to Chaput, scholars ought to account for the omissions of the affective dimensions in the traditional rhetorical discipline and the “non-agentive impersonal operations that function so inconspicuously as to bleed into the natural background of life activities” (23). Chaput claims this notion of affect “has existed alongside and underdeveloped within” the rhetorical tradition (23). To convalesce this lost critical framework, Chaput's affective critique seeks to “expand and augment, rather than displace” rhetorical theory's valorization of the Aristotelian conceptualization of rhetoric. Across four chapters, Chaput reviews how economic theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Milton Friedman and John Galbraith “intuited and engaged the living power . . . of affect” in their positions for and against capitalism (37). In the final chapter, Chaput weaves their arguments and brokers them with Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism, packaging Foucauldian ideas as the most formidable salvo on capitalism.In chapter two, Chaput stitches the conflicting epistemologies of affect in Adam Smith's analysis of capitalism and Karl Marx's critique of capital. Chaput reasons that Smith and Marx are primarily immortalized as the “founding fathers” of discourses involving two opposing political systems—capitalism and socialism. Considered the father of capitalism, Smith postulates the “invisible hand” doctrine to account for the circulation of capitalist desires. For Marx, capitalism alienates us from our agentive powers. While both understood that labor, not commodities or gold, is wealth, they proposed “differing conceptions of the power structure propelling human relationships” (39). Smith sees the market as a natural force that represents traditional designations of affect. For Smith, capitalism pulls us into the market and constitutes us just as nationalism transforms us into nation-states. This way, the market's “invisible hand” directs societal and human affective desires.For Marx, an empowering agent exists internal to human beings, and capitalism works because of commodity fetishism— the ability to transfer a specific human power into things. Power circulates among people and things, orienting human decision-making. Affect is depleted through exploited labor because capital is “a process of coercive labor that traps naturally fluid lie energies or affect, within commodity form” (57). Capitalism depletes our personal power because commodities transform our “creative, energetic social beings into mechanical, lifeless, individual beings” (57). For Marx, “affect is that which adds value to life, and it is the essence or the core of our being as humans to participate in such value-adding activities” (46). Chaput observes that “for Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them mere caricatures of capital” (57). In effect, our sensory capacities are subsumed by capitalism.In chapter three, Chaput examines how John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen's divergent but resonant thoughts fail to provide a robust framework for rethinking the problems of capitalism. A fundamental defect in their thinking is their valorization of rationality. Chaput realizes that the two shared many thoughts on the interconnectedness of the global market and the illogical human behaviors that drive economic attitudes. Capitalism, for Keynes, is global, but individual sympathies are national. In this case, “affect circulates locally while capitalism functions globally, forging a gap between our inner feelings and the outer reality of economic operations” (68). Keynes substitutes the “perfect invisible hand” with “imperfect visible arguments and grounds the need for greater economic deliberation among the public” (74). Veblen, likewise, believes in argumentation but not an explicit role. While Marx allows us to see how language produces a dominant ideology, Veblen extends this assessment to commodities. Because humans have little capacity to “outwit capitalism,” Veblen classifies workers as change agents (85). Both Keynes and Veblen neglect capitalism's affective dimension, which renders their theorizations inadequate to account for how affect circulates.In the immediate post–World War II environment, Frederick Hayek and Theodore Adorno turned their attention to the epistemic consequences of affect. They critiqued the scientific rationality logic as governing human decision-making processes. For Hayek, a rationally managed capitalist state, as envisioned by Keynes, produces poverty akin to modern-day slavery. “Managed capitalism” weakens individuals and does not allow for the assertion of human agency. Adorno rejects the persuasive force governing human desires, extending Marx and Veblen with Freud by realigning affect with rationality (97). Hayek vindicates the “self-regulating nature of capitalism, while Adorno discounts the “role of nonrational motivation” of “administrative society” to emancipate itself (91). As Chaput observes, Hayek envisions the market as working through our sensory orders clandestinely or unconsciously. As a result, we participate in capitalist orientations without realizing its corrosive maneuverings. For this reason, Adorno recommends “aesthetic interventions” that shock us out of our slumber (111). Instead of engaging in active “political and economic questions of the day, individuals turn to mass-produced entertainment, channeling their entire libidinal energies into consuming practices” (111). Chaput reasons that Hayek seems to be endorsed by recent democratic engagements even though he espouses and orients us toward antidemocratic tendencies.Chapter five addresses Milton Friedman's (pro-capitalist) and John Kenneth Galbraith's (anticapitalist) meddling with the politics of the right and left. Although these scholars are not economists by training, they offer perspectives on capitalism's pervasive power. Chaput's reading of them stamps the rhetoric of inquiry—reiterating the need to have rhetorical scholars import interdisciplinary literature into our critical projects. Friedman postulates that, guided by historical forces, “human behavior, particularly within nation states—functions with a high degree of consistency and requires an equally consistent monetary policy to maintain market stability” (114). Galbraith locates reality in contemporary political economy, consumer culture, long-term planning, and the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy, creating a “corporatized marketplace” (114). Friedman believes in rational choice, while Galbraith sees corporate power as the most important way to think about human decision-making. Chaput argues that Galbraith's postulations appear overstated since they leave unexplored “anticapitalist discourse bound to a false binary between rational and irrational” (137).In the concluding chapter, Chaput details what she considers the most formidable confrontation of capitalism. Relying on Foucault's late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Chaput recognizes that procapitalist discourses appropriate the “affective force corralling human behavior before and alongside rationale decision making” (137). For Foucault, procapitalists maintain a superior “rhetorical edge” because they rely on a theory that combines the complexity of physiological effects and the discourses that govern humans. This understanding, Chaput maintains, prompts procapitalists to envision humans as subject to the market's governing rationality. Consequently, the market's “superior” affective sensibility inoculates it against critiques that ignore its affective dimensions and operations. Chaput reasons that anticapitalist offerings must consider humanity's thought-making processes and our natural instincts. Chaput directs us to the Foucauldian praxis that unlocks an unceasing resistance to capitalist governmentality. She believes a “free to choose” doctrine with a grounding in “courageous truth-telling,” or parrhesia, is potent to reconstitute and reinvent the governing praxis of our lives (150). Admitting that capitalist governmentality is impervious to “rhetorical deliberation” (142), Foucault's doctrine permits us to locate the “persuasive power of modern political economy in the market's invisible vitality” (144). Through it, we might see the formation of human agency as a “continuous ontological becoming” that must be orchestrated from within (144).Chaput concludes that the Foucauldian praxis is rooted in Greco-Roman practices of individual governance based on the apparatus of the “care of the self” and the desire to dissect the relationship between power, subjectivity, and discourse. This perspective is to create a confluence between “subject formation, bodily instinct, and truth” (150). Chaput states that “whereas biopolitics reflects the indirect manipulation of predictable instinct-driven bodies, care of the self consciously realigns automated bodily responses so as to oppose institutional injustice through the eruption of parrhesia or courageous truth-telling” (150). For Chaput, parrhesia's discursive apparatus grants agency and transcends courageous truth-telling to “adherence to a particular lifestyle designed to cultivate the kind of person who could “spontaneously confront injustice” (154). Through this attunement, we can distinguish bad parhessiates from good parhessiates. The telos of Chaput's call is “to produce people compelled to confront injustice even at the risk of retribution, requiring a practice of everyday life that constantly adjusts one's knowledge, behavior, and instincts” (157). Parhessiates, Chaput continues, identify as “sociopolitical and economic critics” even in the face of strict opposition (157). As cynics, parhessiates identify with all humanity and act altruistically. Chaput charges critics to “assess the persuasive work of our bodily instincts . . . to invent an alternative affective milieu . . . to assert newly cultivated agencies, ones simultaneously empowered by our conscious and unconscious choice” (159).Chaput's intervention comes at a time of global conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian strife, Russian occupation and aggression, movements and surges for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #Anti-racism, and the curricula of critical race theory. Chaput nudges scholars of rhetoric to examine the various affective circuits governing public debates. We might, for example, look to scholars and activists such as Ales Bialiatski, Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. Specifically, attention to parrhesia charges media organizations and those in positions of power to give attention to vernacular discourses and ideas that dislodge oppression. Market Affect emphasizes that criticism of governing ideas goes beyond examining popular cultural products, innovations, and authoritative discourses. Market Affect prompts us to deconstruct the ideas that underlie and govern our world. Chaput prepares us to decipher and challenge the organizing force of human society and the creation of ideal material worlds that better serve the human commons.

Remembering Women Differently features an introduction, fourteen essays, and an afterword. Yet this review must start with the cover, which cleverly addresses the perennial problem of how to represent that which has been erased or forgotten. It showcases the volume's overall interest in probing stories of historical women that could be remembered differently by visually marrying two case studies from the book. The background is a grayscale photograph of Amos Pinchot and Crystal Eastman in 1915, a nod to Amy Aronson's chapter on how Eastman went from a well-known twentieth century social movement activist to all-but-forgotten in the twenty-first century. We see Pinchot as a smartly-dressed figure with a hat and a bowtie. Yet Eastman appears only as an outline, her silhouette filled in with a colorful painting of flowering plants. These botanicals are the work of Maria Martin, the artist who painted the backgrounds for John James Audubon's famous Birds of America. As Henrietta Nickels Shirk elucidates in the volume, it is Martin's contributions that have faded into the background of public memory. While I'd never suggest you judge the book by it, this cover sets the stage for what is to come: a must-read book for scholars of gender, feminism, rhetorical history, and memory studies.The mother-daughter editorial team of Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey were deliberate in their selection of scholarly contributions that use archival research to demonstrate the range and complexity of topics surrounding memory of historical women. They brought together contributions from “. . . scholars from a variety of humanities disciplines—rhetoricians, historians, educators, compositionists, and literary critics—[to] employ feminist research methods to examine women's work, rhetorical agency, and construction and memory of female representation” (x). Letizia Guglielmo begins the volume with an agenda-setting introduction titled “Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice.” This contribution surveys relevant literature to artfully frame themes that are threaded throughout the book, including memory and recollection, ethos and agency, and intersectionality and marginalization.Rooted in the goal of “challeng[ing] traditional conversations, not merely inserting women into existing understandings of the rhetorical tradition,” the essays are grouped into four sections: “New Theoretical Frameworks,” “Erased Collaborators,” “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts,” and “Disrupted Public Memory” (x). The volume's fourteen case study chapters span occupations, historical periods, and geographical locations, which grant ample opportunities for readers to compare and contrast these historical figures, their lives, and their circumstances. To provide a sense of these rich essays, I will discuss all contributions in the “New Theoretical Frameworks” section and the lead essays in the remaining three sections.The first section on “New Theoretical Frameworks” is an innovative collection of case studies that readers are likely to find most generative for projects in feminist memory studies. The section starts with Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher's compelling chapter, which builds on Royster and Kirsch's concept of social circulation to explore professional networks of women physicians, mathematicians, and computers. Based on her study of Rosalind Franklin, Alice Johnson Myatt's chapter offers a useful heuristic for understanding an understudied avenue for feminist memory studies: the historical figure who, once erased, has now had her reputation restored. In the third chapter, Maria Martin (not to be confused with the artist Maria Martin discussed above) details an important framework for studying African women's feminist agency as she explores the case of Nigerian leader and activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Historians of rhetoric will also be interested in the final essay of the section, in which Ellen Quandal traces the “afterlives” of Byzantine historian Anna Komnene as she has been represented by three different scholars. Each of the essays in this section offers insights into the unique circumstances of individual women while simultaneously underlining how their activism, contributions, and memory have been shaped by social, communal, and collective forces.Part 2 features chapters about women who collaborated with men and their subsequent erasure from history and memory in the contexts of the military, art, and education. For example, Mariana Grohowski and D. Alexis Hart's chapter explores how U.S. women service members have consistently had their contributions marginalized, downplayed, or downright erased. Yet they find considerable promise in the corrective and resistive power of digital archives and oral history collections, such as the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, which allow women service members to narrate their own experiences. The authors of chapters in Part 3 ask readers to think differently about how women's rhetorical contributions are valued. For example, Kristie S. Fleckenstein casts Florence Babbitt as a visual rhetor who did valuable labor in crafting a family photograph album, arguing that in our haste to study women as writers and speakers, we ought not forget the “work, especially the memory work, performed by women as imagesmiths—significant figures in the visual rhetorical tradition—and their use of images circulates across the permeable boundaries of the private and the public” (139). Finally, Part 4 on “Disrupted Public Memory” explores how once-prominent public figures are remembered (or forgotten). While forgetting is sometimes the logical outcome of the passage of time, it can also be a complicated and multifaceted process, as Wendy Hayden demonstrates in her study of Lois Waisbrooker, whose ideas found purchase in anarchist, spiritualist, labor, and free love communities during her lifetime but is largely absent from contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century women's rhetoric.The book's afterword is clearly not an afterthought. Especially helpful for those teaching classes in rhetoric, memory, and history, Lynée Lewis Gaillet offers insightful commentary on how the essays could be read differently if ordered chronologically, by theme or genre, or by method and details how students could use the case study chapters in the book as models for their own investigations into feminist memory studies. Here, the editor also pinpoints the most significant shortcoming of the volume: “With a few fascinating exceptions (Martin, Presbey, and Quandahl), this collection focuses on white Western women working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (259). The afterword calls for more scholarship that will “expand the scope of this work, adapting the research materials here for investigations of African American, Eastern, global, indigenous, Latina, and LGBTQI issues, among many others, occurring in a wide swath of places and times” and explains the need for additional collections that explore other facets of gender and memory (259). In this vein, fruitful collaborations may be forged between rhetoricians in English and Communication departments, as scholars in a special issue of Southern Communication Journal (2017, 82.4) have expressed similar commitments.Remembering Women Differently should be read—from cover to cover—by scholars of gender, rhetorical history, and memory studies. This carefully crafted edited volume is a welcome addition to feminist rhetorical studies, one that invites and is sure to inspire further engagement.

In the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 (re)election, the National Communication Association's annual conference featured an intellectual “Come to Jesus” regarding Jon Stewart and his brand of comedy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The “tl;dr” (“Too long; didn't read”) of this battle was that Professors Lance Bennett and Robert Hariman defended Stewart as a necessary agent in political discourse and public life; Professors Roderick Hart and Johanna Hartelius condemned Stewart's cynicism, arguing people substitute watching Stewart for material participation in public life to the grave detriment of the public sphere. Nearly 20 years later, James Caron's Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement makes a compelling argument that, while comedic speech has limits and is not by any stretch curative, it is an ideal stylistic fit in an era of postmodern truthiness because it creates an innovative public engagement in a participatory media culture (6).Caron “examines the relationship between satire and the public sphere, a relationship that creates a comic public sphere, a parodic counterpart to Habermas's classic articulation of a particular kind of discourse and set of social practices first associated with Enlightenment values and technologies” (2). Rather than presuming satire is political discourse, Caron's gambit is that “satire [is] a form of aesthetic communication supplementing political discourse with its mode of comic discourse” (7). It directly encourages citizens to act together in real life. Satire is public-directed—its purpose is not to mock one person but to direct attention to issues of broader public concern. In this sense, satire is generative.Caron moves through his argument in two parts. Part One is historical background and theoretical foundation. Part Two is comprised of a series of case studies.Caron defines satire in Chapter One saying “satire signifies those instances of comic artifacts that can “exceed . . . serious communications . . . for the sake of deliberation, advocacy, and exchange” (20). That is, the ridiculous and the ludicrous are effects of comic laughter. The ridiculous is designed to critique and improve its object; the ludicrous offers an appreciation of the object as is. Here Caron introduces a kind of rubric for understanding the comic: play, judgment, aggression, laughter. Play separates the comic from the earnest by providing a cue that something is funny. Judgment is critique that marks “The Comic” as both always serious and unserious simultaneously. Aggression enables ridicule and mockery. And laughter is, well, laughter. Here Caron makes one of the central moves of the book arguing, “satire's power lies in its rhetorical potential to change minds, to effect metanoia via it's a-musement” (26). This deconstruction of “a-musement” means we are not merely laughing about something; we are musing on it.Chapter Two investigates the distinction between the Habermasian theorizing on the public sphere and the contemporary reality of the digital public sphere. Habermas's construct relies on social and political bracketing of reality in which intellectual equals gather in coffee houses and argue enlightened perspectives on the issues of the day. The digital public sphere, on the other hand, values “personalized feedback, instantaneous interaction, participation potentially 24/7, and no geographic limitations” (38). But the digital public sphere is something of a Wild West scenario. While the democratization of participatory media culture invites those who would never have had access to Habermas's coffee houses, it also creates dis and misinformation, trolls, and other serious concerns. However, satire thrives in uncertain times: “Satire's most profound cultural role today, then, employs in comic fashion the basic ethos of modern/postmodern liberalism as part of the aesthetic-expressive rationality of Habermas” (50).In the final pages of Part One, Caron layers the nuance to note that “satire operates as comic political speech, not political speech, in the public sphere” (52). Satire operates within a playful aesthetic that fosters dissent, just of a different order than traditional political speech. Digital technologies afford more involved citizenship and (re)presentation as citizens, and so comic sense, irony, mock news performed satirically, comic name-calling and comic insults” are actually “in service to educating its silly citizens and furthering their conversation of engaged levity” (56–57). In this way, the comedic public sphere deals with fakery itself. Comics and satirists, then, are parrhesiasts, or those who speak truth to power. Both through satire and what Caron names “satiractivism,” there is potential for social justice, to turn a “ha ha into an a-ha!” (81).In the second half of Satire, Caron aligns his conception of the comedic public sphere with J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory, distinguishing between constatives and performatives. Constatives are statements of fact, report, or description that can be judged as true or false; performatives are not just saying something, but doing something (85). Austin also articulates the terms locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Locutionary is a performance of the act of saying something. Illocutionary is the performance of the act in saying something (satire ridicules, for instance). And perlocutionary is saying something that produces effects.Caron contends comic speech in satiric mode is illocutionary in that it performs ridicule, but it has potential to be perlocutionary in that it changes people's minds. It has effects. It is, in spiritual terms, metanoia—a conversion or conversion of belief. Satiractivism, or activism generated through satirical speech, is a special kind of political speech act. It is both serious and unserious; both constative and performative.Caron introduces several pivotal case studies in Chapter Five in which “the comic public sphere and the public sphere often appear as one discursive domain” (89). For instance, we see comics playing with the news on SNL's Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These programs are locutionary—news with comic speech as rhetorical flourish. They are also illocutionary because they ridicule a comic but with the veneer of reporting. One of the examples Caron cites is Jordan Klepper's person-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters.But these moments of “playing with the news” are not merely play, they are also a kind of satiractivism. They are quasi-perlocutionary. Jon Stewart hosting 9/11 first responders who had become ill led to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, for instance. Caron also notes the “John Oliver Effect:” Oliver has always eschewed the sort of SNL Weekend Update formula in favor of in-depth, fuller investigations into a news story but done satirically. Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert are also examples of satiractivism, bringing comedy to “real news” in order to amplify it.Yet, satire has limits. It is a methodological paradox in that the satirist is trying to bring about a better society through critique but is often doing so by ridiculing. And sometimes, it can go too far. This is especially perilous when the audience is not prepared to laugh.Michelle Wolf's 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one such time when the audience in the room felt ridicule crossing a line into mean-spiritedness. Part of this challenge for humorists is the particular and universal audience. The WHCD audience (in particular) found the bites too biting. The universal audience understood better the impossibility of civility in the Trump years.Many pointed out how thin-skinned people in the Trump orbit of power were in inverse correlation to their political and cultural power. Speaking truth to power is supposed to be uncomfortable for those in power. But what if those in power are perpetual victims with an entire media infrastructure designed to amplify their victimhood? That is, is what Wolf did a “screed or satire?” (181).Caron's final chapter of case studies centers Trump as buffoon and troll. Caron asks whether satiric speech is harmful to a democratic public sphere because its uptake can be dangerously corrosive. Trump's characteristic defense is he was “just joking,” but as rhetorical critic and historian Jennifer Mercieca notes, Trump consistently “gaslights” the audience about his intentions when the effect crosses a line.1In his final chapter, Caron reminds readers that postmodernism isn't an abandonment of truth but a deep skepticism about truth with a capital T. Comedic style, then, is ideally suited in this moment to scratch the truthiness veneer. As he writes, “The comic logic of truthiness satire and satiractivism repurposes discursive integration and a regime of simulacra with a postmodern aesthetic” (209). Considering that more people believe in the truth of what they learn from those playing with the news than from those delivering it “straight,” imagining the possibilities for satirical speech in the comic public sphere is a generative and purposeful endeavor.

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.

Pamela VanHaitsma's Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers an insightful queer historiography of romantic epistolary rhetoric that opens the reader to queer possibilities in the rhetorical practice of nineteenth-century American letter writing. The author's stated intention is to queer the binary distinctions between public and private life that often push queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education (4). With the genre of letter writing, VanHaitsma not only transcends queer recovery in American letter writing but also effectively reconsiders queer engagement, practice, and pedagogy within the rhetorical process of romantic epistolary.The introduction begins by citing the rhetorical and queer foundations of scholars like Charles E. Morris and Karma Chavez (6–7), previewing the methodological queering of rhetorical education. VanHaitsma first defines the key terms for consideration, including romantic epistolary and rhetorical education, and then situates epistolary rhetoric as a cis-heteronormative genre. Although the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing during this time exclusively privileged opposite-sex romantic discourse, VanHaitsma makes the case that the genre allows for queer openings. For example, queer possibilities existed in same-sex friendship correspondence; and queer invention emerged through a dialogue of the personal as political given race, gender, and sexuality were imbedded within romantic letter writing. VanHaitsma's archival research examines “complete letter writing manuals” (44) and romantic correspondence archived at the Connecticut Historical Society and Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archive. As the author navigates romantic correspondence, VanHaitsma makes thoughtful choices that focus less on the sexual identity of the subjects and more on the “queer rhetorical practices” (11–12) of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus in chapter two and Albert Dodd in chapter three.The first chapter frames letter writing manuals as rhetorical (26) and then situates teaching manuals like the “complete letter writer” as inherently a heteronormative genre. The author considers the manuals as a launching point for analysis because of their ubiquity and circulation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth-century postal age. Complete letter writing manuals, according to VanHaitsma, were organized similarly by genre and served as a “model” for letter writing with respect to rhetor, audience, and purpose (25). For example, chapters are labeled as “on friendship,” “on business,” or “on love, marriage, and courtship.” By situating complete letter guides as rhetorical education, the author suggests that the teaching and learning guided by the manuals uses “language from the heart” to connect romantic epistolary to social inquiry, including class, education, and family; these matters of course were touchpoints in “appropriate” heteronormative correspondence. VanHaitsma advances three dimensions of heteronormativity encouraged by the manuals: (1) normative gendered romantic coupling; (2) normative pacing in romantic exchange; and (3) letter writing as practice toward the normative conventions of marriage. For example, manuals marked a letter as “masculine or feminine” via salutation like “From a Gentleman to a Lady.” Pacing was marked by dating the letters, and a normative convention of time, especially in romantic exchanges, would proceed slowly, cautiously, and without “passionate outbreaks” (34). Finally, the goal of romantic exchange was achieved only through its “heteronormative telos and generic end” (35), which was marriage between a man and woman. The paradox advanced by VanHaitsma is that the same three rigid cis-heteronormative constraints of letter writing manuals are also the dimensions that offer queer openings. The author suggests two “strategies for queer invention” (37); first, through “queer failure,” that informs a critical and queer “re-imagination” (46) of letter writing outside the genre. Second, VanHaitsma argues convincingly that if manuals are constructed as a resource for invention so that a letter writer may “write from their heart,” those generic conventions are already susceptible to queer challenge.Chapters two and three operationalize the call for a critically queer re-examination of American letter writing toward “queer effect,” first through the everyday romantic correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then a more formal civic training through the letters, diaries, and manuals of Albert Dodd. Chapter two begins with a call for more perspectives on epistolary same-sex correspondence beyond the discourses of public and political figures. To this end, VanHaitsma examines the romantic exchange between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, “two freeborn African American women” (51-52) who corresponded during and after the American Civil War. In this chapter, the author is interested in how letter writers learn to participate in romantic exchange when formal training is perhaps inaccessible. As the author notes, even with access to manuals, there was no same-sex romantic correspondence modeled in the complete letter writers, so VanHaitsma considers what the rhetorical practices of these letters tell us broadly about queering romantic epistolary. The author studied the correspondence of Brown and Primus not only through a same-sex lens but also cross-class as Primus was a schoolteacher born to a “prominent African American community in Hartford Connecticut,” while Brown was uneducated in formal schooling and “worked primarily as a domestic” (51). VanHaitsma finds that Brown and Primus learned and used the generic conventions taught by complete letter writers, including salutation strategies and dating each correspondence for pacing. What differs, of course, is the queering of salutations which range in tone from a familial connection like sisters, to friendship, and even romance (55). The pacing of the correspondence reflects an urgency and intensity outside heteronormative convention with quick replies, often within a week (57). The correspondence also defied a marriage telos given the societal constraint that marriage to each other was an impossibility; as a result, the romantic exchange was never scaffolded around that particular generic convention. Finally, the author illustrates how Primus and Brown queered the rhetorical parameters of the manuals by incorporating political discussions alongside romantic exchange (61). Chapter two concludes by describing how the romantic exchange between Brown and Primus borrowed from poetry to compose and queer language of the heart. The most compelling take-away from this analysis is how the correspondence from two everyday, same-sex, cross-class, African American women adopted the generic conventions of inaccessible manuals and then crafted queer inventions to challenge generic norms.Chapter three examines the letter writing and training of Albert Dodd. Where Brown and Primus lacked access to formal rhetorical education, Dodd—an upper-class white cis-man—studied rhetoric as civic engagement at Trinity College and Yale, where he wrote a poetry album and a “commonplace book turned diary” (75). What interests VanHaitsma about Dodd is how he used classical training to repurpose rhetorical and civic education toward a romantic end, which became a multi-genre and genre-queer epistolary practice. Through his formal training, Dodd possessed a rhetorical awareness of generic letter writing conventions that allowed him to negotiate public and private binaries. VanHaitsma illustrates how Dodd's training developed into a queer rhetorical practice by broadening the genre of letter writing through an introduction of epistle verse, letters, poetry, and same-sex erotic correspondence (92). VanHaitsma connects Dodd's formal training to Brown and Primus through a “queer art as failure” (98) where the correspondence of all three defied normative training when the generic conventions could not be met; instead, the rhetors re-purposed the generic strategies for their own queer effect. Building from this connection, the author's concluding chapter is a pedagogical gesture toward “queer failure” (104) in rhetorical studies. As a challenge to the status-quo orientation and cis-heteronormative expectations of rhetorical education, VanHaitsma turns to queer movement studies and implores scholars in the histories of rhetoric and sexuality studies to stay vigilant to the “failures” of queer pasts.Pamela VanHaitsma's compact book is poignant and an important contribution to rhetorical studies, particularly in realizing queer possibilities in spaces dominated by normative histories. Exploring American traditions of letter writing, the author makes a sophisticated and accessible critique of the hegemonic democratic practices of civic engagement, public and private spheres of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality in the histories of rhetorical education. As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies. As the author notes, queer romantic engagement has always existed but with limited scholarly attention. The case made throughout these chapters advocates for a critical break and crucially, an intentional movement toward “non-normative historiographic ways of knowing” (101). VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary.

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.

In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.

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.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern.1 The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.Its usurper is de Dijn's second concept, with advocates as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century's Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model worried the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their legacy survives in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone.2 Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.De Dijn's narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women's suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West's most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.3Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn's account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what's happening now.4 In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent rightwing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn's two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.In politics, modern freedom is advocated most assertively by the Republican Party and most aggressively by those at the rightward reaches. In 2010, a group of these activists posted a “Contract from America” online, ostensibly revising and updating the 1994 “Contract with America” that had helped to prompt a conservative surge in Congress. Calling for a variety of crowd-sourced initiatives and claiming to speak for “the people,” this document articulated an agenda attractive to a narrow set of demographics, demanding to preempt the sort of democratic deliberation that might more accurately reflect the will of a diverse nation. At the outset of his I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, Paul Elliott Johnson characterizes the Contract in familiar terms. It “figured the relation between the freedom of the population and the authority of government as one of inverse proportionality,” he writes, meaning that, “the less ‘the people’ are governed, the freer they are.” Surveying a short list of policy goals including fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Johnson notes that, together, these imagined the “real” population of the United States to be “a set of radically autonomous individuals united in their possession of liberty,” with economic and popular liberty fashioned identically and used interchangeably throughout.5 For the Tea Party and its legacies, freedom has meant nothing more or less than the removal of government constraints from personal and corporate activity, consistent with a set of assumptions about who these persons and corporations are supposed to be. Fully realized, theirs is a world in which one does whatever one wants, provided only that one is one of us.For Johnson, this atomized collective is the animating ideal of conservative populism, a rhetorical mode through which a distinctly white, masculine resentment is gathered and arrayed against a nefarious liberal establishment. Cast at once as both central and marginal, the subject of this discourse is the disenchanted silent majoritarian, the white citizen with an empowered self-concept but without power itself, or at least without power in proportion to certain others with more than they deserve. “By positing a population simultaneously sure of its identity, positioned outside or beyond the messy world of politics, and in possession of a vitality self-same with freedom,” Johnson writes, “conservatism's ‘people’ is oriented with hostility toward the democratic side of the liberal democratic equation.”6 Conservative populists speak the languages of grievance and privilege, claiming entitlement unbound by accountability and indignant at restraint, especially when delivered with official sanction on legal ballots. Reproved once-too-often by electoral defeats, their rhetorical fetishization of freedom must be either abandoned entirely or validated through anti-democratic violence. In October of 2021, at an Idaho rally featuring conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, this tension was expressed succinctly by an audience member who asked his demagogic host, “When do we get to use the guns?” When the crowd responded with laughter and applause, the befuddled young man assured everyone that he was purely in earnest. “That's not a joke,” he said. “I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”7 Here de Dijn's image of the battering ram becomes especially evocative, updated, and weaponized.Though populism as a rhetorical style is traditionally deployed by mass movements against elites, conservative populism draws its boundaries vertically, uniting a portion of the mass with a portion of the elite and activating race as the applicable category for exclusion.8 If the modern concept of freedom has traditionally proven useful to the white managerial class as a means to reinforcing its prerogatives, it has also attracted the white working class with promises of autonomy and status. In each case, the appeal pledges to relieve a self-consciously self-reliant and overwhelmingly white faction of any obligation to the maintenance of a welfare state that, they suppose, caters primarily to black and brown people who do not want to work. Johnson assigns race a central role in his analysis, situating the rhetoric of conservative populism within a larger biopolitics that aligns whiteness with life and blackness with death. The white and the black circulate ominously within the conservative worldview, constituting discourses that inform and mobilize the conservative “people.” If past theoretical treatments of conservative rhetoric have understated these racialized dynamics, I the People centers them.To make his case, Johnson surveys key moments in conservative history, starting with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy, proceeding through Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory, through Newt Gingrich's 1994 takeover of the House, through Tea Party opposition to Barack Obama in 2009, and, finally, an analysis of Donald Trump as candidate and executive. Overall, Johnson convincingly charts a rhetorical trajectory most notable for its consistency, arguing against those who claim that conservatives learned identity politics from the Left or who cite Trump as a one-off perversion of an otherwise rich and nuanced intellectual legacy. On the contrary, Johnson argues, the conservative tradition in the United States has long been driven by the same impulses that drive it today, including overt commitments to whiteness and masculinity, to hegemony and marginality, to individualism and freedom as against government and its pretensions to the common good. Stirred and mobilized still by a dogged populist tone, the movement today is the same as it ever was, if further amplified and pronounced. Proponents of democracy should be candid about what conservative populism is, and responsive to the threats that it poses.Among religious constituencies, the modern conception of freedom has been received most warmly by white evangelical Christians. Remarkably active and reliably Republican, white evangelical voters have ensured the election of conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Their support proved especially decisive in 2000 and 2016, a pair of contests in which the President-elect lost the popular vote while clinching the Electoral College.9 After the latter race, in particular, when exit polls revealed that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical voters had gone for Trump, the racial, religious, and political identities had become so deeply entangled that pastors, pundits, and scholars were moved to revisit the age-old question of what, exactly, an evangelical is.10 For critical observers both within and without the fold, such an examination was necessary to explain how the teachings of Christ could possibly have moved millions into the politics of Trump. In the years since, books pledging to answer the central questions have been published to impressive sales and critical acclaim.11 One of the most recent and most nuanced has come out of rhetorical studies.In her Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin suggests that white evangelical voting behavior is intelligible, at least in part, in the light of evangelical sermonizing. Following the dramatic housing market collapse of 2008, Martin wondered whether the “Great Recession” would prompt white evangelicals to question the linkage between their theological and economic commitments—their concomitant beliefs in the holiness of God and of free markets. Between 2010 and 2018, she transcribed and analyzed hundreds of sermons delivered in evangelical megachurches across more than three dozen states, coding specifically for economic themes.12 Because these large churches are joined weekly by such a high volume of congregants, their discourses would provide a useful window into demographic thought and practice. And because their sermons are streamed and archived online, they would be easily accessible from home. In 2016, Martin attended to election framing as well, performing the analysis that eventually culminated in a different sort of project.Decoding the Digital Church a pair of key to the The first is that, because white evangelical megachurches are for conservative citizens, they as for the of ideas and assumptions that circulate in conservative in the to the in the these reinforcing a high degree of rhetorical or what Martin de In this made by or on with made by the on the between and politics long Though have agency in their they are also to the and of the people in the a that further the of and And because the of the and most churches make their sermons for their work is and by of as well. the conservative discourse second is that, in 2016, the political of a a rhetoric of active to the questions and of the The of most evangelical not Trump for the they delivered of an otherwise that their political while guiding their to the the of is an he by God and for by committed citizens, and who have to this and citizens should the that, this the were If by the on he so do The are the are and the is not finally, the an tension between his first two it in the his to vote their vote the and God with the the to vote as the active of the the assurance of delivered the effectively and fears and the from any accountability for the by the and candidate that their political would persuade them to one of this story is that the linkage between white evangelical identity and Republican by by by the collapse of religious and by certain to further a rightwing religious politics more committed to hegemony than to in to and by this is likely to back that small government and the to would not to be be only that they are Their provides a against the education is the of democracy have themselves, once as of Conservative advocates of have that, as should be able to their to a of their either public or to the In this way, would be within an driven by market to and or the democratic that should be and through the movement to power from and it to thereby education into in which de modern conception of freedom to the democratic his and the of How characterizes the as a between of public The first is best represented by John who that democracy with public education as an for this rather than for and have been made to of as community Because everyone in a is in the citizens are into with their and are in the generation to is to to the about how should be and are from the as in the larger public Their is their influence on an to and They in a citizens, working to an system through which citizens are second is represented by and the who first of as a means to education books such as and to and of the the to in the and while individualism as a means to economic and political the driven as an in a world of collective they imagined an in which citizens may act and without by individuals would be free to their it by and by more than personal And because individuals in a with and other the to them as They this with from a pair of and the By for and by to with a set of and they that any community could citizens an of in which to a generation of of community the democratic and are of different his analysis of and that the of the market and the on which as as the by the in a Though the United States is to a tradition of and our does the and work of we our means of education around without in the community as a that, in to democracy as a of we to practice it at the starting with the should be to and of with education advocates in that the democratic has but that it has to be the best to American education would be to with democratic institutions and then their and than and such a system would young citizens in and to in which individuals rather than certain individuals to the of the the market in education a variety of to public these are and by a common rhetorical They are in a that has proven useful for conservative notes that, their the deployed the style of a of and by “the and of individuals the of In this means that they their as in a market framework that Unlike who are to themselves in and market that appeal to a and Their key are to driven by and of with American beliefs and Their on individuals and as political and economic has If their is to be proponents of democracy in any must to their with and is not a in any case, and with at the many to speak or years from these about the decline of American democracy may either or Their critical on the American Right and its advocates in the Republican Party may either or it is to if only for the of that the scholars that American democracy is in and that the is a may more a to American politics be only of For citizens to understand the across a of the books are each of them, the threat to democracy is animated by a of or at least a of of and proponents of this modern conception the as and able to and act in the world without from others or by of both political and economic this freedom the two into a with a of and to citizens as and to an identity, it is white conservatives that they built this and to that this was built upon a set of and that, in this education should and these a subject to market and to this concept of freedom may the of its American have proven and and against large that our to the by modern freedom is a of democratic the once and In a diverse democracy the and of of In the United States, a and of those citizens may still check the conservative populist The for such are narrow and and their through constraints at from voting and through the dogged of the and the power of the Electoral Their will about in the the of and that rhetorical scholars in their from public and composition through and In that this is the sort of for which rhetorical is The is but the by the maintenance of democracy in to those the of democracy its death. books a call to

On the wall of a large lecture hall at Indiana University, Bloomington hangs a painting that includes in its background a depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally, complete with a burning cross and hooded Klansmen. The painting, titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press,” is one of twenty-two mural panels depicting Indiana history that were created by Thomas Hart Benton for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and later installed in three locations across the university campus. In the most recent debate about the panel, defenders argued that removal would amount to censorship and, furthermore, would mean the destruction of the painting due to its material fragility. Critics argued that it should be removed because hateful imagery has no place in learning spaces, and classrooms must be welcoming to all students. Ultimately, IU administration decided to leave the panel on display but to convert the lecture hall “to other uses beginning in the spring semester of 2018.” They argued that “repurposing the room is the best accommodation of the multiple factors that the murals raise: our obligation to be a welcoming community to all of our students and facilitate their learning; our stewardship of this priceless art; and our obligation to stand firm in defense of artistic expression.”1 As the outcome of the administration's compromise, “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” hangs in a largely unoccupied room as a depiction of a hate-filled chapter of Indiana's past, hidden, as it were, in plain sight.IU's Benton mural is one local instantiation of national debates around what to do with representations of and homages to racism in the United States: one side argues for the value of historical and cultural significance; the other argues against honoring representations of racism and hate. While physical sites are often central to the public conversation around what to do with the symbolism of the United States’ racist history, Stephen M. Monroe smartly demonstrates in his excellent new book Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (2021) how unexamined semiotic traditions can covertly sustain racist hegemony within the discursive practices of our institutions.Examining the discursive practices of his own local community at the University of Mississippi, Monroe asks how we can persuade more white people in the silent majority to become educated and engage in conversations about racial equality and justice (220, 221). In answer, he recognizes that we probably need both radical activism and reconciliation. However, he also insists that scholars of language and rhetoric have a responsibility to respond and act from within their local communities. His intention is “to push readers firmly away from passive acceptance of semiotic traditions and toward purposeful consideration and confrontation of those semiotic traditions” (13). Indeed, this book makes an important contribution to a vision of rhetorical scholarship that aims at producing legitimate cultural change. Monroe's intervention is multidisciplinary, targeting the fields of both rhetoric and Southern studies, and his contribution is triple-layered. He brings the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric to bear on the interdisciplinary field of Southern studies; he brings a thorough example of archival work in institutional history to the field of rhetoric; and he models the kind of locally-situated rhetorical intervention he imagines in his call for readers to interrogate our communities’ stakes in the perpetuation of racism across the nation.The central theoretical thread of Monroe's argument—a thread that applies beyond the confines of racism—is that history, language and symbols, and communal identity are interdependent. Combining methods of critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and archival research, he argues that Old South rhetoric, or “confederate rhetoric,” continues to circulate and sustain racist communal identities across the US South, specifically at the region's universities. Because the semiotic traditions of confederate rhetoric “often create stasis or even reversion,” he explains, institutions’ abilities to achieve racial progress is slowed (13). In other words, confederate rhetoric and racism sustain themselves and each other by hiding in plain sight: in university nicknames and yearbooks, in the guise of school spirit, in Southern collegiate traditions, and, in IU's case, depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.A significant strength of Monroe's project, in fact, is his archive. Over the course of the book's seven chapters, he examines university nicknames, yearbooks, cheers, and historical figures, demonstrating how such semiotic traditions constitute an archive of racist hegemony. He begins, for example, by tracing the history of The University of Mississippi's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to its appropriation from a term used by enslaved Black people to refer to the wife of a plantation owner. He follows the evolution of the name through yearbooks from 1897 to the present day to illustrate how the term covertly sustains racist attitudes. Reading the circulation and solidification of “Ole Miss” through the lens of Laurie Gries's work on virility, Monroe argues that “the term grew in vitality and consequentiality throughout most of the twentieth century, but it did not transform in any substantial sense. Instead, after being appropriated and going viral in the late nineteenth century, ‘Ole Miss’ became and still remains a force for ideological stabilization and stasis” (37).2 Because the term has not been interrogated by the larger university community, as analysis of the archive demonstrates, year after year its racist connotations remain palpable but easily disregarded by that community.Keeping his archival focus on his own institution, Monroe next examines the tradition of the “Hotty Toddy” cheer at the University of Mississippi, explaining how “indexicality is a semiotic phenomenon always at work” (66). “Indexing makes certain meanings always available,” he writes, “or when viewed from another angle, always unavoidable” (66). Thus, for example, the confederate rhetoric within the “Hotty Toddy” cheer is stabilized with each discursive use, indexing a racist agenda. As Monroe puts it, “When white people at the University of Mississippi hurl a beloved cheer against Black classmates, the cheer itself fuels and performs punitive cultural work and redefines itself in ways that are not easily revised or redacted” (66). This quality of the linguistic markers points to an evolving thread in the book's argument: discourse serves the purposes of emergent identity constitution. Each time members of the community cheer “Hotty Toddy,” they “are not simply reflecting identities previously assumed but are reiterating publicly and socially a collective identity that emerges and strengthens again and again with every interactive performance” (68). Because of indexicality, to utter the nickname “Ole Miss” or to cheer “Hotty Toddy” can serve at once to demonstrate membership in the (white) UM community and to exclude others.Even as performances like the “Hotty Toddy” cheer constitute and strengthen communal identity, Monroe expertly emphasizes a more sinister function: historically indexed acts of racism enable those in positions of power and privilege to deny its systemic nature by arguing that such events are isolated. To illustrate, he analyzes a six-year period (2010–2016) in which a series of racist events and protests took place at the University of Missouri. In recounting these incidences, Monroe highlights how university administrators minimized the string of events as isolated and unreflective of the larger university community's values. Likewise, he returns to the controversy over UM's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to show how confederate rhetoric is “naturalized within discourse communities, turned into common sense, and thereby protected from controversy” (112).Monroe analyzes two additional traditions at the University of Mississippi—Blind Jim Ivey and the flying of the Confederate battle flag—to illustrate that the indexicality of racist events cannot be minimized without symbolic and material consequences. He argues that “[w]ithin a community that reveres tradition, one way to shelter a problematic word or symbol is to place it beneath the protective notion of tradition” (143). When Blind Jim Ivey and flying the Confederate battle flag are synchronized into a false sense of historical continuity with other traditions, rather than the truths of their histories confronted and eliminated, they continue to serve as racist ideological symbols. Confederate rhetoric itself, in fact, becomes a tool for synchronization that elides the power that white people continue to wield in the South and the United States at large. “Rather than providing voice and agency to minorities,” Monroe writes, “‘synchronization elides all kinds of possible voices’; it creates undemocratic absences. It silences” (165).While confederate rhetoric certainly silences, Monroe skillfully uses his archive to reveal the complexity of how such rhetoric sustains itself. By returning to yearbooks as archival records of a university's culture and pointing out how racist images in yearbooks are reflective of a culture that openly encourages racist displays, Monroe is able to argue that institutions scapegoat individuals while, in reality, racist acts have long been sanctioned by the larger community. Thus, individuals who face repercussions today for past racist acts “were not sources of discordant messages of hate and exclusion, but were, instead, conveyors of conformist messages” (169). Even so, he characterizes personal interactions as potential sites of redemption and transformation: “Moments of white realization and conversion,” which occur most effectively at the interpersonal level, “must be multiplied within southern communities if the region's long traditions of confederate rhetoric are to be substantially weakened or eliminated” (183, 184). We must recognize that racism is institutionally sustained while acting on the progressive potential of interpersonal engagement.In the final chapter, Monroe turns the book's focus back on himself. Recognizing his “layered levels of privilege and power” as a “white male, cishet, tenure-track scholar who has held multiple administrative positions at a research university,” he asks: “what will I do with that privilege and power?” (189). Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities is an attempt to begin that difficult and indispensable work. He calls upon other scholars of language to perform similar tasks, arguing that white people have the power to change confederate rhetoric and language scholars should advocate for that (201). Through his archival analysis of Southern collegiate history and traditions, Stephen Monroe offers a valuable model of situated scholarship for rhetoricians hoping to effect cultural change at their own institutions.

Discussion of immigration is never contained to politics about migration, nation, and inclusion/exclusion. Indeed, because immigrants to the United States have frequently been framed as racially different in relation to white Americans, immigration discourse is perpetually saturated by race and racialization. Lisa A. Flores's new monograph, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant, meticulously studies public political framings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans across four historical moments of “crisis,” showing how public discourse racializes Mexicans and their descendants along the lines of deportability, disposability, and illegality.Employing constitutive rhetoric and a lens of racial performativity, Flores examines early- to mid-twentieth century newspapers, periodicals, and government documents. Flores traces how “rhetorical climates of deportability and disposability, or those constellations of discourses, cultural practices, laws, and policies that coalesce to produce and maintain constitutive spaces,” racialize Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “illegal” (9). In doing so, Flores's historical analyses identify the figures of the “illegal alien,” “zoot suiter,” “bracero,” and “wetback” as rhetorical sites through which this racialization is constructed and invoked (4). This analysis also allows Flores to identify the role of what she terms “body logics” and “mobility logics” amid a dichotomy of desire for Mexican labor and disgust of Mexican presence (13, 15).Taken together, Flores's monograph offers multiple contributions to scholarship. First, Flores presents rhetorical and race scholars, as well as the public, with a genealogy of the ways in which Mexican “illegality” came to resonate in American political discourse. Second, Flores draws previously undertheorized linkages between the racialization of Mexicans and Black Americans. Third, Flores offers a compelling case for why we ought to view racialization as a fundamentally rhetorical process. Consonant with Flores's article on the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism, this argument reiterates rhetoric's power as a discipline capable of grappling with the complex process of race-making.1 In Flores's words, if rhetorical regimes of deportability and disposability racialize Mexicans as illegal, then “that constitution is rhetorical, an effect of discourse” and rhetorical analysis is well-equipped to probe racialization (5).Deportable and Disposable's first chapter argues that in the 1930s a “rhetorical climate of deportability” spotlighting the figure of the “illegal alien” set the stage for the racialization of Mexicans into illegality (23). After the passage of the 1929 Undesirable Aliens Act, public governmental and media accounts put forward an image of Mexicans as both inherently inferior in “essence and character” as well as “criminal” (33, 35). This process was buttressed by deportation and repatriation campaigns. Deportation raids associated Mexicans with illegality, since Mexicans were deported for not presenting legal documentation; this even though carrying legal documentation was uncommon given the previously lax enforcement of immigration laws and the relatively recent criminalization of undocumented entry (35). At the same time, Flores also claims that Mexicans “perform[ed] that illegality through repatriation, their allegedly willing departure” (29). Combined with a body logic stating that Mexicans were intrinsically inferior and a mobility logic stating that Mexicans spread in scope as they “move across the space of the nation,” public campaigns and pronouncements made Mexicans an inferior, growing, and mobile criminal threat (33).Chapter 2 centers on the figure of the “zoot suiter.” Flores argues that discursive framings and violent responses to zoot suiters racialized Mexicans and their descendants as threatening and disposable (50). During the 1943 zoot suit riots, Los Angeles media and national news coverage fashioned zoot suiters—typically equated with Mexican American youth—as a sexual, masculine, violent, and unpredictable threat to white women, the city, and the nation (66, 67). Zoot suiters, and therefore Mexicans, then, were transformed into threats through tropes of “Black masculinized violence” (66). One media account, for instance, portrayed sailors as assaulting zoot suiters in retaliation for attacks against white women, who were previously represented in the cultural imaginary as threatened by Black men (69). In this account, the zoot suiter provoked a “justified defense.” Given the “threat” posed by zoot suiters, the sailors’ attacks framed whiteness and its concomitant violence as a source of “hope:” “superior, justified, legitimate, even powerful” (152). And as with “illegal aliens,” zoot suiters were once again marked by body and mobility logics. This, time, though, Flores notes that the identifying bodily marker was sartorial and that the mobility marker was instead the threat of “unpredictable” violence.Chapter 3 turns to the figure of the bracero and its implications for Mexican racialization. Unlike the “illegal alien” and the “zoot suiter,” Flores writes that the 1940s wartime bracero was received positively. Still, two prominent reasons behind the public and media celebration of the bracero resulted in a harmful racialization of Mexicans as deportable and disposable. Braceros were celebrated in part because they were synecdochally “reduced to the abstraction of their labor,” and they were conceptualized as temporary workers that “would go home, voluntarily and willingly” when they were no longer needed (82, 113). Thus, even though the body and mobility logics of the bracero did not frame the Mexican laborers as violent threats—the bracero was a Mexican person “eager to labor” whose movement was “carefully” monitored and controlled—these logics reinscribed Mexicans as inferior, deportable, and disposable (115, 103). And, as Flores points out, this racialization yet again relies on a trope key to a colonial American construction of blackness: in this case, that of the “happy slave” (105).Chapter 4 turns to Flores's final figure, the 1950s “wetback.” Flores argues here that the term “wetback” accrued the meanings associated with the previous figures and presented the nation with a non-white economic and criminal threat (143). Because “wetback” emerged after the earlier terms of “illegal alien, “zoot suiter,” and “bracero” had all produced “existing racializations,” it absorbed those meanings but also “extended and complicated” them (119). To illustrate, like “illegal alien,” “wetback” involved the “intersections in bodily logics . . . with mobility logics” such that “anxiety emerged in . . . the ways in which border rhetorics produce difference that is both on the body and exceeding the body” (142). That is, both the “illegal immigrant” and “wetback” were “criminal” figures who were dangerous because their movement traversed the nation (125, 126). However, Flores explains how “wetback” is not strictly reducible to the “illegal alien.” Like the bracero, “wetbacks” had a reportedly visible “primitivity” that assured the realness of race and racial difference (143).In her conclusion, Flores contemplates the “contemporary discursive departure” from the terminology of the four figures she analyzes and offers three potential interpretations regarding this departure's significance (155). First, Flores writes that humanizing narratives and the terminology of “family” and “children” may prompt sympathetic identification with recent immigrant family units and their children (156). Second, Flores provides the possibility that the “instability” of Mexican racialization is yet another mechanism of the “deportation regime” (156). Stated differently, Mexican racialization has always contained an “ambivalence” between desire and disgust that enables race to be “made and unmade” in the service of capitalism and nationalism (156). Third, Flores offers the disconcerting possibility that the figures of the “illegal alien” and “wetback” are no longer necessary because they have “achieved considerable ontological security” (157). In other words, illegality and deportability may now be “so firmly attached to all Latinx bodies” that the racial performative terminology is no longer necessary (157).Deportable and Disposable is useful for scholars and non-academics alike seeking to understand the historical and rhetorical processes behind Latinx racialization. Flores's attentiveness to language and detailed explication of racialized sociological dynamics can engage scholars as it can also introduce complex ideas to non-experts. For instance, it should not be lost on readers that Flores's monograph makes a compelling case that racializations are functions of discourse and that the discipline of rhetoric therefore can and should theorize historical as well as contemporary racializing discourses. In addition, Flores deserves credit for uncovering the rhetorical mechanisms through which illegality became a salient focus in immigration discourse. Sociologist Edwin F. Ackerman argues that, in much scholarship on the “illegal alien,” there exists an assumption that emphasis on illegality achieved widespread circulation because of the semantic and rhetorical “qualities [of “illegal alien”] as a discursive formation.”2 According to Ackerman, this assumption characterizes work by Lina Newton; Hugh Mehan; Douglass Massey, Jorge Durand, and Noland Malone; and Joseph Nevins.3 However, Flores's work resists this assumption and offers a corrective by demonstrating how public discourse coupled with deportation and repatriation campaigns tied Mexicanness with illegality despite undocumented entry previously being treated as a “technical flaw” rather than a moral failing.4

Abstract In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.

Alan G. Gross's The Scientific Sublime1 is nothing if not respectful—of both his subject and his audience. Those looking for pyrotechnics will be disappointed by Gross's sometimes deferential treatment of the various uses and examples of the sublime in contemporary popular science. Readers finish the book with a foundation not only in the scientific sublime but also in the contributions, controversies, and patterns of reasoning of ten of the world's most well-known public scientists from the latter half of the twentieth century. Patient with his material and his reader's potential ignorance of the popularizing scientific discourse, Gross traces how the scientific sublime animates, galvanizes, and explains the work, the rhetorical choices, and the ideal audience of the theoretical physicists, cosmologists, and evolutionary biologists,The balanced organization of the book suggests Gross's measured exploration of the topic: there are analyses of five physicists and five biologists, an introductory chapter on the nature and history of the sublime, and a closing chapter on the interplay of religion, science, and the sublime. Moreover, the thirteen chapters (two are devoted to Steven Jay Gould) are almost all about twenty pages and can largely be read independently of each other. Even without delving into Gross's prose, there is a deliberateness about the construction of the book, an orderliness that seems to eschew too much nervy straying into grey speculations. Indeed, if you are looking for a book that is muscular with theoretical arcana or that strides into speculative meditations, you may feel shortchanged. Gross is careful of his readers’ sensibilities, comprehension, and incredulity. His diction never falls into jargon, despite two subject matters—the sublime and the scientific—that might tempt him, and his arguments are methodically presented, even if he occasionally indulges in whimsical explanations not necessarily germane to his immediate argument. You never feel lost when you're reading The Scientific Sublime; you always feel that you understand what you have read; and you never get the feeling that Gross is forcing the last word on the subject, though you may conclude there certainly is more to say.Beyond giving a layout for the book, chapter one sets up its thesis and guiding principle, one that is only lightly touched upon throughout the analytic chapters but that nonetheless is key to getting the most out of Gross's explorations. Rather than look for ruptures in the form or manner of the popularizers’ works that reveal their commitment to a scientific sublime, Gross is interested in “the sublimity that inheres in their structure, a spirit that informs their every aspect”—a motivation that leads him to survey the argumentation, structure, diction, and images of their works as this principle animates the popularizers’ promotion of science.2 The scientific sublime is essentially a type of wonder in both the scientist and reader, born from the amazement of a novel phenomenon and the astonishment at the hidden pattern in nature shown and then explained by science in its “vast communal epic . . . on a theme of origins.”3 It is this awe and astonishment that Gross deems the scientific sublime, a phrase he justifies in the first chapter by giving his readers a quick tour of the concept of the sublime in Western thought, ending with Adam Smith and C.P. Snow's glossing of the scientific sublime.In Part One of his book, Gross tackles the writings of five popularizing physicists. The first analysis spotlights Richard Feynman, whose work represents the subgenre of the “Consensual Sublime.” Gross explores Feynman's self-construction of the “scientist as raconteur” who delights in the practical puzzles suggested and solved by theoretical physicists.4 His second focuses on Steven Weinberg, who exemplifies the “Conjectural Sublime,” enticing us to follow his narrative in order to understand how the physicist explains to those less schooled in mathematics the very beginning of the universe while gracefully unifying others’ theories. Physicist Lisa Randall's writings represent the “Technological Sublime,” which we feel when confronted with exalted machinery like the Hoover Dam. Through imagery and analogies, Randall's prose leads the reader through abstruse theoretical physics, “a speculative sublime that depends for validation” on equipment like the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite, the supreme manifestations of the technological sublime.5 The penultimate chapter on the physicists considers string-theory pioneer Brian Green, who converts esoteric math into the physical and the visual with analogies that surround us with the familiar as he leads us into his sometimes far-fetched explanations. Gross rightly points out that Green's sublimity is not the result of “the wonder at the revelation not of how the universe works, but how it may possibly work.”6 As is fitting his stature as the most-widely known popularizer of physicists in our time, Stephen Hawkins rounds out Gross's analyses in Part One. In perhaps his most successful chapter, capturing many aspects of Hawkins's rhetoric, Gross argues that Hawkins represents the “Sublime Embodied,” the impression we are interacting with “a myth of genius and indomitable will, a man who has handicapped his handicap.”7 In reading the oracular Hawkins, we not only learn about science and its significance, we experience it through Hawkins, whose playful humor and mental dexterity highlights his own astonishment at the scientific sublime.Gross begins Part Two, on the sublime biologists, with another of his most successful chapters—on Rachel Carson and the “Ethical Sublime.” Showing the development of Carson as a writer and rhetor, “a progress from the love of nature to its defense, from environmental rhapsody to environmental ethics,” Gross not only summarizes the development of Carson's ethical position but also the stylistic techniques that grow from and inform her more mature appreciation of nature.8 Chapters eight, “The Balanced Sublime,” and nine, “Experiencing the Sublime,” cover Steven Jay Goud's books and his essays, respectively. In Gould's books, Gross argues, the biologist portrays a scientific sublime correctly conjured if an equipoise is found between two competing ideas so that our awe of nature has all its requisite complexity. In the survey of his essays in chapter nine, Gross finds that Gould plays the scientific cicerone who cultivates his readers’ curiosity then toys with it through meanderings, frustrations, and, ultimately, discoveries in a manner that parallels the scientific process, explaining nature, its patterns, and its laws. Steven Pinker's “Polymath Sublime” occupies Gross's tenth chapter. Gross argues that all of Pinker's works, when they don't fall into an authoritarian voice, captivate because of the evocation of a sublime that highlights not only the patterns of nature but how science can explain so many subjects beyond those studied in the lab. In chapter eleven, Gross tackles the “Mathematical Sublime” of Richard Dawkins, his rousing persona and the intellectual treasure hunt he brings you by means of his devotion to and knowledge of mathematics, despite the obvious problems of his evolutionary theory. The analyses are rounded out with a discussion of E.O Wilson's “Biophilic Sublime,” which explores the richness and limitations of his sociobiology, infused with his sublimic “love for all living things,” their diversity, and their preservation.9Considering the contemporary popularizers of science in the aggregate, Gross concludes his book with perhaps his most challenging claim, that scientists may be overly hasty in dismissing religion (and philosophy) as irrelevant to the task of understanding the natural world, a “haste galvanized by the populace's recalcitrant faith in a God of origins, the same faith that encourages them to believe that God is a delusion—a very unscientific manner of thinking.10 Gross essentially ends his book with a quiet call to the character trait that indeed he portrays throughout the book and what, incidentally, was a defining characteristic of early nineteenth-century natural philosophers—humility.But if Gross's persona in The Scientific Sublime seems to counterbalance the large egos of the popularizers, in many ways his work parallels their attitude to the natural world they study: he carefully and excitedly explicates those moments of awe in the popularizers’ explanations of the wonders of the world and their studies. Gross does for them what they do for nature and science. Yet, the modesty of Gross's claims may leave some readers asking for a bit more derring-do in the conclusions about what the scientific sublime actually is and what it does, especially after having followed him through his relatively separate analyses of the ten scientists in his book. For example, Gross well-documents those moments the scientists manifest (or even embody) astonishment or wonder from various aspects of science, but does that amazement actually rise to the level of the sublime? Does the scientific sublime require the terror typically associated with the sublime—if not, why not? What are some of the cultural or political consequences of utilizing the sublime when popularizing science? And finally, some readers might also desire grander and more thematic claims about how the feelings of the sublime are generated in general audiences and not simply those who are predisposed to find wonder in science.Like those whom he studies, Gross seems to write with a keen sense that scholars and readers should build off of each other rather than search after an Archimedean eureka. His is a book of exploratory essays. The Scientific Sublime plots not only those areas where the scientist or audience sense awe and astonishment but also those areas that are rich for future interrogations and investigations about the intersection of science, the public, and the sublime.

As we write this, California is being ravaged by the second worst wildfire in its history (Dixie) and our fellow Utahns have experienced some of the world's worst air quality due, in part, to the smoke traveling east from the Dixie and other fires in the west. These consequences are just a few of the many ways in which the ongoing climate crisis is a threat multiplier: worsening extreme weather, droughts, wildfires, and, most significantly, the disproportionate inequities historically marginalized peoples experience as a result of the chaos resulting from human-caused climate change. The climate crisis is here; actions to justly and equitably transition away from fossil fuels are crucial. Although the climate crisis acts as only one backdrop to Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico, Catalina de Onís's book turns our attention to the significant but often less visible role of energy systems not only in the climate crisis but also in what she terms energy coloniality, or systems of power that maintain energy privilege for some and perpetuate energy injustices for many.Energy Islands enacts a decolonial approach to offer a deep and rich analysis of dominant and resistive discourse about energy politics in Puerto Rico. De Onís highlights the importance of a just transition away from fossil-fuel based energy toward centering decarbonization, decentralization, democratization, and decolonization. She argues that energy actors can create decolonial energy futures that support the intertwined wellbeing of people and the planet. De Onís's book “documents, assembles, and evaluates various discourses, narratives, naming practices, and metaphors” to research “the rhetorical efforts of energy actors [in Puerto Rico], particularly by drawing critical inspiration from individuals and groups communicating more sustainable existences.”1 In a rhetorical version of an energy ethnography, the book documents the metaphors that circulate in the discourse of both privileged and marginalized energy stakeholders.Energy Islands is a brilliant example of community-engaged rhetorical fieldwork that makes a difference in scholarly conversations and in ongoing energy transition. In addition to being theoretically keen and methodologically innovative, the book highlights the stories of successful energy justice practitioners in Puerto Rico and documents de Onís's extensive contributions as a scholar-activist to energy politics in Puerto Rico. The book makes significant contributions to conversations in rhetorical methods, decolonial rhetorics, environmental and energy communication, and Latinx rhetorics. It also makes important contributions to interdisciplinary energy studies, energy humanities, environmental justice, and Puerto Rican studies, demonstrating the importance of rhetorical energies in any analysis of Puerto Rico's energy past, present, and future.The introduction outlines the book's theoretical, methodological, and political commitments. Specifically, de Onís theorizes archipelagoes of power “as a network of entities/islands at various levels and hierarchical and horizontal nodes across and within structures and institutions that enable and constrain agency for diverse actors.”2 The archipelagos of power heuristic developed in the book robustly theorizes power vis-á-vis the various rhetorical energies and metaphors that animate resistance to colonial formations. In doing so, de Onís challenges normative definitions of energy as technology and contributes to ongoing theorization of rhetoric as energy. She writes: “this book seeks to convey capacious understandings of energy beyond a narrow focus on powering individual dwellings and workplaces, by addressing and amplifying the human energies required to create and challenge energy infrastructures and technologies.”3 Subsequent chapters focus on particular metaphors in this archipelago of power that enable and constrain energy justice.The main chapters of the book are interspersed with “Routes/Roots/Raíces,” interludes that focus on positionality, methodology, and narratives. The first interlude tells the story of de Onís's familial connections to islands and Puerto Rico and seeks to break down binaries between conquest and resistance and colonizer and colonized.In chapter one, de Onís lays out four key concepts in Puerto Rico's archipelago of power: energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, and energy actors. These constitute a rhetorical matrix “that provides a vocabulary for studying and communicating different energy controversies in Puerto Rico and Beyond.”4 Energy coloniality is a major theoretical contribution; though related to forms of resource colonialism, it hones in on the importance of energy technologies to relations of power within colonial systems. Another valuable contribution is the introduction of energy actors—a term used by one of her colaboradores—as a frame for understanding Puerto Ricans’ agency in energy politics.In the second interlude, de Onís narrates her encounter with the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO) on Puerto Rico's southern coastline (between Ponce and Mayagüez) as an early example of energy coloniality. She links the closure of the refinery and its lingering economic and environmental impacts with an art installation created out of the abandoned remnants.Chapter two traces colonial relations between the U.S. and Puerto Rico by focusing on metaphors of experimentation—“discourses of defense, disease, development, and disaster”—grounded in, and reinforcing, a view of expendability.5 The legacy of, and ongoing struggles under, experimentation are linked to embodied experiences, emplaced politics, and exigencies for resistance. De Onís concludes the chapter by documenting historical resistance to experimentation discourses while also highlighting how contemporary organizations like Casa Pueblo and Coqui Solar appropriate experimentation metaphors to refuse domination and enact transformations towards more just and equitable futures.Chapter three focuses on spatial metaphors related to methane gas (counter-)advocacy. De Onís focuses on the Via Verde Gasoducto Project and Aguirre Offshore Gas Port, both of which have since been defeated by energy actors. These resistances occurred prior to and during de Onís's fieldwork and are introduced into her fieldwork via colaboradores’ reflections and de Onís's emplacement. While proponents framed the projects as ostensibly cleaner fossil fuels serving as supposed bridges towards technological change, resistive energy actors used “tropes of way, path, expansion, and hub [to offer] an alternative focus.”6 The chapter highlights how energy actors can successfully resist energy coloniality and energy privilege, including by appropriating metaphors to open new ways of thinking.In the third interlude, de Onís shares how she grappled with writing about Puerto Rico as a member of the diaspora living at a distance. She argues that critical reflexivity about power relations, engaging collaboratively, admitting mistakes, and making amends are necessary to avoid replicating oppressive dynamics while performing much needed critical research.Chapter four offers a significant methodological intervention. De Onís conceptualizes the need to (re)wire one's alliances, preconceptions, and dispositions in the context of a place experiencing “extreme shocks [e.g., Hurricanes Maria and Irma] with already ongoing everyday stressors.”7 This (re)wiring is vital for successful coalitions among diverse actors to constitute a decolonial archipelago of power that can span across geographic locations and cultures. De Onís extends co-presence8 to “offer e-advocacy as both a concept and a practice for working coalitionally in electronic spaces.”9 The family of islands trope, she argues, holds promise in conceptualizing coalitions that span across geopolitical bodies.The final interlude articulates the interlinkages between mangrove habitats, historic Afro-Caribbean resistance, and ongoing community organizing based on convivencia. This interlude illustrates the value of archipelagos of power as an analytic to cut across time, species, art, and activism to compose a nuanced understanding of resistance in Puerto Rico.Building from energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, energy actors, archipelagos of power, rhetorical energies, and the metaphors developed across the chapters, de Onís uses the conclusion to discuss the “four d's of energy justice.”10 Decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing, she argues, are key components of delinking from energy coloniality and enabling energy justice.Energy Islands’ foremost contribution is archipelagos of power, a theoretically rich heuristic that can energize and empower future analyses of energy politics, energy coloniality, and energy justice. The heuristic accounts for the uniqueness of Puerto Rico as an island and archipelagic formation in the Antilles but also exceeds a potentially limiting focus on Puerto Rico. Building from Tiara Na'puti's foundational work on archipelagic rhetoric,11 de Onís's archipelagoes of power can be used to analyze relational/technological energies across a variety of sites of energy struggle. This heuristic enhances the field of rhetoric's ability to engage with and sustain research that begins with the affordances of thinking archipelagically.Energy Islands is an exemplar of rhetorical fieldwork. De Onís seamlessly integrates textual analysis, interviews, ethnographic participation, e-advocacy, and critical self-reflexivity into a masterful documentation and amplification of energy actors, including herself, making meaningful change in Puerto Rico. The most explicit contribution to rhetorical fieldwork is the development of e-advocacy as a mode of sustaining ethical and political commitments and contributions when one cannot remain perpetually emplaced in the field. In a pivotal moment, de Onís narrates her hesitancy about writing this book due to concerns about speaking for colaboradores from the perspective of a diasporic Puerto Rican living in the U.S. and her ethical commitment to supporting Puerto Rican people in telling their own stories. This and other moments exemplify how de Onís models an ethical, participatory, and community-based methodology that puts care for the community first and challenges extractive models of research. Rhetorical scholars, even those who do not use fieldwork, would benefit from the methodological approach modelled in this book, as it can urge the field rethink dominant norms about the goals of publication, research, and advocacy.Energy Islands is provocative, suggesting future possibilities for research at the intersections of energy, race, and technology. It offers a substantial contribution by presenting a heterogeneous, complex, and nuanced picture of power relations in Puerto Rico. The book challenges homogenous generalizations about Puerto Rico by tracing how colonizer/colonized, north/south, privileged/underprivileged, and mainland/island relations work within Puerto Rico, not just between Puerto Rico and the U.S.; de Onís's analysis engages inequities within Puerto Rico based on, for example, class, location, race, and access to governmental power. Scholars seeking to expand on de Onís's research might consider, for example, how Blackness, stemming from Afro-Caribbean roots, relates to resistive energies in the archipelago; how inter-Island and inter-archipelago race relations relate to energy coloniality and energy justice; and how racial formations intersect with colonial formations. Furthermore, tracing the material forces that energy technologies themselves have in Puerto Rican energy politics would expand de Onís's focus on the rhetorical energies of decolonial energy actors.Energy Islands is a significant offering to rhetoric and public address scholars. It demonstrates how energy (in)justice is rhetorically constituted through the rhetorical energies of many actors and positions analysis of discourses of just transition, climate justice, and energy colonialism as central to rhetorical studies. In a world that is already suffering from the inequitable impacts of climate change, this book highlights the ongoing relevance of rhetorical scholarship to meaningfully addressing the climate crisis amid intersecting political instabilities, economic pressures, and coloniality. Energy Islands is essential reading for scholars across the broad field of rhetorical studies not only because of what it contributes to our understanding of rhetorical energy but also for how it demonstrates that rhetorical scholarship matters in creating a more just and equitable world.

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.

As the bicentennial of the momentous 1824 election approaches, Andrew Jackson is as relevant as ever. Jackson's shadow looms large over contemporary discussions regarding populism, democracy, and America's history of racism and colonization. Moreover, interest in Jackson has grown thanks to President Trump's efforts to frame Jackson as a precursor to his own brand of nationalist populism. A variety of analysts, from historian Mark Cheathem in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson to Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade in Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, have recently revisited the Jacksonian period both to enrich our understanding of that unique historical moment and to offer insights about present day affairs. Amos Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership is a welcome addition to the conversation that provides valuable perspective about Jackson's presidency and the rhetorical nature of presidential authority in general.Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal aims to “give voice to the seventh president” by creating “an account of major addresses’ development, the reasoning and constraints behind them, and ultimately, their impact on the polity” (1–2). The book represents the most comprehensive rhetorical examination of Jackson's public remarks to date. Kiewe not only provides a window into the inner machinations of Jackson's administration and the painstaking process of crafting a public address; he challenges existing understandings of the presidency as an institution. Although Jeffrey Tulis, in The Rhetorical Presidency, argued that the presidency became a seat of popular (rather than constitutional) leadership in the twentieth century, Kiewe persuasively demonstrates that Jackson may have in fact been “the first rhetorical president,” arguing that Jackson's public addresses changed the trajectory of his administration and fundamentally altered the presidency itself (243).Kiewe accomplishes this through in-depth rhetorical histories of Jackson's public addresses. In chapter 1, Kiewe argues that Jackson's 1824 campaign was innovative; Jackson debuted a novel campaign strategy of “writing letters to private individuals for public distribution” (16) and inaugurated a “new era” of party politics featuring populist appeals (36). In chapters 2 through 9, Kiewe conducts case studies of Jackson's inaugural addresses, his first annual message to Congress, his rhetoric regarding the Nullification Crisis and Indian removal policies, and his rhetoric supporting his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Kiewe also devotes attention to addresses of seemingly “minor importance,” such as the Maysville road bill veto, which involved a proposal to improve a sixty-mile stretch of road in Kentucky and foreshadowed the pro-Union rhetoric that would define Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis (77).Chapter 10 takes a step back from Jackson's rhetoric to analyze public images of Jackson. Kiewe, using a visual rhetoric approach, argues that Jackson's popular leadership was reinforced by his supporters’ construction of Jackson as a military hero and populist icon through political cartoons and other portraits. This chapter is a detour from the book's main line of argument, but a welcome one that provides enlightening context about how audiences of the time understood Jackson's leadership. In chapter 11, Kiewe analyzes Jackson's farewell address and credits him with further developing the farewell address as a unique genre of presidential rhetoric.Through these case studies, Kiewe develops several insights about Jackson and his rhetoric. First, Kiewe challenges portrayals of Jackson as “brute, rough, savage, and backward” by documenting his rhetorical skill, strategic acumen, and principled devotion to the Union (4). Second, Kiewe sheds light on the “cumulative effort” that underpinned Jackson's rhetorical presidency (68). Jackson's most famous addresses often underwent several stages of drafting. Jackson would create a first draft that would undergo subsequent vetting and revision from his inner circle, such as Andrew Jackson Donelson, Amos Kendall, Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, James Hamilton, Roger Taney, and others. Kiewe describes Jackson's initial drafts as containing partisan and “forceful language” (75), whereas the revised final forms are “moderate relative to his initial points” (90, 248). These detailed accounts of the administration's speechwriting colorfully illustrate Jackson's behind-the-scenes struggle to balance popular leadership with adherence to the norms of his office. Third, Jackson is revealed to be a rhetorical president cognizant of the extra-constitutional powers of his office, who frequently “appealed directly” to the public and “used his rhetoric as a political tool . . . for governing purposes” (243).Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal provides a granular look at a crucial chapter of American history, using a rhetorical perspective that highlights how presidential authority is in part constructed through discourse. Given the book's nineteenth-century subject matter, Kiewe's meticulous account of Jackson's governance and speechwriting process is impressive. Nonetheless, Kiewe's characterizations of Jackson are occasionally questionable. At several points, he describes Jackson as a “progressive” (164, 178), an interpretation that is hard to sustain in light of Jackson's vigorous opposition to policies that would utilize government on behalf of national development and his plainly regressive attitudes and actions towards Indigenous peoples and the abolitionist cause. Kiewe's choice to analyze Jackson in the context of his times bolsters the book's primary strength; it allows for a thorough account of the dynamics and constraints of the era and how Jackson responded to them. However, some readers may be frustrated by Kiewe's hesitance to more forthrightly acknowledge Jackson's complicity with genocide and chattel slavery or to criticize the exclusionary definition of “the people” imagined by Jackson's populist rhetoric. For instance, Kiewe's recognition of Jackson's condescending, paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous peoples in chapter 6 may have been strengthened by conversing more extensively with texts such as Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children that explain the colonialist attitudes that underpinned Jackson's paternalism.As a book that sits “at the intersection of history, politics, and rhetoric,” Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal will prove useful to a variety of readers (1). Historians and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century United States may find this rhetorical study of Jackson a complement to other accounts of the era, as the book's special attention to the development of Jackson's addresses and their impact on the public is relatively unique. Scholars of the presidency may appreciate the book's intervention into the debate about the extent to which the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century affair or a phenomenon that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Rhetorical scholars should appreciate the central place that Kiewe assigns rhetoric in the process of governance, even in an era where communication mediums were considerably more limited in reach and scope than today. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal suggests that scholars should pay attention to how rhetoric can strengthen or weaken institutions such as the presidency, and how presidents influence and are influenced by evolving modes of mass communication. Above all, Kiewe's book highlights the need for scholars to conduct rigorous rhetorical analyses of other nineteenth-century rhetorical presidents, to enrich understanding of the era and to illustrate how rhetorical choices made centuries ago exert influence on the present-day institution of the presidency.

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.

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.

AbstractWhile many have critiqued the racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced nature of comedic rhetorics, few have considered how identity-based comedy, particularly racial comedy, functions productively, rather than merely oppressively. Studies of comedic rhetorics have primarily focused on Black and white comedians, but the increasing number and variety of popular comedians of color demands investigation into how comedians from different racial backgrounds use humor to rhetorically articulate the boundaries of their racial(ized) identities. This essay theorizes comedic rhetoric, particularly stereotypes in comedy, as a constitutive form of rhetoric that can articulate generative racial identities as they exist within the ambivalent spaces of in-group stereotypes. By pairing polysemy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, and Tina Chen’s theory of impersonation to analyze the standup performances of Asian American comedian Ali Wong, this essay ultimately represents a necessary intervention into understanding racial comedy and stereotypes as potentially productive sites for examining racial identity.

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

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.

Research Article| September 01 2020 The Complicity of Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism: The Coherence and Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement David A. Frank David A. Frank David A. Frank is Professor of Rhetoric in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He thanks Professor John Hatch and Charley Leistner for their help in constructing this manuscript. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 553–586. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0553 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David A. Frank; The Complicity of Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism: The Coherence and Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 553–586. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0553 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.

Research Article| September 01 2020 Racial Reconciliation Revisited John B. Hatch John B. Hatch John B. Hatch is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 527–528. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0527 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John B. Hatch; Racial Reconciliation Revisited. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 527–528. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0527 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.

Research Article| September 01 2020 “Childish Things“: Tragic Conservatism, White Evangelicalism, and the Challenge of Racial Reconciliation John B. Hatch John B. Hatch John B. Hatch is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He would like to thank Prof. Martin Medhurst for dedicating space in Rhetoric & Public Affairs both to the present and previous forums on racial reconciliation, and thank Mark McPhail and David Frank for modeling consilience, mutual respect across differing views, and dialogic coherence in pursuing racial justice and healing. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 587–616. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John B. Hatch; “Childish Things“: Tragic Conservatism, White Evangelicalism, and the Challenge of Racial Reconciliation. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 587–616. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587 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.