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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

A World of Turmoil is part of the Michigan State University Press series “US-China Relations in the Age of Globalization.” As Stephen J. Hartnett writes in a preface to the series, “This series . . . strives to practice what Qingwen Dong calls ‘edge ball’: Getting as close as possible to the boundary of what is sayable without crossing the line of being offensive.” At the beginning, Hartnett calls himself “a participant-observer in the reemergence of China as a global power” and, importantly, “a supporter of the ongoing successes of Taiwan” (xxvii). He addresses an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers in “communication, history, international studies, political science, globalization, and more” (li). It's clear from the content of the book that he does not expect his readers to be intimately familiar with the history of postwar U.S.-Taiwan-China relations, although readers well-versed in this history will also benefit from his communication-based perspective. Focus is on “moments of rupture and innovation” in U.S.-Taiwan-China relations because they illustrate how the disruption of communicative patterns in moments of political crisis led to new ways of communicating (xlvi). Therefore, he focuses on five “case studies” of communicative challenges: The period from the end of World War Two to 1952 (the end of the Truman administration), when Chiang Kai-shek lost the Civil War with the Communists and escaped to Taiwan, and the United States separated the Communist and Nationalist forces;The beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55 (also known as the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis);Nixon's and Kissinger's visits to China and negotiations over the Shanghai Communiqué in the early 1970s;Lee Teng-hui's presidency, his visit to Cornell, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, and the Clinton administration's “Three Noes” policy; andThe Tsai and Trump administrations of 2016–present.Hartnett analyzes the cases using rhetorics that he argues characterize the communicative dynamics of relations among the United States, China, and Taiwan: “China's rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” in which the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) draws upon China's “century of humiliation” beginning in the nineteenth century to accuse the West of continuing to suppress China's rise as a major geopolitical power;U.S. “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” a phrase used to describe how the United States has used misinformation and sown confusion in the pursuit of global influence;“United States’ treatment of Taiwan via the rhetoric of marginal significance” (xxix), which belittles Taiwan and treats the people as minor participants in their own future;Taiwan's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion,” which during the Lee Teng-hui period portrayed Taiwan as a model for a future democratic China; andTaiwan's “rhetoric of democratic disdain” (xxx), a more recent response to CPC pressure on Taiwan, casting the Communists as a hidebound authoritarian government that has nothing to offer the Taiwanese.Chapter one covers the Truman administration's relations with China and the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in Taiwan. The chapter focuses on the rhetorical contexts for two of Truman's speeches on U.S.-ROC relations, which Hartnett argues show how the president's policy on Taiwan changed between January and June of 1950 due not only to the Chinese involvement in the conflict on the Korean peninsula but also to McCarthy era accusations of appeasement. Hartnett argues that Truman's eventual involvement in the Taiwan-PRC conflict treated Taiwan with “the rhetoric of marginal significance” by protecting both Taiwan from attacks by the PRC and China from attacks by the Chiang regime. Still, China reacted with the “rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” viewing U.S. involvement as yet more western imperialism.The second chapter focuses on the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55. Hartnett argues that although Eisenhower entered the White House with a clear anti-communist stance, intending to release Chiang from his U.S.-imposed restrictions on attacking China, eventually the U.S. government found itself back in the role of restraining Chiang even as it moved from an unintentional “rhetoric of geostrategic deception” (unintentional because, Hartnett argues, it was more a reaction to events than a purposeful strategy) to a chillingly clear rhetoric which found the U.S. for the first time threatening nuclear strikes on China's military assets. Hartnett intriguingly proposes that the Eisenhower administration's use of “fuzzing,” which is often seen as the origin of “strategic ambiguity” and an example of Eisenhower's brilliant Cold War strategizing, was actually the result of confusion, disagreement, and lack of information about China's purposes in shelling the offshore island of Quemoy. According to Hartnett, evidence shows that Mao Zedong never intended to use the shelling of Quemoy as a precursor to invading Taiwan—in fact, Hartnett argues that Mao did not want Chiang to give up Quemoy because such a retreat would result in a “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan” scenario that was unacceptable to the Communists. However, not everyone in the Eisenhower administration agreed about Mao's intentions, which resulted in the frightening statement that the United States would consider using “tactical” atomic bombs on China (43). An eventual result of this miscommunication was that the PRC was able to get from the Soviets materials to develop its own nuclear weapons.In the third chapter, Hartnett argues that Nixon's approach to the China-Taiwan problem was more intentional than that of Truman or even Eisenhower. Hartnett contrasts the formal written product of negotiations between Nixon/Kissinger and Chou Enlai (Zhou Enlai)/Mao Zedong with the—until recently—classified conversations that the two parties had, illustrating how unwritten (or at least confidential or classified) aspects of negotiation, where there's an attempt to be ambiguous in the product, can result in the meaning or effect of the document getting away from the intentions of the authors. Nixon expected to get reelected and be in power until 1976, and what he and Kissinger said to Zhou depended on that. Pro-Taiwanese advocates reference the text of the Shanghai Communiqué to say that “acknowledg[ing] that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China” is not the same as “accepting” that position; according to Hartnett, however, this is not what Nixon and Kissinger told Zhou Enlai (71). In fact, they exercised what Hartnett calls a “rhetoric of abeyance,” tied to the “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” to persuade the CPC of Nixon's plan to tell the American people and the government of Taiwan that the Communiqué did not signal any change in relations with China or Taiwan.Chapter four covers most of Lee Teng-hui's twelve years as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). As the first president to be directly elected by the people of Taiwan and as a Christian, Lee embodied the “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” in his speech and interactions with the PRC. Hartnett begins, however, with a brief discussion of the 1978 U.S. decision under President Carter to break off official relations with the Republic of China and normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. Accompanying normalization, however, was the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which made many of the official interactions with Taiwan unofficial and established “the non-governmental, embassy-but-not-an-embassy ‘American Institute in Taiwan’ (AIT)” (87). While losing official relations with the United States made Taiwan once again the victim of the “rhetoric of marginal significance,” the TRA also made the PRC once again the victim of “the rhetoric of geostrategic deception.”When Lee became the first Taiwanese president of Taiwan ten years later, he asserted that a democratic Taiwan was a model for what the PRC could become if it turned away from authoritarianism. Hartnett argues that Lee's approach to China also signaled to the United States that Taiwan would not accept being treated through the rhetoric of marginal significance anymore. Unfortunately, Lee's popular reelection in 1996 amidst threatening Chinese military exercises was followed by what Hartnett calls U.S. President Clinton's “slow motion betrayal of Taiwan” (109). Clinton's “Three Noes” (no support for Taiwan independence, for “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan,” or for Taiwan's participation in international organizations that require statehood) shook Taiwan. Clinton once again treated Taiwan to a dose of the rhetoric of marginal significance, while arguably capitulating to Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's “rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism,” which advanced a vision of a postcolonial China “striv[ing] for national greatness by trying to absorb [its] less powerful neighbors” (102).In the fifth chapter, Hartnett jumps ahead to the administrations of Donald Trump and Tsai Ing-wen, where Taiwan's stance toward China changed from Lee's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” to a “rhetoric of democratic disdain,” mocking the CPC's outdated authoritarianism in response to misogynistic rhetorical attacks on Tsai. Internally, Tsai exercised what Hartnett calls a rhetoric of “postcolonial nationalism” that sought transitional justice to heal the wounds the people suffered under the previously authoritarian state (128). This rhetoric also acknowledged the need to recognize Taiwan's Indigenous people and its colonial past in order to move forward; notably, moving forward meant moving away from a Chinese identity and toward “a Taiwanese version of postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (129). Hartnett thus argues that the Tsai administration's celebration of the Republic of China's National Day (October 10) contradicted the effort to build a Taiwanese identity. This chapter also criticizes Donald Trump for sending confusing signals to Taiwan and China, characterizing him as “an anarchist setting into play words and forces meant not to sustain the status quo or build trust, but to release the unpredictable energies of creative destruction” (145).I have doubts about Hartnett's concluding recommendations for peaceful and productive relations among China, the United States, and Taiwan, including his suggestion that Taiwan should simply stop calling itself the Republic of China and change its constitution. Hartnett implies that the changes he recommends for the United States, China, and Taiwan are all interdependent: Taiwan cannot change its name and constitution without believable assurances from the CPC that it is willing to change what has basically motivated its relationship with Taiwan since 1949—the belief that Taiwan is part of China and needs to “return” to China. However, as Hartnett points out, the CPC is stuck in a stance toward Taiwan that accepts no compromise regarding Taiwan's fate. It is not clear to me what would lead the current CPC leadership to change their stance toward Taiwan.Hartnett also recommends that the United States should engage more with China as an equal partner in areas that recognize the PRC's status as a rising power. But U.S.-China relations inevitably encompass U.S.-Taiwan relations. China terminated climate talks after former Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, for instance. It is unclear how the United States can interact with Taiwan in a way that will not result in China exercising the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism or the rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism. That is, in the end, it seems to me that everything depends on China giving up its dream of “reunification” with Taiwan, which is rather unlikely in the foreseeable future.I also disagree with the author's criticism of Taiwan's use of the rhetorics of “democracy as conversion” and “democratic disdain.” Humor or sarcasm can be seen as a “weapon of the weak” to counter the strident rhetoric of the more powerful PRC government. While this kind of humor might anger them, Hartnett's own analysis implies that the rhetorics of traumatized nationalism and postcolonial colonialism that would drive their responses are performative.A minor aspect of A World of Turmoil that might confuse readers not familiar with the nuances of Taiwan's history and politics is the usage of “Taiwanese” to describe the martial law regimes of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo as well as the more Taiwan-centric administrations of presidents like Lee Teng-hui and Tsai Ing-wen. It is particularly surprising to see a statement that describes Chiang Ching-kuo as “arguing for Taiwanese independence” (108), rather than saying that the younger Chiang was arguing for the legitimacy of the Republic of China on Taiwan as a sovereign state. There are also some small errors, such as calling Hakka the “dominant” language in Taiwan (xxii).These issues aside, for communications scholars interested in U.S.-China-Taiwan relations, A World of Turmoil will provide an accessible discussion of the problems in international communication among the three countries. Hartnett's reading of the history of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations through the lens of the various “rhetorical dispositions” opens opportunities to rethink what has worked—and, more importantly, what has not worked—during the past nearly eight decades (163). It is also gratifying to see a major work of rhetorical history that focuses at least in part on Taiwan's rhetorical practices. Perhaps this book will serve as a basis for further study of Taiwanese rhetoric.

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

The role of emerging media is often central in stories of presidential campaigns, from Herbert Hoover's embrace of radio to broadcast his speeches and John F. Kennedy's success in the first televised debate to the contemporary adoption of social media by Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The presidency has always adapted to (and been shaped by) emerging media. Studies of U.S. media history have the potential to capture the changing norms of presidential rhetoric. To that end, Mel Laracey's new book provides an important antecedent to modern presidential media use with its account of Thomas Jefferson's reliance on print media to influence public opinion. Just as Brian Ott and Greg Dickinson studied Trump's “Twitter Presidency,” Laracey argues that Jefferson created a “Newspaper Presidency.”1 This book expands Laracey's earlier work by focusing on Jefferson's creation of the National Intelligencer, a partisan Washington D.C. newspaper that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the American public via what was essentially “the state-controlled media of its time” (1–2).Laracey's argument is twofold. First, he claims that the Intelligencer served as a “presidential newspaper,” a medium that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the public in a way that challenges Jeffrey K. Tulis's concept of the rhetorical presidency. Second, Laracey uses his exhaustive reading of the newspaper's contents to show how Jefferson used public appeals not just to sway public opinion in favor of his own election, but to also define his political ideals and convince the American public to adopt them. The latter point offers an opportunity for rhetoricians beyond the focus on political and media history; the implications point to a consideration of public opinion, national identity, and the articulation of ideology through news media. Laracey reveals how the Intelligencer allowed Jefferson to avoid direct engagement in partisan politics, in line with a Constitutional view of the presidency, while still shaping public opinion, as in Tulis's rhetorical presidency (2).The book moves chronologically through Jefferson's presidency. Chapter two outlines the creation of the Intelligencer and establishes Jefferson's influence on and strategic use of the newspaper. This supports Laracey's claim that both the public and Jefferson's Federalist rivals read the paper as an extension of Jefferson's rhetoric and political platform. Chapters three and four examine coverage of the 1800 election and the aftermath of Jefferson's victory, which he claimed both for himself and for Republicanism. Chapter five collects the Intelligencer's defenses of Jefferson's appointments and removals of federal officers, unpacking a Jeffersonian vision of executive power that reflects Vanessa Beasley's work on the “unitary executive.”2 Chapters six and seven turn their focus to the judiciary, specifically how the Intelligencer covered the Marbury v. Madison case and the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. These chapters trace the changing Republican understanding of “judicial review’” and correct what Laracey views as omissions in the existing historical accounts of Jefferson's role in the impeachment. The concluding chapters analyze news coverage of the Louisiana Purchase and the 1804 presidential election.One of Laracey's primary contributions is a critique/expansion of Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency.3 In Tulis's story of the presidency as an institution, Woodrow Wilson oversaw an early twentieth-century shift in presidential communication in which presidents began to appeal directly to the people to establish support for their policies and pressure Congress. Tulis worried that this new “rhetorical presidency” threatened the traditional Constitutional model that had dominated the eighteenth century. As many rhetoricians have done, Laracey complicates Tulis's timeline. Reiterating the thesis of his first book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, Laracey argues that “presidentially sponsored newspapers . . . were widely understood to be speaking on behalf of a president's administration,” allowing presidents to “engage in a form of mass political communication” (3).4 Through various examples of Jefferson's Federalist opponents recognizing the Intelligencer as carrying Jefferson's messages (sometimes, quite literally through the use of editorials that Laracey claims Jefferson published under a pseudonym), Laracey positions the newspaper as a site of presidential rhetoric. Of particular interest to rhetoricians is the argument that, in addressing the public, Jefferson went beyond garnering political support and into the realm of political definition. While the book's first goal is to provide a detailed history that responds to Tulis, it also considers “how the treatment of various topics in the Intelligencer can expand scholarly understanding of the strategies and goals of Jefferson and his allies as they confronted those issues” (15–16).With this aspect of Informing a Nation, Laracey establishes generative grounds for analyzing how Jefferson used a newspaper to address public opinion and, by extension, attempted to persuade “the people” into embracing Republican ideals. While a rhetorician might want to extend many of Laracey's arguments into a larger conceptualization of how early nineteenth-century presidents understood the role of public opinion, this is the most promising part of the book for scholars of presidential rhetoric, and it is best exemplified by the third and fourth chapters. These chapters go beyond campaigning to show that Jefferson was not just making the case for his own presidency, but for his vision of a nation. In other words, he was articulating a set of values and ideals that we might understand as Jeffersonian Republicanism.Public opinion mattered to Jefferson, Laracey argues, because his Republican ideals positioned him as representing the will of the people. In turn, Jefferson's democratic theory called for a “body politic” of an “informed citizenry” (6). Consequently, the people required information to make decisions, and the Intelligencer served that function by “presenting to the American public the information, ranging from the factual to the constitutional and even philosophical, that Jefferson and his allies thought would facilitate responsible popular control of the government, a bedrock principle of Jeffersonian Republicanism” (39). As Samuel Harrison Smith (the newspaper's editor) said, the Intelligencer would publish both “unperverted facts” and “correct political ideas,” the correct ideas in this case being Republican ideas (8). As Laracey summarizes, “Issue by issue, the Intelligencer was constructing for its readers a communal understanding of what being a Jeffersonian Republican meant,” culminating in what the Intelligencer portrayed as a victory of Republicanism over Federalism in Jefferson's 1804 re-election (185, 192). In this sense, Laracey pushes the public opinion framework into a borderline rhetorical history about Jefferson's vision for the young nation and its ideals. This history traces the development of Republicanism as a discourse and analyzes Jefferson's emerging rhetoric of nationhood as he argued for his own interpretation of what the U.S. presidency should be.Still, the book is first and foremost a political history, and to that end, many of the contributions are of most interest to those directly engaged in either Jefferson's presidency or the political debates of the day, such as the interplay between Jefferson and the early development of the U.S. Supreme Court. Laracey makes several corrections to the historical record, especially regarding the impeachment of Samuel Chase. While traditional histories described Chase as remaining mostly silent until the trial, Laracey uncovers an editorial by Chase that the Intelligencer published in April of 1804 in which he directly attacked Jefferson. Laracey also uses continuing coverage of the trial to critique narratives that Jefferson eventually lost interest in the impeachment, showing that it was a Republican priority even after the final verdict in Chase's favor. Likewise, the fourth chapter further contextualizes Jefferson's decision to give his Annual Message to Congress in writing, referencing a series of editorials that portrayed the move as a strategic decision to reflect Republican values and not, as Tulis suggested, a decision based on Jefferson's Constitutional understandings of the presidency (90–93).At just under two hundred pages, Informing A Nation is a well-written, briskly paced look at Jefferson's newspaper presidency, though its main argument and historical emphasis create a few limits. Given his framing as a critique of Tulis, Laracey occasionally overstates the connection between Jefferson and the Intelligencer. When the authorship of a pseudonymous editorial is less defensible as Jefferson's work or does not reflect Jefferson's opinions as clearly, Laracey asserts that Jefferson would have agreed with a given editorial even if he did not write or sanction it, stretching the analytical framework of the book. There are some parts of this analysis that might have been better served by understanding the Intelligencer and its writers as having their own agency and conceptualizing the newspaper not only as Jefferson's mouthpiece but as an interlocutor regarding Republicanism. The aim to correct the historical record also presents a few structural trade-offs. For example, while the Louisiana Purchase is a sensible inclusion in terms of historical significance, the eighth chapter detailing the Intelligencer's coverage of it offers less analytical insight than the book's middle chapters.Though scholars invested in expanding the historical records of Jefferson's presidency or the development of American newspapers make up its immediate audience, Informing A Nation offers interdisciplinary contributions. Scholars of presidential rhetoric, especially those studying the Early American Republic, will find a valuable analysis of Jefferson's political discourse and a well-chronicled example of presidential rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Those in media studies or political communication willing to engage in historically-oriented work will be more drawn to Laracey's emphasis on the development of a partisan newspaper system in the United States and the challenges he poses to Tulis's account of the rhetorical presidency. Overall, Informing A Nation is a concise but comprehensive analysis of both an understudied element of the Jefferson presidency and the origins of partisan news media.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cara Finnegan's Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital is an important new work poised to bring a rhetorical perspective into public conversations about politics and visual culture. With a deep and thoughtful reading of the historical development of visual technologies, Finnegan examines the cultural importance of photographic images of American presidents. Rather than analyzing individual depictions of presidents, Finnegan interrogates the complex interplay between photography as both technology and practice and the meanings of the American presidency. As she puts it, instead of focusing on how particular images of individual presidents are meaningful, she asks “how presidents became photographic. In what ways . . . did photography shape public experience?”1As in her previous book, the excellent Making Photography Matter, Finnegan marshals an impressive mix of archival materials, close readings of individual images, and a mastery of cultural and technological histories to study the shifting terrain of visual depiction.2 Where Photographic Presidents differs from its predecessor is in the focus on the connection between photography and American political culture and in the accessibility of its writing. Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of Photographic Presidents is the effortless elegance of its prose and the liveliness of its narrative arc. The methodological questions about visual rhetoric that Finnegan asked in her earlier book are in the background, and on display are the insights of a thoughtful and thorough analysis.Given its emphasis on accessible analysis, the introductory chapter is short and to the point, focused mainly on establishing the key turn away from “presidential photography” and towards the “photographic president.” Once this emphasis on the fluid nature of visual representations is in place, Finnegan moves to the narrative itself. The subsequent chapters trace the shifting practices of photographing presidents across four key periods, each punctuated by changes in photographic technology.The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 led to an American fascination with the photographic image and what Finnegan terms the “Daguerreotype President.” Oddly, one of the first images widely circulated through the new technology was of George Washington, who had died some forty years earlier. While obviously not available to sit for a photograph, daguerreotypes were made of various paintings and sculptures of Washington. These photographs proved remarkably popular. The use of the new visual technology to circulate the image of America's first president in the 1840s helped, as Finnegan notes, to reinforce the nation's history and, importantly, this historical representation also worked to inscribe photography into the national character. As Finnegan writes, “In 1848 the nation still needed Washington, but so, apparently, did photography: to authorize its value, to connect it to the nation's past and present, and to establish its own norms of portraiture for decades to come.”3 These norms of portraiture continue as a theme throughout the remainder of this section. Finnegan examines the diaries of John Quincy Adams, for instance, as he reflected on his experiences sitting for daguerreotype photographs and his belief that photographs might help instill democratic values by allowing citizens to see themselves as others see them.The democratizing potential of the photographic images becomes central in the book's second section, which examines the development of cheaper and smaller cameras and paper photographs, which allowed for the rise of the “Snapshot President.” Presidents during this period took full advantage of their photographic image but also had to contend with a growing number of amateur photographers, or “camera fiends.” Added to the increasing accessibility of the camera was the ability of newspapers to print photographs more easily with the development of halftone reproductions. Together, these technological innovations, as Finnegan observes, fueled the American public's desire for photography. As she notes, “the new impulse for pictures demanded quantity,”4 and one of the most desirable subjects for this new photographic impulse was the American president. Finnegan explores this interest in immediate and plentiful photographic images of the president through a careful consideration of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. The ubiquity of amateur photographers and the ability of newspapers to publish their photographs helped instill the value of timeliness into American visual culture. Finnegan notes that many contemporary newspapers insisted upon labeling one of their photographic images as the “last photograph” of the President, suggesting the crucial element of images being instantaneously available to an eager public.5As cameras became smaller and both professional and amateur photographers more ubiquitous, pressures grew on the White House to find ways to manage what Finnegan labels the era of the “Candid Camera President.” The candid camera period between the Roosevelts saw presidents facing regular intrusion by amateur photographers as well as increasingly sophisticated professional news photographers. President-elect Woodrow Wilson, for example, angrily confronted a photographer who snapped a picture of his daughter, Jessie Wilson. Finnegan recounts the impact of German photographer Erich Salomon, who was labeled “king of the indiscreet” for his skill in hiding his camera and snapping images of world leaders in unposed settings.6 The ability of photographers to slip into politics and give the public a glimpse of real negotiation led to both a growing public demand for unscripted images and the formalization of press relations through the development of what would eventually become an official White House press secretary. This effort to manage the photographs taken of presidents, however, was in tension with, as Finnegan argues, “the new visual values of candid photography, those of access, intimacy, and energy.”7 Finnegan uses the tension between presidential impression management and public hunger for intimate images to frame the complex visual politics surrounding Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As is now widely known, FDR's affliction with polio limited his mobility, and his efforts to manage how he was represented have been widely studied. Finnegan adds a fascinating perspective by focusing not so much on prohibitions on images of his infirm body but on the ways FDR made himself visible and, in so doing, broadened norms surrounding the use of candid shots. Here Finnegan contends that FDR's “media savvy” extended well beyond his use of radio and includes his careful orchestration of photographs of him. “FDR would not hide from the spotlight,” Finnegan writes. “He would be seen, but on his terms and according to an ever changing yet firm set of rules.”8These firm rules, of course, would not last, and with the advent of new media technology, especially television and the internet, the presidents’ ability to govern how they were photographed diminished. Finnegan's fourth era focuses on the development of the “Social Media President” and the widespread ability of everyday citizens to create, circulate, and alter images. The effort to maintain some control over photographic images led to the formalization of official White House photographers, and Finnegan recounts the ways presidents like Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson used official photographers as extensions of their own efforts at image management. The official White House photographer plays a crucial role in Finnegan's final chapter, a thorough consideration of Barack Obama's use of social media. Obama's chief White House photographer, Pete Souza, framed himself as a “visual historian” and used the image sharing social media site, Flickr, to release thousands of images directly to the public. As Finnegan notes, this media strategy allowed the Obama White House to offer the kind of intimate, behind-the-scenes access the public craved, albeit carefully orchestrated by the administration, as well as an opportunity to bypass the traditional media.9 Continuous publicizing of presidential photographs directly to the public bolstered the perception that Obama was media savvy and technologically sophisticated. Iconic images ranging from tense images of the situation room during the mission against Osama Bin Laden to playful moments of the President interacting with children were made immediately available without relying on traditional media outlets. Such direct access also allowed the administration to respond to growing interest in meme and remix culture. In this way, as Finnegan notes, the Flickr archive of the Obama presidency continues “to serve as a resource for invention and critique,”10 including Souza's use of those images to provide subtle but damning criticisms of the administration of Donald Trump.Photographic Presidents concludes by resituating its key question, how presidents come to be photographic, and by considering the complex interplay of new visual technologies, shifting cultural norms of representation, and the changing nature of the American presidency. Photography, like the presidency, is “not and never has been only one thing”11 and Finnegan challenges us to continue examining the intersection of visual and political culture as various forces cause it to shift and transform.Finnegan's latest book is a masterwork in rhetorical scholarship and demonstrates how a close reading of visual texts and the contexts within which they become meaningful provide engaging and provocative insights. The archival work, careful historical analysis, and thoughtful critical examination are exemplary. This book should be widely studied not only in courses on visual rhetoric and media technology but in any course on rhetorical criticism or archival methods. It is also one of a relatively rare set of books within rhetorical studies that I would recommend to a family member or friend who wanted to understand what rhetorical studies does. This is not only impressive scholarship but also an engaging, funny, and at times delightful work of nonfiction that could as easily be enjoyed by a person interested in presidents as it could be someone with a fascination for American popular culture or media.

As honorary president and first speaker at the First Zionist Congress, Dr. Karpel Lippe of Romania embodied continuities in the history of the Jews and of Zionism, but his address also heralded transformations occurring in the movement as its delegates assembled in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. The speech, given in German, is analyzed with respect to its multiplex audience and other aspects of the rhetorical situation. Lippe declares the Congress to be a gewaltiger Sprung (mighty leap): the “leap” refers to the reinvention of Zionism as a solidly modern, middle-class movement, as shown by its leadership, language, repertoires of action, and values. Those values—positivism with respect to social and historical knowledge; individual self-reliance, secular work, and “civilization”; deprecation of indolence and dependency; and a respectful but assertive engagement with the established political-economic order—are set over against the social and ideological equivocations, administrative paternalism, and political timidity that caused its predecessor, Hibbat Zion, to falter.

Abstract In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hung on the whims of a deeply divided Supreme Court. His ninth fireside chat argued for legislation that would grant FDR enough new justices to shift the Court in favor of the New Deal. Facing entrenched opposition to his unpopular plan, Roosevelt presented the president as a constitutional authority who must act in response to the crisis of the Great Depression to drive the three-horse team of government toward recovery. Throughout the text, Roosevelt worked to create a sense of urgency and asked the nation to see this moment as the time for decisive action. This study examines the flow of kairos in the speech, tracing timeliness in Roosevelt’s argument for swift action targeting the Court to safeguard economic recovery. Although Roosevelt did not expand the Court, his language lives on as a model for subsequent executives and part of our public constitutional discourse.

Book Review| June 01 2017 American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. By Jenell Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. +240. $49.50 cloth; $26.96 paper. Jordynn Jack Jordynn Jack University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 369–376. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jordynn Jack; American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 369–376. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim to recenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to these memory practices, the “woman problem” of civil rights memory is more acknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civil rights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlations among Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationship among these spatial and rhetorical configurations is termed the “rhetorical geography of memory.” Through an account of the rhetorical geography of memory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place, violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and response, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset the conditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

Book Review| December 01 2015 Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. By Anne Marie Todd. New York: Routledge, 2013; pp. 168. $135.00 cloth. James Coleman McGuffey James Coleman McGuffey Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 763–766. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Coleman McGuffey; Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 763–766. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 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. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.