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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhetoric and psychoanalysis have a long history of entanglement. As Patrick Mahoney wrote, it would be “hard to exaggerate the historical and intrinsic significance of rhetoric for psychoanalysis”; Aristotle's Rhetoric could even be said to constitute “the first major psychological treatise in the West.”1 Diego Enrique Londoño, drawing on Juan Rigoli, has documented the influence of rhetoric on eighteenth and nineteenth century alienism,2 while Michael Billig, Risto Fried, and others have sought these links in Freud and later theorists.3 Although Jacques Lacan gets most of the credit, two pioneering women beat him to the punch in systematically introducing rhetorical concepts (especially metaphor): Gertrude Buck and Ella Freeman Sharpe.4 Rhetoricians, in turn, have enriched their craft through psychoanalytic thinking—first with Sigmund Freud (most notably in Kenneth Burke), then Carl Jung,5 with a great deal of later work inspired by Lacan,6 although authors like Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott also make occasional appearances.7Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is the latest effort to find resonances between rhetoric and psychoanalysis to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. The book is quite short and by necessity focuses on a few key thinkers—Burke represents rhetoric, while Freud and Lacan epitomize the psychoanalytic tradition. Although Adleman and Vanderwees find some connections that are sure to be of interest to psychoanalytically inclined rhetoricians, they unfortunately do so while almost entirely omitting decades of significant work forging these links. Todd McGowan's blurb declaring the book “a miracle” for describing connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis that “now seem clear and self-evident, but only because [Adleman and Vanderwees] have written this pathbreaking work” is sustainable only if one discounts the work cited above, plus many dozens of articles and books published by graduate students and junior rhetorical scholars. Lundberg's Lacan in Public, which undertakes a much more comprehensive study of the connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis, is cited only to support a minor claim about Quintilian; if one were to ask a rhetorician working with psychoanalysis today to recommend a single volume on the topic, Lacan in Public might very well be the choice, whatever the rhetorician's opinion of the book. While it is always easy to lodge criticisms based on the omission of one's idiosyncratic favorites, the absences in Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may set limits on the execution of its ambition. Rather than a continuation of scholarship on its overall topic, this book is a commentary on Lacan, Burke, and Freud narrowly, which does not diminish its contributions to that end but does make plain a missed opportunity to accomplish a larger goal.8Adleman and Vanderwees begin with a brief account of the “missed encounters” of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. Their central premise is that the two disciplines, “when closely scrutinized, often appear, uncannily, as each other's doppelgangers” due to their inquiries into human motives and their “perennial struggles with legitimacy” (1). This “peripheral status” as “third-class” denizens of “the republic of knowledge” is a major theme in the book (27). The authors claim that rhetoric disproportionately focuses attention on “pragmatic compositional concerns” while “almost none is allocated to bringing rhetorical theory to bear on . . . persuasion, influence, identifications, and propaganda” (9). This misconception is perhaps a product of the authors’ thin engagement with contemporary journals in the field (including this one), many of which do precisely this and few of which are cited. The phrase “new rhetoric” in the book's title might suggest some engagement with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaïm Perelman, but their work is not discussed—a particularly surprising choice because Lacan's own essay “Metaphor of the Subject” (which is cited) was written in direct response to Perelman. This is in line with a greater emphasis on the influence of psychoanalysis on rhetoric, rather than the converse or cross-pollination. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric therefore repeats the “missed encounters” it identifies rather than benefiting from this “unending conversation.”Despite the decision not to deeply commit to the literature about the intersection of its two primary fields of interest, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric makes a number of contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The first four chapters of the book engage with Burke fairly extensively. Chapter 1 explores the resonances between Burke and Freud, while Chapter 2 focuses closely on the concepts of symbolic action and attitude. The equation of attitude with Lacan's objet petit a, the “hallucinatory motor of desire” (45), is particularly interesting as an approach to the perennial problem of the relation between rhetoric and desire. Chapter 3 deals with identification as a concept in Freud and Burke with special reference to Burke's “Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” perhaps a particularly timely work which can be appreciated differently through a more thorough exposition of Freud's conceptual influence on Burke. Chapter 4 applies Burke's thought to conspiracy theories, an area where others have already leveraged psychoanalysis to good effect.9The last three chapters are somewhat more theoretical and, while the thread of Burke's thought persists, they lean toward Freud and Lacan. Chapter 5, about the origins of Freud's free association, is primarily of historical interest (and could perhaps benefit from engaging work on the pre-Freudian influence of rhetoric in psychology). Chapter 6 engages listening from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Chapter 7 is less a Lacanian theory of rhetoric than an engagement with Lacan's own rhetoric and its implications for theory. It ends with a fine aphorism, borrowed from Simone Weil, about how the wall dividing rhetoric and psychoanalysis might also be the medium of communication between them.Taken as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a worthwhile exposition of its specific foci, even though many other potential symbioses are left unexplored in this short text. For scholars of rhetoric whose familiarity with psychoanalysis is limited, but for whom Kenneth Burke or the topics of each chapter are of interest, this book can serve as a valuable place to begin thinking about psychoanalysis's confluence with rhetoric. Those knowledgeable about psychoanalysis outside the rhetorical tradition will likely find it helpful as well, especially because its treatment of rhetoric is accessible to non-specialists and forgoes the opportunity to grind intradisciplinary theoretical axes. Rhetoricians more extensively versed in psychoanalysis, however, will find particular points of interest, but may be somewhat frustrated by the book's failure to intervene in any of the important conversations happening at an intersection that Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may seem to inaugurate, but in fact is simply compelled to repeat.

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

Abstract The study of the Vietnam War and American presidential discourse has followed a somewhat meandering path. The Vietnam discourse of Jimmy Carter remains the most poorly understood of the late Cold War presidents. Throughout the 1970s, Carter participated in, and at times led, the national debate over the federal government's responsibility to Vietnam veterans. He spoke of a debt of gratitude that the American people owed to the war's veterans. As president, parts of his domestic agenda prioritized Vietnam veterans, leading him to preside over commemorative events for the war's veterans on several occasions. During his time in elective office, he alternatingly defined the purpose of the war in Southeast Asia as preserving the American way of life, promoting democracy, or defending liberty and freedom. Carter practiced an ethics of remembering that sought to redeem the American soldier, to erase the divisiveness of the past, and to “delegitimize and marginalize anti-war opinions.”1 Despite the obvious importance of both his discourse and his actions, Carter's Vietnam War rhetoric has received very little attention.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part of the RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric, this volume brings together the insights of a diverse group of rhetorical scholars exploring the rhetorical dimensions of mathematics. There is no single perspective or approach on display as the reader is presented with studies of the rhetoric of mathematics as well as the use of rhetoric in mathematics and the rhetorical nature of mathematical language. These three prongs structure Edward Schiappa's foundational paper that explicitly informs the work of several contributors to the volume. In addition to these essentially theoretical explorations, the volume is rounded out by prescient applications that reinforce the topicality and importance of the subject matter. But any full review of the collection must begin with Schiappa's analyses.To the casual reader, no subjects could be more disconnected than rhetoric and mathematics. The language of demonstration and proofs measures an attitude of mind that values the apodictic and axiomatic while marginalizing, if not ignoring, the efforts of rhetoric. Chaim Perelman drew attention to this divide in his critique of the Cartesian ideal that detached the self-evident from the human sphere, wherein questions arise that mathematicians would consider foreign to their discipline.1 To consider numbers themselves as a source of evidence is part of what is at stake when mathematics is exposed as a human activity. Schiappa takes what Perelman abandoned and claims it as rhetorical territory. “In What Ways Shall We Describe Mathematics as Rhetorical?” answers the question in fertile ways (as subsequent papers show). The rhetorical turn of recent decades involves the rhetorical nature of mathematics on different fronts: “(1) the rhetoric of mathematics, understood as the persuasive argumentative use of mathematics; (2) rhetoric in mathematics, understood as the argumentative modes of persuasion found in written proofs and arguments throughout the history of mathematics; and (3) mathematical language as rhetorical, a sociolinguistic approach to the language of mathematics,” an approach supported by recent writings of Thomas Kuhn (33). In the first case, mathematics serves as evidence in an argument, increasing the persuasiveness of a claim. The second case refers to the argumentative and stylistic modes of persuasion found in proofs, a feature of the history of mathematics. The final case finds its motivation in the work of rhetoricians like Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke,2 for whom all symbol use is rhetorical including that of mathematics. Mathematics is a language like others and with its own reasoning patterns operating in the discourse community of mathematicians. Schiappa illustrates each of these rhetorical aspects of mathematics with examples and bolsters their importance with argument, including a detailed discussion of the work of Kuhn. This, before taking a particularly interesting turn into ethnomathematics and the differences in how mathematics is conceived and used across cultures.Four of the papers in the collection make explicit reference to Schiappa's account and draw part of their stimulus from his distinctions; and the other analyses can be read through the lens of one or more of his distinctions, whether the papers are historical in nature or deal with contemporary questions. In the opening paper, and beyond their Introduction, the book's editors, James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, open some of the relevant discussions by exploring relationships between rhetoric and mathematics. They reinforce their belief that the volume offers a timely and coordinated effort to explore the intersections of these two fields. In Schiappa's distinctions they find the appropriate routes into the subject matter. They trace the historical division between the fields, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, whose system of argument offered little overlap between rhetoric and mathematics, through to the uneven attention directed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (not so much, although the authors’ reading of quasi-logical arguments suggests something) and Burke (quite a bit, with the explicit inclusion of mathematics as a symbolic means of communication). This reinforces the importance of rhetoric in mathematics, and much of Wynn and Reyes’ closing analyses confirm this.Two papers pursue the themes of the volume into the field of economics. Catherine Chaput and Crystal Broch Colombini explore the persuasive role of mathematics at work in the metaphor of the invisible hand. And G. Mitchell Reyes provides a detailed investigation of the 2008 financial crisis through a case study of the mathematical formula known as the Li Gaussian copula. As Reyes writes: “Unraveling this copula reveals the constitutive rhetorical force of mathematical discourse—its capacity to invent, accelerate, and concentrate economic networks” (83). The story is long and far too complex to be detailed here. But the study rewards the reader with an understanding of just how traditional rhetorical modalities (like analogy and argument) connect to the rhetorical modalities of numeracy (like abstraction and commensurability) to generate something new (114).Likewise, Chaput and Colombini draw from the traditions of rhetoric in exploring the metaphor of the invisible hand. Their concept of particular focus is energeia, the power or force that activates potential. One of the theses of the analysis is that “the metaphor of the invisible hand regulates the energetic force of economic arguments” (62), and they track the metaphor accordingly, from the work of Adam Smith to that of John Maynard Keynes, where mathematics gains a more central place in economic discussion, and on to Milton Friedman's “positivist mathematical economics” (66). Through these and further analyses, the paper successfully supports the argument that capitalism's force (energeia) emerges in part from the historical developments of the mathematization of the invisible hand.The last paper of Part 2, by Andrew C. Jones and Nathan Crick, weaves together the mathematical reasoning of Charles Sanders Peirce and the detective fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, specifically the Dupin trilogy that includes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The discussion identifies similarities between Poe's forensic analyst and Peirce's mathematician, offering a further case of rhetoric in mathematics. Like Burke in the earlier paper, Peirce is a thinker who understands rhetoric as the effective communication of signs—although I would not want to be taken as suggesting similarities between Burke and Peirce beyond this—and this would apply to all signs, including the mathematical. Poe's detective Dupin further illustrates Peirce's method of abduction, and Jones and Crick take us through the steps involved, from hypothesis to confirmation (while also using the wrong turn of the real case behind “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” to show how abductive reasoning can fail).Part 3, on mathematical argument and rhetorical invention, begins with Joseph Little's adoption of Schiappa's taxonomy for his study of the Saturnian account of atomic spectra, the most technical paper in the collection. That said, the historical case study of Hantaro Nagaoka underlying the discussion is quite accessible. The investigation of atomic spectra begins with a puzzle involving different appearances under different conditions. Little addresses responses to this by looking at rhetoric in Nagaok's mathematics, specifically his use of an analogy between the behaviour of material in Saturn's rings and that of atoms in what is known as the Zeeman effect. Little then analyzes the rhetoric of Nagaoka's mathematics, showing that “a mathematical equation can function indexically, symbolically, and qualitatively in a given case without taking on a computational role (164). Finally, he completes the Schiappian analysis with an account of Nagaoka's mathematical language as rhetorical in the debate that ensued between Nagaoka and the mathematical physicist G.A. Schott.Jeanne Fahnestock's paper, “The New Mathematical Arts of Argument: Naturalists Images and Geometric Diagrams,” completes Part 3. The study takes its place among Fahnestock's meticulously wrought accounts of rhetorical thinking in the history of science.3 She plunges the reader immediately into a discussion of the depiction of scallops in Martin Lister's publications of 1695. Illustrated with original drawings from the account, the rhetorical importance of image reproduction combined with geometrical ways of seeing diagrammatically is shown to underlie arguing in sixteenth century natural philosophy to an extent “that is difficult to appreciate from a twenty-first century perspective that separates the mathematical and the verbal” (174). Fahnestock believes these features underlie arguing because, unlike today, grounding all disciplines (including mathematics) was dialectic in the form of a general art of argumentation. The dialectic in question is Philip Melanchthon's Erotemata dialectics, a work which Fahnestock has just translated into English (Fahnestock 2021). This is a dialectic in which mathematics plays a detailed role, and the paper proceeds to provide a history of this work that blends naturally into a deeper history of the argumentative use of diagrams. Her conclusions point to how, through geometrically controlled images. mathematical ways of viewing the natural world issued in today's “mathematically constructed world” (204).The final two essays comprise Part 4, and both deal with the role of mathematics in education. James Wynn's “Accommodating Young Women” explores some of the gender biases in the way mathematics is taught but more specifically provides a lengthy case study of the rhetorical devices used by TV star and math scholar Danica McKellar to turn middle school girls to the study of mathematics through her book Math Doesn't Suck. This involves an interesting application of epideictic rhetoric to a contemporary subject of concern, and the strategies used are both traditional and innovative. Essentially, McKellar strives to modify the image of mathematics, and Wynn's study of her attempts is both fascinating and instructive.The final paper in the collection, Michael Dreher's “Turning Principles of Action into Practice,” studies the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) rhetoric in reforming mathematics education. Two of Schiappa's categories come into play here: rhetoric of mathematics and in mathematics. Built on a historical account of philosophies of mathematics education, and incorporating several pertinent anecdotes, Dreher reveals the successes and failures of the NCTM's persuasive attempts to counter the idea that mathematical ability is inherent in only few and instead promote wide success in students’ mathematical achievement. It is a challenge that continues, and Dreher makes clear the difficulties still to be faced.This is, in sum, an eclectic set of papers gathered around a few common agreements and unified by a deep conviction of the importance of challenging any vestiges of the traditional belief that rhetoric and mathematics occupy different, even competing, spheres. The stand-out paper, testified to by the importance accorded it by many of the other studies in the book, is Schiappa's. One could say that it is worth the price of the book, but that would be unfair to the many other fine pieces of scholarship collected here.The observant reader will also have noted that much of the forgoing discussion refers to rhetoric and mathematics, while the title of the volume speaks of arguing. In fact, the attention to argumentation is pervasive, and this book takes its place among a recent appreciation of the role of mathematics in argumentation,4 while answering the kinds of dismissive critiques we once witnessed from skeptics like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,5 who attempted to maintain the rhetoric/mathematics gap by suggesting that those who crossed it (at least from one direction) were unknowledgeable interlopers. It was one of Schiappa's opening insights that “If we replace the word “rhetoric” with “argument” . . . we find considerable recent interest in “mathematical argumentation” as a social and pedagogical practice” (43). And, as I have noted, this is repeatedly corroborated in this highly recommended book.

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

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

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

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

Abstract Despite consensus that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election did not extend to actual hacking of voting technology, Russian efforts to intervene on behalf of the Trump campaign have been defined as “hacking” by elements of the liberal media. This definition is broadly accepted in liberal circles, and there is now a widespread misperception that Russia tampered with voting technology to alter the outcome of the election. In this essay, we trace the emergence of this definition of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and explain the factors that led to its acceptance, arguing that the debate over Russia’s “hacking” illustrates that definitional arguments may operate differently than scholars have previously conceived. Traditional studies of definition emphasize the role of political leaders in crafting salient definitions, adopting a top-down approach. We argue that definitions also emerge from the bottom up, moving from media sources toward institutional centers of power. Our findings both illustrate the dangers of efforts to define Russia’s influence campaign as “hacking” and extend previous scholarship on definitional argument.

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

Book Review| March 01 2019 Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric. Edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016; pp. vii + 304. $45.00 paper. Brittany Knutson Brittany Knutson University of Minnesota—Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (1): 164–167. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0164 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brittany Knutson; Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2019; 22 (1): 164–167. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0164 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Gridlock plagues modern policy deliberations in Congress. By analyzing the 2013 Senate debate over the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, this essay shows how distrust operates as a rhetorical stance that forecloses compromise and justifies corrosive legislative stalemates. Despite agreeing on most policy specifics, congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle constructed subversive, untrustworthy policy actors to legitimate their refusal to compromise on a final bill. Republicans denounced the Obama administration as flouters of immigration laws and uninterested in border security, while Democrats detailed a Republican “ploy” to cheat millions of undocumented immigrants out of a pathway to citizenship. These rhetorics of distrust created irreconcilable visions for how to implement immigration reform. The essay concludes by proposing that more dialogic forums among representatives and a politically realist outlook could help ameliorate rhetorics of distrust.

Abstract This essay examines the transvaginal ultrasound (TVU) debate that was ignited in the spring of 2012 by a Virginia law mandating the procedure as a prerequisite for first-trimester abortions. This debate represents a recent intensification of historical arguments grounded in how the abortion debate intersects with medical practice. By following the debate as it unfolded on pro-choice and pro-life blogs, this analysis uncovers three overarching topoi in the discourse mirrored on both sides: the medical necessity (or lack thereof) of the procedure; the importance of informed consent; and comparisons to rape. Using Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, this essay argues that across all three topoi, both pro-choice and pro-life activists’ rhetoric relied heavily upon implicit assumptions of the superiority and necessity of medical science. The TVU debate demonstrates an argumentation strategy that both strips the issue of its political, legal, moral, and personal contexts and rhetorically positions pro-choice groups disadvantageously by obfuscating any discussion of women’s rights.

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.

Abstract This essay situates Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message within the context of previous discourse on African colonization to illuminate the significance of the text as public policy rhetoric. I argue that Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation and colonization in the Second Annual Message was the apotheosis of colonization advocacy. Lincoln’s argumentation navigated the complicated context to make a final, but failed, case for a compromise between North and South before the Final Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

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

Book Review| June 01 2018 The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. By James L. Kastely. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. xvii + 260. $35.00 cloth. John J. Jasso John J. Jasso Pennsylvania State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (2): 383–386. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0383 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John J. Jasso; The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2018; 21 (2): 383–386. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0383 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. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Treatises on rhetoric since antiquity have illustrated how to amplify passages but give scant attention to strategies for when or why. Dealing mostly with isolated passages, they ignore the effect of amplification on amplitude, the proportions of units that give a text its overall shape. This article considers the relationship between length and importance, sets criteria for a method of mapping amplitude, and applies the method to the Gettysburg addresses of Abraham Lincoln and Edward Everett. Though their shapes differ, each address balances crucial sections against each other. In Lincoln’s case, a more symmetrical shape emerged by accident as he delivered the speech. Then, when editing the official version, he decided to preserve the new shape. Everett’s address is shown to have better proportions than critics assume. Mapping amplitude sheds light on authors’ strategies for dealing with their kairos.

Abstract This article situates the entrenchment of an American commitment to home ownership at a critical moment in U.S. history—the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 (NHA). An examination of the introduction, deliberation, and promotion of the legislation reveals how policymakers concretized the value and civic import of residential property. The analysis shows how policymakers, housing advocates, and NHA skeptics collectively framed borrowing for home ownership to be a progressive, secure, and patriotic investment. The NHA discourse illustrates the power of policy rhetoric to define American experiences and prescribe American values.

Abstract In 1961, the American Medical Association (AMA) funded a persuasive campaign called Operation Coffeecup. The campaign, which was designed to defeat Medicare, featured a speech by a young Ronald Reagan outlining the dangers of “socialized medicine.” The speech was recorded on a long-play record and distributed to the Women’s Auxiliary of the AMA, a group primarily composed of the wives of doctors who were instructed to write seemingly spontaneous letters to Congress detailing their opposition to the program. This essay investigates Operation Coffeecup mainly through a rhetorical analysis of Reagan’s speech. I argue that “socialized medicine” drew upon a problematic articulation of American culture that privileges the individual at the expense of the larger community. I conclude by discussing the thread of individualism that has persisted in the United States from the pre-Depression era mythos of rugged individualism to neoliberal discourses that shape debates about health policy today.

Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

Abstract This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.

Abstract Scholars have repeatedly argued that Harry Truman’s decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights would ultimately influence civil rights in the United States for many years afterward. However, scholars have been less clear in explaining what led Truman to act on civil rights in the first place. One important factor in the Truman administration’s creation of the committee that is often mentioned but almost never given as much attention as it deserves is the 1946 Georgia Lynching. Through a reception study of the articles, congressional debates, editorials, and speeches that responded to the murders, this essay argues that the murders of four African Americans in a small, rural town were transformed into a national focusing event because of how several key interpretive decisions emerged from the basic facts of the lynching in conjunction with larger cultural concerns. This analysis both highlights how the mass lynching came to have cultural significance and argues for the importance of rhetorical scholarship that engages the role of focusing events in both public debate and policy creation.

Book Review| December 01 2015 Cries of Crisis: Rethinking the Healthcare Debate Cries of Crisis: Rethinking the Healthcare Debate. By Robert B. Hackey. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2012; pp. 208. $34.95 cloth. Nathan Stormer Nathan Stormer University of Maine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 769–771. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0769 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Stormer; Cries of Crisis: Rethinking the Healthcare Debate. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 769–771. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0769 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.

Other| June 01 2015 Rhetorical Studies and the Gun Debate: A Public Policy Perspective J. Michael Hogan; J. Michael Hogan J. Michael Hogan is Liberal Arts Research Professor and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Craig Rood Craig Rood Craig Rood is a Ph.D. student in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (2): 359–372. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0359 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Michael Hogan, Craig Rood; Rhetorical Studies and the Gun Debate: A Public Policy Perspective. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2015; 18 (2): 359–372. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0359 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 Issue Section: Forum: Responses to Collins on the Second Amendment You do not currently have access to this content.