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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

When the Medium Was the Mission is an account of the ways in which religious discourse and network infrastructure were entangled in popular imagination of nineteenth century U.S. Americans. To trace the “surprisingly religious origin” (1) of communications networks, the author analyzes the case of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable, a project that exemplifies the utopian hopes undergirding infrastructural developments in the antebellum period. Supp-Montgomerie makes clear from the outset that, as an instance of infrastructural development, the Atlantic cable was an abject failure. It rarely worked and broke down completely after a few short weeks (5). Nonetheless, the “successful” completion of the line, which ran from Newfoundland to Ireland, was heralded at the time by enthusiastic observers as an event of world-historical significance (3–5). Supp-Montgomerie's account is an attempt to understand the roots of public enthusiasm for an occurrence that, on its surface, appears to be no more than a failed attempt at laying an undersea cable. She argues that the true impact of the 1858 telegraph was far reaching and continues to shape our understanding of networks. U.S. Americans, specifically white Protestant Christians, saw the electromagnetic telegraph as a means to connect and thereby “civilize” the world through technology. The work of building telegraphic networks was simultaneously the work of God and the work of the nation since, in the popular imaginary of the time, the two were aligned. According to Supp-Montgomerie, the topoi around which this religious public's hopes and dreams converged—“connection, speed, unity and immediacy” (209)—remain central to how we discuss networks today.At the heart of this work is a theoretical investigation into the ways in which a religious rhetoric of connectivity (i.e., body to soul, believer to God, church to community) preceded the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph and helped stabilize its symbolic place in the social imaginary (80). The telegraph became the metaphoric embodiment of an overarching worldview concerning the United States’ place in the global community. It was rhetorically framed as the herald of a unified Christian world conjoined by a fast, reliable, friction-free network—a dream that persists to this day (albeit in less overtly religious terms) (11). As the author explains, “Religious actors put telegraph technology in place around the world, religious language described this new mode of global communication, religious imaginaries covered what the worldwide telegraph network would become, and religious forms of communication indelibly marked the idiomatic conventions of networks” (1). According to Supp-Montgomerie, tracing the indelible mark such religious rhetoric left on the social imaginary is crucial for understanding the underlying teleological drive toward ever-increasing connectivity. Namely, this framework erases other important aspects of how networks actually function, including through disconnection (21–23). As she explains, “network disconnections always appear problematic not because they disrupt networks (networks expect and even rely on them) but because they disrupt the religiously empowered myth that networks connect” (3). This persistent “disconnect” between how networks actually function and how they are imagined to work did not arise through sheer chance.Chapter one focuses on the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire. While it may seem odd to begin an inquiry into the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable in Istanbul, Supp-Montgomerie explains that “U.S. religious activity abroad helped form and strengthen emerging—and increasingly protestant—imaginaries of networks at home” (38, emphasis in original). Protestant missionaries saw themselves as “primary agents of the circulation of [U.S. American] ‘civilization,’” (36) and as such their efforts included a healthy dose of technological evangelism. For them, the telegraph was more than a communicative technology, it was “marvelous material evidence of God's work on earth” (37) that could “awe others into a particularly Christian reverence” (37). In this religious framework, telegraphic networks were seen as a vital “partner” (37) in the spread of Christianity. Missionaries treated the Ottoman's embrace of telegraphic networks as proof that “any possibility of Christian conversion required first a step of familiarity with European and U.S. technologies” (44–45). In reality, the Ottoman telegraphic network was both faulty and fractured, and building it helped fuel local resistance against imperial rule (59).Chapter two focuses on the disconnect between public enthusiasm for the Atlantic cable and its technical failure. Supp-Montgomerie argues that the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph as the telegraph was not the result of its technological superiority or ubiquity, as is popularly imagined. The electromagnetic telegraph was too expensive for the general public (105) and largely unreliable as a communicative medium (115–16). Furthermore, in 1858 the electromagnetic telegraph was simply one of several forms of telegraphy then occupying a place in public discourse. Among these were the “grapevine telegraph” used by Black Americans during slavery (98) and the “optical telegraph,” which often supplemented the less-reliable electromagnetic telegraph (114). By the century's end, however, these other forms of telegraphy had been largely forgotten, swept aside by public enthusiasm for electromagnetic networks. Unlike the other telegraphs outlined above, the electromagnetic telegraph fueled the fantasy of “a divinely ordained human destiny” to unify the world through a combination of U.S. Protestantism and technological know-how (93). By examining electromagnetic telegraphy alongside other contemporary telegraphs, Supp-Montgomerie “complicates the naturalization of a number of characteristics that we now think of as inherent affordances of networks: that they are national, global, politically neutral, technological, connective, and even fully functional” (83). What we learn instead is that networks are as much affective as technological.In chapter three, Supp-Montgomerie turns her attention to the utopian movements of the mid-nineteenth century as a way of further demonstrating how the religious fervor of the period shaped public reactions to infrastructural developments. Rather than attempting to analyze the entire movement, Supp-Montgomerie uses the Oneida Community as a case study in the overlap between “moral and technological perfection[ism]” (128). Utopian communities like Oneida, she argues, may appear the products of fringe enthusiasts but actually serve as a fitting synecdoche for the utopian underpinnings of an emerging global imaginary (127). These experimental communities “organized themselves around the ambitious assurance that they could make a perfect world in the present” (128), thus sharing in the broader “popular imagination of a world united and pacified by electric communication technology” (129). By taking a “highly local” approach to her analysis, the author demonstrates that even the most insular communities internalized the prevailing “religious logic of . . . a world united by communication technology” (135). The Oneida Community members understood the Atlantic telegraph as “a compelling metaphor for their own utopian endeavor, as a sign of the bridging of this world with God's, and as a primary means for the unification of humanity through communication technology” (136). As such, “the Oneida Community represents a broader and emphatically mainstream U.S. movement that saw an ideal reality become accessible in unprecedented ways” (132). In the social imaginary, religion and technology played equal and mutually dependent roles in realizing a unified globe. By negotiating the disconnect between the world they envisioned and the limits of the technology before them, religiously motivated actors like the Oneidans “cemented connection into technological and social forms as a given, no matter the reality of their promise” (160).In chapter four, the author focuses on the “simple signaling” of the Atlantic telegraph (167). As mentioned above, in the rare instances when the Atlantic cable worked as intended, it required slow, painstaking labor to make sense of the garbled messages sent across its expanse (170–72). The overwhelming majority of transmissions consisted of little more than a steady stream of electrical impulses meant to signal that the line had not broken. While these signals were meaningless in and of themselves, “this meaningless telegraphic language bore profoundly meaningful effects” (172) for a public transfixed by the “grand imaginary of global connection” (167). By focusing on this steady stream of content-free impulses, Supp-Montgomerie makes the claim that it was the “infrastructural form” of the electromagnetic telegraph itself that was imagined as meaningful rather than the messages it often failed to transmit (174). Because of the affective, religious meaning attached to the very idea of connectivity, a cable that was “primarily a medium for the failure of communication” (171) was made to stand in as proof of the inevitability, or even immanence, of a global, Christian network. In other words, “the telegraph relocated meaning from content to technology” (167) so that the development of network infrastructure became “both the message and the mission” of its champions (174).When the Medium Was the Mission challenges many assumptions about how we understand the rhetorical relationship between infrastructure and imagination. In a brief epilogue, Supp-Montgomerie explains that her aim in this work was to “sketch out a possible characterization” of “the relationship between the original and contemporary networks” that will “invite further inquiry into this particular genealogy” (204). As she continues, “both the telegraph and the internet are networks hailed through imaginaries that deny some of the most basic elements of their functioning” (204). While our network imaginary pictures a world of ever-increasing connectivity, the spaces between connections are what make networks possible at all. Networks do not only (or even primarily) connect; they also exclude, and the latter is just as important to their overall functioning. It is only when networks “fail”—for example, when we encounter an unexpected and undesired disconnection (Why won't Netflix load? It was working five minutes ago!)—that we encounter this constitutive feature of the form itself. To the author, disconnection should be central to how we understand networks, since “failure is part of how networks work” (206). The refusal to attend to disconnection is problematic since networks are imaginaries as much (or more) than they are infrastructure. This governs how infrastructure serves political ends. When the imaginary of the infrastructure is one of unmitigated, utopian goodness, it can lead to “technological and social practices that feed the omnivorous appetite of connection as such: every element that falls outside the purview of the network must be integrated into the broader structure . . . effectively excluding from recognizable existence anything that breaks from network logic” (206). By attending to the religious origins of this imaginary, we can better understand that the “defining elements of ‘the digital age’ . . . are not contemporary technological affordances but the effects of a habitual set of cultural practices” (209).

Abstract This essay explores coalition-building as a confluence of space and embodiment. In particular, the author studies the relationship between U.S. military Veterans and Lakota protestors during the 2016 and 2017 anti-Pipeline Demonstrations at Standing Rock. A critical analysis of the case study brings to light a set of workable practices that involve situating physical bodies together in space, locating the situated-self relative to other people and the world, and performing an enlarged understanding of the self as always potentially coalitional. Together, these practices contribute to forming not only a functional social alliance but also a transformative coalitional consciousness.

Abstract The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion, and interruption. These material strategies use the senses as vehicles to communicate multiple arguments simultaneously, direct museumgoers’ attention, and amplify lived experiences as valid ways of knowing and evaluating the science of human origins. I conclude by noting the role of sensory rhetorical strategies in other scientific controversies and encouraging additional scholarship into how sensory evidence offers convincing challenges to scientific knowledge.

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

AbstractUsing the murder of Magdiel Sanchez as a case study, we argue that rhetoric’s future must embrace practices of situated listening. While much of the field’s work has focused on speakers and practices of invention, we argue that a more just study of public deliberation must position this approach in conversation with an acknowledgment of situated reception. We follow scholars of color, feminist theorists, and disability advocates who have long argued for the practices of ethical listening, adding that the imperative to listen extends beyond the listening ear, accounting for the totality of the body and its environmental and contextual positions. By reaching beyond the demands of race to consider the intersecting axis of (dis)ability, we push the fields of rhetoric, sound studies, and critical/cultural communication studies to consider embodiment as a whole condition of rhetorical reception.

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.