Rhetoric & Public Affairs
10 articlesJune 2024
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Abstract
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.
December 2023
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Abstract
Rhetorical critics have often explored the dualism present in identification. Namely, that identification is intimately linked to division. Coming together involves some undoing of the previous identity; the creation of new material and symbolic connections. While identification has been theorized in the past by Burke, Black, and Ratcliffe, today's scholars of national identity and identification include Khan, Engels, Mercieca, and Stuckey (plus, so many more!). Lee and Atchison enter this conversation on the side of separation and division. We are Not One People: Succession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776 by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison provides a necessary challenge to theories of identification by underscoring the rhetorical work of division within U.S. politics. We are Not One People is a fascinating interrogation of secession as such practices have appeared diachronically across historical contexts from the nation's founding to the present. This book offers readers an astute understanding of the rhetorical tactics that anticipate, desire, and/or negotiate separatism.The structure of We are Not One People is far-reaching in scope and discussion. This is a comparative volume, a long durée historical analysis that offers global insights both within and across rhetorical discourses and practices of secession. In a prologue along with seven chapters, Lee and Atchison walk us through practices of secession and union across U.S. history. The volume begins its analysis chapters with libertarians who “opted out,” or created a separate community, followed by a chapter on Confederate secessionists. Later chapters include discussions of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, lesbian separatist communities of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as Mormon exodus during the early-to-mid 1800s. Insights gleaned from this volume demonstrate the paradoxical relationships between secession and union; separation and division. We are Not One People is a wonderful contribution to how political communication scholars understand political division and identification in and through the lens of rhetoric.One of the most prominent features of this volume is that Lee and Atchison offer rich histories of separatist rhetorics within each content chapter. For instance, the chapter on lesbian separatism incorporates work on engineered communities of the period, as well as broad-ranging historical discourses that may have inspired or guided actors in the 1970s and 1980s. The range of discourses supplied in this volume offers readers an accessible chart of how efforts to build communities are predicated on removal of existing communities. For instance, chapter two, on libertarian opt out, is a sweeping history of libertarian thought as such philosophy applies to community building. Yet, Lee and Atchison do not allow libertarian thought to be presented without a necessary corrective: that when libertarian idealism is challenged on principle, attempts to “opt out” reveal an unstated desire to oppress and/or enslave minoritized populations. Lee and Atchison both explain the rhetorical tactics that libertarians use to demonstrate their resistance to authority, while also elaborating on an exceptionalism founded on brutality. Lee and Atchison continue that line of reasoning to demonstrate how contemporary island homes engineered by Silicon Valley libertarian ideologues are efforts to ignore federal law and power, to escape the destruction wrought by climate change. The work of resisting authority within the confines of the state is fully actualized as an extra-juridical, rhetorical maneuver, an ongoing set of escapes rather than a singular action.Rich histories of secession are connected tightly to the political and rhetorical maneuvers of division and identification. We have long been a nation of separatism, imagined as a necessary condition for distinctions between groups and the basis of personhood and citizenship. Even the Declaration of Independence was understood as a paradoxical document—with beliefs that espouse both a rejection of taxation and state authority, as well as an embrace of the nation to come. The dualism, even dialectic, relationship between separation and union, is at the heart of this volume. Lee and Atchison weave the nature of this dualistic relationship throughout the text, highlighting how the desire for separation co-emerges alongside the desire to connect with others. Carefully engaging each of the case studies, this volume neither praises nor blames separatists but rather analyzes the rhetorical maneuvers of separatist discourses within the political motivations of the times. In this way, Lee and Atchison study both the contextual reasons that motivated secession and the larger political contexts that suggest how exit plans were predicated on exceptional exit. The exceptional exit is to create a selective utopia after decimating shared resources and habitats. This book offers a powerful way of engaging with rhetorical tactics of separation and exceptionalism.This volume presents useful critical approaches for scholars to follow. For instance, one way to extend the arguments presented in this book is to consider how the relationships between union and secession may also be constitutive of certain historical erasures. That is, there are moments in this book, where—if Lee and Atchison had an infinite number of pages (unlikely)—they might have had time to extend their argument that rhetorical devotion to utopia is based in dystopia. In chapter six, on the numerous exoduses of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (CLDS), Lee and Atchison analyze records from the Council of Fifty from the 1840s. In these documents, the Mormon church debated where the community might find safe harbor after genocide in Missouri, murder in Illinois, and wars in Utah. In We are Not One People these debates are focused on theocracy, with Mormon leaders, or Saints, arguing that the Kingdom of God needed separation from the United States of America as an enemy nation. Undoubtedly, the Mormon leaders of the Council of Fifty desired the Kingdom of God on earth as—Lee and Atchison demonstrate—the CLDS, like many other religious communities in the nineteenth century, believed that Jesus would eminently return. The Saints needed to be ready, spiritually but also tactically if they were to live. Lee and Atchison provide exceptional history and rhetorical analysis of these documents.Yet, the Council of Fifty documents are also a vision of utopia that does not simply imagine a future but also manufactures a CLDS history that erases and devalues broader church histories. Lee and Atchison write that Council of Fifty documents show a church built on Joseph Smith and his legacy. Smith, often worshipped as a utopian visionary, eventually became corrupt and demanded the community capitulate to his whims. Lee and Atchison highlight that Smith would, in his final decades, encourage church members to submit their wives and children to him. Smith wielded sweeping power over the church. Smith's unwavering authority derives from a discovery he made on September 22, 1827. On that day, Joseph Smith was said to have arrived on Hill Cumorah where he received a set of golden plates, telling him of Jesus's arrival in the Americas and the inspiration for a new church. In all of church lore, that discovery is announced as Joseph's alone. Such a singular position was fully realized by 1844, when the Council was convened. Yet, Smith was not alone in his discovery. His future bride, Emma Hale, was often with him. She relished in his discovery and helped Smith translate the Book of Mormon. Emma was also an early Saint. Yet, Emma's place in church history is a hotly contested topic. The official history created by the Council of Fifty elides a much more foundational violence. In this history, the Saints claim all the glory, and their children and wives are written out of this narrative. It is this erasure of others that allows Smith, Young, and others to create a utopian vision for CLDS.The utopian/dystopian dualism demonstrates the wealth of ways We are Not One People can inform rhetorical methods. Using the theocratic principles enunciated by the Council of Fifty allows Lee and Atchison to explicate a double movement: First, there is the erasure of much of the content of upon which Mormon belief is based, namely that Joseph Smith had been guided by the angel Maroni, who was described as Indigenous, and told him about the golden plates. Maroni is the one who tells Smith that Jesus had appeared in the Americas. In response to these revelations, Smith expended huge efforts to unsuccessfully minister to First Nations, who immediately recognized that Smith wanted to “save them” as they were “red sons of Israel.” By 1857, Mormon poisonings and murders of native peoples demonstrated the nastiness of the Saints exceptionalism—that if Indigenous peoples did not capitulate to the one true faith, violence was justified.Second, as a function of the Council's theocratic principles, women were erased from their part in church history and made explicitly subservient within the structures of the church. Emma Smith was present at many of Joseph's significant revelations—or later shared in those discoveries—but the power of women to receive the eucharist, to be a Saint, is fully denied in church structure. Saints are men, and women are allowed access to the Priesthood of belief only through their fathers, their husbands, or their Elders. It is the submission of women—to marry whomever she is told, to bare as many children as possible, and to do whatever her Priesthood holder commands—that allows the church to grow throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mormon adoption of women's lack of access to God—to a literal divorce of women from their heavenly father—is how Saints create their theocratic future. For the Saints to march into Zion, they demand full authority over those seen as lesser members of the community and against the peoples who do not adopt Maroni's vision of the new Israel.This brief example is meant to show the dexterity of We are Not One People. Its method's portability enables this volume to be exceptionally useful. We are Not One People is accessible for seniors, graduate students, faculty, and readers of popular press political communication scholarship. Readers will discover that the concepts in this book and the careful nuances supplied by the authors allow for extension and commentary. Indeed, some of the topics are so rich that, on their own, they merit full elaboration and present significant opportunities for further research. We are Not One People should be assigned reading for scholars invested in political communication, polarization, identity politics, U.S. politics, and national identity. Lee and Atchison are in conversation with the work of Paul Elliott Johnson, Mary Stuckey, Kevin Musgrave, E. Cram, Joshua Trey Barnett, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Christian Lundberg, and so many others. Lee and Atchison generate deep and wide understandings of national identity as already imbricated in division and secession. As founders dream of the utopian future, Lee and Atchison take care to show how idealistic visions and initiatives are necessarily based on divisive, often violent, actions. Here is where the method of rhetorical history illuminates the intricacies of secessionist motivations. Whereas Confederate secessionists were motivated by greed and avarice, Marcus Garvey's motivations were based on survival and the need for Black futures. Lee and Atchison draw attention to these distinctions and their rhetorical and political functions. Being able to read secession as a dualistic rhetorical action is what enables such flexibility. Identification and division remain a central paradox that actors must nevertheless negotiate.
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Abstract
Rhetoric and psychoanalysis have a long history of entanglement. As Patrick Mahoney wrote, it would be “hard to exaggerate the historical and intrinsic significance of rhetoric for psychoanalysis”; Aristotle's Rhetoric could even be said to constitute “the first major psychological treatise in the West.”1 Diego Enrique Londoño, drawing on Juan Rigoli, has documented the influence of rhetoric on eighteenth and nineteenth century alienism,2 while Michael Billig, Risto Fried, and others have sought these links in Freud and later theorists.3 Although Jacques Lacan gets most of the credit, two pioneering women beat him to the punch in systematically introducing rhetorical concepts (especially metaphor): Gertrude Buck and Ella Freeman Sharpe.4 Rhetoricians, in turn, have enriched their craft through psychoanalytic thinking—first with Sigmund Freud (most notably in Kenneth Burke), then Carl Jung,5 with a great deal of later work inspired by Lacan,6 although authors like Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott also make occasional appearances.7Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is the latest effort to find resonances between rhetoric and psychoanalysis to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. The book is quite short and by necessity focuses on a few key thinkers—Burke represents rhetoric, while Freud and Lacan epitomize the psychoanalytic tradition. Although Adleman and Vanderwees find some connections that are sure to be of interest to psychoanalytically inclined rhetoricians, they unfortunately do so while almost entirely omitting decades of significant work forging these links. Todd McGowan's blurb declaring the book “a miracle” for describing connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis that “now seem clear and self-evident, but only because [Adleman and Vanderwees] have written this pathbreaking work” is sustainable only if one discounts the work cited above, plus many dozens of articles and books published by graduate students and junior rhetorical scholars. Lundberg's Lacan in Public, which undertakes a much more comprehensive study of the connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis, is cited only to support a minor claim about Quintilian; if one were to ask a rhetorician working with psychoanalysis today to recommend a single volume on the topic, Lacan in Public might very well be the choice, whatever the rhetorician's opinion of the book. While it is always easy to lodge criticisms based on the omission of one's idiosyncratic favorites, the absences in Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may set limits on the execution of its ambition. Rather than a continuation of scholarship on its overall topic, this book is a commentary on Lacan, Burke, and Freud narrowly, which does not diminish its contributions to that end but does make plain a missed opportunity to accomplish a larger goal.8Adleman and Vanderwees begin with a brief account of the “missed encounters” of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. Their central premise is that the two disciplines, “when closely scrutinized, often appear, uncannily, as each other's doppelgangers” due to their inquiries into human motives and their “perennial struggles with legitimacy” (1). This “peripheral status” as “third-class” denizens of “the republic of knowledge” is a major theme in the book (27). The authors claim that rhetoric disproportionately focuses attention on “pragmatic compositional concerns” while “almost none is allocated to bringing rhetorical theory to bear on . . . persuasion, influence, identifications, and propaganda” (9). This misconception is perhaps a product of the authors’ thin engagement with contemporary journals in the field (including this one), many of which do precisely this and few of which are cited. The phrase “new rhetoric” in the book's title might suggest some engagement with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaïm Perelman, but their work is not discussed—a particularly surprising choice because Lacan's own essay “Metaphor of the Subject” (which is cited) was written in direct response to Perelman. This is in line with a greater emphasis on the influence of psychoanalysis on rhetoric, rather than the converse or cross-pollination. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric therefore repeats the “missed encounters” it identifies rather than benefiting from this “unending conversation.”Despite the decision not to deeply commit to the literature about the intersection of its two primary fields of interest, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric makes a number of contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The first four chapters of the book engage with Burke fairly extensively. Chapter 1 explores the resonances between Burke and Freud, while Chapter 2 focuses closely on the concepts of symbolic action and attitude. The equation of attitude with Lacan's objet petit a, the “hallucinatory motor of desire” (45), is particularly interesting as an approach to the perennial problem of the relation between rhetoric and desire. Chapter 3 deals with identification as a concept in Freud and Burke with special reference to Burke's “Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” perhaps a particularly timely work which can be appreciated differently through a more thorough exposition of Freud's conceptual influence on Burke. Chapter 4 applies Burke's thought to conspiracy theories, an area where others have already leveraged psychoanalysis to good effect.9The last three chapters are somewhat more theoretical and, while the thread of Burke's thought persists, they lean toward Freud and Lacan. Chapter 5, about the origins of Freud's free association, is primarily of historical interest (and could perhaps benefit from engaging work on the pre-Freudian influence of rhetoric in psychology). Chapter 6 engages listening from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Chapter 7 is less a Lacanian theory of rhetoric than an engagement with Lacan's own rhetoric and its implications for theory. It ends with a fine aphorism, borrowed from Simone Weil, about how the wall dividing rhetoric and psychoanalysis might also be the medium of communication between them.Taken as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a worthwhile exposition of its specific foci, even though many other potential symbioses are left unexplored in this short text. For scholars of rhetoric whose familiarity with psychoanalysis is limited, but for whom Kenneth Burke or the topics of each chapter are of interest, this book can serve as a valuable place to begin thinking about psychoanalysis's confluence with rhetoric. Those knowledgeable about psychoanalysis outside the rhetorical tradition will likely find it helpful as well, especially because its treatment of rhetoric is accessible to non-specialists and forgoes the opportunity to grind intradisciplinary theoretical axes. Rhetoricians more extensively versed in psychoanalysis, however, will find particular points of interest, but may be somewhat frustrated by the book's failure to intervene in any of the important conversations happening at an intersection that Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may seem to inaugurate, but in fact is simply compelled to repeat.
September 2023
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Abstract
This edited collection offers an array of essays forwarding the rhetorical work constituting the political activity of and concerning Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although scholars have certainly interrogated Latin American experiences in the United States and across the Western Hemisphere (some of whom have contributed to this volume), I can think of no other collection in rhetorical studies that supplies the kind of birds-eye-view of Latin America and its political landscape(s) as a whole. The edited volume is unabashedly transnational in its case studies, although not each individual case study is transnationally oriented, and the authors invited by the editors claim homes across the Western Hemisphere (e.g., the United States, Columbia, Argentina). In short, this book embodies and takes care to fulfill its commitment to presenting “rhetorics of democracy in the Americas.”Although it is customary to provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters in a book review, the chapter summaries provided by the editors in the collection's Introduction are superbly written and need not be replicated here. I would encourage those interested in their summaries to access the “Introduction,” which is made available through the publisher's website.1 The book follows, flexibly, a conventional Part I “theory” and Part II “case study” structure that readers can navigate easily and according to their own needs. Each chapter stands alone quite well. Even so, in what follows I retrace the chapters and articulate what I think are the major questions the collection and each essay provokes. For, while this book is commendable for initiating a conversation, it would be a mistake to treat this volume as more than an entry into the exploration of “rhetoric of democracy in the Americas.” Thus, I provide a bridge between the entry point that I think the collection offers and further lines of inquiry that I believe it spurs.One of the collection's strengths, as I have stated, lies in its focus on the “Americas.” Given this focus, readers wishing to find how the notion of an “America” informs rhetorical or democratic theory must reflect on how they might extend the work provided by these chapters. For example, editors claim a “constitutive” notion of rhetoric over an “instrumental” view in the Introduction (15), but I find that most case studies adopt the language of “instrumental” rhetoric in their examinations (e.g., chapter six's discussion of “strategies”). Though readers might not care too much about whether one adopts an instrumental or constitutive view of rhetoric, I point out this feature to highlight that the collection's presumption of this distinction evinces its reliance upon conventional rhetorical theory. That most case studies interrogate “rhetoric” as a “tool” or “device” to be leveraged to some end underscores how these case studies recontextualize traditional rhetorical theory within Latin American spaces rather than spurring retheorizations of rhetorical inquiry. Similar presumptions about “democracy” and its supposed “ideal” also become manifest in each essay when trying to define democracy. The “Introduction” certainly provides some guidance by claiming democracy as “among the vital concepts in rhetorical studies” (5), and as a governmental form offering citizens a “promise” of “good things” (5–6). The collection's case studies, nonetheless, do not furnish much about what “democracy” entails or how democracy in Latin America differs from, in content and form, that in the United States or anywhere else. Democracy is presumed as a context for each study and an ideal in which rhetoric flourishes.Such presumptions, though not misguided or wrong, highlight not a problem with the collection as much as they illuminate opportunities for other scholars to take up. Christa Olson's chapter, as I read it, articulates a notion of the telluric in contrast to the traditional topos to encourage readers to consider new material stakes in rhetorical discourse—a materialism based in “ideas” of Latin America. Though gesturing toward the operationalization of the telluric in her beautifully written essay, Olson's proposal demonstrates how we might interrupt the conventional reliance on the “commonplace” for studying rhetoric in América. Cortez's essay does something similar to Olson in that he encourages a departure from a familiar concept—subalternity. Though offering the most philosophically minded take in the collection, his take-down of the “decolonial imaginary” underscores how studies involving Latin America pose a complex and inescapable problematic, namely, how to conceptualize Latin America without reproducing the very colonial structure rendering it, in the words of Walter Mignolo and other decolonial scholars, a fiction. While I personally remain skeptical that “rhetoric” is capable of resolving the issues Cortez raises, given the imperial stakes “rhetoric” qua art implicates, Cortez's argument that the terms we use to characterize and study “Latin America” cannot be presumed to give it a voice spurs scholars to reflect on the classifications used to identify non-dominant rhetorics.Although Part I begins with theoretical explorations, its remaining chapters take on a more practical tone. Chapters 3–5 address a different subject related to but not limited to U.S. relationships with Latin America(ns). De los Santos's chapter tackles the rhetorical contributions of migrants, a work that he is curiously committed to distance from prior work on citizenship despite suturing his study to “ancient Greece” (84). I find De los Santos's work to be quite similar to, for example, Josue David Cisneros's for its emphasis on a discursively constructed yet politically imagined citizenship. Nevertheless, perhaps the most surprising theme—or not, depending on the reader—was the prevalence of former President Donald Trump. I say surprising because, while President Donald Trump has had quite an influence on recent rhetorical studies, Trump's relationship to Latin America is not any more appalling, xenophobic, sly, or even pretentious than past U.S. presidents. I am not denying that this former President might have altered the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere during his administration, but I think that the ways in which chapters center Trump's influence suggest that his actions are an aberration. Still, while these scholars view more dissonance than coherence in U.S.-Latin American relations, I think that the essays foster inquiry along its opposing line, namely, answering the question of how consistently presidencies have negotiated and enforced a power imbalance between the United States and Latin America.The chapters encourage not necessarily a complete reassessment of “migrants,” “immigration,” or even “American Exceptionalism” as much as they compel revisitations of what we might call “familiar” rhetorics to impart a peculiarity to otherwise recognizable themes. That peculiarity is important, for, recalling Olson and Cortez, the ways in which we critically interrogate “rhetoric” in and through Latin America cannot be presumed to simply reinscribe what we already know about “rhetoric” or “democracy.” Indeed, as Butterworth underscores, “American Exceptionalism” takes a particular form when Cuba is involved, and it takes on a peculiar form when it involves relations with Latin America. Viewed thus, each of the chapters in Part 1 encourages scholars to come back to familiar rhetorics to “question the narratives of democracy” that we take for granted and presume to be universally operative.Part II takes up the theme of “Problematizing and Reconstructing Democracy in Latin America,” with each chapter proffering not only a unique perspective on politics in Latin America but a discrete take on “rhetorical” study within politically resonant moments. Privileging as it does not only Latin American regions but Latin American scholars, this section showcases what scholarship done in and through Latin America might look like for future scholars across the Western Hemisphere. More concretely, these essays magnify senses of rhetoric and rhetorical study that scholars interested in prioritizing Latin America might assume in their own work. Focused on a variety of politically rich subjects such as corruption (chapter 6), rhetorical agency (chapter 7), the religious right (chapter 8), presidential rhetoric (chapters 9 and 10), and, finally, crisis (chapter 11), these case studies diversify the subjects with which rhetoricians can—and should—grapple. At the same time, they underscore how these subjects might be theorized in and through Latin America. This is not to say that the subjects are exclusive to Latin America or that certain themes need to be relegated to Latin America. Rather, if I consider how many studies have been written on “corruption” in the United States, I might have to consider alternative vocabularies (e.g., racism, bureaucracy, morality, etc.) to expand my inquiry, since there are simply too few studies of U.S. political corruption outside of Bruce Gronbeck's 1978 essay—an essay nearly fifty years old! Studying rhetoric in Latin America is, these essays suggest, productive of the kinds of questions that rhetoric scholars across the Americas must consider. For, what happens in Latin America cannot be presumed to be exclusive to Latin America.Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas challenges scholars to take on two distinct but related tasks. First, the collection urges us (U.S.-based scholars) to consider how we might employ familiar tools to study rhetorics in Latin America. No longer can or should we view rhetoric in Latin America as a uniquely Latin American operation in need of new tools. Even though calls from Olson and De los Santos to consider Latin America in “Américan” rhetoric creep toward a decade old (!), this collection encourages us not to provide comprehensive work but responsible work in interrogating relationships between politics and rhetoric in “the Americas.” U.S.-based scholars (of which I am one) must begin to view themselves as Américan scholars.Second, if U.S.-based scholars assume the identity of an “Américan scholar,” this collection encourages us to deploy and harness Latin American histories to theorize “rhetoric” and “democratic” politics across the Americas—including the United States. In what sense must we alter our rhetorical theories and vocabularies in light of the way persuasive communication is enacted and performed in Latin American spaces? How might we conceptualize rhetoric's relationship to “democracy” in light of the ways in which Latin American rhetorics engage with the United States? With other Latin American nations? With their own histories and traditions? Alejandra Vitale's essay (chapter 10), I suggest, demonstrates this concretely by revisiting how our conception of ēthos might be transformed when considering the rhetorical work accomplished through an Argentinian presidential farewell address. As readers will see, Vitale is no stranger to U.S.-based rhetorical scholarship, nor a stranger to Argentinian scholarship and culture. In the essay, Vitale demonstrates how conventional understandings of ēthos, a rhetorical concept that U.S.-based scholars might cringe at for its neo-Aristotelian status, might be disrupted and expanded by prioritizing a uniquely Latin American political context.The collection edited by Drs. Angel, Butterworth, and Gómez shows paths of inquiry that I think hold promise for graduate students looking to integrate more transnational approaches to their study or those wishing to study politics outside of U.S. borders. It is an exhibition in how to overcome theoretical challenges to the study of Latin American rhetorics, as well as how to problematize conventional understandings of rhetoric in light of having studied and taken seriously Latin American politics. Moreover, I think that The Pennsylvania State University Press deserves credit for expanding the repertoire of Latinx rhetorical inquiries with both the 24th volume and this 25th volume in the “Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation” series. That a couple of this press's latest volumes have focused on scholarship related to Latinx politics highlights how now is the time to strike the anvil and continue to pursue such a rich scholarly endeavor.
June 2023
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Abstract
In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples’ experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as “an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation.”1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, “Reconciliation as a way of Seeing,” Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, “Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle,” Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors’ memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, “Conceal,” “Desire,” “Grateful,” “Attempt and Remain,” and “Purchase, Wealthy” (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, “Images of Contact,” Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of “everydayness” in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of “looking past,” Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might “challenge how images have been assigned meaning” (58). This act of resignification is a kind of “sifting” through collective memory for “colonial debris” which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of “contact” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the “before and after,” depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the “before” pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is “The Long Goodbye.” Deploying the “civic skill” of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person “I” throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A “rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation,” this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, “Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter,” Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the “colonial debris” of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a “palimpsest, layered and textured by memory” (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and “unsettle” colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or “milieux de memoire” (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of “dancing with ghosts” to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as “a beating heart of episodes,” physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.
March 2022
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Abstract
John Oddo's book argues that propaganda should be defined as an intertextual process. According to this perspective, a message succeeds as propaganda when people recontextualize it over and over, keeping that message alive across many texts. Of course, some messages achieve greater success as propaganda than others, and Oddo is interested in the linguistic and contextual factors that make certain messages “comparatively more worthy of recontextualization” (25). His focus is American propaganda justifying the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In fact, Oddo's case studies explore a wide range of wartime materials, including print and television news, presidential speeches and political advertisements, and tweets by ordinary people. As such, his book will interest scholars studying war rhetoric as well as those interested in mediated discourse, multimodal analysis, political discourse, and circulation. In addition, this book illustrates how the inclusion of discourse analytic methods can work productively for rhetoricians interested in public address.In the introduction, Oddo states four goals. He seeks, first, to build upon insights of critical discourse analysis to develop an explicit definition of propaganda; second, to suggest a set of intertextual methods for studying propaganda; third, to draw attention to both contextual and sociolinguistic factors that give rise to propaganda; and finally, to challenge readers to consider the consequences of propaganda in a democratic society. Oddo argues that “one essential characteristic of successful propaganda is that it propagates” (3). In fact, his book's premise is that those who study propaganda should examine not only the content of messages but also the “rhetorical and sociolinguistic details” that reveal “how those messages spread, how they become mobile, durable, and repeatable” with the help of an institutional and ideological infrastructure (6, 3).Part 1 defines propaganda as an “intertextual process” in which manipulative and antidemocratic discourse is “recontextualized on a mass scale” (37). First, Oddo argues that an intertextual perspective can better account for both deliberate top–down propaganda and unwitting propaganda among ordinary people, preserving the notion that propaganda is harmful without presupposing that every propagandist seeks a selfish advantage. Building on theories of intertextuality, this section calls attention to the following question: “how do propagandists create discourse, whether strategically or unintentionally, that is likely to be recontextualized?” (22). Next, Oddo suggests that another key feature of propaganda is manipulation, which often involves positive self-representation and negative other-representation, emotional coercion, misleading representations and arguments, and manipulation of dialogic space (27–31). Finally, Oddo argues that propaganda should be defined by its antidemocratic societal consequences rather than intentions of the communicator. In other words, “it is propaganda if it consolidates the power of one group while harming the interests of subordinate groups” (34).Part 2 presents the first case study as it discusses how political propagandists create messages that are likely to be recontextualized by reporters. Oddo studies the iterations of the “incubator story,” a fabricated story in 1990 that accused Iraqi forces of removing Kuwaiti infants from their incubators and leaving them to die. He shows how the incubator story was staged as a credible narrative of personal experience. Moreover, Oddo shows that the narrative “could only succeed with the aid of journalists,” whose subsequent recontextualizations of the incubator story rendered it dominant and influential (71). Through a close analysis of linguistic discourse, multimodal semiotics, and intertextual relations between a public event and subsequent news reports, part 2 elucidates how powerful elites can induce a favorable uptake of their messages, inducing others to circulate them.Part 3 presents Oddo's second case study, which examines how TV news analysts before the 2003 Iraq War were presented as neutral experts, even though they held vested interests. Oddo argues that because news analysts are simultaneously journalists and political insiders, they, on the one hand, provide viewers with rare perspectives and penetrating insights, but, on the other, may circulate propaganda they hear from political sources (106). Oddo suggests that political propagandists exploit the dual identity of news analysts, offering them symbolic or material rewards and effectively compensating those who repeat their desired meanings (103). Meanwhile, news networks render the analysts credible and disinterested, highlighting their authority through advertising, on-screen titles, spoken introductions, background scenery, and communicative roles. Part 3 shows how this constructed authority together with incentivization from deliberate propagandists constitutes a form of manipulation, one that ultimately suppresses alternative views and enables mass recontextualization of propaganda.Part 4 presents Oddo's third case study and examines widespread publicity of the slogan “Support Our Troops.” Oddo argues that “Support Our Troops” has gained momentum for two reasons. First, it has “formal properties that make it more amenable to repetition—and, thus, more capable of traveling” (156). Second, it is surrounded by historical and cultural significance, reflecting larger wartime narratives in which the reasons for war are averted and dissent against war is demonized (156). Regarding the slogan's formal properties, Oddo shows how phonological, lexico-grammatical, and semantic factors contribute to the slogan's memorability, repeatability, and positive identification with a candidate, policy, or brand (156). Regarding cultural factors, Oddo examines the slogan as having ideographical functions by tracing its history in the Vietnam era and its continued use in both vertical campaigns (i.e., from the leaders at the top to the masses) and horizontal ones (i.e., spread among ordinary people on the same level). Oddo's discussion of the slogan sheds light on our understanding of similar slogans by encouraging attention to “the artful design of the slogan itself” and “the web of cultural meaning that shapes how people use and understand it” (175). Part 4 might interest scholars studying ideographs because it illustrates how a micro-analysis can facilitate analyses of phrases with ideological functions.Overall, the book has valuable pedagogical and theoretical implications. It provides an up-to-date discussion of propaganda studies. Its case studies are relatively independent and can be assigned separately. The author does not assume prior knowledge in his subject matter or methodology, which contributes to its accessibility. For these reasons, it can be used in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate classrooms concerning rhetorical analysis of political discourse or the combination of rhetorical and critical discourse analysis methods. For rhetoric scholars, this book contributes an intertextual perspective to their tool kit. This perspective can be applied beyond the specific cases of this book, calling attention to the transfer and transformation of messages across texts both in domestic contexts and international ones where power dynamics may have different manifestations. Overall, this book exemplifies and furthers Oddo's endeavors to show how rhetorical scholars can draw on sociolinguistics, multimodality, and micro-intertextual comparison to conduct granular analyses of political discourse that are critical of the political status quo and grounded in textual evidence.
June 2017
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Abstract
Book Review| June 01 2017 Old Rhetoric and New Media Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. By Douglas Eyman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 162. $75.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. By John Durham Peters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 409. $30.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. By Damien Smith Pfister. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. ix + 272. $69.95 cloth.Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Edited by Jim Rodolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. v + 330. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. Katie P. Bruner; Katie P. Bruner Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Paul R. McKean; Paul R. McKean Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ned O’Gorman; Ned O’Gorman Ned O’Gorman is Associate Professor of Communication at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Matthew C. Pitchford; Matthew C. Pitchford Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nikki R. Weickum Nikki R. Weickum Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 339–356. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Katie P. Bruner, Paul R. McKean, Ned O’Gorman, Matthew C. Pitchford, Nikki R. Weickum; Old Rhetoric and New Media. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 339–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 2016
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Abstract
Research Article| March 01 2016 Rights Talk and Political Dispositions Laura J. Collins Laura J. Collins Laura J. Collins is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. She holds a J.D. from the Emory University School of Law. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (1): 83–90. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0083 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Laura J. Collins; Rights Talk and Political Dispositions. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2016; 19 (1): 83–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0083 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
December 2014
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Abstract
Research Article| December 01 2014 Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings Thomas A. Hollihan; Thomas A. Hollihan Thomas A. Hollihan is Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francesca Marie Smith Francesca Marie Smith Francesca Marie Smith is a doctoral candidate and Provost's Fellow at the USC Annenberg School. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (4): 577–584. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0577 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas A. Hollihan, Francesca Marie Smith; Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2014; 17 (4): 577–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0577 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 2014
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Abstract
In the mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Michael Leff organized a series of informal summer reading groups for rhetoric graduate students. During one of those summers, at Leff’s suggestion, the groupmet weekly to enjoy some Leinekugel’s beer and discuss the founding documents of our discipline—the key articles published in the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking from 1915 to 1923. Leff always emphasized the importance of understanding the institutional and pedagogical history of the communication field, and the exercise of reading those founding documents was, for me, formative. Thus, I appreciate enormously Professor Sproule’s effort to discover and illuminate a vital chapter in the “communication discipline’s own creation story.” His essay explores the multifaceted origins of the “quintessential modern speech book” that emerged in the early twentieth century from an eclectic theoretical and pedagogical ancestry stretching back over the previous two centuries. To Professor Sproule, the evolution of the modern public speaking text is revealing of a lively disciplinary fermentation and stands as the chief manifestation of both a new paradigm of speech pedagogy, and of a “growing confidence” in the youthful speech discipline. In the texts that emerged from this evolution, and especially in JamesWinans’s “widely influential” Public Speaking (1915), Sproule witnesses the materialization of the discipline’s rejection of its elocutionary heritage and its embrace of a mode of public address “that was plain, practical, ideafocused, extemporaneous, conversationally direct, audience-adapted, outline-prepared, and library-researched.”