Abstract This essay turns to an early 1920s controversy over a proposed Lost Cause Mammy monument to examine how Black activists crafted their collective commemorative authority over Mammy and her memory. It uses 15 letters and editorials published across several Black press publications to argue activists deployed a complex series of dissociations to displace dominant memory of Mammy and craft their commemorative authority. Activists split the singular, powerful memory of Mammy reified by Lost Cause mythology at several points to uncover a critical alternative, a vision of her in accord with Black freedom. This essay extends existing scholarship on critical memory by inflecting it with an emphasis on authority and revealing how traditionally subaltern stories of the past can gain public influence. Additionally, this case offers lessons for modern activists seeking to discredit renewed white supremacist histories.

Abstract To describe what rhetorical leadership looks like in Critical Mexican Studies, my area of study, I analyze Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta's “Speech Commemorating the 65th Anniversary of the PRI at the Monument to the Revolution,” known colloquially as the “I See a Mexico” speech. One of the fundamental texts of Mexico's 1994, “Yo Veo un México” is regarded as the speech that led to Colosio's assassination—an event that set off a series of misfortunes Mexico continues to correct. By employing the lens of metanoia, the temporal missed opportunity that leads to transformation through regret, I first describe the theoretical relationship between metanoia and pessimism. Then, I describe the sociopolitical conditions that demanded a speech that communicated a break in political tradition. Finally, I unpack the rhetorical strategies that, in aiming to create a vision of progress, shed light on previously obscure realities. Colosio asserts himself as the only leader with the proper vision to lead Mexico through the arrival of neoliberalism by evoking pessimistic images that resonated with public concerns. His speech catapulted him to Mexico's presidency while simultaneously threatening his life. Colosio offered a series of fleeting opportunities Mexico must capitalize on to enter a new stage in democratic possibility. I conclude by discussing how Colosio's haunting rhetoric continues to inform presidential campaigns.

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

Abstract Queer rhetorical leadership describes performances of leadership with a queer disposition. As an idea, it exceeds the doing of traditional models of rhetorical leadership by queer rhetors for queer audiences on matters of queer concerns. Rather, queer rhetorical leadership subverts, inverts, and reconceptualizes many of the most common assumptions about how to do “good” leadership in order to lead others in the construction of more queer worlds. This essay explores the notion of queer rhetorical leadership by investigating the discourses of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton in their influential text, The Ethical Slut (1997). In particular, the essay notes how the rhetors use radical revisioning, transformational vulgarities, and cultivating comfort in irresolution to lead readers toward a queerer world via the practice of polyamory.

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

Abstract The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates victims of lynching in a three-part experience featuring 800 coffin-size monuments that appear to be suspended in the air. While providing a space for Black grieving, the memorial's design also creates an experience that invites white Americans to feel-with Black grief-yet-hope. This felt experience may produce discomfort for white visitors, as well as white acknowledgement of generations of white supremacist violence against Black Americans. Such an experience is possible because the memorial generates rhetorical quiet or the creative, artful, and public expression of interiority—an attempt to share that which is deeply felt but which often eludes efforts to be adequately communicated through traditional rhetorical/verbal forms.

Abstract At the 2017 Women's March, Shepard Fairey's We The People posters generated a great deal of excitement for their patriotic depiction of a diverse “people.” But the posters’ success exists in tension with the broader critiques of the Women's March. This essay argues that our current understanding of constitutive rhetoric is ill-equipped to explain this tension. Using the ideas of Danielle Allen and feminist scholars Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Karma Chávez, and Alyssa A. Samek, I perform several readings of the posters to explicate the fractures within our theories of constitutive rhetoric. I demonstrate that our current understanding of “the people” through oneness is hampered by a unity/difference binary that limits our ability to understand heterogenous collectives. Instead, I argue that an approach of wholeness better captures the complex collective life of contemporary coalitions and better attunes scholars to the intricate ways “the people” come into being. I argue that shifting the key terms of constitutive rhetoric to solidarity, vision, and health can help critics develop a more nuanced understanding of diverse coalitions. Overall, this essay offers scholars an opportunity to rethink our theories of “the people” to better account for the emerging strategies, needs, and values of contemporary collectives.

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

Abstract Antilynching activists in the United States have agitated to establish criminal civil rights violations for lynching for more than a century. Ida B. Wells, a renowned antilynching activist, tapped into and expanded upon existing transnational advocacy networks to mainstream antilynching rhetorics across borders in the late nineteenth century. This essay analyzes Wells's dispatches to the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean during her 1894 transatlantic antilynching tour. I argue that Wells provides an example of how rhetors can mainstream social justice issues through transnational advocacy networks by refuting and recirculating key arguments, which in turn amplifies them to exert pressure on potential change agents. As activists work to stem modern-day violence that persists with frightening similarities to the lynching violence of the 1890s, Wells's strategy of amplification provides further insight into transnational rhetorical movement and efforts to mainstream social justice issues across borders.

Abstract This essay contends that the red MAGA hat in the modern conservative movement plays off Donald Trump's populist construction of his supporters as victims by creating opportunities for the performance of what we call “rehearsed victimhood.” As an enactment of vulnerability that allows individuals in historically powerful positions to claim marginalized status by manifesting material evidence of their subjugation, we argue that rehearsed victimhood relies on weaponized polysemy to bait critics, the cooptation of civil rights rhetoric, and acts of humiliation and violent self-sacrifice. We illustrate the performance of rehearsed victimhood through a close reading of media coverage of numerous incidents where Trump supporters claimed discrimination after being attacked, fired, or ridiculed for wearing a MAGA hat.

Abstract This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist ritual among many others, and its capacity to induce affective investment from consuming publics, just as surely as the killer himself, is a function of what I am calling sadistic form. To clarify this argument, the essay reads serial killer Ted Bundy's many crimes as ritualistic enactments of sadistic form, as well as the varied responses during his 1989 execution. In so doing, I illustrate how different rituals function to obscure or amplify the sadism to which they give expression.

Abstract On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, demanding the head of Vice-President Mike Pence while challenging the results of a fair presidential election. Amid the shock, US journalists—finding few words to describe the severity of the moment—dusted off the old term: “banana republic.” Banana republics are countries whose economy depends on the export of a finite natural resource, like bananas. By design, the ruling elites of banana republics work alongside foreign, multinational corporations to benefit from the republic's human labor. Banana republics are typically governed by a military dictator appointed by a foreign power and elected through illegitimate elections. Notably, dictators ascend to power through military and/or populist violence, like coups d’état and magnicide. Among the reckonings that US Americans encountered the days following the riots was the idea that their country had been relegated beside those so-called “banana republics.” Indeed, the public display of violence brought about by a populist insurrection indicated a failure of the highest rank. In this essay, I ask: “What are the implications of treating violence seriously as a rhetorical event?” I suggest that referring to the United States as a “banana republic” due to populist violence against sacrosanct, democratic institutions requires that US Americans open themselves to the possibility of unexceptionalism, a recognition that—like a medicine—few are willing to stomach. I offer the idea that Donald Trump is the first Latin American president of the United States, and, in turn, that the United States has opened itself to a vulnerability whose damage is unknowable. To do so, I revisit two works by Jacques Derrida: Autoimmunity (2003), an interview where he describes the paradox of post-9/11 counterterrorist violence as autoimmunity, or, how organisms attack themselves in a quasi-suicidal fashion; and Plato's Pharmacy (1968), where he demonstrates an approach to unveiling the unseen ideological traces that haunt particular words. I ask: what is the unseen, terroristic force concealed by the claim that the United States is a banana republic? I explore the Capitol riots as a new “major event” (a televised moment playing on loop and accompanied by specific phrases), where a new type of terrorist uses state-sanctioned freedoms to inflict violence upon itself. I then draw from Chilean poets to provide scholars a lesson on the role of violence in the forming of national identity.

Abstract This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on “The Rhetoric of Violence.” In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.

Abstract This essay examines the cybernetic rhetoric of Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a cybernetician and prominent Mexican intellectual. Published in a journal reaffirming Mexico's political image in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, his essay offered a counter to one of the government's rationales for the violence enacted against the movimiento estudiantil at Tlatelolco—the influence of el extranjero. Rosenblueth's essay evinced a mediating path between complete disavowal of Mexico's statist tendencies and support for the Mexican state in post-Tlatelolco Mexico. Yet, in invoking cybernetics as a rhetoric for public intervention in this moment of crisis, I argue that Rosenblueth's use of cybernetics both empowered his proposals calling for an adjustment to perceptions of el extranjero and supported the survival of a strong Mexican state enacting violence against it. I conclude from my reading of Rosenblueth's essay that the political possibilities of cybernetic rhetoric lie not only on the cybernetician's ideological commitments or political context(s) but by a plasticity constitutive of cybernetics.

Abstract Donald Trump's tweets on writing, whether his own or the print media's, typically employ an extreme form of rhetoric involving the manipulation of meaning and construction of self-serving arguments. The practice of close reading suggests that these tweets often display several types of rhetorical operation, which distort the message through the amalgamation, expansion, contraction, and reversal of meaning to create expressions like “the Fake News.” These polysemous expressions are then combined to form word groups, all centered on the self but each designed to meet a particular narcissistic need, from self-promotion and self-proclaimed victory to self-defense and self-casting as the Messiah. Trump's tweets often take the form of a triangular configuration, composed of the writer to proclaim, an adversary to be conquered, and a witness to validate the victory. By putting at least two of the three actors into play within its reduced space, the tweet becomes a miniature psychodrama—scripted, cast, and staged by the narcissist for an audience of kindred spirit.

Abstract When side-by-side photographs of the 2009 and 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration crowds circulated after President Trump's inauguration, few doubted what they saw: the crowd in 2017 was significantly smaller than it had been eight years earlier. Whereas popular discourse around the photo obsessed over size of the crowds, I argue that differences in contrast, color, and clarity suggest a different narrative than the logic of quantity: Trump will return an orderly, white national body, cleansed of Obama's unruly, sepia swarm. This essay re-reads a key moment of recent U.S. visual politics, turning what came to be read as either a joke or a preview of the “death of facts” as something more sinister: a visual harbinger of Trump's white supremacist program.

Abstract Russian disinformation activities imitate divisive U.S. political discourse within a polarized social media ecosystem. As part of a multipronged response, U.S. citizens have been urged to increase their personal vigilance and to identify inauthentic messages, hence flagging foreign-made disinformation by studying its content. However, by applying Taylor's concept of “imitation (in)security” to a set of Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) Facebook and Instagram advertisements, this article explains why content-centered approaches to combatting disinformation need to be reimagined. Building upon imitation (in)security, we propose that the strength of the IRA disinformation campaign was not its ability to foist falsehoods upon unsuspecting Americans, but, rather, its uncanny imitation of prevalent themes, images, and arguments within American civic life. Our analysis of IRA-generated advertisements targeting U.S. military veterans demonstrates how IRA “trolls” were imitating American communication patterns to amplify existing positions within a deluge of messages marked by polysemy. Our analysis suggests readers should be less concerned by such Russian-made imitations than was suggested in much of the breathless 2016 post-election coverage, for the traction of such disinformation hinges on domestic crises and injustices that long predate Russian interference. Pointing to foreign-made social media content stokes a sense of threat and crisis—the essence of national insecurity and a main objective of the IRA's efforts—yet our actual security weaknesses are homemade.

Abstract This essay performs a critical rhetorical analysis of out-of-court texts pertaining to Naruto v. Slater, colloquially known as the “Monkey Selfie Lawsuit.” By veering from a legal positivist perspective on law and turning toward theories of the public screen, it argues that while People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) formally lost its case on appeal, it successfully litigated their case in the court of public opinion. It further offers the concept of the “litigious event”—a staged lawsuit designed for mass media dissemination—to explain my perspective. By latching onto the already-viral monkey selfies at the center of the copyright dispute, PETA took advantage of the public screen by bringing a private, logocentric civil suit into a public, image-based digital sphere. Increased coverage of the case allowed PETA's legal team to harness the power of digital media to disseminate important arguments about legal rights for animals. Naruto v. Slater functioned as a trial for media, as a strategic lawsuit for public participation—in other words, as a strategically sound and rhetorically powerful litigious event.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

Abstract In this conversation series, we discuss some of the enduring and evolving interests that the subfield of visual rhetoric provokes for us. We begin with how we found visual rhetoric; questions of disciplinarity and methodology; issues of archive and field; concerns about the objects and scenes for visual rhetoric; and conclude with a focus on the future, core and evolving concepts, and pedagogy.

Abstract We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs’ future should center public-facing scholarship in rhetorical studies. We begin by chronicling some of the work colleagues are doing to bridge expert and lay publics: podcasts, popular and trade press interviews, social media content development and management, and activist engagements. Centering public-facing scholarship creates several notable shifts: (1) it changes the “so what?” for traditional scholarship by inviting scholars to think about audiences outside of journal readership; (2) it opens space for different stylistic conventions in scholarly writing; and (3) it indicates that nonexpert audiences are valuable as readers. We note the considerable barriers to entry to public scholarship including gatekeeping, framing public scholarship for tenure, and training. We contend that Rhetoric & Public Affairs could lead other journals through an updated definition of impact that takes into account contemporary modes of circulation and sharing, should accept pieces written for nonexpert readers in rhetoric, and should consider, if possible, making available for public reading one scholarly article every month or every quarter.

Abstract The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

Abstract This essay considers civil rights mass meetings as rhetorical events that operated with doubled purpose. Surveying three 1960s civil rights scenes, the study reveals how meetings provided spaces to recharge and regroup at the same time that they functioned as sites for countermovement engagement. Centering attention on this fluid movement among purposes offers insights into strategies activists devised for double-voicing. For the speakers and meetings analyzed here, metonymy, parrhesia, and religious reframing provided rhetors with modes for exploiting outsiders’ presence at these events while continuing to use the meeting for their own ends.

Abstract During the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Will Rogers described the party’s deliberation on Saturday as “the day when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced of any day in the world’s history.” The Democrats had been debating over whether to officially condemn the Ku Klux Klan in the party platform. William Jennings Bryan ended his own address offering white supremacist support with an all-too-common appeal for the party to simply “return to Jesus” rather than condemn white supremacy. Among the flurry of religious rhetoric that week, one voice surprised the delegates. Just before Bryan, one son of a Confederate officer and former mayor of the Klan stronghold, Athens, Georgia, spoke. He looked small. His voice cracked. But when he spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK, Madison Square Garden erupted with both hisses and cheers. That day Andrew Cobb Erwin gave us a model of how to resist within a politically charged religious climate.

AbstractThis essay analyzes General Orders No. 100, a U.S. Civil War document considered the fırst modern codifıcation of the rules of war. Recent scholarship praises the humanitarian nature of the legal code, especially as it concerns the emancipation of slaves. Without rejecting these features, I argue that the code marks a key shift in the legal framing of war. The author, Francis Lieber, uses new spatial and temporal boundaries to forge a sprawling and timeless fıeld of battle while amplifying the moral mandate of war to grant legitimacy to numerous acts of harsh violence. The only safeguard to Lieber’s broad mandate for military force is a vague notion of self-restraint that I label “humane nationalism.” Given the enormous influence of the Lieber Code, its rhetoric marks a powerful antecedent to how nations conduct warfare and legitimize what we now call “total war.”

Abstract Opioid addiction and overdose are widely recognized as a contemporary “crisis” across the United States. To address rapidly increasing mortality rates related to this substance use epidemic, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office announced in January 2018 that it would encourage the development of supervised injection sites or “Comprehensive User Engagement Sites” within city limits. Official communications cited select moments from the region’s past to frame these sites as urgent while constituting a supportive, unified public. Through remediating disidentification, a mode of rhetorical contestation and reformulation, local community members used an alternate historical framing to resist dominant ideology and revise the terms of the related public discourse. By further developing the concept of rhetorical disidentification, this essay demonstrates how the deployment of historical analogy in response to proposed public health interventions can enable the public recognition and potential address of systemic racial inequities.

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

Research Article| December 01 2018 Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers: The Newman Legacy Carol Winkler Carol Winkler Carol Winkler is Professor of Communication Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 683–694. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0683 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Carol Winkler; Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers: The Newman Legacy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 683–694. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0683 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| September 01 2018 The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. By Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016; pp. xi + 344. $35.00 cloth. Laurie E. Gries Laurie E. Gries University of Colorado, Boulder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (3): 539–542. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0539 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Laurie E. Gries; The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2018; 21 (3): 539–542. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0539 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

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

Book Review| March 01 2018 The New Science of Communication: Reconsidering McLuhan’s Message for Our Modern Moment The New Science of Communication: Reconsidering McLuhan’s Message for Our Modern Moment. By Anthony M. Wachs. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015; pp. 1–222. $25.00 Paper. Corey Anton Corey Anton Grand Valley State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 193–195. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0193 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Corey Anton; The New Science of Communication: Reconsidering McLuhan’s Message for Our Modern Moment. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 193–195. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0193 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: BOOK REVIEW You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract On November 18, 1999, Texas A&M University (TAMU) experienced profound tragedy when the famed Aggie Bonfire collapsed, killing 12 students and injuring 27 others. This essay examines the rhetorical dynamics of the TAMU Bonfire Memorial and explores how it navigates the tension created when a constitutive symbol is implicated in a moment of tragedy. Specifically, we use this case to explore how memorials help shape perceptions of victim agency in commemorative form. As we argue, the memorial taps into resonant modes of public reasoning—including temporal metaphors, Christian theology, and campus tradition—to imply the tragic outcome of the 1999 collapse had cause beyond human or institutional control. Our analysis of the Bonfire Memorial illustrates the importance of commemorative agency and, in particular, how eliding victim agency can limit epideictic encounters that might foster a sense of present and future engagement on unreconciled issues.

AbstractIn 2010, LeBron James, “The Chosen One,” humiliated Northeast Ohio by announcing on nationwide television that he was leaving the Cavaliers to play for Miami. James announced his return to Cleveland four years later through an open letter that set off euphoria in the region. This essay offers a postsecular framework to explain: (1) how James’s messianic image established a context in which his departure, in tandem with the way he announced his decision, made James a “sinner” in the eyes of Cleveland fans, and (2) how his open letter adapted the parable of the Prodigal Son to depict him as the son of Northeast Ohio who had made mistakes, rather than sinned and, simultaneously, as the wise father who was forgiving of others. James portrayed his departure as a necessary step in gaining maturity, yet—much like the Prodigal Son—admitted to a revelation about his relationship with Northeast Ohio.

Review Article| March 01 2018 Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. By Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015; pp. xiii + 240. $50.00 cloth.Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action. By Thomas W. Benson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; pp. viii + 214. $29.95 paper.Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. By Laurie E. Gries. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015; pp. xxiii +311. $27.95 paper. Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 157–174. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Scott Jenkins; Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 157–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract In this project, I argue that J. Edgar Hoover’s style of political realism should be studied by critics because it long preceded that of President Harry S. Truman. The style belonged to a stockpile of anti-Communist imagery that helped to shape how the Truman Doctrine speech was drafted and how audiences interpreted its meanings in more local domestic politics. When Truman finally announced that the Soviet Union had challenged international protocol, I argue that he confirmed the vision that his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director and other detractors had developed throughout the New Deal to discredit reformers who challenged issues of race, labor, and police technique. In this way, anti-Communist containment rhetoric limited the president’s ability to control the domestic security and economic agendas. The stockpile of anti-Communist discourse belonged to, I also argue, a relative of political realism—literary realism and its spinoff, literary naturalism. My final argument is that the FBI director refurbished key tropes in the stockpile, which helped Truman’s congressional opponents invoke Hoover’s authority within the executive branch and thereby displace the president’s credibility as commander in chief. Combined, Hoover and his allies in Congress and elsewhere used rhetorical realism to communicate a deterministic philosophy about human nature through a diffuse mythic narrative, coordinated between Congress, Hollywood, the press, and official FBI discourse.

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

Abstract The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States Navy has dominated the area, but that hegemony is now in question as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes more assertive as a rising power. In efforts to justify their clashing claims over the region, the United States and the PRC have launched campaigns against each other, producing a rhetorical crisis that may foreshadow war. To try to make sense of the rhetoric driving this crisis, the first part of this essay unpacks some of the colorful history of the South China Sea—its legacy of rogues, pirates, opium wars, and so on—to argue that it has always been less of a governed and ordered place and more of a transitory and heterodox space crisscrossed by overlapping intentions, designs, and dreams. From this perspective, any nation’s claims to sovereignty are fictions that aspire to be constitutive, albeit by erasing the constitutive claims of others. The second section of the essay then addresses the PRC’s use of “traumatized nationalism” to advocate for its rights in the South China Sea, while the third section tackles the United States’ use of “belligerent humanitarianism” to justify its actions. The essay concludes with an appeal for a postnational version of shared governance, called for in the name of defending the global commons from the militarized encroachments of nation-states.

Abstract This essay examines President Barack Obama’s March 28, 2011 address on the war in Libya to theorize a shift in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which violence is insulated from critique through the numbing of public sensation. In contrast to traditional persuasive appeals aimed at securing collective participation and approval for war, Obama’s oratory is characteristic of “light war,” a mode of conflict that flows more freely by placing few demands on thought, feeling, and attention. I argue that Obama’s rhetoric limits the potential for audiences to sense the material consequences of war through a set of kairotic justifications in which violence is considered “just” in the dual sense that it just ended, and that it is just war, or merely a banal and quotidian version of conflict. After unpacking the anesthetizing features of Obama’s discourse, I conclude by addressing the prospects of resistance given the compressed interval for public thought and feeling to interrupt violent practices.

Abstract This essay argues against the prevailing historical conception that George Strock’s graphic photograph of three lifeless Marines—published by Life magazine on September 20, 1943—was the definitive point when domestic U.S. propaganda began to portray increasingly grisly images of dead American soldiers. After considering how the visual culture of the home front made the photo’s publication a dubious prospect for the government, I examine a series of predecessor images that arguably helped construct a rhetorical space in which such graphic depictions could gradually gain public acceptance and that, ultimately, ushered in a transformation of the home front’s visual culture.

Abstract This essay investigates the authenticity of Geraldine Hoff Doyle’s widely accepted status as the model for the World War II–era “We Can Do It!” poster. After considering the rhetorical nature of the so-called woozle effect, the analysis endeavors to counter this particular woozle by plotting a reverse narrative. Taking the form of a quest that moves backward through a metaphorical forest of visual rhetoric, the essay initially traces the sources of Doyle’s tale into the recent past and, subsequently, into the original visual context. At length, it debunks Doyle’s claim while identifying Naomi Parker as a previously unknown figure in the controversy surrounding the poster.

Abstract This article examines how rhetoric about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier, Fala, contributed to the president’s public image. I argue that Fala’s presence further enhanced FDR’s more personable presidency by highlighting the president’s warmth and humanity. To demonstrate this claim, I perform a close textual analysis of archival evidence from the FDR Presidential Library and two Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shorts. Presidential pets thus provide presidents with important sources for fashioning their public image.

Abstract The U.S. news media’s heavy circulation of images of dead soldiers returning home from Vietnam in “body bags” is frequently offered as an explanation for the state of popular political disaffection with war commonly called “Vietnam Syndrome.” We argue that the rhetoric of Vietnam Syndrome misdiagnoses dissent against war as a photo-pathogenic affective disorder, a visually transmitted disease of the popular political mind. In their respective attempts to stave off the syndrome, Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush enacted visual quarantines of deceased U.S. soldiers—first in 1991 and again in 2003. Our analysis suggests that President Obama’s lifting of the ban in 2009 represented not only a more precise grasp of U.S. war history but also a cynical recognition of the limited need for popular assent in executing the war on terror.

Abstract In the decades after the Civil War, countless Americans saw the bloody conflict as some kind of message from God. These perceptions created a problem for the preeminent Republican orator of the day, Robert Ingersoll, who was also a fierce opponent of revealed religion. In speaking for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Ingersoll managed to interact successfully with religiously structured memories of the war while maintaining his reputation as the Great Agnostic. This essay explores how he was able to do so. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s work on the rhetoric of religion, I argue that Ingersoll interacted with Civil War memory by redirecting supernatural terms to natural and sociopolitical contexts. In so doing he imbued political culture with a sacred character that allowed believers, nonbelievers, and people of various persuasions to participate in memories of the war. In the end, Ingersoll’s oratory modeled a “pluralistic civil religion,” which employs religious language for civic ends but eschews references to the divine as a way of accommodating a range of beliefs.

Abstract In 1953 a Hollywood-based U.S. Air Force film studio, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, produced a documentary film about America’s first detonation of a thermonuclear device, the 1952 “MIKE” device. The film, called Operation Ivy, was initially shown only to the highest-level government officials, but a later, edited version was eventually released for public distribution. We argue that the story of Operation Ivy illuminates not only the ways in which the rhetoric of the “Super” was managed but also the way in which the Cold War state was both subject to and productive of political and aesthetic sensibilities.

Abstract In 2005 the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned the use of American Indian symbols such as mascots, nicknames, and imagery in postseason sporting events. However, several universities successfully appealed this decision by demonstrating permission from eponymous American Indian nations. The focus of this essay is on the rhetorical implications of this permission argument within American Indian rhetoric about American Indian mascots, nicknames, and imagery. Drawing from the lens of rhetorical colonialism and an examination of the University of Utah Utes, I reveal how American Indian permission for mascots can be seen as upholding rather than challenging the system of colonialism through a form of self-colonization.

Abstract The perceived social value of higher education in the United States and the political will to fund it represents a fascinating paradox. This article explores one way that paradox is reconciled. I look closely at the emergence of a specific educational critique in the discourse of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The critique encourages a neoliberal reinvention of higher education. It does so by constructing symbolic representations that align with preexisting public vocabularies and socially shared orientations reflected in images of the Deserving and Undeserving Poor. By illuminating the discursive techniques by which these representations construct an image of what I call the Undeserving Professor, the critique offers significant theoretical and political insights into an underexplored area of rhetoric, neoliberalism, and public affairs.

Abstract During his first term as president, Barack Obama delivered four national eulogies at the sites of gun violence tragedies, two of which garnered considerable national attention: one delivered in Tucson, Arizona on January 12, 2011 (following the attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords and an assembled crowd), and another in Newtown, Connecticut on December 16, 2012 (following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School). The deaths of innocents, the result of a host of causes, required the president to face the issue of gun violence, help the nation work through the trauma, and create the conditions of civility necessary for policy action. At Tucson, Obama drew from the book of Job to explain that the evil in Tucson happened “for reasons that defy human understanding.” In his Newtown address, Obama replaced the more fatalistic theology of his Tucson memorial with a spirit of perseverance and renewal rooted in 2 Corinthians. In this essay, I suggest that Obama’s eulogy at Newtown serves as a counterpart to the call Obama advanced in the Tucson address. I argue that, though the messages embedded in the Tucson speech serve as a legitimate theological and epistemological check on the presumptions of reason, the Newtown address better met the aspirations of civility because it led to a consideration of policies designed to reduce gun violence.

Abstract This essay analyzes three pedagogical manuals on publicity design published by the National Committee of Patriotic Societies (NCPS) during the First World War. The NCPS represented dozens of nationalistic organizations dedicated to the mission of preparedness. This essay argues that in its publicity guidebooks, the NCPS suggested that propaganda designed with a Republican aesthetic could wed the working class to the war effort. Such advice was predicated on the psychological notion that affective experiences conditioned audiences for further persuasive appeals. Examination of these manuals thus highlights the importance of psychological theories of affect to the aesthetics of propaganda.

Abstract Pirates are commonly referred to as hostis humani generis, the enemy of all. This essay explores the contours of this figuration through an analysis of early nineteenth century American legal and political texts concerning piracy. I argue that pirate rhetorics in this period are part of a constitutive rhetoric of sovereignty, principally identified with Emerich de Vattel’s famous definition of sovereignty in The Law of Nations. Through an analysis of the textual milieu surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1820 decision in United States v. Smith, I show that the pirate is figured as an anti-sovereign, which allows for the consolidation of an otherwise differential system of international relations characterized by liberal, self-interested, sovereign nations. In becoming hostis humani generis, the pirate enters into an antagonistic relationship with the sovereign that provides the ontological ground for the theory of sovereignty characteristic of modern thought in international law. Supplementing Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric with Laclau and Mouffe’s work on antagonisms in social relations, I argue that focusing on negative identification, which is an essential component of any constitutive rhetoric, opens up unique avenues for analysis that may otherwise be obscured by attending solely to the positive dimensions of a rhetoric.