Abstract In this essay, we respond to claims made about so-called leaderless social movements, which tend to overstate the organizing abilities of their membership. Like many Indigenous, feminist, and activist scholars, however, we contend that many so-called leaderless social movements are land-based and rely on cultivating human connection to land or, in some cases, severing human connection to land. This essay re-centers land and land-based leadership in a conceptualization of rhetorical leadership that accounts for social movements mediated through shared space. Then, the essay draws from a case where social movements described as leaderless draw direction from a relationship to place, what we call land-led politics: the enduring Syrian revolution. We show how a land-led politics is impelled not only by the severing of people from their subsistence base and the expropriation of their lands but by an ontological relation that draws leadership from the land. Hence, the land as theopanic influences social actor subjectivities and how they manage their conduct in relation to land. Emphasizing the amorphous, symbiotic, and rhizomatic relationships social actors have with land brings to light the land's political power and agentic qualities. As such, land-led politics demonstrates the limits of a leader-centric approach, which reproduces colonial understandings of power by failing to account for the political valence of land in realizing visions of a transformed landscape.

Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

Abstract Annie Hill and Carol A. Stabile discuss U.S. cultural and political shifts in relation to sexual violence and what that means for rhetoric, public affairs, and the academic landscape.

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

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

Book Review| March 01 2013 On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation. By Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly. New York: Palgrave, 2011; pp. 224. $22.00 cloth; $14.00 paperKing's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech. By Eric Sundquist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009; pp. viii + 295. $14.00 paper"Making a Way out of No Way": Martin Luther King's Proverbial Rhetoric. By Wolfgang Mieder. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; pp. xiv + 551. $169.95 clothMartin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights. By Gary Selby. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008; pp. xii + 217. $34.95 paperThe Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. By Jonathan Rieder. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2008; pp. xi + 394. $18.95 paper Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller is Professor of English at Arizona State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (1): 167–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Keith D. Miller; On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2013; 16 (1): 167–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.