This article reroutes the more radical tendrils of the commonplace by pursuing Christa J. Olson's call for questioning the "terrain of rhetoric." We ask: What if commonplaces and the commonality they entrench are not required for banding together in community? By thinking with Édouard Glissant's Creole garden, we rework the commonplace as common place, which conceives a place that welcomes difference without requiring common ground. To articulate the possibilities of Glissant's common place for rhetorical invention, we demonstrate its movement with examples of marronage in the southern Louisiana Territory of the United States. Marronage helps us to think how the Creole garden gathers the world's thoughts to "illustrate the immeasurable diversity of the world," thus founding a rhetoric that resists even as it relates to settler colonialisms and racial capitalisms (Treatise). This article demonstrates how the terrain of rhetoric may be limited by the pursuit of/for common ground.

Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent's limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant "rhetoric of innovation" that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative "rhetorics of innovation" that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

Taking the slogan "no lives matter" as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter's work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land's essay "The Dark Enlightenment" through the lens of Wynter's understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter's work offers a radical alternative to Land's apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it.

Studies of Augustine's rhetoric have been focused on the De doctrina christiana and the Confessions. As a result, these studies have been restricted to questions of Augustine's reception of Greco-Roman ideas. This article analyzes an underappreciated source, the De catechizandis rudibus, to show that Augustine engaged with a topic that his pagan forebears did not account for, namely rhetorical depression, a condition that tempts speakers to slide into a grim silence. Because rhetorical depression does not admit of a technical solution, Augustine responds to it by locating discourse within a redemptive drama animated by love. The hope of love's ultimate victory over communicative futility and frustration inspires the depressed speaker to stammer onward rejoicing. Augustine's placement of rhetoric within a dramatic history can prompt future reflection on the stories and myths found in past handbooks of rhetoric. It may also help us tell stories about rhetoric today that help depressed speakers get up in the morning.

This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

This article looks at how exigence is made publicly observable in user-based media operating on recommendation algorithms. Messaging in these rhetorical environments often takes the form of imitative behaviors rather than statements inviting a direct response. Examined in the article are two audio memes from TikTok representing two modes of imitation: one a physical imitation meme associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, and the other a narrative imitation meme where participants objectify endemic social problems. The findings suggest that the responsorial imperative of audio memes can either intensify the speed and urgency with which an exigence is experienced, or it can bring urgency to endemic problems. The studies also find that the formal qualities of a given audio meme constrain both how an exigence is communicated as well as what kinds of exigences the meme can be taken up for in the first place.

ABSTRACTThis short essay explores oblique approaches to rhetorical theory and practice and, in doing so, accidently arrives at a renewed appreciation of Aesthetics.KEYWORDS: Aestheticsobliquesense AcknowledgmentsI thank Crystal Colombini for reading versions of this essay and offering editorial guidance that made the essay much better. I also thank the anonymous reviewer whose questions and suggestions undoubtedly strengthened the work.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 One such encounter with the oblique can be found in Debra Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (177n13).2 Thanks to Eunsong Kim for pointing me toward Glissant’s discussion of the opaque.

Scholars have often noted that the Greek rhetorical term, kairos, relates etymologically to weaving. However, many accounts of this connection overlook the weaving technology used in ancient Greece, the warp-weighted loom. Examining this technology alongside archeological experiments, ancient depictions on vases, and references in ancient lexicons, we propose adopting a definition of kairos (in its weaving sense) as a “chained spacing cord” used to ensure balance and evenness. By focusing on kairos’ relationship to weaving, we shift its etymological resonances away from the idea of an opening to be penetrated, reemphasizing a concept of kairos grounded in embodiment, materiality, balance, and due measure. More broadly, attending to the materiality of praxis highlights rhetoric’s connection to other technai and offers an additional way to understand gendered histories of rhetoric.

The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis)continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes a display of Wenonah and the “Lover’s Leap” in Winona, Minnesota, as an example of dissociative memory(-)work. Applying dissociation to the organization of commemorative space, I attend to how the display uses markers of commemorative labor as modifying terms that invite audiences to dissociate investiture from the figure represented in order to privilege the people, actions, and temporal frameworks of those who made and maintained the memorial. This analysis proposes different dissociative units relevant to memory(-)work, including persona memorialized/persona memorializing, act memorialized/act of memorializing, and time memorialized/time of memorializing. Attention to this example of memory(-)work helps critics account for a unique and resilient form of rhetorical colonialism.KEYWORDS: Dissociationlover’s leapmemory(-)workrhetorical colonialismWenonah AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers, Jacqueline Rhodes, and Anna M. M. Gaffey for their insights toward improving this essay. This work also benefited from assistance and resources provided by the Winona County Historical Society and Winona State University Krueger Library.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This article performs a psycho-rhetorical reading of the generalized theorization and specific application of simile in classical and early modern rhetorical treatises and in Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It (1600), respectively. Shakespeare’s play articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are associated with the figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses the Law of the phallus, and fabricates alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTSteele Indian School Park (2001), a city park in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as the memory site for the Phoenix Indian School (1891–1990), an off-reservation boarding school that was part of the federal program of forced assimilation. In this essay, we perform an analysis of the park’s 24 interpretive columns, which serve as an educational display. We argue that the park’s recreational use dominates its role as a historic site. To begin we consider how the history of place shapes memory. We argue that, like museums, parks have a colonial past by addressing their historic relationship to assimilation. Next, we establish that the school served as a recreational destination for Phoenicians. We theorize that both these general and specific histories of place influence the site’s public memory narrative by bifurcating the intended audience and privileging a recreational user. To theorize the relationship between recreation and memory, we build on geographer Kenneth Foote’s term “rectification,” which describes how signs of violent or tragic events are removed so that a site can be returned, in this case, to recreational use. To facilitate the process of rectification, we argue the interpretive columns use four interdependent rhetorical strategies—decontextualization, erasure, appropriation, and paternalism—to elide the racist history of forced assimilation. Our findings indicate the colonial history of place, if unexamined, may continue to influence public memory narratives.KEYWORDS: Off-reservation boarding schoolsparksplacepublic memoryrhetoric AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank Joseph Buenker at ASU Library for research assistance.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The splinternet continues to chip away at transnationally networked publics and reconfigure the digital landscape along national borders. What would a fractured cyberspace mean for conceptualizing transnational rhetorical circulation? How might we rethink our approaches to tracing transnational rhetorical circulation in the splinternet age? This essay begins by contextualizing the infrastructural and geopolitical conditions for transnational circulation, focusing on the implications of the splinternet, and then discusses how we may reconceptualize the notion of place in tracing transnational circulation in a splintered cyberspace. The reconceptualization of place is illustrated with an analysis of how the global online campaign in the name of “stop Russian invasion” and “stand with Ukraine” in 2022 was suspended, repurposed, co-opted, and rejuvenated across the border of the splintered network of China.

Persuasive effect will always be an essential part of rhetoric studies, but it should not be either its ready shorthand, identifying trait, or lodestar. The decades-long momentum to move beyond the identification of rhetoric with the production and management of effects should be pointedly encouraged, with many new rhetorical imaginaries (invitational, dialogic, agonistic, ecologic, etc.) providing ample resources for doing so. This paper will describe the self-limiting nature of an effects frame, show that there have always been alternatives within rhetoric’s traditions to move beyond it, outline the persistence of a first-order identification with persuasive effect in contemporary disciplinary history, and point to specific ways to put this habit in the rear-view mirror. The rhetorical appropriation of Foucault’s interpretation of parrhesia is explored as an example of a rhetorical practice that moves beyond the reductive straight-jacket of effects.

In this article, I argue that an epideictic approach to climate rephotography may produce what Jenny Rice has referred to as “exceptional” public subjectivities by encouraging audiences to further distance themselves from the complex political and rhetorical processes of climate inaction. To elucidate this claim, I conduct an analysis of two popular climate change documentaries that position rephotography as the lynchpin of rhetorically impactful climate advocacy (Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral). Both documentaries function as a form of epideictic in their own right by displaying exemplary moments of emotional conversion as the desired rhetorical outcome of a rephotographic encounter. I then turn to consider how epideictic rephotography potentially forecloses deliberative possibilities enabled through this mode of visual advocacy. I thus conclude by offering insight into how deliberative approaches to rephotography might be incorporated into rhetorical pedagogies.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

In this essay, I examine the 17 November 1991 “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” advertisement in the New York Times. The advertisement is a reflection of 1,600 Black women coming to the defense of Anita Hill after the Hill-Thomas Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings. By analyzing how the advertisement’s authors came to the defense of Anita Hill while inverting Lewis Gordon’s idea of bad faith, building with Sylvia Wynter’s conception of Being as Praxis, attuning to Hortense Spillers’s description of Black women as Being for the Captor, and critiquing Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man,” I illuminate a logic of care, Being in Good Faith, that broadens rhetorical scholars’ understandings of the boundaries of what humans can care about and how humans can care.

As COVID-19 infections spread in early 2020, the term herd immunity drew the Trump administration’s attention as a remedy for redressing the pandemic. However, scientific experts warned the Trump administration against adopting herd immunity as a pandemic response. The Trump administration was unmoved. I argue that understanding the Trump administration’s incongruous pandemic response is impossible without theorizing the deeper catastrophic formations uniting herd immunity and the political Right. Drawing evidence from the Trump administration and its allies, I analyze herd immunity as a reflection of a catastrophic form of social Darwinism emerging from the Trump administration’s coronavirus messaging. By exploring the Trump administration’s general enthusiasm for catastrophe, I offer a fresh scholarly contribution at the intersection of rhetorical studies, public address, and health, political, and scientific communication, ultimately illuminating larger theoretical and political lessons for the discipline and beyond.

In comparative rhetoric, interconnectivity emerges as a frame to conceptualize power struggle, one that specifically counters othering and the underlying essentialist and colonial logics. Interconnectivity stands for a third space where difference and connection coexist and where interdependence characterizes the relationship among interlocutors. This essay addresses how to forge interconnectivity and argues for the rhetoric of according-with. According-with refers to a threefold act, namely, to navigate, use, and refigure established and emergent discursive circumstances. In re/contextualizing practices of according-with in China’s pre-Qin period and various other places and time, I specify resourcefulness and situatedness as two epistemes exercised by according-with. The rhetoric of according-with, then, nuances the particular doing-thinking-be(com)ing that disenfranchised people enact to reshape power differentials. The rhetoric of according-with functions as a critical apparatus to cultivate interconnectivity as one pathway toward subverting power.

Judges and jurists frequently read police-recorded video as arhetorical. It is not. Footage recorded from the perspective of an officer favors police. Drawing on both Burke’s theory of identification and film studies, I consider how footage filmed from an officer’s perspective functions as a nonverbal constitutive rhetoric. In an analysis of Harris v. Scott (2007), I demonstrate how police-recorded video encourages viewers to dissolve the space between themselves and the police, inviting audiences to characterize both police and themselves as passive, impartial, and objective viewers of an recorded event. When successful as constitutive rhetoric, footage from police-recorded video makes jurors and judges more suspectable to arguments that characterize police as passive observers in an event.

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines discourse surrounding contemporary calls for consilience, a form of interdisciplinary collaboration articulated by E. O. Wilson aimed at uniting the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from a Darwinian perspective. This essay builds on earlier examinations of Wilsonian consilience by analyzing a sample of texts that reflect a “second wave” of consilience and shifting rhetorical tactics over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that current calls for consilience reflect heightened rhetorical awareness among authors and that additional rhetorical work is required to gain adherence among diverse cross-disciplinary audiences. Implications are discussed for future research into enactments of consilience-style interdisciplinary research.KEYWORDS: CollaborationconsilienceE. O. Wilsoninterdisciplinarity Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Wilson’s rationale for unifying the disciplines is, on the surface, noncontroversial. In Consilience, he argues that knowledge is too segregated, academic specialties too specialized, and engagements too infrequent among scholars and researchers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities (9). Additionally, Wilson believes that addressing real-world social and political problems demands “fluency across boundaries” (13–14), that any single branch of knowledge would not yield the synoptic vision required for effective intervention. For Wilson in 1998, consilience remains a “metaphysical” hope, ultimately pointing the way toward a more systematic and integrated account of human knowledge about the world and ourselves (9).2 For example, conferences and workshops include Integrating Science and the Humanities (Vancouver, BC, 2008), Consilience Conference (St. Louis, MO, 2012), and TEDxWellesleyCollege on Consilience (Wellesley, MA, 2014). Scholarly texts include, among others, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Dutton); Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Slingerland & Collard); Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences (Carroll); The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Gottschall).3 While a broader conversation about consilience style research might take into consideration works in subfields such as evolutionary esthetics, evolutionary literary study, paleoesthetics, evolutionary film and media study, evolutionary musicology, evolutionary studies in popular culture and include journals such as Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, these works—along with the remaining chapters excluded from Darwin’s Bridge and Creating Consilience—would fall into the category of enactments of consilience and do not meet Ceccarelli’s criteria for “interdisciplinary inspirational” texts. Although such works might prove to be fruitful examples of enactments of consilience, they do not explicitly label their work as a continuation of Wilson’s Consilience, as is the case in both Creating Consilience and Darwin’s Bridge.

This essay proposes “jian-rhetorical seeing”—an art of invention—to foster genuine dialogs about human rights in transnational spaces and to challenge asymmetric distributions of power that so often course through these spaces. Building on and extending recent scholarship on human rights rhetoric and comparative rhetoric, the essay reinterprets an ancient Chinese concept, jian 鉴, as reflective/reflexive “rhetorical seeing” and brings it into dialog with Confucian ethics and rhetorical theories of recognition. Through an analysis of the Chinese translations and interpretations of rights in a few distilled historical moments during the Late Qing period (1840–1912), the authors demonstrate jian-rhetorical seeing and illuminate the implications of this rhetorical art for human rights debates in today’s global context.

This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

This essay places rhetorical theories of publicity and the common in conversation around the concept of intimacy. Defined as a felt sense of proximity or closeness, intimacy is a form of affective relation that underlies both private and public worldmaking practices, and that produces investments in certain forms of life and community. Considering the relationship between publicity and the common in terms of intimacy makes clear that dominant forms of contemporary publicity are predicated on racialized and gendered enclosures of intimacy that have dispossessed noncapitalist relationships to land and community and instead fostered intimacies conducive to capital accumulation. Our argument suggests that critical scholars who are concerned with contemporary capitalism’s subjection of life to the market have a common interest in attending to the ways these histories of enclosure shape the horizons of modern publicity. Our argument also suggests further attention be directed to forms of counterintimacy aimed at producing anticapitalist coalition.

Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.

To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

ABSTRACTThe unique experience of Black Americans in the United States produces a physical and cultural space with a long history of misuse, commodification, and theft of the Black imagination and Black culture. These spaces, which also historically complicate notions of privatization and ownership, are replicated online today. In this essay, we propose the corner as a lens through which to interrogate whether Black networks online potentially produce a rhetorical digital commons and, further, whether the theory and practice of “the commons” adequately make space for the particular historical reality of Black America. To do so, we focus on three social media platforms wherein Black digital praxis meets the possibility of the corner: TikTok, Twitter, and Black Planet. These digital corners provide lessons that center the Black experience on- and offline, and point toward possibilities and limitations in our digital future. Ultimately we argue that the corner contradicts hegemonic modes of white supremacy in public spaces while also spotlighting the brutal realities of gentrification, commodification, and theft that fortify the exploitation of Black communities.KEYWORDS: Black/African American rhetoricdigital commonsdigital rhetoricsocial media Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We use Black liberation here to reference freeing Black persons from multiple forms of political, social, and economic subjugation. Black liberation movements, theories, and theologies have been espoused by numerous organizations. Here. though, we reference any orientation toward this perspective whether explicitly named by individuals or simply inferred through their online activities. See Stokley Carmicheal’s “Toward Black Liberation” and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From# BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.2 See André Brock, Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, especially chapter four, for an insightful analysis on breaking the dichotomy of ratchetry and antiracism.3 See Nakamura 181–93.

Exhortations to tend to the flourishing of one’s gut microbes have increased in past years and can be recited by rote: consume pre- and probiotics, diverse plants, and fermented foods; avoid unnecessary medicinal antibiotics and antimicrobial products. Recognizing that all frontiers of enclosure require corollary rhetorical enclosures, this essay locates the human microbiome as an imminent frontier of simultaneous capitalist and rhetorical enclosure. Human microbiome rhetoric encodes microbial life as a contained asset and narrowly frames human-microbe relations as the concern of responsible neoliberal consumers. Individual health as the ambit of concern should give way to the understanding of human-microbial relations as a shared multispecies concern—a visceral commons. Foregrounding the rhetorical dimensions of the practices that manage a crucial relational resource, a visceral commons coheres by means of intense feeling regarding the ways in which an always already distributed yet crucial resource irrevocably entangles us. This essay borrows concepts from commoners to close with four gestures resistant to the rhetorical enclosure of the human microbiome.

ABSTRACTThis research demonstrates how public memorializing can enable practices of the undercommons. Using the Equal Justice Initiative’s Soil Collection Community Remembrance Project as our case study, we demonstrate how coalition-building shapes memory in the creation, rather than viewing, of memorial artifacts. We argue that the Soil Collection CRP enables two practices of the undercommons, Black study and unsettling grounds, and we contribute to conversations in rhetoric, ecology, and memory by offering a geologic approach that emphasizes the erosive quality of time.KEYWORDS: Black studycoalitiongeologypublic memorysoilundercommons AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank the College of Arts & Sciences and Humanities Center at the University of San Diego, E. Johanna Hartelius, Joshua Trey Barnett, Margaret E. Solace, and the anonymous reviewers. We also thank the Equal Justice Initiative and its participants for preserving this memory.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThis essay examines religious trauma by introducing two critical terms to rhetoricians, especially those working in mental health rhetorics: testimonial silencing and hermeneutical marginalization. Since Marlene Winell wrote about Religious Trauma Syndrome nearly three decades ago, the emergent field of religious trauma has only grown. However, we still lack critical vocabulary to describe various types of religious harm, especially epistemic injustice. By examining religious trauma through the lens of epistemic injustice, I center marginalized bodies who have been historically harmed as knowers. I also offer epistemic associative pleasure as a digital intervention. Now, new religious speakers can create their own good words and other ways of knowing by speaking back on social media.KEYWORDS: Epistemic injusticehermeneutical marginalizationmental healthreligious traumatestimonial silencing Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Multispecies rhetoric functions as an umbrella for diverse approaches to more-than-human communications that invoke distinct varieties of relations among human and other creatures. Amid that diversity, rhetorical engagements in which all creatures “speak” with others in mutual, iterative exchange can become lost. My argument is, first, that this particular variety of multispecies conversation is rare in discussions of multispecies rhetoric because rhetorical engagement “with” other creatures is often underspecified, and because it is incompatible with Aristotelian foundations that still often underpin rhetorical inquiry; and second, that it should be cultivated so that humans can invite other creatures to be more interesting than the anthropoexceptionalist lens may suggest, such that we can accomplish more together. A multispecies rhetoric wherein humans speak with other creatures, not only speaking for, about, or around them, requires drawing a distinction between capacities to affect/be affected and assumptions about any creature’s internal state of mind.

This essay centers the legal and coalitional strategies of Black feminist Civil Rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in pre-Roe v. Wade abortion rights advocacy. Examining the depositional records of the 1969 case Abramowitz v. Lefkowitz and its subsequent distillation into the 1971 book Abortion Rap, we demonstrate how Kennedy’s rhetorical tactics enabled white women’s reproductive experiences to be intelligible—but centered—as expertise in the legal domain. Kennedy’s lines of questioning enabled feelings about unwanted pregnancies to become intelligible as expertise, challenging the authority of established experts. Kennedy impatiently leveraged her expert knowledge of the legal system to manage the state’s objections that threatened the well-being of witnesses and integrity of the case. While Abortion Rap appealed to the intersections of Black women’s reproductive concerns, it also hindered the possibility for coalitional trust to be built between legal experts and Black Power activists around abortion advocacy.

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

The Spanish flu’s efficacy of spreading across El Paso was in part due to neoliberal governments and racially prejudiced free-market economies exploiting a natural ecosystem to marginalize a Latinx community. This study identifies the tragic consequences these actions brought about for an entire city of both marginalized and privileged. This work argues for a new paradigm of rhetorical agency that accounts for interactions between rhetorical ecologies happening over time. This work demonstrates this paradigm through government policies, newspaper articles, press releases, and ecological surveys of El Paso, Texas, beginning with the early nineteenth century through the first years of the Spanish flu (1918–20). Through the lens of rhetorical methods concerning agency distribution and radical interactionality, we see how one neighborhood played a vital role in the epidemic’s spread throughout the city.

This essay uses Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” as a heuristic for analyzing the rhetorical processes of erasure that have created one of the largest open pit copper mines on the planet: The Bingham Canyon Mine (BCM). Contributing to studies of corporate rhetoric, persona criticism, and nonhuman agencies, I argue that the BCM, and its corporate owner Rio Tinto, is characteristic of Being-in-the-Anthropocene and informs rhetoricians about our extra-human ethos, or manner of dwelling, as an entwinement with corporate actors. Taking Rio Tinto as a synecdoche for corporate personhood and persona (prosōpon), I make the case for an ecological approach to corporate disclosedness that accounts for the earthly resources of corporate rhetorical invention (e.g., copper). Through the later work of Martin Heidegger, I show how the BCM has become a standing reserve within a corporate world picture that is rhetorically apparent in the rhetorical architecture of Salt Lake City, Utah.