This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video "This Is America," artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of "appropriate" kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst's own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

Charles "Teenie" Harris spent more than three decades as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, capturing through his camera lens both once-in-a-lifetime and everyday occurrences in the city. The Courier played an active role in the lives of many African Americans in Pittsburgh, promoting local and national news, sports, and entertainment that represented their communities. Using a selection of Harris's photos, this essay begins by identifying the self-evidently political images in his oeuvre. It then theorizes what I refer to as idiomatic visual rhetorical strategies of representation that manifest in less obvious places: images of women and children whose celebrations and struggles were not likely to be publicized outside their own neighborhoods. Through the introduction of idiomatic representational strategies, this essay contributes to efforts in visual rhetorics to refine methodologies for interpreting images, and it also furthers historiographies of African American rhetorics.

Our period of foreshortened attention spans corresponds to a glittering array of urgent demands on attention. Within each disciplinary community, scholarship of substance proliferates exponentially...

This essay argues that the successful political careers of certain populist leaders rhetorically enact what scholars have long recognized in art, literature, and entertainment as the grotesque. The grotesque provides a theoretically rich means for describing the vulgar and chaotic public behaviors that take strong hold among anti-elite audiences at certain points in history. By closely reading comments from political leaders cast in the grotesque mold, including Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez, and Donald Trump, this essay explains not only what the grotesque is, but also when and how it is likely to find traction in a political culture ripe for change. The essay concludes that while the grotesque may be ideologically neutral, it shows an unsettling complaisance to twenty-first-century demagoguery and may be a defining mode for our time.

The turn to Latin American rhetoric has broadly been galvanized by the need for a politics of difference. Critics have drawn from Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality to mobilize epistemological alternatives to Western forms of knowledge production and to critique the representations of alterity in the Western rhetorical tradition, posing variations of a common question: how to proceed from merely tolerating difference in the Western paradigm of rhetoric to actually theorizing rhetoric from the locus of non-Western (that is, non-logocentric) space? In this essay, we analyze the aporia dredged up by Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality as a prism through which to renew and rethink the terms and conditions of comparativist inquiry. We conclude by setting to work on preparing the non-nostalgic grounds for an alterity yet to arrive under the heading of the X.

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California's Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners' subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists' accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

With Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, Michele Kennerly has produced an erudite contribution to the fields of ancient rhetoric, intellectual history, and c...

The centennial of the First World War constituted a major event for many nations. For New Zealand, much of the memorialization focused on the campaign at Gallipoli, which has become an important part of the nation’s identity. This essay examines one of the official memorials to Gallipoli, a large exhibition entitled “The Scale of Our War.” Designed in conjunction with filmmaker Sir Richard Taylor and his Weta Studio, the exhibition combines artifacts and displays with larger than life hyperrealistic figures. Focusing on the cinematic framing of the exhibition, we question the rhetorical limits of media technologies in creating immersive experiences for patrons. We suggest that the spectacle of the cinematic framing of remembrance may overshadow the events being remembered.

In the Black Lives Matter era, scholarship focused on race and state (sanctioned) violence is commonly remarked on by allies within and beyond the academy as “timely.” While Ersula J. Ore’s Lynchin...

Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.

This essay analyzes Union peace activism, commonly called the “Copperhead” movement, to illustrate how anti-war rhetoric during the US Civil War participated in debates over the nature of political violence. While the Copperhead push to end the war failed, the movement was an influential cultural and electoral force, pressuring opponents to modify their views while popularizing a version of national identity that did not end with the advent of Reconstruction. Far from petitioning for peace, the Copperheads’ rhetoric reframed the boundaries of justified violence along intersecting lines of gender, race, and memory. Specifically, I consider how the Copperheads appealed to a powerful “generational” memory built on a gendered interpretation of activism itself, offering a narrative of “manly” resolve meant to withstand the withering effects of their effeminate opponents who threatened the bedrock of an American civilization indebted to a white supremacist system.

This essay revisits the rhetoric of El Plan de Delano, a pivotal document in the farm workers movement and the broader Chican@ movement. Composed and circulated during their peregrinación from Delano to Sacramento, California in 1966, the manifesto stretched the topography of race in the 1960s, both geographically and bodily, as it publicized the farm workers’ struggle during their wage-strike. My reading of the visual and verbal rhetorics of the pamphlet of El Plan de Delano surfaces race as an energizing topos. I show how El Plan de Delano (re)fashioned a racial identity for farm workers and parlayed that identity in its appeals.

While 2016 marked the defeat of the first woman presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, it also marked a groundswell in particular forms of women’s engagement with US politics....

When representatives from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage program approved Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley for inclusion on its list of World Heritage sites in 2004, they did not anticipate that the area—selected as a model of sustainable development—would be delisted five years later. Plans for construction of Waldschlösschen Bridge (Waldschlößchenbrücke) on the site sparked a debate between the World Heritage Committee and Dresden’s city council over the best possible future for the site. This controversy is indicative of the challenges involved in maintaining international conservation efforts. I analyze how urban planners, Dresden’s city council, World Heritage representatives, and citizens navigated competing visions of Dresden’s past and future during the bridge controversy. Each party’s reliance on memories of Dresden’s past at the expense of other possibilities for invention reveals the limits of the topos of historical legitimacy as a determining factor for the future of a space.

Questioning modernity’s humanism, rhetorical theory has increasingly sought to describe the rhetorical force of the material. Central to this movement has been Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). While Latour’s theory is useful, his general aversion to rhetoric prevents ANT from fully explaining processes of translation or the politics of networks. This essay mobilizes Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of individuation and technics as a necessary corrective to ANT. Their hybridization facilitates a theory of rhetoric as the architechnical organizer of networks. I develop this position by analyzing Facebook’s mobilization of the slogan “time well spent” after revelations about their problematic role in the 2016 US presidential elections. This case demonstrates how rhetoric translates memory to build networks, reshaping the subjectivity and politics of involved—and excluded—actants. Such an approach overcomes the rhetorical shortcomings of ANT and Stiegler while refiguring discussions regarding systems of individuation, rhetorical subjectivity, and power in networked relation.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

This essay introduces the archive created by the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA)’s Oral History Initiative. The archive consists of 21 audio interviews recorded at the 2018 RSA conference, transcripts of those interviews, and miscellaneous supplementary materials. Recorded on the occasion of RSA’s fiftieth anniversary, the interviews feature long-time RSA members, past and present officers and board members, and those who were otherwise a part of key moments in the society’s history. The essay’s authors explore the contents of the interviews, emphasizing three key terms frequently invoked by the interviewees themselves: interdisciplinarity, intimacy, and inclusivity. The authors also provide instructions for accessing the archival materials and invite readers to make use of them.

Living in California seems to require interaction with the state’s twenty-one historic Spanish missions, either by visiting them as a tourist, driving by a mission in one’s neighborhood, or learning about them as a schoolchild. While the missions ostensibly celebrate California’s history, many promote an anachronistic and dishonest re-telling of history that elides the devastating impact of the missions on Native communities (both historically and today). The missions operate as largely uncontested tourist attractions that promote self-serving collective memories about California’s founding narrative. Rhetorical analysis, I argue, can lead to a more honest engagement with the “hard truths” of their pasts, thus enabling a decolonizing paradigm (Lonetree). Toward this end, this essay focuses on the missions’ role in shaping public memory in California by comparing the rhetorical choices made at two locations: Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa and La Purisima Mission State Park.

Asking how post-crisis countercultural formations compose new means of resisting an unjust economic order, this essay centers the tiny homes movement, which takes the financialization and commodification of housing as a warrant for radically downsized dwellings. As I argue, the campaign to displace (from) big homes and emplace tiny homes relies on coordinating rhetorical modalities: the parrhēsiastic case against dominant but flawed materializations of “good living” and the eudaimonic envisioning of an alternative “good living” less beholden to capital. I conclude by reviewing both problematics and possibilities that emerge from this inventive play for social and economic change.

The 2011 phenomenon “Grindr Remembers the Holocaust” represents one of the most controversial artifacts at the intersection of sex, shame, and Holocaust memory. Featuring men who have sex with men posing for Grindr profile pictures at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this trend was widely condemned as “shameful” across global media. This essay argues, on the contrary, that such images can be read as productive rhetorical acts, particularly as a controversy that instigated discourses to remember and recover long-forgotten homosexual victims of the Holocaust. In particular, I show how these “shameful” images and their framing by others both affirm past homosexual victims and redirect shame toward contemporary critics ignorant of anti-homosexual atrocities under the Nazi regime.

This essay argues that medieval bestiaries are dependent on and best understood through a process of rhetorical hermeneutics indebted to Augustine’s theory of interpretation. The essay suggests that texts such as the Aberdeen Bestiary leverage the instability of allegorical and the clarity of tropological representation to blur the line between human and nonhuman, encouraging the reader to reflect on predatory human-animal relationships and act to reduce actions that impact the natural world.

Imagine a neologism enters a parlor. It comes late but it does not care. When it arrives, other terms have long preceded it, and they are engaged in a heated disciplinary discussion, a discussion t...

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

This essay analyzes Decision Points, an interactive exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and illustrates how it leverages the digital properties of videogames to make an argument for the necessity of the Bush Doctrine. Starting with how the museum’s material and spatial environment builds identification between visitors and Bush, the piece proceeds to show how the exhibit relies on the affordances of digital environments to characterize Bush’s decision-making process as complex. Focusing on the exhibit’s simulation of the War in Iraq, I argue that rhetorical studies will need to account for the persuasive capacities of videogames in memory places in order to help visitors become more aware of and responsive to the rhetorical claims they encode. This necessity opens possibility spaces for collaboration between the fields of rhetoric, museology, and game studies.

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

Kate Manne’s examination of misogyny is a crucial foray into a rampant and misunderstood social phenomenon. Through critical analyses of the term’s history and its relevance to recent cases, Manne ...

Equal rights remain a fantasy in the United States. In 2017, President Trump rolled back the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order made by President Obama, an order that ensured busines...

This essay argues that we can usefully separate “heroic demagogues” from “dangerous demagogues” by whether or not the demagogue allows themselves to be held accountable for their words and actions. “Dangerous demagoguery” can be thought of as “weaponized communication” that uses words as weapons to achieve the dangerous demagogue’s strategic goals. The essay examines several recent examples of dangerous demagogues using weaponized communication strategies, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, and Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Weaponized communication is a danger in any democracy as it corresponds with democratic erosion.

This article considers how demagoguery gives meaning to violence by providing a symbolic, expressive outlet for resentment resulting from real or felt precarity. This rhetorical process redirects frustrations away from the entities and sociopolitical structures responsible for creating precarity and toward a scapegoat. Rather than examining demagoguery as rhetoric produced by an individual rhetor or consumed by an audience of the masses, the author explores the “meso-level” of demagogic discourse: the organizations called into existence and motivated by individuals’ shared identification with a symbolic struggle against an imagined Other. This phenomenon is illustrated through a close reading of the Proud Boys, a multinational fraternal organization that uses an aesthetic of libertarianism to advance a fascist politic.

This essay argues that scholars who focus on demagogues rather than demagoguery are mistakenly making charismatic leadership a necessary quality of demagoguery. Instead of focusing on demagogues, we should focus on the conditions that nurture demagoguery. This essay makes the case that charismatic leadership is not necessary for demagoguery but an almost inevitable method of gaining compliance in a culture that promotes outcomes-based ethics.

Demagoguery is a subject of much discussion around the world in light of recent international political affairs. But since demagoguery remains a contested term, the definition invites continued deliberation as rhetoricians grapple with its usefulness, persistence, and presence in world affairs, and as they consider what, if anything, to do about it. Building from Aristotle’s famously imprecise definition of demagoguery and from contemporary definitions that locate demagoguery in culture not in a specific speaker, this essay argues that demagogic rhetoric necessarily incorporates arguments, topoi, and evidence that attack and attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Specifically, demagogic rhetoric hyperextends or supercharges direct democracy by amplifying “the will of the people” to undermine the constraining functions of democratic institutions.

Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery—how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to reverse it, or if it’s even possible to do so. The essays in this issue advance that effort in a time when demagoguery is once again on the rise.

Historical efforts to thwart demagoguery through rhetorical pedagogy have inadvertently abetted further demagoguery. Highlighting three American episodes of pedagogic backfire, this essay interrogates how teachers of rhetoric have fueled resentments, upheld logics of exclusion, or presumed an exceptional immunity to demagogic cooptation. Theorizing demagoguery and democracy as reciprocal forces that operate through the same rhetorical and institutional structures, this essay advises an attitudinal reorientation toward teaching rhetoric that emphasizes spontaneity and vigilance in the face of demagoguery's continual infiltration of discursive practices.

The next decade will be one of the most decisive periods in human history. We currently face the reality of a coming climate catastrophe brought about by centuries of industrial resource extraction...

In 2013, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge was confronted with the all too familiar scary statistic aimed at women trying to conceive in their thirties: the probability of getting...

As I write this response, I am also preparing my life writing syllabus for the spring, and in that course, I will be teaching essays and memoirs whose authors seek adequate witnesses for their test...

This article examines the ways evangelical rhetors Rachael Denhollander and Beth Moore engage in enclave deliberation regarding their community’s responses to sexual violence. Their contextual theological analysis proceeds through “casuistic tightening,” an inventive repurposing of casuistic stretching. Examining Denhollander’s and Moore’s rhetorical activity as a repurposing of casuistic practice helps explain how they productively revise theological abstractions—platitudes about forgiveness—that stymie robust deliberation, thus facilitating enclave deliberation. They confront the theological problem of an implicit-yet-operational antinomianism toward sexual violence, a problem that creates rhetorical difficulties: distinguishing sexual violence from sexual immorality generally and differentiating divine grace from human forgiveness in instances of assault. Negotiating this difficulty, Denhollander and Moore critique forgiveness as instant forgetting and magical healing, and they argue for a reinvigorated understanding of forgiveness.

The thousand-yard stare is a commonplace rhetorical convention in visual representations of US wars. This essay analyzes the stare in Tom Lea’s, David Douglas Duncan’s, and Luis Sinco’s war images, and asks: How does circulation of such images encourage civilian spectators to imagine their military representatives’ wartime experiences? Does this imagination support or constrain civic action on behalf of veterans? Unlike prior analyses, which critique the stare for constraining protest, this essay argues that the stare can encourage civilian action by productively mediating civilians’ distance from war’s violence. The stare indexes traumatic violence not presented in the image yet calls on spectators to imagine that violence in spite of its absence. Although Duncan’s framing of the stare offers a masculine, stoic, and sacrificial vision constraining its critical potential, Lea’s and Sinco’s framings offer multimodal depth, rendering originary violence, traumatic dissociation, and mental injury as public problems in need of redress.

Evangelical women who write from lived experience—in blogs, social media, and memoirs—develop a personal narrative rhetoric to negotiate contentious currents of religious thought. This essay studies the work of Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker, who use this rhetorical strategy to destabilize mainstream evangelical discourses of gender and biblical authority. This study expands understandings of rhetorical practices in North American evangelicalism, particularly the contemporary, female-led Xvangelical movement. Analyzing their writing illuminates the interplay among feminist and conservative agendas in debates over gender roles and biblical authority. Because they take conservative doctrine seriously, Hatmaker and Bessey invoke an audience of evangelical readers disappointed with the political and patriarchal commitments of their churches. Finally, this essay advances conversations about the rhetoric of personal narrative. Bessey and Hatmaker explore the ways life writing creates knowledge and offers alternatives to argumentation based in certainty that often characterizes evangelical rhetoric.