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.

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.

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.

The persuasive power of souvenir postal cards has been overlooked in scholarship. This essay examines how settlers in San Antonio, at the turn of the twentieth century, used souvenir postal cards strategically to produce knowledge about their city and its place in the modern nation, to market it to White tourists and other settlers as a “bordertown,” and to continue to dispossess and subordinate native Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican locals. Examples in this essay are drawn from a corpus of 300 real-photo postcards (1904–17) to consider their modes of production, images, captions, messages, and affects en masse. Through this essay, I show that souvenir postal cards are a way settler colonialism and coloniality/modernity worked, evidencing on local and global scales networked interest and cooperation between dominant imperial nations and groups to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power.

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

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.

Reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments in dialog with civil rights struggles in the United States and with decolonial thinking more generally, this essay argues that sympathy constrains the conditions for social change by restricting the legibility of Black suffering. To demonstrate as much, this essay offers a close reading of Smith’s account of sympathy and of the impartial spectator, following which this essay reads #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag and social movement whose advocacy is counteracted by antisympathetic rhetorics of white universalism, Black respectability, and masculine supremacy. In response, this essay argues in favor of decolonial acts of listening that occur in the context of a societal project of restorative justice because it is the persistence of reified colonial sympathy-allocation patterns in the United States and elsewhere that are driving the disproportionate impacts of anthropogenic climate change, COVID-19, and other historic events on nonwhite, nonmale people around the world.

In this essay, Patterson continues the tradition of turning to analysis of family as a way to challenge asymmetrical power relations within academic discourse. Through an analysis of publications and performances from three members of the author’s family—Phillip Patterson’s The Serenity of Knowing, Michael Patterson’s Humanist Solutions to American Problems: An Apolitical Approach to Governing, and Morgan Deane’s “A Light in the Night: Reopening & Operating Nightlife Venues in the Time of Covid-19”—Patterson animates Tracie Morris’s theory of grace as an African proverb performance rooted in Black family rhetoric to make visible rhetorical traditions and strategies used to create literacies for working across difference and surviving and thriving despite racist hegemonic structures of oppression. Additionally, Patterson extends their family rhetorical practices as useful techniques for decolonizing curriculum in form and content.

White settlers began to establish Christian schools in what is now Wisconsin in 1661. Through examining the papers of Benjamin Stucki, the headmaster of the Winnebago Mission Home—a Wisconsin boarding school in which many Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Chippewa, and Potawatomi children (and others whom were of mixed ancestry) were indoctrinated into Christianity—the author argues manipulation of chronos affects decolonial kairotic moments. Undergirding this argument is the conviction that manipulation of chronos tampers with perceiving settler colonialism’s everyday exigency. The mission school’s rhetorical obscuring and replacing of settler colonialism’s exigency with one (or multiple) they manufacture is a settler exigency. In this process, settlers segment, omit, and create new timelines that distract from the past violence that is undoubtedly stretching into the present. Through manipulating time, what surfaces as the new problem (i.e., not settler colonialism) is the Indigenous person’s vulnerability. The implications of rhetorically manipulating time are therefore central concerns in decolonial goals and coalitions.

In this essay, I argue that the ecological turn in rhetorical studies has produced spatiotemporal problems and that these problems are directly tied to the material disciplinary history of ecosystems ecology and its connections to the Anthropocene violence of nuclear colonialism. These spatiotemporal concerns result from rhetoric’s “ecological moment”—a kairotic framework that emphasizes flux but elides material histories. Building from rhetorical scholarship in decolonial historiography and place-based methods, I offer a counterhistory of ecology to demonstrate how our field can better engage with the dynamic narrative pasts that shape contemporary rhetorical ecological inquiry. Through this counterhistory, I provide a method for combating rhetoric’s spatiotemporal concerns, a framework I refer to as field histories, which aims to situate disciplinary practices in place and time by combining historiography and fieldwork.

Upon the Arab Spring’s rise (2010–11), Arabs started expressing a sense of confidence in their capabilities as agents of change (a sense of agency). The emergence of that sense appears to have pushed Arabs to protest in the streets across their region. I draw on theories of agency, affects, and rhetorical ecologies to illuminate the emergence of the sense of agency in the Tunisian revolution. I explicate that Arab cultures and Islamic tradition inspired the emergence of the sense of agency and its interrelation with a sense of vulnerability and a sense of responsibility among Arabs, which pushed them to revolt. Thus, I offer a decolonial theory that affirms the Arab Spring as an authentic movement led by its people. The theory contributes a new answer to the long-standing dispute over agency, which is essential to understand how structurally marginalized groups arrive at the moment of resistance across cultures.

This essay analyzes the Heard Museum’s exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, a site that documents student experiences at off-reservation boarding schools in the United States. The essay pursues questions of materiality and memory in the creation and disruption of public memory narratives. More specifically, this essay attends to the meaning-making of objects and analyzes their contributions to the exhibit’s documentation and identification work. I argue the successful use of objects in this site holds two key implications for the rhetoric of public memory scholarship: (1) that objects are a resource for the rhetorical invention of public memory, and (2) that additional possibilities for documentation and identification may rest in objects. In making this argument, I thus theorize the relationship among public memory, objects, and settler colonialism, and call for increased attention to objects in our rhetorical histories and theories.

This essay details a history of environmental violence in Wisconsin, showing the ways that the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) responded during the walleye wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. I show that resentment-laden settler colonialism was engaged by an Ojibwe rhetoric of collaboration, a response that pedagogically emphasizes mutual respect and responsibility. In ongoing relationships with Wisconsin publics, they practice a rhetoric that works counter to the logics of settler colonialism. This essay ultimately shows how GLIFWC’s public outreach during the walleye wars unsettles a settler colonial violence grounded in ignorance and resentment. Such an approach to collaborative relationships enacts a pedagogy grounded in treaty rights between the US and Ojibwe tribes, all the while asserting sovereignty.

Rhetorical studies scholars in both communication and writing and rhetorical studies (WRS) are currently investing in momentous discussions about social justice with the promise of material, consti...

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.

As postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking continue to intersect with the field of rhetorical studies, two primary aims are articulated. The first aim speaks to how language, knowledge, and rh...

On November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” (IOAT) invaded Alcatraz Island. The group’s founding proclamation was addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People,” and declared “We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (2). Tongue-in-cheek, the IOAT offered to purchase Alcatraz Island for “twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red clothe.” In this essay, I illustrate how the IOAT engaged in a rhetoric of détournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates texts until they clearly display their oppressive qualities. I argue that the Proclamation established a textual framework that calls for a skeptical and irreverent reading of dominant discourse. I conclude that strategic détournements suture dominant discourses to the moniker of colonialism and invite sympathetic audiences to engage in decolonization.

“Grand Convergence” introduces Mexican colonial rhetoric by way of a short text that is partial to clerical ideology and that eclipses a rich tradition of Amerindian medical rhetoric. Noting distinctions between Burke's theory of the representative anecdote and New Historicist uses of the “detail,” it explores the suitability of the text as an introduction to Latin American rhetoric historiography. Part two of the article examines contemporary scholarship on colonial Mexican rhetoric for its reductions and deflections.