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.

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.

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

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.

Western notions of race have never been for us. Yet culture has historically functioned as an “insider” discourse, representing our ways of living, knowing, and communing with one another. How, then, might Black folks remain mindful in our treatments of race and culture, ever cognizant of how we wield these constructs to our collective global advantage? In this essay, I reflect on how three Africana historical figures have engaged this question: (1) David Walker, whose sense of literacy in Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World centered free and enslaved Black audiences as cultural “insiders,” (2) C.L.R. James, whose evolving sense of collective Black identity prompted him to write texts such as The Black Jacobins, a Black-centered interpretation of the Haitian Revolution, and (3) Reverend John Chilembwe, whose Africana global alliances and literacy-based leadership ignited the Nyasaland Uprising against colonial oppression in Malawi. I argue that these three figures resisted race by affirming global Black collectivity as a cultural homeplace, thus informing how we may theorize and practice Black rhetorical studies today.

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.

"Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 52(2), pp. 217–218

This essay examines social panic surrounding trans youth, arguing that rhetorics supporting “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) emerge from and reinforce hegemonic scripts about race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Building from Jay Dolmage’s concept of “disability drift,” I demonstrate how anti-trans activists channel other social anxieties into transphobia. Arguments about ROGD frame trans people as infinitesimally rare and as threats to all other communities, but these claims rely on the same narratives used to stigmatize mental illness, to dehumanize people of color and queer people, and to police the bodies and behavior of cisgender women. Introducing the concept of “affective drift,” I consider how ROGD rhetorics draw from ableism, racism, and heteronormativity to fuel transphobia and vise versa. In direct opposition to the logics of ROGD, then, I propose that rhetorical studies is equipped to foster connections across contrived social divides, and to enact solidarity in one another’s struggles.

In The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance, Karma R. Chavez introduces readers to the “alienizing logic” that arose out of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune d...

In Indigenous/settler relations, temporal rhetoric functions as an essential tool for both subjugation and resistance. Much scholarship on these temporalities focuses on Turtle Island and is thus implicitly shaped by a seminal historical event: the arrival of European colonizers. We extend this research by turning to Sweden, where the Indigenous Sami and the Scandinavians, who would later become their colonizers, have a long history of continuous interaction. We analyze a pamphlet written by Elsa Laula, the leader of the Sami civil rights movement in early twentieth-century Sweden, as well as Swedish policies and press documents from the time. While the settler Swedes employ similar techniques of temporal othering and erasure as colonizers on Turtle Island, Laula’s rhetoric differs subtly. Her rhetoric enacts resistance by highlighting how Sami temporalities are braided with Swedish temporalities, a rhetorical move that echoes their intertwined histories.

Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.

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...

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.

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.

Bryan J. McCann asks us to think about the history of Gangsta Rap as instructive for engaging rhetorics of identity and embodied performances embedded in the politics of “the mark of criminality,” ...

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how Aristotle's conception of tragic catharsis provides a basis for fleshing out the political office he tacitly assigns to rhetoric: defending a city-state's constitution against its characteristic forces of corruption so as to promote stability over the long-run. By inquiring into the Politics' emphasis on preservation and its endorsement of ostracism, this essay argues that Aristotle's theory of constitutions enables a rethinking of rhetoric's political efficacy in terms of a non-representational cathartic process that by means of facilitating civic purgation renews a community's political identity and so strengthens its commitment to the task of preserving the constitution. It demonstrates how, in articulating the grounds for exile, appeals to ostracism work toward the clarification both of the community's organizing principle and the emotional bonds of political philia. The essay concludes by reflecting on the persistence of rhetorical catharsis in today's Western democracies.

Race and Reconciliation is an ambitious study of recent trends in sociopolitical reconciliation within and among nation-states. At 401 pages the book is one of the most exhaustive considerations of...

This article examines the work of anthropologist Franz Boas who, in the early twentieth century, argued against the existence of the stability of the cephalic index, a measure of head shape, and its relation to the mental and moral capacities of human races. The article claims that Boas successfully shifted the burden of proof to his opponents and set the stage for the scientific rejection of belief in innate racial differences in intelligence. The article urges rhetorical scholars to attend to the notions of burden of proof and presumption in scientific controversies over neurological differences.

Abstract A Rhetoric of Motives is Kenneth Burke's only published work to consistently focus upon the subject of race. Although encouraged by the book's topic, this treatment was significantly shaped by Burke's friendship with African American novelist and critic, Ralph Ellison. Consequently, this essay offers one history of Burke's Rhetoric, drawing on both published work and unpublished correspondence between and concerning these two men. Based upon these materials, I isolate three texts as the central moments of the Burke/Ellison dialogue on race: Ellison's essay, “Richard Wright's Blues,”; Ellison's letter to Burke of November 23, 1945, and, finally. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives.