According to Black Twitter community members, who were active online just after rock 'n' roll artist Little Richard's passing in 2020, Michael Jackson's purchase of the Beatles catalog (thirty-five years prior) was viewed as what Twitter user and academic author DJ Scholarship calls "rhythmic reparations," offering restitution for Black artists like Little Richard who were never compensated fairly in a white industry. The purchase of Sony/ATV then became more than just a business transaction; it worked rhetorically as a pop culture object to amplify and change narratives about race, music, money, and power. I rely on two concepts of rhetoric—counterpunch and copia—to reexamine language surrounding Jackson's initial purchase and the conversation about Jackson occurring in the wake of Little Richard's death. I also explain how this conversation on Black Twitter led me to revise my knowledge of popular culture and music history and to confront my own white privilege.

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.

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.

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).

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.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

What does it mean to be literate in contemporary rhetorics of nostalgia? How can such knowledge lead to a better-designed world? From scrutinizing digital technologies of longing like Facebook’s On This Day to pursuing Afrofuturistic traditions toward neostalgic tomorrows, this essay surveys the human need to bathe in lost pasts, how such longing is coded into our lives, and how it can be activated by rhetoric students to design equitable futures. In doing so, I propose five tenets of nostalgic design, a making-centric approach to the rhetoric of memory that (1) interrogates technologies of nostalgia, (2) learns from user longings, (3) urges solidarity across a design’s lifespan, (4) fragments isolated traditions, and (5) surveys the past for lost futures. Within each movement, I both introduce defining features of the rhetoric of nostalgia and assignments that aid students in remaking the memory systems around them.

This essay investigates the extent to which an “ecological turn” in rhetorical studies—a turn toward systemic understandings of circulation and material interrelation—enables us to understand the ways that rhetors transform the networked public sphere. The essay argues that while ecological models have helped attune us to the complex, ever-shifting interrelations that constitute networked environments, they have demonstrated limitations. Specifically, ecological models have deemphasized (1) the historical specificity of rhetorical ecologies, (2) the role that social imaginaries play in structuring rhetorical ecologies, and (3) the ways that rhetors collectively invest in transforming rhetorical ecologies. Drawing on a qualitative study of activism on Twitter, this essay advocates the development of an infrastructural politics, an approach that emphasizes the ecological qualities of public rhetoric—dispersion, complexity, and emergence—while also attuning us to the collective and ethical dimensions of practicing rhetoric in today’s networked public sphere.

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.

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.

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.

This essay features a study of the #NotOkay Twitter thread, which arose as a response to the Access Hollywood Trump tape and comprises thousands of tweets by women who describe their first experience of sexual assault. I analyze this hashtag as an act of what Elspeth Probyn calls “writing shame.” I first trace the cultural habitus of emotion around sexual assault and harassment, which teaches survivors to internalize shame and normalizes assault. I then examine how #NotOkay contributors—both before and after the election—participate in writing shame, a practice that does the following rhetorical work: serves as an invitational space for women to rewrite assault-related shame; revises the locus of shame from the individual to the culture that shames; and generates calls to transform this emotional and rhetorical sphere.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.