Abstract In 1906, Eugene V. Debs published the most infamous editorial of his career, entitled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Addressing the murder charges against prominent Western Federation of Miners leadership, Debs mobilized threats and rhetorical violence to provoke attention to reportedly unjust legal practices. “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” remains something of a puzzling outlier in Debs's rhetorical canon. Despite his established legacy of peaceful protest and his preference for education toward gradual change, he announced a bold plan in the editorial for violent revolt and immediate upheaval. Through an analysis of “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” in context, I argue Debs invoked rhetorical violence in the service of ultimately peaceful outcomes, suggesting a theory of rhetorical violence geared toward nonviolent social change. This study contributes a recovery of the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone murder controversy for rhetorical scholars, while providing an expanded theoretical understanding of rhetorical violence to explain Debs's puzzling but successful navigation of an uncharacteristic rhetorical strategy.

Abstract Bayard Rustin influenced the trajectory of Black political rhetoric in the post-civil rights era. In this essay, I offer a rhetorical recovery of this neglected figure, focusing on the centrality of his emphasis on coalitional politics to the Black freedom struggle while noting that his stress on economics as the basis for coalition building shaped a rhetorical strategy tradition that I call “the rhetoric of race-neutral coalitional politics.” I also examine the legacy of this rhetorical strategy, against the backdrop of the Obama era, arguing that it silences dissent, de-emphasizes the policy priorities of Black communities, and reinforces the white gaze in Black political rhetoric and thought. I conclude that success in the Black freedom struggle depends on the community's ability to develop rhetorical strategies that position it as an equal partner in political coalitions rather than a captive participant.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

Using data sets from ethnographic research, this article examines how language minorities navigate textual regimes in disaster recovery procedures governed by bureaucratic recovery technologies. To discuss the impacts of Western climate governance regimes and alternative disaster recovery communication, this article traces rhetorical practices of transnational multilingual communities of color around a disaster relief program. I argue that community-engaged translation practices operate as the locus of rhetorical strategies against disaster recovery injustice.

Abstract In 1954, the Ford Foundation, new to international grant-giving, administered a small grant to a U.S.-educated Tehran native, Najmeh Najafi, to begin a development program for “village women” in rural Iran. Development was fast becoming a central transnational discourse of the post-war decolonization period and the early Cold War, and Najafi appears as a unique contributor to this discourse, as investment in women and women's programs would not become commonplace in international philanthropy until the early 1970s. But rather than a mere footnote, Najafi's case represents an important example of Ford's surveillance and increasingly “projectized” approach to development processes in strategic areas of the world, even as Najafi evaded Ford's attempts to make her “legible” in their global philanthropic system. This essay offers a rhetorical history of Najafi's negotiations with Ford and the tensions that arose between them around the binaries of North/South, East/West, developed/developing, and masculine/feminine. Using a lens of “scalar geopolitics” to emphasizes linkages between the local, national, and global, the article mines both Najafi's memoirs and Ford's grant archives in order to reflect on the complex ways development and philanthropy were framed and constituted during a tumultuous era in Iran and beyond.

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

Abstract President Barack Obama faced very difficult electoral prospects in the summer of 2011. A slow economic recovery, along with Republican efforts to block his agenda, had undercut his message of hope and change. Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas has been widely recognized as a crucial moment in his successful 2012 campaign. Obama's speech was important not because he supported new policies but because it corrected a major flaw in the community-oriented narrative at the core of his message. Obama reenergized his retelling of the American Dream by shifting the villain in his narrative from partisanship to the greedy rich.

The following is the Opening Address given at the 2022 TYCA National Conference. It explains the exigence for the conference theme, “Recovery and Reinvention in Our Profession: Emerging from a Recent Time of Crisis,” in this current moment—particularly, the conference’s call for a mobilization of previously overlooked narratives in the two-year writing classroom. The talk has been lightly edited for inclusion here.

PDF version Abstract This article intersects the US government’s imperialistic attitude with its ambivalent and sluggish behavior towards helping the island of Puerto Rico achieve disaster preparedness and recovery from hurricane events. To learn how Puerto Rican residents employed self-reliance and resiliency in the context of disaster to shift and extend past definitions of tactical… Continue reading “We Were Cut Off From the Rest of the World . . . and From Each Other”: Advocating for the “Whos” After Hurricane María

Drawing on Kenyan hip-hop, this article: (1) illustrates the decolonial possibilities of translingualism, including paths to linguistic decolonization; (2) showcases how translingualism can facilitate the recovery of Indigenous hybrid languaging practices; (3) highlights how global Western capitalism threatens translingualism’s decolonial potential; and (4) offers further implications for rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. Link to PDF

This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork,… Continue reading Breaking Free While Locked Up: Rewriting Narratives of Authority, Addiction, and Recovery via University-Community Partnership by Taryn Collis, Felice Davis, & Jennifer Smith

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form… Continue reading Activist Archival Research, Environmental Intervention, and the Flint Water Crisis by Julie Collins Bates

At a moment when multiculturalism is inspiring new directions for studying non-fiction, new literary genres are emerging, including the oral history narrative. This essay explores the value of the oral history narrative through its recovery in a service-learning course. Interrogating questions of genre, subjectivity, ethics, and composition, this paper affirms the place of oral history… Continue reading A Hunger for Memory: Oral History Recovery in Community Service-Learning by Susie Lan Cassel

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the… Continue reading CITYbuild Consortium of Schools: From Disaster Response to a Collaborative Model for Community Design and Planning by Sarah Gamble and Dan Etheridge

As honorary president and first speaker at the First Zionist Congress, Dr. Karpel Lippe of Romania embodied continuities in the history of the Jews and of Zionism, but his address also heralded transformations occurring in the movement as its delegates assembled in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. The speech, given in German, is analyzed with respect to its multiplex audience and other aspects of the rhetorical situation. Lippe declares the Congress to be a gewaltiger Sprung (mighty leap): the “leap” refers to the reinvention of Zionism as a solidly modern, middle-class movement, as shown by its leadership, language, repertoires of action, and values. Those values—positivism with respect to social and historical knowledge; individual self-reliance, secular work, and “civilization”; deprecation of indolence and dependency; and a respectful but assertive engagement with the established political-economic order—are set over against the social and ideological equivocations, administrative paternalism, and political timidity that caused its predecessor, Hibbat Zion, to falter.

The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on… Continue reading Introduction to the Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing by Eileen Schell & Ivy Kleinbart

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

ABSTRACT The emergence of narratives concerning post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, and the like underpins a felt sense of crisis about the possibility of debate, insofar as argument depends on truth norms. This essay argues that the post-truth narrative is regressive. It depends on Enlightenment-derived standards of truth that were from the beginning impoverished. I argue that rather than appeal nostalgically to the past, we should look to arguments interior to rhetorical history that point to truth norms that include worldly experience, or thereness. Using examples from Protagoras, Johann Georg Hamann, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I briefly expand on different ways of conceiving how to marry worldly involvements to our conceptions of knowledge. The world, inclusive of radical technological change, doesn't just shape but takes part in who we are and what we know, say, and do. In this sense, argument and debate are ambient phenomena.

This article positions community college students as co-researchers who participate in the author’s inquiry into the rhetorical practices of anthology editors.

Abstract In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hung on the whims of a deeply divided Supreme Court. His ninth fireside chat argued for legislation that would grant FDR enough new justices to shift the Court in favor of the New Deal. Facing entrenched opposition to his unpopular plan, Roosevelt presented the president as a constitutional authority who must act in response to the crisis of the Great Depression to drive the three-horse team of government toward recovery. Throughout the text, Roosevelt worked to create a sense of urgency and asked the nation to see this moment as the time for decisive action. This study examines the flow of kairos in the speech, tracing timeliness in Roosevelt’s argument for swift action targeting the Court to safeguard economic recovery. Although Roosevelt did not expand the Court, his language lives on as a model for subsequent executives and part of our public constitutional discourse.

This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric’s queer extra curriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

Book Review| June 01 2017 American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. By Jenell Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. +240. $49.50 cloth; $26.96 paper. Jordynn Jack Jordynn Jack University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 369–376. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jordynn Jack; American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 369–376. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines archival research as a generative community literacy practice. Through the example of a community-based project centered on archival research, I examine the increased possibility the archives hold as a site for rhetorical invention based on collaboration that includes contemporary community members and the recovered rhetoric of historical figures. I argue that archival research as community literacy practice creates conditions for a communal form of literacy sponsorship and offer a framework for approaching the archives.

This study extends a line of inquiry established by researchers using narrative theory to investigate the discourses of psychiatry. Drawing primarily on theories of narrative and genre, the study analyzes a series of autobiographical books intended for an audience of youth suffering from mental illness. Our research investigates how the rhetorical design of the books harnesses the discursive affordances of autobiographical narrative to encourage a particular uptake on the part of a reader suffering from mental illness. Performing an analysis of four of the books in the series, we found them to exhibit a design in which autobiographical narrative is used to prompt an anticipated uptake by the reader: motivation to commit to therapy and engage in lifelong self-care. The study offers insights to authors producing texts intended to support psychiatric practitioners in guiding youth toward recovery from mental illness.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

Abstract Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim to recenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to these memory practices, the “woman problem” of civil rights memory is more acknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civil rights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlations among Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationship among these spatial and rhetorical configurations is termed the “rhetorical geography of memory.” Through an account of the rhetorical geography of memory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place, violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and response, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset the conditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

Book Review| December 01 2015 Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. By Anne Marie Todd. New York: Routledge, 2013; pp. 168. $135.00 cloth. James Coleman McGuffey James Coleman McGuffey Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 763–766. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Coleman McGuffey; Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 763–766. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay explores the pedagogical project of integrating digital archival research into the undergraduate classroom. We contend that rather than simply asking students to

This article explores The Crisis magazine as a framework for students to gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Ortega’s essay details the benefits of archival research for undergraduate students and specific ways in which to use The Crisis as a teaching tool in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Finally, her essay examines the ways in which The Crisis helps facilitate an understanding of canon formation during the Harlem Renaissance.

This essay details the pedagogical possibilities of incorporating archival research assignments in undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses. It uses Susan Wells’s concept of the “gifts” of the archives to explore a pedagogy for undergraduate research that emphasizes uncertainty and exploration—a pedagogy that has applications beyond undergraduate archival research projects.

This article argues for a framework of material methods, a forefronted material-rhetorical approach to archival research, applying material-methodological heuristics of rhetorical accretion and proximity. The article offers an extended example of archival research undertaken at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Such heuristic content generated by a material approach is valuable in two ways. First, it offers readable layers of rhetorical accretion that deserve examination and analysis as separate texts in order to make meaning of research processes. Second, such content makes archival methods more transparent while resisting an untroubled narrative arc of our stories of research.

Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

Abstract Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism provide an implicit critique of the contemporary theoretical emphasis on antirepresentational, immanent theories of discourse, subjectivity, and power. From this standpoint, such immanentism can be understood as a distinct effect of a neoliberal governmental practice directed at the suppression of the idea of totality. To address Foucault's critique, this article argues for a reinterpretation of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of “situation” to recover a working notion of totality that would be useful for critical and material rhetorical inquiry. Historicizing the immanent turn in the critical humanities can open the way for a critical social theory of communication.

This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

This essay considers the dispersed Samaritan manuscripts as a challenge for digital and rhetorical scholars. Although the entire Samaritan population of 760 lives in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, most of their manuscripts are housed in libraries, collections, and museums across the world. Drawing on interviews and archival research, I introduce the term textual diaspora to describe how some Samaritan Elders are strategically thinking about the future digital delivery of manuscripts in diaspora, and I suggest the importance of engaging with stakeholders when building digital repositories in the humanities.

This article describes the rationale and efficacy of a graduate-level teaching module providing loosely structured practice with real archives. Introducing early career scholarsto archival methods changed their beliefs about knowledge, research, teaching, and their discipline(s). This case study suggests that archives can be productive training spacesfor all writing studies researchers.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

What are the key ethical issues involved in conducting archival research? Based on examination of cases and interviews with leading archival researchers in composition,this article discusses several ethical questions and offers a heuristic to guide ethical decision making. Key to this process is recognizing the person-ness of archival materials.

This article raises multiple issues associated with archival research methodologies and methods. Based on a survey of recent scholarship and interviews with experiencedarchival researchers, this overview of the current status of archival research both complicates traditional conceptions of archival investigation and encourages scholars toadopt the stance of archivist-researcher.

Abstract Doug Peacock, known as the inspiration for Edward Abbey's George Hayduke in the environmentalist comedy The Monkey Wrench Gang, has published his own accounts of their relationship and his conservationist work. These memoirs recount his experiences with PTSD after serving in Vietnam and argue for grizzly bear conservation. By using trauma to establish identification with the audience, the texts encourage readers to value other species and their own while resisting the totalizing tendencies of Burkean consubstantiality. The texts build identification and preserve difference through narrative structure and appeals to collective memory that encourage empathy yet stress the specificity of personal experience. Notes 1 I thank RR peer reviewers Jeremy Engels and Randy Lake for their valuable suggestions and encouragement. 2 On the representation of My Lai in popular cinema and how collective memory of the war has evolved, see Owen.