Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

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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.

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.

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes a display of Wenonah and the “Lover’s Leap” in Winona, Minnesota, as an example of dissociative memory(-)work. Applying dissociation to the organization of commemorative space, I attend to how the display uses markers of commemorative labor as modifying terms that invite audiences to dissociate investiture from the figure represented in order to privilege the people, actions, and temporal frameworks of those who made and maintained the memorial. This analysis proposes different dissociative units relevant to memory(-)work, including persona memorialized/persona memorializing, act memorialized/act of memorializing, and time memorialized/time of memorializing. Attention to this example of memory(-)work helps critics account for a unique and resilient form of rhetorical colonialism.KEYWORDS: Dissociationlover’s leapmemory(-)workrhetorical colonialismWenonah AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers, Jacqueline Rhodes, and Anna M. M. Gaffey for their insights toward improving this essay. This work also benefited from assistance and resources provided by the Winona County Historical Society and Winona State University Krueger Library.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This article performs a psycho-rhetorical reading of the generalized theorization and specific application of simile in classical and early modern rhetorical treatises and in Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It (1600), respectively. Shakespeare’s play articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are associated with the figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses the Law of the phallus, and fabricates alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTSteele Indian School Park (2001), a city park in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as the memory site for the Phoenix Indian School (1891–1990), an off-reservation boarding school that was part of the federal program of forced assimilation. In this essay, we perform an analysis of the park’s 24 interpretive columns, which serve as an educational display. We argue that the park’s recreational use dominates its role as a historic site. To begin we consider how the history of place shapes memory. We argue that, like museums, parks have a colonial past by addressing their historic relationship to assimilation. Next, we establish that the school served as a recreational destination for Phoenicians. We theorize that both these general and specific histories of place influence the site’s public memory narrative by bifurcating the intended audience and privileging a recreational user. To theorize the relationship between recreation and memory, we build on geographer Kenneth Foote’s term “rectification,” which describes how signs of violent or tragic events are removed so that a site can be returned, in this case, to recreational use. To facilitate the process of rectification, we argue the interpretive columns use four interdependent rhetorical strategies—decontextualization, erasure, appropriation, and paternalism—to elide the racist history of forced assimilation. Our findings indicate the colonial history of place, if unexamined, may continue to influence public memory narratives.KEYWORDS: Off-reservation boarding schoolsparksplacepublic memoryrhetoric AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank Joseph Buenker at ASU Library for research assistance.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The splinternet continues to chip away at transnationally networked publics and reconfigure the digital landscape along national borders. What would a fractured cyberspace mean for conceptualizing transnational rhetorical circulation? How might we rethink our approaches to tracing transnational rhetorical circulation in the splinternet age? This essay begins by contextualizing the infrastructural and geopolitical conditions for transnational circulation, focusing on the implications of the splinternet, and then discusses how we may reconceptualize the notion of place in tracing transnational circulation in a splintered cyberspace. The reconceptualization of place is illustrated with an analysis of how the global online campaign in the name of “stop Russian invasion” and “stand with Ukraine” in 2022 was suspended, repurposed, co-opted, and rejuvenated across the border of the splintered network of China.

Persuasive effect will always be an essential part of rhetoric studies, but it should not be either its ready shorthand, identifying trait, or lodestar. The decades-long momentum to move beyond the identification of rhetoric with the production and management of effects should be pointedly encouraged, with many new rhetorical imaginaries (invitational, dialogic, agonistic, ecologic, etc.) providing ample resources for doing so. This paper will describe the self-limiting nature of an effects frame, show that there have always been alternatives within rhetoric’s traditions to move beyond it, outline the persistence of a first-order identification with persuasive effect in contemporary disciplinary history, and point to specific ways to put this habit in the rear-view mirror. The rhetorical appropriation of Foucault’s interpretation of parrhesia is explored as an example of a rhetorical practice that moves beyond the reductive straight-jacket of effects.

In this article, I argue that an epideictic approach to climate rephotography may produce what Jenny Rice has referred to as “exceptional” public subjectivities by encouraging audiences to further distance themselves from the complex political and rhetorical processes of climate inaction. To elucidate this claim, I conduct an analysis of two popular climate change documentaries that position rephotography as the lynchpin of rhetorically impactful climate advocacy (Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral). Both documentaries function as a form of epideictic in their own right by displaying exemplary moments of emotional conversion as the desired rhetorical outcome of a rephotographic encounter. I then turn to consider how epideictic rephotography potentially forecloses deliberative possibilities enabled through this mode of visual advocacy. I thus conclude by offering insight into how deliberative approaches to rephotography might be incorporated into rhetorical pedagogies.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThis article engages with TPC scholarship that calls for increased attention to agency as distributed and interdependent. This study analyzes 320 postings in one online health forum to better understand how patients come together to collaborate with one another, distribute information, and make health decisions. I argue that viewing crowdsourced forums as agentive assemblages may help researchers explain both the agency of individual actors as well as the collective agency of groups over time.KEYWORDS: Agencyassemblagescommunityembodimentempowermentonline health AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Katherine Fredlund, Alexandra Russell, Elizabeth Lane, Bess Myers, William Duffy, Edward Maclin, Kimberly Hensley Owens, and Julie Homchick Crowe, as well as the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at TCQ, for their kind and valuable suggestions on early drafts of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsShanna CameronShanna Cameron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program at the University of Memphis. Her research interests include feminist theories and practices, digital rhetorics, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

Discussion sections of research articles are important because they are where researchers make claims for advancing knowledge in their fields. There has been a growing interest in research articles focused on Discussions. However, only a few studies have centered on the role of arguments. What is missing in this literature is the potential for rhetoricians to identify specific, sentence-level arguments. The idea is that to analyze persuasion in Discussions, rhetoricians should be able to identify arguments contributing to persuasion. Toward that aim, I refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a catalyst for specific arguments and examples from thirty science research articles.

While scholarship in rhetoric and composition has deliberated its disciplinary identity, we do not yet have a current account of how pluralistic approaches to curriculum at the doctoral level professionalize graduate students as teachers, researchers, and future faculty.

This essay shows the rhetorical and material process of regendering and forgetting that accompanied the downsizing and tearing down of U.S. progressive-era settlement homes founded by female maternalists who lost their ethos by mid-century in the U.S. The regendering of place by mid-century urban renewalist’s rhetoric, policy and culture enabled the elimination of neighborhoods. It made vulnerable the concept and material space of the neighborhood as a headquarters for community engagement, and denied the emotional attachment to homes that Progressive-Era maternalists embraced. The legacy of maternalist placemaking layered into Detroit’s contemporary social service agencies embodies the impact of this regendering.

While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

Technical communication practice can change rapidly over time and across organizations. As a result, lifelong learning is an important mind-set, yet few studies explore how technical communicators learn on the job. This study builds on research about technical communication training by reporting on learning practices in one documentation team working at a large, multinational corporate information technology firm. Based on interviews and artifact analysis, the authors report on topics, technologies, and learning purposes that the team discussed, finding that peer-led, collaborative learning enables documentation teams to create and sustain group dynamics, an underexplored facet of on-the-job learning.

Despite students’ growing interest in entrepreneurship education (EE), the small body of research exploring rhetorical strategies for proposing new business ventures has focused only on the argument strategies that startup entrepreneurs use when delivering oral pitches to investors. This study, by contrast, explores the topoi, or lines of argument, that small business entrepreneurs use in written business plans created for bank lenders. Small business entrepreneurs use nine topoi in order to accomplish two rhetorical goals: justifying their ventures, via the creation of stability-focused value propositions, and establishing their entrepreneurial credibility. Ultimately, I argue that small business entrepreneurs use these topoi to frame their ventures as low-risk and stable, which contrasts with startup entrepreneurs’ arguments that their ventures are innovative and disruptive. In addition to learning strategies for highlighting innovation and disruption, EE students would likely benefit from learning rhetorical strategies for minimizing risk and emphasizing stability.

AbstractIn ‘The making of argumentation theory’ van Eemeren and van Haaften describe the contributions made to the five components of a full-fledged research program of argumentation theory by four prominent approaches to the discipline: formal dialectics, rhetoric/pragmalinguistics, informal logic, and pragma-dialectics. Most of these approaches do not contribute to all components, but to some in particular. Starting from the pragma-dialectical view of the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness – the crucial issue in argumentation theory – van Eemeren and van Haaften explain the positions taken by representatives from the approaches discussed and indicate where they differ from the pragma-dialectical approach. It transpires that approaches focusing on dialectical reasonableness are, next to pragma-dialectics, formal dialectics and informal logic; approaches focusing on rhetorical effectiveness are, next to pragma-dialectics, rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, and the informal logician Tindale. When it comes to the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness, some interest in it is shown in rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, but only in pragma-dialectics and in Tindale’s work is it a real focus. The main difference between Tindale’s view and the pragma-dialectical view is that in pragma-dialectics the decisive role in deciding about reasonableness is assigned to a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse and in Tindale’s approach this role is assigned to Tindale’s interpretation of the Perelmanian universal audience.

Reviewed by: Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric by Michelle Bolduc Denise Stodola Michelle Bolduc, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, Studies and Texts 217. Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2020. 443 pp. ISBN: 978-0-88844-217-8. Many scholars have worked to uncover the transmission of rhetorical texts over time, which is important but nothing new; however, this book takes a novel and illuminating approach in examining a specific case of the transmission of Cicero diachronically by delineating its transmission from Cicero to Brunetto Latini's translation of Cicero and then to Jean Paulhan's translation of Latini's translation of Cicero, and finally, to Perelman's and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project. Significantly, the book posits a close relationship between rhetoric and translation, and does so by exploring the different meanings of the medieval term of translatio and using the notion of translatio as the organizing metaphor overall. Indeed, the work argues that the New Rhetoric Project grew out of this line of transmission and did so through both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the notion of translatio. In order to support these assertions, Bolduc presents us with very thorough and meticulously documented research. She provides an extensive bibliography of seventy-one pages, which is subdivided into two major categories: "Pre-Modern Works (before 1800)" and "Modern Works (after 1800)." Her bibliography includes works in many different languages, and she herself, as indicated in "A Note on Translation," has performed all of the translations unless indicated otherwise in the text. Moreover, each chapter includes numerous notes, each of which is painstakingly thorough. Just as an example, the first chapter contains one hundred twenty-one notes, while the second contains two hundred and sixty-five. In addition to using such high-quality scholarship methods, Bolduc does a good job of organizing her chapters: before launching into the chronology of the transmission in the third chapter, her second chapter conveys the different facets of the word translatio and exactly what that term brings to the discussion of the roots of the New Rhetoric Project. As Bolduc points out, translatio means not only the act of literally putting a text written in one language into a different language, but it also takes on additional types of meanings as generated in the Middle Ages. In fact, in the Middle Ages, translatio also included the metaphorical meaning of the [End Page 446] term. In other words, the term takes on the meaning of transcultural transmission of ideas and a sort of recontextualization of those ideas. Moreover, the act of translating a text includes this kind of transcultural transmission and recontextualization. In showing the chronological movement of the argument she is making, chapters two through five are in chronological order. In the first of these chronological chapters, entitled "Cicero: Rhetoric and Translation for the Roman Republic," Bolduc focuses on Cicero's translation of Greek sources and the manner in which he was integral in the "transfer of knowledge from Greece to Rome" (58). Cicero's translation and translation function to show that Latin, as a language, could transmit knowledge as readily as Greek, that the Romans were legitimate heirs of Greek knowledge, and could ultimately move even beyond what they inherited from the Greeks. Ultimately, however, Cicero's political aims despite, and perhaps because of, his renowned eloquence, led to his execution after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Cicero thus became synonymous with the demise of the Republic itself. This focus on the connection between rhetoric and civic concerns persists throughout the rest of Bolduc's chapters. The focus on the metaphorical meaning of translatio and its application to this line of transmission becomes clearer as the chapters progress. Chapter three is entitled "Bringing Ciceronian Rhetoric to the Florentine comune: Brunetto Latini's Translation of Cicero," and in it Bolduc posits that Latini's translation of Cicero is done as a response to his exile, which occurred for political reasons: he was a leading figure of the Guelph party, which suffered a defeat at Montaperti. As such, La Rettorica was shaped metaphorically by Latini's political context. As Bolduc asserts, "Latini transfers the Roman story of the conspiracy of...

Reviewed by: Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History by Jason Barrett-Fox Lisa Mastrangelo Jason Barrett-Fox, Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5828-6. Jason Barrett-Fox's Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History offers feminist scholars and in particular feminist historians a dense but useful theoretical method for reading and recovering feminist artifacts. In particular, Barrett-Fox is focused on media such as film and book publication. He uses his new method for reading to examine work by the film star and medium Mae West, the silent film scenarist, novella writer, and autobiographer Anita Loos, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, the writer, editor, and co-owner of socialist publishing company Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company (source of the famous Little Blue Books series). On the surface these seem odd choices since all three have already been "recovered" and there is extensive scholarship about them. However, part of Barrett-Fox's critique of earlier recovery projects is the tendency to recover the women that we recognize most easily from our own vantage points, particularly academic women. His project therefore diverges in order to read West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius through new rhetorical lenses. [End Page 450] Barrett-Fox explicitly builds on early feminist historiography scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Carol Mattingly. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of extant models, Barrett-Fox jumps off from these previous models of feminist historiography by using a concept he calls "Medio-Materialist Historiography" or MMH. This concept provides new methods for reading texts from the past, particularly complicated ones, and requires several things from the objects in consideration. Chief among them is the original creator's use of some form of "inscriptional technology" and their "facility with a particular medium" (48). Next, "another facet of a likely candidate would be the quality with which she manipulated her chosen media and how those manipulations coincided with particular messages, critiques, or other, less overt demonstrations of (distributed) rhetorical force" (48). Importantly (and in a deviation from much current rhetorical recovery work), the material creator, in Barrett-Fox's imagining of MMH, need not be intentionally creating feminist material and may instead be responding to the private circumstances (social, historical, economic) of their own lives (31). MMH would allow for researchers to trace not just the materializations of the subject but also the distributions that result. Barrett-Fox begins with a discussion of how works may move between the ontic and the ontological in what he calls "radical inscription: materialized inscription that punctures the membrane separating the ontic from the ontological and, often, the past from the present" (4, emphasis original). With this in place, Barrett-Fox sets up the discussion of MMH and the ways in which it can be used to move beyond previous readings and even previous qualifications for whose work is recoverable. Chapter 1 of the text introduces us briefly to each of the three women under discussion (West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius) as well as some background of the ways in which these women have been remembered. Barrett-Fox also lays out some further background for the concept of MMH through the discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose 1887 experimentation with telepathy pushed the threshold between existence and knowability, and Georges Méliès's concept of the "cinematic stop trick," which used distortion to create images that were not "real" (much as current cinema does with CGI). Perhaps the most important concept introduced in this first chapter is the idea of cold kairos: the idea that a text or artifact may have been dormant for many years but can now be mediated. This notion is particularly helpful for those of us who routinely encounter historical artifacts and think that they are interesting but need a larger or better framework for thinking about how and why they should be recovered. Through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius, respectively), Barrett-Fox introduces new concepts to help bolster an MMH reading of each of his subjects. In Chapter 2, for example, Barrett-Fox introduces the idea of using MMH...

Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...

Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...

Abstract: Gorgias's Encomium of Helen stands out as more than a display speech: it is a sophisticated statement on fifth century Greek life. Within a mythic framework, it presents Gorgias's post-Eleatic understanding of the world, including new ways of conceiving the logos within the finite boundaries of human life. I show how Gorgias's thoughts build out of Empedocles's cosmology and stylistics, leading Gorgias to consider more deeply how language and world go together. I demonstrate that the order of Gorgias's four causes is cyclical, which allows Gorgias to make gradated distinctions about responsibility. Gorgias's exploration of responsibility enables him to portray the world as something that continually marks and molds human being, and this includes the logos . Gorgias also addresses temporality, which not only imposes existential limits on human capacity but also contours language itself. Ultimately, the Helen conducts third-order (self-reflexive) thinking by marshalling a battery of rhetorical resources designed to attune an audience to how their own participation in the logos generates and sustains its powers. In effect, what the Helen is about is the work that the Helen does. Through a mixture of new insights into persuasion, language, temporality, and psychology, combined with self-reflexive rhetorical work, the Helen inspires further thought about key aspects of Greek existence.

Abstract: The renaissance witnessed both a large expansion of teaching and composition of rhetoric manuals and a flowering of literature in the sixteenth century. This essay asks what rhetorical theory contributed to renaissance literature. Where some earlier accounts, for example by Cave, Eden and Vickers, focus on the impact of one or two rhetorical doctrines, this essay argues that renaissance writers drew on, adapted and combined a wide range of rhetorical doctrines in thinking about how to persuade and move their audiences. In order to make this argument it sets out sixteen skills taught by renaissance rhetoric which writers could use: thinking about the audience; self-presentation; reusing reading in writing; style and amplification; emotion; pleasing; narrative; character; argument; examples; comparison; contraries; proverbs and axioms; disposition; beginning; and ending. It analyses texts by Erasmus, Tasso, Sidney, Montaigne and Shakespeare to show how the greatest renaissance writers adapted and combined ideas from rhetoric.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the new AI chatbot application, ChatGPT, I wonder how Logie would seek to include this new technology in his work. I ponder this because, throughout the book, Logie presents compelling evidence for why the concepts of invention, composition, and internetworked writing should be embraced and not feared. While some denounce the application and take to social media to disparage the possible negative impact on students, creativity, and composition, ChatGPT, I believe Logie would argue, would be a powerful tool we can implement to become "composers." He believes that through cloud computing services we are now more apt to collaborate, use, remix, and create rhetorical modes that extend far beyond the formulaic argument, therefore we are composers. So, Logie applies the idea of a composer as someone who is a "prosumer" (Toffler). This composer is media literate and transforms traditional rhetorical canons into multimodal compositions such as memes, Google Docs, and digital collages. However, his overarching argument is that internetworked writing tools have democratized writing through that same offering of innovative outlets. His book is arranged in a way that walks the reader through this argument.

Sonic rhetoric is still a relatively small field within writing studies. For the uninitiated, the editors define soundwriting as the study and practice of writing recorded texts. As a digital and multimodal text,Tuning in to Soundwritingexplores how aural rhetoric should be given as much consideration as visual and written composition. Building on their 2018 edited collection,Songwriting Pedagogies, editors Kyle D. Stedman, Courtney S. Danforth, and Michael J. Faris explore compositional approaches to soundwriting through interdisciplinary practices. All five chapters are grounded in practical applications showcasing how soundwriting can be a generative approach to composition, allowing students to consider accessibility, technology, and audience reception in meaning making.

Kevin Musgrave's Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology breaks novel ground in rhetorical studies by unspooling the historical evolution and contemporary significance of a phenomenon so seemingly worldly as corporate personhood. This robust transdisciplinary conversation on economic theology is suasive in arraying its theoretical and methodological provisions for discerning how notions of the sacred are vouchsafed in the secular formations of modern economic life. And too, Persons of the Market is cogent in advancing the claim that by attuning to political economy's theological inheritances, critics can enter into a generative grappling with Western capitalist and racial power in the era of juridical personality.Corporations are people too. If this provocative, vexatious, and even baffling refrain of the neoliberal public sphere is an obvious exigence for this study, then Musgrave pierces its roots by using personhood to rethink historical relations among Christian theology and liberal capitalism. Departing from a common account of political economy, which looks to secularization to explain how an economic order founded on market rationality displaced the sovereign and divine right of kings, his hermeneutics traces “the gradual process of the emergence of a new social imaginary that occurs in and through theological grammars, not against them” (xiv). When we discern how such grammars historically authorize the capitalist order, we discover new relations of persons—between the person of Christian theology and that of political economy; between human and corporate personhood; among the person and an array of human and nonhuman, racialized, social and political, earthly and divine bodies; and more. To re-see political economy as relation rather than negation of theological thought, Musgrave situates the contending legacies of economic theology by taking Foucaultian biopolitics as a theoretical vocabulary for critiquing political liberalisms from within; then repairs against Foucault's atheistic framing with Agamben's reinstatement of the theological; then, finally, works from the current consensus in humanities studies that, one way or another, economic theology must inform political economic critique. Enfolding rhetorical dispositions—Black's cognizance of subjectivity, Burke's socioanagogical sensitivity—within a genealogical approach inflected by Nietzsche as well as Foucault, he offers economic theology as a register of meaning-making. It bears noting that this attunement does not seek “a unified and clear development of its conceptual basis in the teleological or dialectical unfolding of capitalist logic or in the concerted efforts of a unified bourgeois stratum” (xvi). Rather, by accenting rhetoric's ontological and material dimensions, it strives to grasp how notions of corporate personhood are seeded theoretically, supported juridically, and sustained politically in complex, even haphazard rhetorical dances between the theological and the secular, the religious and the rational.How do corporations become persons? In a quick synopsis: When courts rule that for legal purposes they are persons, and social and political worlds fall in line. Prior to, within, and beyond juridical decision-making, the bizarre corporation-to-person becoming has discursive and intellectual co-requisites. Before anything, corporate personhood incubates in the fecund environs of liberal political and economic thought, ripening in rhetorical traditions that—from Roman slave law to Trinitarian doctrine, from Adam Smith to Roberto Esposito—gradually economize the theological heredity of personhood with the recombinant genetics of self-ownership as a contractual right. From this mutative embryonic nurturing, a corporation assays to capture in studied succession the key thematic attributes of personhood: a Body, a Soul, a Voice, and a Conscience. Locating each acquisition at a chaotic yet formative juncture of U.S. political economic history, Musgrave narrates something like the four-stage tour of a body snatcher, the piecemeal making of a Frankenstein, but in this case, the suturing of the animate form strangely does not yield a monster. Quite the contrary, it refigures an entity “once understood as a monster of capital, an alien, and even a worm in the entrails of the nation” (45) as a normative model of personhood so elegant that corporeal persons can only aspire.The Body is, first, seized from the conflicted terrain of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the mid-late nineteenth century. The corporation wrested embodiment from the incorporation conflicts that, emerging around the development of commerce and the amalgamation of actual corpora in the body public, claimed the Chinese laborer as embodied host for rising racio-economic anxiety: “If the nation was civilized, Christian, prosperous, and pure—that is to say, white, in all of its coded language—how could it incorporate a people that was deemed biologically incapable of reaching these statuses?” (29). Musgrave's impressively detailed analysis shows how the corporation, once anathema in Jacksonian democratic sentiments, sails to legal protection thanks in large measure to the theologically-soaked rhetoric of one eventual Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field. Through two cases that laid jurisprudential ground for the landmark 1886 Waite Court ruling that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, Field liberalized corporate law vis-à-vis the right of Chinese laborers. To be clear, these rulings were far less about protecting the laborer's right to safe and legal working conditions and far more about preserving the industry's right to exploit their productive capacities for profit. How are we not surprised? No synthetic fabrication, corporate corporealization requires the appropriation and expenditure of the actual material bodies of racialized persons. By marking the Chinese worker as “the racial other of the corporation” (51), these legalities stood the corporation as an embodied symbol of white Western capitalist rationality, securing its ascendancy through the symbolic hierarchies of personhood.The Soul is next, as early twentieth century Progressive activism placed the corporation in need of salvation. Musgrave's theologically-attuned economic rhetorical analysis finds early masters of mass communication turning to the cultural power of advertising not only to promote the corporation's commercial products but also to “personalize” the corporation itself. Merging Protestant convictions with free markets ideals, the new discourse of evangelical capital mobilized the “great parables of advertising” within secularized versions of Christian spiritual themes—shepherd and flock, confession, transformation, redemption—to renew the corporation as a “benevolent shepherd” (63), which could minister a lost public to salvation. Then it's Voice, as political antagonism toward the New Deal and the affects of the Cold War vitalized godly libertarian businessmen to better align Christianity with capitalism, launching a new wave of jurisprudential activity that granted the corporation legal voice.Lastly, Musgrave offers Conscience, as the nearly-personified corporation forges from the evangelical neoliberalism of Reagan, to the paleoconservative backlash, to Trump's successful rallying of conservatives around key issues of conscience—that is, “freedom from a godless and all-powerful state apparatus that polices language through a soft totalitarian discourse of political correctness on the one hand, and mandates that companies abandon their religious convictions in the name of state-sanctioned multiculturalism on the other” (140). With each successive acquisition, the corporation more fully realizes personhood, even as personhood is itself flattened and recast as “a mask that never fully adheres to the face that wears it” (3), reordered as a dispositif of techniques and technologies for systematizing biopolitical bodies.The operative claim of this book is that our best hopes for resistance against neoliberalism do not lie with rational persuasion. Rather, they depend on our capacity to enter onto an existential plane where we may query our theological commitments and convictions about human personhood. Rhetorical readers of many persuasions will appreciate this book's potential to incline critique and analysis in various directions, not least into further discussion of the intriguing possibility with which the book closes: the potential for rhetorical thinking on economic theology to instantiate more humane and democratic configurations of personhood by adopting a post-human humanist orientation to life as a gift. If “the cosmic and existential levels of economic theology” (175), as Musgrave argues, suffuse our public and political worlds, then scholars of communications and rhetoric indeed stand to gain by engaging them—as do scholars of economic theology, arguably, by inviting the contributions of communications and rhetoric. What new future may emerge for a rhetorical critique of economy that better apperceives how sacred and secular understandings of the person share affinity? What might economic rhetorical inquiry discover when it looks both at and beyond the clear-cut theologies of evangelical capital discourses? How might theological attunements that surpass Judeo-Christian adherences to also account for non-Western, non-white, and non-dominant belief systems open rhetorical studies to more diversely cultural knowledges of moral and market order, and thus better equip them for critique? Persons of the Market poses these questions; they are ours now to answer.

Abstract The United States and Middle East autocracies do not make for the most natural of allies. One of the most common rhetorical tactics used to defend these alliances is to portray the ruler in question as a reformer who is steering his country into alignment with American sociopolitical norms. We argue that this tactic emerged out of realist assessments of foreign policy during the Cold War. However, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's attempt to deploy this topos during the Trump presidency met mixed results, calling into question the ability of leaders to balance between idealist and realist strains of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. This essay explores the ramifications of this outcome, including how increased information access may portend the eventual demise of the reformer topos and signal the need for new topoi to legitimize American alliances with Middle Eastern autocracies.

This edited collection offers an array of essays forwarding the rhetorical work constituting the political activity of and concerning Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although scholars have certainly interrogated Latin American experiences in the United States and across the Western Hemisphere (some of whom have contributed to this volume), I can think of no other collection in rhetorical studies that supplies the kind of birds-eye-view of Latin America and its political landscape(s) as a whole. The edited volume is unabashedly transnational in its case studies, although not each individual case study is transnationally oriented, and the authors invited by the editors claim homes across the Western Hemisphere (e.g., the United States, Columbia, Argentina). In short, this book embodies and takes care to fulfill its commitment to presenting “rhetorics of democracy in the Americas.”Although it is customary to provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters in a book review, the chapter summaries provided by the editors in the collection's Introduction are superbly written and need not be replicated here. I would encourage those interested in their summaries to access the “Introduction,” which is made available through the publisher's website.1 The book follows, flexibly, a conventional Part I “theory” and Part II “case study” structure that readers can navigate easily and according to their own needs. Each chapter stands alone quite well. Even so, in what follows I retrace the chapters and articulate what I think are the major questions the collection and each essay provokes. For, while this book is commendable for initiating a conversation, it would be a mistake to treat this volume as more than an entry into the exploration of “rhetoric of democracy in the Americas.” Thus, I provide a bridge between the entry point that I think the collection offers and further lines of inquiry that I believe it spurs.One of the collection's strengths, as I have stated, lies in its focus on the “Americas.” Given this focus, readers wishing to find how the notion of an “America” informs rhetorical or democratic theory must reflect on how they might extend the work provided by these chapters. For example, editors claim a “constitutive” notion of rhetoric over an “instrumental” view in the Introduction (15), but I find that most case studies adopt the language of “instrumental” rhetoric in their examinations (e.g., chapter six's discussion of “strategies”). Though readers might not care too much about whether one adopts an instrumental or constitutive view of rhetoric, I point out this feature to highlight that the collection's presumption of this distinction evinces its reliance upon conventional rhetorical theory. That most case studies interrogate “rhetoric” as a “tool” or “device” to be leveraged to some end underscores how these case studies recontextualize traditional rhetorical theory within Latin American spaces rather than spurring retheorizations of rhetorical inquiry. Similar presumptions about “democracy” and its supposed “ideal” also become manifest in each essay when trying to define democracy. The “Introduction” certainly provides some guidance by claiming democracy as “among the vital concepts in rhetorical studies” (5), and as a governmental form offering citizens a “promise” of “good things” (5–6). The collection's case studies, nonetheless, do not furnish much about what “democracy” entails or how democracy in Latin America differs from, in content and form, that in the United States or anywhere else. Democracy is presumed as a context for each study and an ideal in which rhetoric flourishes.Such presumptions, though not misguided or wrong, highlight not a problem with the collection as much as they illuminate opportunities for other scholars to take up. Christa Olson's chapter, as I read it, articulates a notion of the telluric in contrast to the traditional topos to encourage readers to consider new material stakes in rhetorical discourse—a materialism based in “ideas” of Latin America. Though gesturing toward the operationalization of the telluric in her beautifully written essay, Olson's proposal demonstrates how we might interrupt the conventional reliance on the “commonplace” for studying rhetoric in América. Cortez's essay does something similar to Olson in that he encourages a departure from a familiar concept—subalternity. Though offering the most philosophically minded take in the collection, his take-down of the “decolonial imaginary” underscores how studies involving Latin America pose a complex and inescapable problematic, namely, how to conceptualize Latin America without reproducing the very colonial structure rendering it, in the words of Walter Mignolo and other decolonial scholars, a fiction. While I personally remain skeptical that “rhetoric” is capable of resolving the issues Cortez raises, given the imperial stakes “rhetoric” qua art implicates, Cortez's argument that the terms we use to characterize and study “Latin America” cannot be presumed to give it a voice spurs scholars to reflect on the classifications used to identify non-dominant rhetorics.Although Part I begins with theoretical explorations, its remaining chapters take on a more practical tone. Chapters 3–5 address a different subject related to but not limited to U.S. relationships with Latin America(ns). De los Santos's chapter tackles the rhetorical contributions of migrants, a work that he is curiously committed to distance from prior work on citizenship despite suturing his study to “ancient Greece” (84). I find De los Santos's work to be quite similar to, for example, Josue David Cisneros's for its emphasis on a discursively constructed yet politically imagined citizenship. Nevertheless, perhaps the most surprising theme—or not, depending on the reader—was the prevalence of former President Donald Trump. I say surprising because, while President Donald Trump has had quite an influence on recent rhetorical studies, Trump's relationship to Latin America is not any more appalling, xenophobic, sly, or even pretentious than past U.S. presidents. I am not denying that this former President might have altered the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere during his administration, but I think that the ways in which chapters center Trump's influence suggest that his actions are an aberration. Still, while these scholars view more dissonance than coherence in U.S.-Latin American relations, I think that the essays foster inquiry along its opposing line, namely, answering the question of how consistently presidencies have negotiated and enforced a power imbalance between the United States and Latin America.The chapters encourage not necessarily a complete reassessment of “migrants,” “immigration,” or even “American Exceptionalism” as much as they compel revisitations of what we might call “familiar” rhetorics to impart a peculiarity to otherwise recognizable themes. That peculiarity is important, for, recalling Olson and Cortez, the ways in which we critically interrogate “rhetoric” in and through Latin America cannot be presumed to simply reinscribe what we already know about “rhetoric” or “democracy.” Indeed, as Butterworth underscores, “American Exceptionalism” takes a particular form when Cuba is involved, and it takes on a peculiar form when it involves relations with Latin America. Viewed thus, each of the chapters in Part 1 encourages scholars to come back to familiar rhetorics to “question the narratives of democracy” that we take for granted and presume to be universally operative.Part II takes up the theme of “Problematizing and Reconstructing Democracy in Latin America,” with each chapter proffering not only a unique perspective on politics in Latin America but a discrete take on “rhetorical” study within politically resonant moments. Privileging as it does not only Latin American regions but Latin American scholars, this section showcases what scholarship done in and through Latin America might look like for future scholars across the Western Hemisphere. More concretely, these essays magnify senses of rhetoric and rhetorical study that scholars interested in prioritizing Latin America might assume in their own work. Focused on a variety of politically rich subjects such as corruption (chapter 6), rhetorical agency (chapter 7), the religious right (chapter 8), presidential rhetoric (chapters 9 and 10), and, finally, crisis (chapter 11), these case studies diversify the subjects with which rhetoricians can—and should—grapple. At the same time, they underscore how these subjects might be theorized in and through Latin America. This is not to say that the subjects are exclusive to Latin America or that certain themes need to be relegated to Latin America. Rather, if I consider how many studies have been written on “corruption” in the United States, I might have to consider alternative vocabularies (e.g., racism, bureaucracy, morality, etc.) to expand my inquiry, since there are simply too few studies of U.S. political corruption outside of Bruce Gronbeck's 1978 essay—an essay nearly fifty years old! Studying rhetoric in Latin America is, these essays suggest, productive of the kinds of questions that rhetoric scholars across the Americas must consider. For, what happens in Latin America cannot be presumed to be exclusive to Latin America.Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas challenges scholars to take on two distinct but related tasks. First, the collection urges us (U.S.-based scholars) to consider how we might employ familiar tools to study rhetorics in Latin America. No longer can or should we view rhetoric in Latin America as a uniquely Latin American operation in need of new tools. Even though calls from Olson and De los Santos to consider Latin America in “Américan” rhetoric creep toward a decade old (!), this collection encourages us not to provide comprehensive work but responsible work in interrogating relationships between politics and rhetoric in “the Americas.” U.S.-based scholars (of which I am one) must begin to view themselves as Américan scholars.Second, if U.S.-based scholars assume the identity of an “Américan scholar,” this collection encourages us to deploy and harness Latin American histories to theorize “rhetoric” and “democratic” politics across the Americas—including the United States. In what sense must we alter our rhetorical theories and vocabularies in light of the way persuasive communication is enacted and performed in Latin American spaces? How might we conceptualize rhetoric's relationship to “democracy” in light of the ways in which Latin American rhetorics engage with the United States? With other Latin American nations? With their own histories and traditions? Alejandra Vitale's essay (chapter 10), I suggest, demonstrates this concretely by revisiting how our conception of ēthos might be transformed when considering the rhetorical work accomplished through an Argentinian presidential farewell address. As readers will see, Vitale is no stranger to U.S.-based rhetorical scholarship, nor a stranger to Argentinian scholarship and culture. In the essay, Vitale demonstrates how conventional understandings of ēthos, a rhetorical concept that U.S.-based scholars might cringe at for its neo-Aristotelian status, might be disrupted and expanded by prioritizing a uniquely Latin American political context.The collection edited by Drs. Angel, Butterworth, and Gómez shows paths of inquiry that I think hold promise for graduate students looking to integrate more transnational approaches to their study or those wishing to study politics outside of U.S. borders. It is an exhibition in how to overcome theoretical challenges to the study of Latin American rhetorics, as well as how to problematize conventional understandings of rhetoric in light of having studied and taken seriously Latin American politics. Moreover, I think that The Pennsylvania State University Press deserves credit for expanding the repertoire of Latinx rhetorical inquiries with both the 24th volume and this 25th volume in the “Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation” series. That a couple of this press's latest volumes have focused on scholarship related to Latinx politics highlights how now is the time to strike the anvil and continue to pursue such a rich scholarly endeavor.

When the Medium Was the Mission is an account of the ways in which religious discourse and network infrastructure were entangled in popular imagination of nineteenth century U.S. Americans. To trace the “surprisingly religious origin” (1) of communications networks, the author analyzes the case of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable, a project that exemplifies the utopian hopes undergirding infrastructural developments in the antebellum period. Supp-Montgomerie makes clear from the outset that, as an instance of infrastructural development, the Atlantic cable was an abject failure. It rarely worked and broke down completely after a few short weeks (5). Nonetheless, the “successful” completion of the line, which ran from Newfoundland to Ireland, was heralded at the time by enthusiastic observers as an event of world-historical significance (3–5). Supp-Montgomerie's account is an attempt to understand the roots of public enthusiasm for an occurrence that, on its surface, appears to be no more than a failed attempt at laying an undersea cable. She argues that the true impact of the 1858 telegraph was far reaching and continues to shape our understanding of networks. U.S. Americans, specifically white Protestant Christians, saw the electromagnetic telegraph as a means to connect and thereby “civilize” the world through technology. The work of building telegraphic networks was simultaneously the work of God and the work of the nation since, in the popular imaginary of the time, the two were aligned. According to Supp-Montgomerie, the topoi around which this religious public's hopes and dreams converged—“connection, speed, unity and immediacy” (209)—remain central to how we discuss networks today.At the heart of this work is a theoretical investigation into the ways in which a religious rhetoric of connectivity (i.e., body to soul, believer to God, church to community) preceded the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph and helped stabilize its symbolic place in the social imaginary (80). The telegraph became the metaphoric embodiment of an overarching worldview concerning the United States’ place in the global community. It was rhetorically framed as the herald of a unified Christian world conjoined by a fast, reliable, friction-free network—a dream that persists to this day (albeit in less overtly religious terms) (11). As the author explains, “Religious actors put telegraph technology in place around the world, religious language described this new mode of global communication, religious imaginaries covered what the worldwide telegraph network would become, and religious forms of communication indelibly marked the idiomatic conventions of networks” (1). According to Supp-Montgomerie, tracing the indelible mark such religious rhetoric left on the social imaginary is crucial for understanding the underlying teleological drive toward ever-increasing connectivity. Namely, this framework erases other important aspects of how networks actually function, including through disconnection (21–23). As she explains, “network disconnections always appear problematic not because they disrupt networks (networks expect and even rely on them) but because they disrupt the religiously empowered myth that networks connect” (3). This persistent “disconnect” between how networks actually function and how they are imagined to work did not arise through sheer chance.Chapter one focuses on the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire. While it may seem odd to begin an inquiry into the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable in Istanbul, Supp-Montgomerie explains that “U.S. religious activity abroad helped form and strengthen emerging—and increasingly protestant—imaginaries of networks at home” (38, emphasis in original). Protestant missionaries saw themselves as “primary agents of the circulation of [U.S. American] ‘civilization,’” (36) and as such their efforts included a healthy dose of technological evangelism. For them, the telegraph was more than a communicative technology, it was “marvelous material evidence of God's work on earth” (37) that could “awe others into a particularly Christian reverence” (37). In this religious framework, telegraphic networks were seen as a vital “partner” (37) in the spread of Christianity. Missionaries treated the Ottoman's embrace of telegraphic networks as proof that “any possibility of Christian conversion required first a step of familiarity with European and U.S. technologies” (44–45). In reality, the Ottoman telegraphic network was both faulty and fractured, and building it helped fuel local resistance against imperial rule (59).Chapter two focuses on the disconnect between public enthusiasm for the Atlantic cable and its technical failure. Supp-Montgomerie argues that the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph as the telegraph was not the result of its technological superiority or ubiquity, as is popularly imagined. The electromagnetic telegraph was too expensive for the general public (105) and largely unreliable as a communicative medium (115–16). Furthermore, in 1858 the electromagnetic telegraph was simply one of several forms of telegraphy then occupying a place in public discourse. Among these were the “grapevine telegraph” used by Black Americans during slavery (98) and the “optical telegraph,” which often supplemented the less-reliable electromagnetic telegraph (114). By the century's end, however, these other forms of telegraphy had been largely forgotten, swept aside by public enthusiasm for electromagnetic networks. Unlike the other telegraphs outlined above, the electromagnetic telegraph fueled the fantasy of “a divinely ordained human destiny” to unify the world through a combination of U.S. Protestantism and technological know-how (93). By examining electromagnetic telegraphy alongside other contemporary telegraphs, Supp-Montgomerie “complicates the naturalization of a number of characteristics that we now think of as inherent affordances of networks: that they are national, global, politically neutral, technological, connective, and even fully functional” (83). What we learn instead is that networks are as much affective as technological.In chapter three, Supp-Montgomerie turns her attention to the utopian movements of the mid-nineteenth century as a way of further demonstrating how the religious fervor of the period shaped public reactions to infrastructural developments. Rather than attempting to analyze the entire movement, Supp-Montgomerie uses the Oneida Community as a case study in the overlap between “moral and technological perfection[ism]” (128). Utopian communities like Oneida, she argues, may appear the products of fringe enthusiasts but actually serve as a fitting synecdoche for the utopian underpinnings of an emerging global imaginary (127). These experimental communities “organized themselves around the ambitious assurance that they could make a perfect world in the present” (128), thus sharing in the broader “popular imagination of a world united and pacified by electric communication technology” (129). By taking a “highly local” approach to her analysis, the author demonstrates that even the most insular communities internalized the prevailing “religious logic of . . . a world united by communication technology” (135). The Oneida Community members understood the Atlantic telegraph as “a compelling metaphor for their own utopian endeavor, as a sign of the bridging of this world with God's, and as a primary means for the unification of humanity through communication technology” (136). As such, “the Oneida Community represents a broader and emphatically mainstream U.S. movement that saw an ideal reality become accessible in unprecedented ways” (132). In the social imaginary, religion and technology played equal and mutually dependent roles in realizing a unified globe. By negotiating the disconnect between the world they envisioned and the limits of the technology before them, religiously motivated actors like the Oneidans “cemented connection into technological and social forms as a given, no matter the reality of their promise” (160).In chapter four, the author focuses on the “simple signaling” of the Atlantic telegraph (167). As mentioned above, in the rare instances when the Atlantic cable worked as intended, it required slow, painstaking labor to make sense of the garbled messages sent across its expanse (170–72). The overwhelming majority of transmissions consisted of little more than a steady stream of electrical impulses meant to signal that the line had not broken. While these signals were meaningless in and of themselves, “this meaningless telegraphic language bore profoundly meaningful effects” (172) for a public transfixed by the “grand imaginary of global connection” (167). By focusing on this steady stream of content-free impulses, Supp-Montgomerie makes the claim that it was the “infrastructural form” of the electromagnetic telegraph itself that was imagined as meaningful rather than the messages it often failed to transmit (174). Because of the affective, religious meaning attached to the very idea of connectivity, a cable that was “primarily a medium for the failure of communication” (171) was made to stand in as proof of the inevitability, or even immanence, of a global, Christian network. In other words, “the telegraph relocated meaning from content to technology” (167) so that the development of network infrastructure became “both the message and the mission” of its champions (174).When the Medium Was the Mission challenges many assumptions about how we understand the rhetorical relationship between infrastructure and imagination. In a brief epilogue, Supp-Montgomerie explains that her aim in this work was to “sketch out a possible characterization” of “the relationship between the original and contemporary networks” that will “invite further inquiry into this particular genealogy” (204). As she continues, “both the telegraph and the internet are networks hailed through imaginaries that deny some of the most basic elements of their functioning” (204). While our network imaginary pictures a world of ever-increasing connectivity, the spaces between connections are what make networks possible at all. Networks do not only (or even primarily) connect; they also exclude, and the latter is just as important to their overall functioning. It is only when networks “fail”—for example, when we encounter an unexpected and undesired disconnection (Why won't Netflix load? It was working five minutes ago!)—that we encounter this constitutive feature of the form itself. To the author, disconnection should be central to how we understand networks, since “failure is part of how networks work” (206). The refusal to attend to disconnection is problematic since networks are imaginaries as much (or more) than they are infrastructure. This governs how infrastructure serves political ends. When the imaginary of the infrastructure is one of unmitigated, utopian goodness, it can lead to “technological and social practices that feed the omnivorous appetite of connection as such: every element that falls outside the purview of the network must be integrated into the broader structure . . . effectively excluding from recognizable existence anything that breaks from network logic” (206). By attending to the religious origins of this imaginary, we can better understand that the “defining elements of ‘the digital age’ . . . are not contemporary technological affordances but the effects of a habitual set of cultural practices” (209).

Abstract National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stunned the United States with her captivating performance of “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” during the 2021 inaugural ceremony for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Analyzing this political poem, we contribute to the rhetorical scholarship of inaugural ceremonies and demonstrate how Gorman's performance renews a tradition of Black jeremiads. Specifically, we argue that Gorman's performance creates a “double play” on white expectations, thereby crafting a rival version of democratic unity as she poetically envisions a “we the people” that does not center on the U.S. system of white supremacy and is not sponsored by white aesthetic and rhetorical traditions. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Gorman's Black poetic jeremiad calls Americans into a democracy that rejects white supremacist assumptions of the good life.

Abstract The study of the Vietnam War and American presidential discourse has followed a somewhat meandering path. The Vietnam discourse of Jimmy Carter remains the most poorly understood of the late Cold War presidents. Throughout the 1970s, Carter participated in, and at times led, the national debate over the federal government's responsibility to Vietnam veterans. He spoke of a debt of gratitude that the American people owed to the war's veterans. As president, parts of his domestic agenda prioritized Vietnam veterans, leading him to preside over commemorative events for the war's veterans on several occasions. During his time in elective office, he alternatingly defined the purpose of the war in Southeast Asia as preserving the American way of life, promoting democracy, or defending liberty and freedom. Carter practiced an ethics of remembering that sought to redeem the American soldier, to erase the divisiveness of the past, and to “delegitimize and marginalize anti-war opinions.”1 Despite the obvious importance of both his discourse and his actions, Carter's Vietnam War rhetoric has received very little attention.

A World of Turmoil is part of the Michigan State University Press series “US-China Relations in the Age of Globalization.” As Stephen J. Hartnett writes in a preface to the series, “This series . . . strives to practice what Qingwen Dong calls ‘edge ball’: Getting as close as possible to the boundary of what is sayable without crossing the line of being offensive.” At the beginning, Hartnett calls himself “a participant-observer in the reemergence of China as a global power” and, importantly, “a supporter of the ongoing successes of Taiwan” (xxvii). He addresses an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers in “communication, history, international studies, political science, globalization, and more” (li). It's clear from the content of the book that he does not expect his readers to be intimately familiar with the history of postwar U.S.-Taiwan-China relations, although readers well-versed in this history will also benefit from his communication-based perspective. Focus is on “moments of rupture and innovation” in U.S.-Taiwan-China relations because they illustrate how the disruption of communicative patterns in moments of political crisis led to new ways of communicating (xlvi). Therefore, he focuses on five “case studies” of communicative challenges: The period from the end of World War Two to 1952 (the end of the Truman administration), when Chiang Kai-shek lost the Civil War with the Communists and escaped to Taiwan, and the United States separated the Communist and Nationalist forces;The beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55 (also known as the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis);Nixon's and Kissinger's visits to China and negotiations over the Shanghai Communiqué in the early 1970s;Lee Teng-hui's presidency, his visit to Cornell, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, and the Clinton administration's “Three Noes” policy; andThe Tsai and Trump administrations of 2016–present.Hartnett analyzes the cases using rhetorics that he argues characterize the communicative dynamics of relations among the United States, China, and Taiwan: “China's rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” in which the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) draws upon China's “century of humiliation” beginning in the nineteenth century to accuse the West of continuing to suppress China's rise as a major geopolitical power;U.S. “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” a phrase used to describe how the United States has used misinformation and sown confusion in the pursuit of global influence;“United States’ treatment of Taiwan via the rhetoric of marginal significance” (xxix), which belittles Taiwan and treats the people as minor participants in their own future;Taiwan's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion,” which during the Lee Teng-hui period portrayed Taiwan as a model for a future democratic China; andTaiwan's “rhetoric of democratic disdain” (xxx), a more recent response to CPC pressure on Taiwan, casting the Communists as a hidebound authoritarian government that has nothing to offer the Taiwanese.Chapter one covers the Truman administration's relations with China and the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in Taiwan. The chapter focuses on the rhetorical contexts for two of Truman's speeches on U.S.-ROC relations, which Hartnett argues show how the president's policy on Taiwan changed between January and June of 1950 due not only to the Chinese involvement in the conflict on the Korean peninsula but also to McCarthy era accusations of appeasement. Hartnett argues that Truman's eventual involvement in the Taiwan-PRC conflict treated Taiwan with “the rhetoric of marginal significance” by protecting both Taiwan from attacks by the PRC and China from attacks by the Chiang regime. Still, China reacted with the “rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” viewing U.S. involvement as yet more western imperialism.The second chapter focuses on the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55. Hartnett argues that although Eisenhower entered the White House with a clear anti-communist stance, intending to release Chiang from his U.S.-imposed restrictions on attacking China, eventually the U.S. government found itself back in the role of restraining Chiang even as it moved from an unintentional “rhetoric of geostrategic deception” (unintentional because, Hartnett argues, it was more a reaction to events than a purposeful strategy) to a chillingly clear rhetoric which found the U.S. for the first time threatening nuclear strikes on China's military assets. Hartnett intriguingly proposes that the Eisenhower administration's use of “fuzzing,” which is often seen as the origin of “strategic ambiguity” and an example of Eisenhower's brilliant Cold War strategizing, was actually the result of confusion, disagreement, and lack of information about China's purposes in shelling the offshore island of Quemoy. According to Hartnett, evidence shows that Mao Zedong never intended to use the shelling of Quemoy as a precursor to invading Taiwan—in fact, Hartnett argues that Mao did not want Chiang to give up Quemoy because such a retreat would result in a “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan” scenario that was unacceptable to the Communists. However, not everyone in the Eisenhower administration agreed about Mao's intentions, which resulted in the frightening statement that the United States would consider using “tactical” atomic bombs on China (43). An eventual result of this miscommunication was that the PRC was able to get from the Soviets materials to develop its own nuclear weapons.In the third chapter, Hartnett argues that Nixon's approach to the China-Taiwan problem was more intentional than that of Truman or even Eisenhower. Hartnett contrasts the formal written product of negotiations between Nixon/Kissinger and Chou Enlai (Zhou Enlai)/Mao Zedong with the—until recently—classified conversations that the two parties had, illustrating how unwritten (or at least confidential or classified) aspects of negotiation, where there's an attempt to be ambiguous in the product, can result in the meaning or effect of the document getting away from the intentions of the authors. Nixon expected to get reelected and be in power until 1976, and what he and Kissinger said to Zhou depended on that. Pro-Taiwanese advocates reference the text of the Shanghai Communiqué to say that “acknowledg[ing] that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China” is not the same as “accepting” that position; according to Hartnett, however, this is not what Nixon and Kissinger told Zhou Enlai (71). In fact, they exercised what Hartnett calls a “rhetoric of abeyance,” tied to the “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” to persuade the CPC of Nixon's plan to tell the American people and the government of Taiwan that the Communiqué did not signal any change in relations with China or Taiwan.Chapter four covers most of Lee Teng-hui's twelve years as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). As the first president to be directly elected by the people of Taiwan and as a Christian, Lee embodied the “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” in his speech and interactions with the PRC. Hartnett begins, however, with a brief discussion of the 1978 U.S. decision under President Carter to break off official relations with the Republic of China and normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. Accompanying normalization, however, was the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which made many of the official interactions with Taiwan unofficial and established “the non-governmental, embassy-but-not-an-embassy ‘American Institute in Taiwan’ (AIT)” (87). While losing official relations with the United States made Taiwan once again the victim of the “rhetoric of marginal significance,” the TRA also made the PRC once again the victim of “the rhetoric of geostrategic deception.”When Lee became the first Taiwanese president of Taiwan ten years later, he asserted that a democratic Taiwan was a model for what the PRC could become if it turned away from authoritarianism. Hartnett argues that Lee's approach to China also signaled to the United States that Taiwan would not accept being treated through the rhetoric of marginal significance anymore. Unfortunately, Lee's popular reelection in 1996 amidst threatening Chinese military exercises was followed by what Hartnett calls U.S. President Clinton's “slow motion betrayal of Taiwan” (109). Clinton's “Three Noes” (no support for Taiwan independence, for “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan,” or for Taiwan's participation in international organizations that require statehood) shook Taiwan. Clinton once again treated Taiwan to a dose of the rhetoric of marginal significance, while arguably capitulating to Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's “rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism,” which advanced a vision of a postcolonial China “striv[ing] for national greatness by trying to absorb [its] less powerful neighbors” (102).In the fifth chapter, Hartnett jumps ahead to the administrations of Donald Trump and Tsai Ing-wen, where Taiwan's stance toward China changed from Lee's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” to a “rhetoric of democratic disdain,” mocking the CPC's outdated authoritarianism in response to misogynistic rhetorical attacks on Tsai. Internally, Tsai exercised what Hartnett calls a rhetoric of “postcolonial nationalism” that sought transitional justice to heal the wounds the people suffered under the previously authoritarian state (128). This rhetoric also acknowledged the need to recognize Taiwan's Indigenous people and its colonial past in order to move forward; notably, moving forward meant moving away from a Chinese identity and toward “a Taiwanese version of postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (129). Hartnett thus argues that the Tsai administration's celebration of the Republic of China's National Day (October 10) contradicted the effort to build a Taiwanese identity. This chapter also criticizes Donald Trump for sending confusing signals to Taiwan and China, characterizing him as “an anarchist setting into play words and forces meant not to sustain the status quo or build trust, but to release the unpredictable energies of creative destruction” (145).I have doubts about Hartnett's concluding recommendations for peaceful and productive relations among China, the United States, and Taiwan, including his suggestion that Taiwan should simply stop calling itself the Republic of China and change its constitution. Hartnett implies that the changes he recommends for the United States, China, and Taiwan are all interdependent: Taiwan cannot change its name and constitution without believable assurances from the CPC that it is willing to change what has basically motivated its relationship with Taiwan since 1949—the belief that Taiwan is part of China and needs to “return” to China. However, as Hartnett points out, the CPC is stuck in a stance toward Taiwan that accepts no compromise regarding Taiwan's fate. It is not clear to me what would lead the current CPC leadership to change their stance toward Taiwan.Hartnett also recommends that the United States should engage more with China as an equal partner in areas that recognize the PRC's status as a rising power. But U.S.-China relations inevitably encompass U.S.-Taiwan relations. China terminated climate talks after former Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, for instance. It is unclear how the United States can interact with Taiwan in a way that will not result in China exercising the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism or the rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism. That is, in the end, it seems to me that everything depends on China giving up its dream of “reunification” with Taiwan, which is rather unlikely in the foreseeable future.I also disagree with the author's criticism of Taiwan's use of the rhetorics of “democracy as conversion” and “democratic disdain.” Humor or sarcasm can be seen as a “weapon of the weak” to counter the strident rhetoric of the more powerful PRC government. While this kind of humor might anger them, Hartnett's own analysis implies that the rhetorics of traumatized nationalism and postcolonial colonialism that would drive their responses are performative.A minor aspect of A World of Turmoil that might confuse readers not familiar with the nuances of Taiwan's history and politics is the usage of “Taiwanese” to describe the martial law regimes of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo as well as the more Taiwan-centric administrations of presidents like Lee Teng-hui and Tsai Ing-wen. It is particularly surprising to see a statement that describes Chiang Ching-kuo as “arguing for Taiwanese independence” (108), rather than saying that the younger Chiang was arguing for the legitimacy of the Republic of China on Taiwan as a sovereign state. There are also some small errors, such as calling Hakka the “dominant” language in Taiwan (xxii).These issues aside, for communications scholars interested in U.S.-China-Taiwan relations, A World of Turmoil will provide an accessible discussion of the problems in international communication among the three countries. Hartnett's reading of the history of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations through the lens of the various “rhetorical dispositions” opens opportunities to rethink what has worked—and, more importantly, what has not worked—during the past nearly eight decades (163). It is also gratifying to see a major work of rhetorical history that focuses at least in part on Taiwan's rhetorical practices. Perhaps this book will serve as a basis for further study of Taiwanese rhetoric.

Abstract In August 2022, the U.S. restaurant chain Cracker Barrel introduced a meatless sausage patty—the “Impossible Sausage”—to its breakfast menu. A viral social media backlash against the restaurant ensued. Using Fabio Parasecoli's theory of gastronativism as a theoretical lens, we perform a critical rhetorical analysis of online commentaries regarding Cracker Barrel's Impossible Sausage with an eye toward synecdochic representation. We contend that the online “culture war” that ensued within and beyond Cracker Barrel's social media pages is representative of plant-based meat alternatives’ gastropolitical resonance in U.S. American identity construction. Two synecdoches emerge through our analysis, the Cracker Barrel restaurant as right-wing sacred space embedded in “tradition” and the Impossible Sausage as a leftist, progressive, contagious intrusion into this space. Discourses of faux-Southern identity, right-wing appeals to traditional ways of life, and white masculine victimhood are entrenched in these synecdochic tropes. Understanding the Cracker Barrel's meatless menu debacle as a manifestation of gastronativist synecdoche demonstrates the ideological significance of meat and plant-based meat in contemporary U.S. political imaginaries. Given plant-based foods’ increasing popularity among health- and environmentally conscious consumers, rhetoricians concerned with the intersections of food, power, and identity should take note of how flesh (non)consumption symbolically (re)constructs U.S. American gastropolitical identities.

We are haunted—politically, professionally, and personally—by the rhetorical constraints of contrition and forgiveness. The Rhetoric of Official Apologies, a coedited book by internationally prominent rhetorical scholars Lisa S. Villadsen and Jason A. Edwards, offers a timely intervention. The volume focuses on an “official apology” as a globally-recognized and prevalent rhetorical genre, which they define narrowly as “a statement of regret presented by a representative of a state or a government (e.g., a leading political figure such as a prime minister) to a particular group of citizens or an entire population (or subgroup thereof) of a different country for wrongs committed against them by or in the name of the state or government” (2). They focus beyond crisis communication playbooks of containing damage to one's reputation and into the riskier, more vulnerable realm of a government seeking to recognize and reconcile intergenerational legacies of harm. More than political gestures, though they are that, Villadsen and Edwards underscore the significance of “doing it in public” (3), emphasizing the ceremonial settings and public address of the genre.The book considers what characteristics we might identify when the genre is performed in meaningful ways instead of as empty symbolic acts. The editors insist, as rhetoricians should, that words matter and can help re-constitute meaning about our ugliest, most traumatic, and violent moments in history. Instead of pivoting on guilt, Villadsen and Edwards argue that the genre turns on responsibility, “that is, publicly acknowledging that the acts of the past were wrong, expressing sorrow and remorse over the wrongdoing, and committing to nonrepetition and to new measures for improvement” (6). They conclude that a key to a too-often-overlooked purpose of official apologies is: “a redefinition of or recommitment to the societal norms holding the community together, in other words, the function of rearticulating the meaning of citizenship” (222). Publics, therefore, are critical to assessing whether an official apology matters because moving past immediate harms, these reflections can indicate who maintains or might begin to identify with a sense of belonging in the “us” of what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community” of a nation.The Rhetoric of Official Apologies further narrows the genre to how and why national governments are moved to address past injustices, grappling with the messy work of negotiating morality, harms, and reconciliations. The book includes an introduction and an afterword written by the coeditors, as well as nine chapters without any organizing subthemes. Historical events include slavery, genocide, and colonization. While more than half the book focuses on the United States, chapters also include atrocities in Scotland, Rwanda, Canada, Iraq, Australia, and Indigenous nations. Chapters also include failed or non-apologies, such as Bradley Serber's analysis of U.S. President Clinton's apology for nonintervention in the Rwandan genocide, John Hatch's study of U.S. Congress's apologies for slavery, and Jeremy Cox and Tiara Good's assessment of U.S. President Obama's apology to Native Peoples. In the last chapter, Kundai Chirindo and Jasper Edwards extend rhetorical research on reconciliation to the context of Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islanders, insisting that self-determination is an overlooked feature, to date, that is necessary in addressing the legitimacy of how power over destiny is negotiated between two sovereign nations. This chapter powerfully troubles the idea of “citizenship” as a central term of official apologies by asking how we might imagine reconciliation in the broader framework of human rights or the more daring realm of redistributing power through self-determination.As this book was published during the height of the COVID pandemic, many, like me, may have missed its release. Given its exorbitant price, interested readers might request their libraries order copies. The term “official apology” is immensely useful for rhetoricians studying how state officials navigate blame, self-reflection, and repair. I hope this volume helps make space for studying other genres of apology, including those by corporations, NGOs, and educational institutions (including journals, professional organizations, and departments). Given the focus, for example, the book doesn't engage theorization of transformative justice and abolitionist rhetorics, which focus more on systemic roots and prevention of harm beyond state power. Nevertheless, The Rhetoric of Official Apologies establishes the significance of the genre to public affairs and the work left to develop more robust vocabularies for genres of contrition and forgiveness.

Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research, this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing, pedagogy, professional interaction, and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates, inclusion is not inherently equitable, nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately, I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.