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.

Drawing on disability studies analysis of institutional narratives of disability by composition and rhetoric scholars, this article theorizes “favor access.” Favor access gestures toward inclusion, but is steeped in the capitalist, colonialist logic of academic institutions in service of ultimately extractive, dehumanizing agendas. Instead of favor access, the article points to collective access as articulated by disability justice activists. As opposed to favor access, collective access rejects institutional logics and values community and collaboration rather than academia’s emphasis on individualism and competition. This article considers sites where collective access is happening in composition classrooms and in the field of composition and rhetoric.

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide. In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

In this article, we share and reflect on our experience working together (as a Native youth and settler scholar) to develop a cultural camp for tribal youth. Through reflection and storytelling, we came to realize the complexities of attempting to support what Scott Lyons terms “rhetorical sovereignty” (particularly of youth) in real institutional contexts, of appealing to different audiences without compromising our vision, and of determining where the line really is between “I” and “we” in our writing and our visions for this work. In short, we have come to realize how complicated justice-driven work really is and how the process has actually changed us both along the way. We use our own stories of collaboration and the program we designed to explore both the possibilities and complexities of allyship and collaboration across difference in our cultural rhetorics practice.

Expanding conceptions of material cultural rhetorics in activism, I explore how amplifying autogestión by artist-activist collectives allows for an approach to allyship that contributes to changing material realities for those involved. Writing about artistic collectives that engage in autogestión amplifies projects calling out corrupt governing practices rooted in systems of oppression, while emphasizing and exercising the power of relying on each other. In this article, I reflect on how amplifying autogestión as cultural rhetoric in venues outside of the field expands the reach of cultural rhetorics and how bringing that work back to the writing classroom encourages interdisciplinary perspectives where students learn about their relationality and responsibility to Puerto Ricans and other colonized peoples within the United States.

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

In this essay, I examine the 17 November 1991 “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” advertisement in the New York Times. The advertisement is a reflection of 1,600 Black women coming to the defense of Anita Hill after the Hill-Thomas Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings. By analyzing how the advertisement’s authors came to the defense of Anita Hill while inverting Lewis Gordon’s idea of bad faith, building with Sylvia Wynter’s conception of Being as Praxis, attuning to Hortense Spillers’s description of Black women as Being for the Captor, and critiquing Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man,” I illuminate a logic of care, Being in Good Faith, that broadens rhetorical scholars’ understandings of the boundaries of what humans can care about and how humans can care.

As COVID-19 infections spread in early 2020, the term herd immunity drew the Trump administration’s attention as a remedy for redressing the pandemic. However, scientific experts warned the Trump administration against adopting herd immunity as a pandemic response. The Trump administration was unmoved. I argue that understanding the Trump administration’s incongruous pandemic response is impossible without theorizing the deeper catastrophic formations uniting herd immunity and the political Right. Drawing evidence from the Trump administration and its allies, I analyze herd immunity as a reflection of a catastrophic form of social Darwinism emerging from the Trump administration’s coronavirus messaging. By exploring the Trump administration’s general enthusiasm for catastrophe, I offer a fresh scholarly contribution at the intersection of rhetorical studies, public address, and health, political, and scientific communication, ultimately illuminating larger theoretical and political lessons for the discipline and beyond.

In comparative rhetoric, interconnectivity emerges as a frame to conceptualize power struggle, one that specifically counters othering and the underlying essentialist and colonial logics. Interconnectivity stands for a third space where difference and connection coexist and where interdependence characterizes the relationship among interlocutors. This essay addresses how to forge interconnectivity and argues for the rhetoric of according-with. According-with refers to a threefold act, namely, to navigate, use, and refigure established and emergent discursive circumstances. In re/contextualizing practices of according-with in China’s pre-Qin period and various other places and time, I specify resourcefulness and situatedness as two epistemes exercised by according-with. The rhetoric of according-with, then, nuances the particular doing-thinking-be(com)ing that disenfranchised people enact to reshape power differentials. The rhetoric of according-with functions as a critical apparatus to cultivate interconnectivity as one pathway toward subverting power.

Judges and jurists frequently read police-recorded video as arhetorical. It is not. Footage recorded from the perspective of an officer favors police. Drawing on both Burke’s theory of identification and film studies, I consider how footage filmed from an officer’s perspective functions as a nonverbal constitutive rhetoric. In an analysis of Harris v. Scott (2007), I demonstrate how police-recorded video encourages viewers to dissolve the space between themselves and the police, inviting audiences to characterize both police and themselves as passive, impartial, and objective viewers of an recorded event. When successful as constitutive rhetoric, footage from police-recorded video makes jurors and judges more suspectable to arguments that characterize police as passive observers in an event.

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines discourse surrounding contemporary calls for consilience, a form of interdisciplinary collaboration articulated by E. O. Wilson aimed at uniting the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from a Darwinian perspective. This essay builds on earlier examinations of Wilsonian consilience by analyzing a sample of texts that reflect a “second wave” of consilience and shifting rhetorical tactics over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that current calls for consilience reflect heightened rhetorical awareness among authors and that additional rhetorical work is required to gain adherence among diverse cross-disciplinary audiences. Implications are discussed for future research into enactments of consilience-style interdisciplinary research.KEYWORDS: CollaborationconsilienceE. O. Wilsoninterdisciplinarity Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Wilson’s rationale for unifying the disciplines is, on the surface, noncontroversial. In Consilience, he argues that knowledge is too segregated, academic specialties too specialized, and engagements too infrequent among scholars and researchers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities (9). Additionally, Wilson believes that addressing real-world social and political problems demands “fluency across boundaries” (13–14), that any single branch of knowledge would not yield the synoptic vision required for effective intervention. For Wilson in 1998, consilience remains a “metaphysical” hope, ultimately pointing the way toward a more systematic and integrated account of human knowledge about the world and ourselves (9).2 For example, conferences and workshops include Integrating Science and the Humanities (Vancouver, BC, 2008), Consilience Conference (St. Louis, MO, 2012), and TEDxWellesleyCollege on Consilience (Wellesley, MA, 2014). Scholarly texts include, among others, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Dutton); Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Slingerland & Collard); Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences (Carroll); The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Gottschall).3 While a broader conversation about consilience style research might take into consideration works in subfields such as evolutionary esthetics, evolutionary literary study, paleoesthetics, evolutionary film and media study, evolutionary musicology, evolutionary studies in popular culture and include journals such as Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, these works—along with the remaining chapters excluded from Darwin’s Bridge and Creating Consilience—would fall into the category of enactments of consilience and do not meet Ceccarelli’s criteria for “interdisciplinary inspirational” texts. Although such works might prove to be fruitful examples of enactments of consilience, they do not explicitly label their work as a continuation of Wilson’s Consilience, as is the case in both Creating Consilience and Darwin’s Bridge.

This essay proposes “jian-rhetorical seeing”—an art of invention—to foster genuine dialogs about human rights in transnational spaces and to challenge asymmetric distributions of power that so often course through these spaces. Building on and extending recent scholarship on human rights rhetoric and comparative rhetoric, the essay reinterprets an ancient Chinese concept, jian 鉴, as reflective/reflexive “rhetorical seeing” and brings it into dialog with Confucian ethics and rhetorical theories of recognition. Through an analysis of the Chinese translations and interpretations of rights in a few distilled historical moments during the Late Qing period (1840–1912), the authors demonstrate jian-rhetorical seeing and illuminate the implications of this rhetorical art for human rights debates in today’s global context.

This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

ABSTRACT Post-truth, understood as a turn from collective sense and judgment to nonpublic forms of epistemic justification, is a distinctly rhetorical problem. This article offers, in response, a theorization of knowledge making as the means by which affective and material impingements upon bodies become publicly legible and rhetorically available. For this, the author turns, perhaps unexpectedly, to John Locke. Locke’s works offer the foundations of an empirical theory of rhetoric that embraces the sensible realm not as a conduit to reality but as a space where social connection becomes possible. Locke engages this realm through natural historical inquiry. Tracing this inquiry to his commonplacing practices, the author presents the rhetorical-dialectical topics as a basis for the shared sense and judgment that he pursued and that post-truth demands. The topics, this article argues, guide and enlarge the senses, forming objects of knowledge with which to sustain public life—objects about which plural truths are possible.

ABSTRACT This article examines Foucault as a rhetorician rather than as a historian of parrhesia and rhetoric. It explores what we can learn about his philosophy by examining it through the lens of his rhetorical practices. Focusing on his famous 1961 preface to History and Madness, it suggests that Foucault’s model of philosophy entails a rhetoric of conversion or transformation.

E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place. . . . As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy of nature. Following the route Wister presents in his journal, Cram details the social ecologies of sexual modernity as they emerge in Chicago as the racialized White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the train ride to Wyoming, and Theodore Roosevelt’s much touted rehabilitation from enervated neurasthenia through the “West cure.” The violent inheritance, the land lines, traced in this chapter link together the racial-sexual dynamics of heredity, rail’s connectivity, the logic of climatic therapeutics, the relations of electricity to sexuality, and the articulation of energetic friction between urbanity and nature. In these lines, Cram finds a capacitive network that cultivated settler sexuality as energy regulation for the purposes of reinvention.Chapter 2 queers settler sexuality and its relation to the land by considering the life of Grace Raymond Hebard, “a historian, suffrage activist, and progressive” who was crucial to developing pioneer mythology, particularly the White mythos surrounding Sacajawea, and who also shared a home and a life with historian Agnes Wergeland (62). Cram studies how archival practices at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming establish “relationships between memory and imagination” that mediate Hebard’s life and love and, in turn, shape the violent inheritance of sexual modernity. Cram queers the affective possibilities of archival mediation by reading how Hebard’s and Wergeland’s lives are connected through Hebard’s sentimental “love for land and woman” within archived materials and against a “narrow vision of settler feminism” that inscribed “extractive world making into her labor” (65). Cram’s intention is to undercut recuperation (here of the New Western feminist woman) and instead foster what they term regeneration. First, they examine Hebard’s racial biopolitics of pioneering, including her sentimental incorporation of Sacajawea into a settler imagination of racial vitalization through extractive, colonial relations to Western land and climate. Then Cram performs queer detective work to disrupt the landline of pioneer womanhood by inspecting Hebard’s efforts to preserve Wergeland’s papers, Hebard and Wergeland’s side-by-side burial plots, Wergeland’s love poetry, a handwritten endearment on the back of a photograph, and embossed lettering on Hebard’s briefcase that suggests Hebard had Wergeland’s name placed opposite hers after Wergeland’s death. Cram’s sensitivity to working against the materials’ normative mediation of Hebard’s memory is admirable for modeling an attunement to traces of queer life in an archive that proceeds as if their love for each other were unthinkable or irrelevant.Chapter 3 shifts again, taking the reader to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, where Cram stresses “the importance of engaging in situ encounters with settler aesthetics of violence as an entry point to witnessing violent inheritance” (92). The organizing interest for the chapter is controversy over the CMHR’s muted account of Canada’s residential school system, which was “explicitly designed to rupture the kinship ties and languages of Indigenous children stolen from their families” (91). Attending to administrative discourse, they contextualize the systemic educational violence of the residential school system within colonial biopolitics, namely the forcible sexualization of Indigeneity through the figure of childhood. Doing so, Cram situates children as resources within the extractive logic of sexual modernity, noting the abusive, paternal absorption of childlike “Natives” to revitalize the settler nation. Then they elaborate the controversy surrounding the CMHR’s handling of residential schools, centering on the museum’s justification that it was protecting (settler) children from “difficult memories” regarding the schools (92). They read two of the museum’s exhibits, the permanent Childhood Denied exhibit and a temporary one, Witness Blanket, to demonstrate the infrastructural violence of incorporating Indigenous sovereignty through Witness Blanket while also erasing it as a special instance within a persistent aesthetic, narrative architecture of settler inheritance. Cram offers a subtle, delicately written, experiential analysis of the two exhibits to contrast a settler vision of reconciliation in the permanent exhibit with that of the temporary exhibit, designed by Carey Newman (Kwagiulth and Coast Salish), which “reconfigures the metaphysics of witness” (126). This counter-installation offers a remapping of Indigeneity through “regenerative aesthetics . . . that do not presume the integrity of nor Indigenous incorporation into the settler state” (127, emphasis original). Cram closes by noting that as of 2019 the CMHR entered a nonpossessive, collaborative stewardship arrangement for Witness Blanket, thus opening future regenerative possibilities. The entire chapter is richly detailed and, against the brutality of the schools, draws transformative inspiration from the power of alternative aesthetic practices.Chapter 4 reflects again on the contested memory of the land, this time through the Minidoka National Historical Site in northern Wyoming, which memorializes the Japanese internment camp that was sited there. It is perhaps the most complex and unexpected chapter in a complex and often unexpected book. Using detailed participation of a pilgrimage to the site, interviews, and historical methods, Cram resituates the politics of internment without disrupting the memory work of its survivors and descendants; in fact, they provide nuance that leaves one humbled. Specifically, they analyze the state’s 2012 allowance of Big Sky Farms to place an eight-thousand-animal concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) just over a mile from Minidoka. Cram uses the legal logic of affected persons, determined by property and residence status (which thus denied survivors and descendants standing to object), to “narrate the overlapping and conflicted relationships it encompasses” (132). Affected persons trace the land lines of this chapter, allowing one to follow the “inherited consequence [cumulative impacts] of earlier appropriations of land from its earlier uses prior to contact, land grabs, and later appropriations” (133). Cram maps how the War Relocation Authority articulated Japanese detention within “histories and spatialities of Indianness” (134) by situating detention sites in federal lands of dispossessed Indigenous people and within imaginaries of future land development, in particular how Japanese forced labor was used to cultivate seized land to be “later transferred to private homesteaders” (134). The chapter outlines a complicated memoryscape by detailing the experience of the pilgrimage (filtered through voices of pilgrims), the history of locating Minidoka on public (dispossessed) land, the camp’s physical layout, pilgrims’ witnessing practices, the intimate environmental dimensions of the memorial, and the smell and pollution of the CAFO. Cram traces these through the way sexuality weaves through capital’s racialized, extractive biopolitics, where land seizure, cultivation by forced labor, and large private bovine agriculture operations make affected persons a window onto the violent inheritance of Western land’s relation to national, whitened vitality.Chapter 5 shifts from sites to mobilities, specifically to Interstate 80 as “a landmark of national and bicoastal queer mobility, a mid-twentieth century route for small-town queer dreams of moving to the Big Gay Bay or Big Apple” (164). To “speak of queer automobilities means thinking through processes of dwelling and constraints on movement” and also taking “seriously the vast energy infrastructures that make such social space possible” (164, 165). Cram makes a strong case for queer scholarship to attend to petroculture because “petroleum and carbon byproducts literally scatter throughout queer migration stories” (166). The chapter follows the connection between urban and rural spaces along I-80, notably through interviews conducted in Laramie and Boulder, to demonstrate the “regional affect” of queer and trans life inhabiting “settler colonial structures” of “‘living oil’” (169, 166). Because the chapter is based in interviews, the regional affect Cram is trying to show us is encountered through “intimate atmospheres” of “queer regional stories” (169). In Laramie, which is defined by petroculture, Cram listens to the suffocating, slow, ambient violence that “petromasculinity” prosecutes and how it creates isolation, vulnerability, and a deep sense of misattunement for queer and trans people. In Boulder, suffocating misattunement becomes a kind of misfitting amid pervasive emphasis on fitness and outdoor life that is ableist, white, and heteronormative. The overpowering desire to just get out created by such toxic, intimate atmospheres pushes people toward the affordances of automobility—“the promise of white selfhood connected to unfettered movement”—in which such mobility depends on consumptive, violent inheritances (183).Cram closes chapter 5, almost like a coda, by taking us to Queer Nature in Colorado in search of an alternative, regenerative form of atmospheric intimacy. As a kind of sanctuary, Cram situates Queer Nature within the longer history of intentional communities of the “lesbian land” movement of the 1970s and 1980s (187). Queer Nature’s mission “overlaps and departs from these models” with the goal of “tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (188). The philosophy of Queer Nature focuses on ecological awareness and grief, which Cram argues is a form of “transing of the erotic,” drawing from Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “energy for change” (196, 194).To say this book is an accomplishment is understatement. Methodologically it is brilliant, demonstrating the significant potential of painstaking regional, case-based scholarship. Conceptually it is discerning, unbound by rigid expectations to hew to schools of thought and consistently profound as a result. As a “read,” it is engrossing. And, most important, as a perspective, exploring violent land relations as an inheritance of energy extraction, settler coloniality, racialized biopolitics, and queer life and insight, it is inspiring. Cram models a kind of environmentally minded scholarship that defies simple categorization but adds to every conversation they enter.Further, because the book is built around case studies brocaded with detail, Cram also generates further lines of inquiry that can build on their work. For example, while the case studies focus on extractive and violent relations, Cram continuously remarks on the ironies of responding to such violence from within its inheritances. How to transform violence into a differently regenerative ethics in opposition to the consumptive regeneration that marks a Whitened settler world is a critical question—one of the broad questions today. Across a range of critical literatures, scholars have considered how to foment new possibilities amid deep structures of violence, and such possibilities come not from establishing a pristine, alternative space or by seeking refuge from vulnerabilities that are necessary to life, but by understanding how one is integrally bound up in, as Cram describes, the inheritances that layer even the simplest actions, like driving to escape your intolerant, hate-filled hometown. Cram helps readers understand that such desires are a form of queer decoloniality, or “dwelling in a decolonial ancestral imagination that abides in the political imagination of eroticism” in the transed sense of Lorde’s erotic (199). The book does not provide answers but rather, from a different vantage point, returns to an important, long-standing question about the necessity and limits of resistance. What is regeneration if it is tied to the land and tangled in lines connecting violence, energy extraction, and modern sexuality? What does regeneration look like if (against individual, whitened bodily vitalization) it is pursued environmentally and attuned to violent infrastructures of feeling?As is evident, I greatly admire Cram and their book. Violent Inheritance does not forge a scalpel to do specific analytical work. As a model for others, Cram writes into the contexts presented, being more evocative than precisely conceptual, sometimes to the point of being elliptical, but gradually you come to feel what they mean in a very concrete way. In that, the book enacts what Cram has previously called queer orientational scholarship in order to advocate for “queer collaborative stewardship.” Such stewardship “models a different kind of queer politics routed not through liberal imagination but though an ecological imagination” that “resists a scarcity framework of settler modernity in favor of abundance” (204, 206). To make this stewardship imaginable, Cram produces concepts that are not instruments so much as they are doorways for readers to enter a different, regenerative inhabitation of their world, by which I mean their bodies, their thoughts, and their feelings in relation to all that makes up “place.” You must sit with this book to understand it; you cannot extract from it easily. And that, I suspect, is part of what Cram means by queer orientational scholarship—to study and connect in affirmative ways that resist the extractive sexualities of modernity, including the modes of scholarship to which all of us are inured.

Other| July 31 2023 BOOKS OF INTEREST Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2023) 56 (2): 206–212. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.2.0206 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 31 July 2023; 56 (2): 206–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.2.0206 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2023The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT Reverse eikos (plausibility) arguments are notorious for reversing a reason that supports an accusation into a reason that denies this accusation. This article offers new insights on their analysis and evaluation, by reconstructing a reverse eikos argument’s line of reasoning as an argumentative pattern. The pattern reveals that this type of argument centers not only on the arguer’s claim that by doing the act of which they have been accused, they would risk becoming the likely suspect, but also on the connected reasoning that they would not want to risk this since that would be stupid and they are not stupid. The proposed analysis, which is illustrated with classic and modern examples of reverse eikos arguments, shows that the evaluation of these arguments boils down to estimating the arguer’s calculation of the costs and benefits of taking the risk, while taking into account the arguer’s character, intellect, and circumstances.

September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.

This article details a collaborative editing assignment that asks students to analyze and assess editorial contributions made to Wikipedia. This project not only provides students an opportunity to apply their understanding of grammar and style concepts to real-world editing situations, it also calls students' attention to the underlying ideological biases and rhetorical impact of subtle language choices used in specific Wikipedia articles. In explaining the rationale behind this assignment and discussing several student samples, this article demonstrates how designing writing assignments around the collaborative, multi-authored nature of Wikipedia can highlight the influence of cultural circumstances on both sentence-level stylistic choices and broader developmental editorial practices.

ABSTRACT This article invites critical inquiry into the rhetorical form of Sylvia Wynter’s thought. The author identifies the key to Wynter’s thought as charting a cartography that is intransigently committed to a vision of the intellectual imagination at its most ambitious while staying true to the grain and detail of the liminal, the lumpen, and the particular. The upshot is that Wynter wants to open up a space for the imagination and labor of Black thought, one that comes after and beyond philosophy and theory.

ABSTRACT Africana scholars often address their texts to a reader who is implicitly white. This tendency, which this article characterizes as the “discursive orientation toward whiteness,” has the pernicious effect of limiting the range and rigor of scholars’ research questions and proposal. This analysis examines the other discursive “face,” following J. Saunders Redding’s observation from almost eighty years ago, which remains unnervingly insightful: “Negro [sic] writers have been obliged to have two faces . . . to satisfy two different (and opposed when not entirely opposite) audiences, the [B]lack and the white.” Scholars have described this second face in the text in a number of ways—variously as a temperament, a rhythm, or an “aesthetic.” Through an analysis of a few exemplary texts, the current study will describe a few of the most salient characteristics, ultimately in the service of equipping the “Black” scholar with a few effective, liberatory rhetorical strategies.

This paper explores opportunities for intergenerational communication to foster collective climate action and justice. While climate change communication can be framed as a site of intergenerational conflict and blame, we consider how the concept of superordinate identities offers rhetorical possibilities for generational coalition building to ultimately facilitate joint climate action.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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

This case study explores the rhetorical tactics and strategies of grassroots environmental efforts to oppose the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) in Appalachia. I emphasize the use of epideictic rhetoric by POWHR in their advocacy for climate justice

Knowledge about the use of the term “Indigenous science” (IS) is valuable to technical and scientific communication in the larger goal of exposing colonial, appropriative legacies. Using rhetorical content analysis, we analyze 61 instances of IS in US-based news articles and find that IS is often represented as an ongoing activity, connected to food production, and related to higher education activities. However, IS is rarely defined and Indigenous people are not always cited/quoted.

This essay uses a cultural rhetoric framework to analyze Hermanas: Deepening our Identity and Growing Our Influence (2019), a multi-authored book by evangelical Latinas in the U.S. The distinct storytelling in the text—which layers the authors' personal narratives with discussions of biblical texts—emerges from both white evangelical and Latina cultural contexts. This communal, activist approach to personal narrative enacts rhetorical leadership by confronting systemic injustices in U.S. evangelicalism and offering readers in that community new ways to engage with dominant evangelical rhetoric and with the stories of others.

AbstractThis essay rhetorically analyzes stories about domestic gun violence from Everytown for Gun Safety’s website, “Moments That Survive.” These everyday writers challenge America’s dominant narrative of protection, offering a counternarrative of protection by asking readers to reimagine the perpetrators of gun violence, guns themselves, and moments of gun violence. Extending previous rhetorical scholarship, I demonstrate how and why “imagination” is an essential concept for rhetorical scholars seeking to understand gun violence rhetorics and advocates seeking to change them. Notes1 For their feedback on various stages of this project, thanks to Laura Michael Brown, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Anne Kretsinger-Harries, and Lori Peterson. Thanks as well to Rhetoric Review editor, Elise Hurley, and the reviewers, CitationJenny Andrus and a second reviewer who remains anonymous. I presented portions of this essay for a lecture at the College of Holy Cross’s McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture; thanks to Tom Landy for the invitation and the attendees for their feedback.2 For instance, gun suicides account for over half of all gun-related deaths each year (CitationSilver).3 This percentage is likely higher because it excludes the 48.9% of cases in which “the relationship between murder victims and offenders was unknown” by investigators. Only 9.9% of people were killed by confirmed strangers.4 Although I use “story” and “narrative” interchangeably in this essay, I acknowledge that literary scholars and sociologists, among others, have debated whether these terms mean different things. I use the term “counternarrative” here to indicate how narratives and stories can challenge one another. Counterstories, by contrast, are stories that “subscribe to CRT’s [Critical Race Theory] tenets, particularly in their critique of a dominant ideology (liberalism, whiteness, color blindness) and their sustained focus on social justice as an objective” (CitationMartinez 17). The “Moments That Survive” stories’ critique of dominant ideologies is at best implicit.5 For historical examples in rhetoric, see works by Aristotle and Quintilian (CitationKennerly). Beyond rhetoric, imagination has been usefully theorized by psychoanalysts and by social and political theorists, including postcolonialist, feminist, and queer theorists.6 My description of the “Moments That Survive” website borrows heavily from my earlier essay on stories about gun suicide (CitationRood, “Protection”).7 I have described how domestic violence is operationalized within these stories, but I want to acknowledge that there is disagreement over definitions (CitationSnyder 17). For instance, according to The National Council Against Domestic Violence, “[d]omestic violence is the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another” (“What”). Although their definition is expansive in several ways, it seems to exclude violence committed by family members and former partners.8 The FBI’s 2019 data show that 482 wives and 505 girlfriends were killed by their partner, whereas 85 husbands and 187 boyfriends were killed by their partner. Yet these data have several limitations. First, there is no space for nonbinary folks. Second, a “wife” or “husband” is presumed to be in a heterosexual relationship. A note at the bottom of the FBI’s chart reveals that “the category of acquaintance includes homosexual relationships and the composite category for other known to victim.”9 The labels “us” and “them” can be slippery. The dominant narrative of protection often assumes and perpetuates cultural biases (such as racism) so that “us” means white people and “them” means people of color. But depending on who is speaking, listeners might imagine themselves—or hear themselves being imagined—as an “us” or a “them.” For instance, even though the NRA’s account of protection regularly relies on racist appeals, a person of color might nonetheless hear themselves as an “us” rather than a “them.”In their counternarrative of protection, the “Moments That Survive” writers urge readers to consider danger not just from “them” but also from “us.” Depending on the context, “us” seems to refer to “(a) ourselves and our loved ones, (b) the exclusionary “us” common in gun rights advocacy (e.g., white men), and (c) a capacious account of “us” that includes people historically cast as literal or metaphoric outsiders” (CitationRood, “Protection” 35).10 I do not focus here on depictions of people subject to abuse, but CitationDonileen R. Loseke highlights how women subject to abuse—and organizations seeking to support them—face pressure to portray “morally pure victims” to garner sympathy and support even though such depictions are exclusionary, unrealistic, constraining, and ultimately beside the point—the problem is with the abuser, not the abused (679).11 CitationCaroline E. Light and CitationAngela Stroud thoroughly critique “stand-your-ground” laws and explain why the underlying appeal to self-defense is not available to everyone, particularly people who are not white men.12 Jennifer Andrus illustrates why these different accounts of agency matter. Police tend to assume that the abused have unrestricted agency (they can just leave) or nonagency (they will inevitably return to their abuser). Consequently, police are often ill prepared to understand let alone help the victims/survivors that they are called upon to protect.13 Paige L. Sweet traces how therapy has come to be the primary way of supporting women subject to abuse—or at least an obstacle to receiving other forms of support. While therapy can be useful, it might also suggest that blame lies within women (rather than the men who abused them). Many women desperately need other forms of support (money, housing, food, and so forth), but therapy nonetheless became politically popular because it was seen as distinct from welfare.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCraig RoodCraig Rood is an associate professor in the Department of English at Iowa State University. He is the author of After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock (Penn State UP, 2019).

AbstractThe rhetorical figure of speech called prolepsis, describing a presaging of time and events to come, commonly appears in environmental communication and importantly frames the possibilities for action. Prolepsis is a figure employed in communication about climate change that demands attention in its various deployments, configurations, and, importantly, rhetorical inducements. Such inducements may rely upon feelings of hope or fear, and this study investigates the rhetorical and ethical conditions prolepsis may generate. A considerable literature studying the concept of hope offers great insights into climate change perceptions and behavior concerning climate action. The present study examines prolepsis to discuss how the figure's inducement of suasive effect through appeals to hope and fear shape the ethical horizons for action. We examine media coverage of the IPCC's sixth report, Part I, warning of the enormous impacts of the ongoing climate emergency and necessary climate action to mitigate the worst of these effects. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAshley Rose MehlenbacherAshley Rose Mehlenbacher is Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication at the University of Waterloo and the author of On Expertise (Penn State UP) and Science Communication Online (Ohio State UP). She is also the inaugural Co-Director, with Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST) network.Carolyn EckertCarolyn Eckert is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research investigates the ethotic construction of experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also teaches at Conestoga College and in the Humber College School of Business.Sara DoodySara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo where she investigates climate change communication and transdisciplinary collaboration between science and philosophy. Her research examines written communication in science and higher education and inter-/transdisciplinary communication and collaboration.Sarah ForstSarah Forst is a graduate psychology student at the University of Cologne and a research assistant in the Department of Research Methods and Experimental Psychology. She was a Mitacs Global Link intern in Summer 2021 at the University of Waterloo.Brad MehlenbacherBrad Mehlenbacher is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Mehlenbacher is author of the NCTE award-winning book, Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning (MIT Press), co-author of Online Help: Design and Evaluation (Ablex).

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 As I detail in the book I’m writing, Hitler received intensive, rhetorical training in public speaking and propaganda in the German military’s demobilization force after the First World War.2 He actually says there are six elements of eloquence, but the fifth entry in his enumeration is just a list of analogies he thinks are incontrovertible.

AbstractThis article analyzes the epideictic practices Chicana rhetors use to reclaim the figure of Malintzin, a woman cast as a promiscuous traitor for her role in the Spanish conquest. Since the figure of la Malinche was used to shame Chicana feminists as the traitors of the Chicano movement, Chicanas responded by first rejecting the narrative of la Malinche through rhetorical delinking, reframing her story with the use of amplification and depreciation, and finally reclaiming Malintzin as an aspirational symbol for Chicana feminists. Chicana epideictic makes a political argument about the value and worth of Chicana feminists by praising the Malintzin figure. Chicana epideictic challenges and celebrates community values and blurs the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Notes1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Jaime Armin Mejía and Brigitte Mussack for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. Their guidance was immensely helpful.2 The works by del Castillo and Candelaria represent modern-day encomia to Malintzin since they focus heavily on her values and virtues. Gonzales and Sosa Riddell present an encomium to the Chicana and Alarcón falls somewhere in the middle.3 The events leading to the Cholula massacre remain a contested point among historians because some believe Cortés lied to cover the fact that the attack was meant to cement his alliance with the Tlaxcalan people (CitationTownsend 81-82).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMiriam L FernandezMiriam Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino.