Special Issue Editors' Introduction, Rhetoric of Chronicity

Abstract Even though gun suicides account for well over half of all U.S. gun deaths each year, they largely are absent from collective attention, policy discussion, and rhetorical study. Using stories about gun suicide from Everytown for Gun Safety's website, “Moments That Survive,” this essay examines how the authors depict gun suicide as a public problem and a gun problem rather than as a private problem limited only to the individual gun user. In so doing, these stories revise three of the gun debate's key terms: collective grief, character, and agency. More than simply drawing attention to gun suicide, these stories critique the dominant narrative of protection (protection from “them”) and urge readers to reimagine suicide, protection, and gun violence.

Cara Finnegan's Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital is an important new work poised to bring a rhetorical perspective into public conversations about politics and visual culture. With a deep and thoughtful reading of the historical development of visual technologies, Finnegan examines the cultural importance of photographic images of American presidents. Rather than analyzing individual depictions of presidents, Finnegan interrogates the complex interplay between photography as both technology and practice and the meanings of the American presidency. As she puts it, instead of focusing on how particular images of individual presidents are meaningful, she asks “how presidents became photographic. In what ways . . . did photography shape public experience?”1As in her previous book, the excellent Making Photography Matter, Finnegan marshals an impressive mix of archival materials, close readings of individual images, and a mastery of cultural and technological histories to study the shifting terrain of visual depiction.2 Where Photographic Presidents differs from its predecessor is in the focus on the connection between photography and American political culture and in the accessibility of its writing. Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of Photographic Presidents is the effortless elegance of its prose and the liveliness of its narrative arc. The methodological questions about visual rhetoric that Finnegan asked in her earlier book are in the background, and on display are the insights of a thoughtful and thorough analysis.Given its emphasis on accessible analysis, the introductory chapter is short and to the point, focused mainly on establishing the key turn away from “presidential photography” and towards the “photographic president.” Once this emphasis on the fluid nature of visual representations is in place, Finnegan moves to the narrative itself. The subsequent chapters trace the shifting practices of photographing presidents across four key periods, each punctuated by changes in photographic technology.The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 led to an American fascination with the photographic image and what Finnegan terms the “Daguerreotype President.” Oddly, one of the first images widely circulated through the new technology was of George Washington, who had died some forty years earlier. While obviously not available to sit for a photograph, daguerreotypes were made of various paintings and sculptures of Washington. These photographs proved remarkably popular. The use of the new visual technology to circulate the image of America's first president in the 1840s helped, as Finnegan notes, to reinforce the nation's history and, importantly, this historical representation also worked to inscribe photography into the national character. As Finnegan writes, “In 1848 the nation still needed Washington, but so, apparently, did photography: to authorize its value, to connect it to the nation's past and present, and to establish its own norms of portraiture for decades to come.”3 These norms of portraiture continue as a theme throughout the remainder of this section. Finnegan examines the diaries of John Quincy Adams, for instance, as he reflected on his experiences sitting for daguerreotype photographs and his belief that photographs might help instill democratic values by allowing citizens to see themselves as others see them.The democratizing potential of the photographic images becomes central in the book's second section, which examines the development of cheaper and smaller cameras and paper photographs, which allowed for the rise of the “Snapshot President.” Presidents during this period took full advantage of their photographic image but also had to contend with a growing number of amateur photographers, or “camera fiends.” Added to the increasing accessibility of the camera was the ability of newspapers to print photographs more easily with the development of halftone reproductions. Together, these technological innovations, as Finnegan observes, fueled the American public's desire for photography. As she notes, “the new impulse for pictures demanded quantity,”4 and one of the most desirable subjects for this new photographic impulse was the American president. Finnegan explores this interest in immediate and plentiful photographic images of the president through a careful consideration of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. The ubiquity of amateur photographers and the ability of newspapers to publish their photographs helped instill the value of timeliness into American visual culture. Finnegan notes that many contemporary newspapers insisted upon labeling one of their photographic images as the “last photograph” of the President, suggesting the crucial element of images being instantaneously available to an eager public.5As cameras became smaller and both professional and amateur photographers more ubiquitous, pressures grew on the White House to find ways to manage what Finnegan labels the era of the “Candid Camera President.” The candid camera period between the Roosevelts saw presidents facing regular intrusion by amateur photographers as well as increasingly sophisticated professional news photographers. President-elect Woodrow Wilson, for example, angrily confronted a photographer who snapped a picture of his daughter, Jessie Wilson. Finnegan recounts the impact of German photographer Erich Salomon, who was labeled “king of the indiscreet” for his skill in hiding his camera and snapping images of world leaders in unposed settings.6 The ability of photographers to slip into politics and give the public a glimpse of real negotiation led to both a growing public demand for unscripted images and the formalization of press relations through the development of what would eventually become an official White House press secretary. This effort to manage the photographs taken of presidents, however, was in tension with, as Finnegan argues, “the new visual values of candid photography, those of access, intimacy, and energy.”7 Finnegan uses the tension between presidential impression management and public hunger for intimate images to frame the complex visual politics surrounding Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As is now widely known, FDR's affliction with polio limited his mobility, and his efforts to manage how he was represented have been widely studied. Finnegan adds a fascinating perspective by focusing not so much on prohibitions on images of his infirm body but on the ways FDR made himself visible and, in so doing, broadened norms surrounding the use of candid shots. Here Finnegan contends that FDR's “media savvy” extended well beyond his use of radio and includes his careful orchestration of photographs of him. “FDR would not hide from the spotlight,” Finnegan writes. “He would be seen, but on his terms and according to an ever changing yet firm set of rules.”8These firm rules, of course, would not last, and with the advent of new media technology, especially television and the internet, the presidents’ ability to govern how they were photographed diminished. Finnegan's fourth era focuses on the development of the “Social Media President” and the widespread ability of everyday citizens to create, circulate, and alter images. The effort to maintain some control over photographic images led to the formalization of official White House photographers, and Finnegan recounts the ways presidents like Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson used official photographers as extensions of their own efforts at image management. The official White House photographer plays a crucial role in Finnegan's final chapter, a thorough consideration of Barack Obama's use of social media. Obama's chief White House photographer, Pete Souza, framed himself as a “visual historian” and used the image sharing social media site, Flickr, to release thousands of images directly to the public. As Finnegan notes, this media strategy allowed the Obama White House to offer the kind of intimate, behind-the-scenes access the public craved, albeit carefully orchestrated by the administration, as well as an opportunity to bypass the traditional media.9 Continuous publicizing of presidential photographs directly to the public bolstered the perception that Obama was media savvy and technologically sophisticated. Iconic images ranging from tense images of the situation room during the mission against Osama Bin Laden to playful moments of the President interacting with children were made immediately available without relying on traditional media outlets. Such direct access also allowed the administration to respond to growing interest in meme and remix culture. In this way, as Finnegan notes, the Flickr archive of the Obama presidency continues “to serve as a resource for invention and critique,”10 including Souza's use of those images to provide subtle but damning criticisms of the administration of Donald Trump.Photographic Presidents concludes by resituating its key question, how presidents come to be photographic, and by considering the complex interplay of new visual technologies, shifting cultural norms of representation, and the changing nature of the American presidency. Photography, like the presidency, is “not and never has been only one thing”11 and Finnegan challenges us to continue examining the intersection of visual and political culture as various forces cause it to shift and transform.Finnegan's latest book is a masterwork in rhetorical scholarship and demonstrates how a close reading of visual texts and the contexts within which they become meaningful provide engaging and provocative insights. The archival work, careful historical analysis, and thoughtful critical examination are exemplary. This book should be widely studied not only in courses on visual rhetoric and media technology but in any course on rhetorical criticism or archival methods. It is also one of a relatively rare set of books within rhetorical studies that I would recommend to a family member or friend who wanted to understand what rhetorical studies does. This is not only impressive scholarship but also an engaging, funny, and at times delightful work of nonfiction that could as easily be enjoyed by a person interested in presidents as it could be someone with a fascination for American popular culture or media.

Alan G. Gross's The Scientific Sublime1 is nothing if not respectful—of both his subject and his audience. Those looking for pyrotechnics will be disappointed by Gross's sometimes deferential treatment of the various uses and examples of the sublime in contemporary popular science. Readers finish the book with a foundation not only in the scientific sublime but also in the contributions, controversies, and patterns of reasoning of ten of the world's most well-known public scientists from the latter half of the twentieth century. Patient with his material and his reader's potential ignorance of the popularizing scientific discourse, Gross traces how the scientific sublime animates, galvanizes, and explains the work, the rhetorical choices, and the ideal audience of the theoretical physicists, cosmologists, and evolutionary biologists,The balanced organization of the book suggests Gross's measured exploration of the topic: there are analyses of five physicists and five biologists, an introductory chapter on the nature and history of the sublime, and a closing chapter on the interplay of religion, science, and the sublime. Moreover, the thirteen chapters (two are devoted to Steven Jay Gould) are almost all about twenty pages and can largely be read independently of each other. Even without delving into Gross's prose, there is a deliberateness about the construction of the book, an orderliness that seems to eschew too much nervy straying into grey speculations. Indeed, if you are looking for a book that is muscular with theoretical arcana or that strides into speculative meditations, you may feel shortchanged. Gross is careful of his readers’ sensibilities, comprehension, and incredulity. His diction never falls into jargon, despite two subject matters—the sublime and the scientific—that might tempt him, and his arguments are methodically presented, even if he occasionally indulges in whimsical explanations not necessarily germane to his immediate argument. You never feel lost when you're reading The Scientific Sublime; you always feel that you understand what you have read; and you never get the feeling that Gross is forcing the last word on the subject, though you may conclude there certainly is more to say.Beyond giving a layout for the book, chapter one sets up its thesis and guiding principle, one that is only lightly touched upon throughout the analytic chapters but that nonetheless is key to getting the most out of Gross's explorations. Rather than look for ruptures in the form or manner of the popularizers’ works that reveal their commitment to a scientific sublime, Gross is interested in “the sublimity that inheres in their structure, a spirit that informs their every aspect”—a motivation that leads him to survey the argumentation, structure, diction, and images of their works as this principle animates the popularizers’ promotion of science.2 The scientific sublime is essentially a type of wonder in both the scientist and reader, born from the amazement of a novel phenomenon and the astonishment at the hidden pattern in nature shown and then explained by science in its “vast communal epic . . . on a theme of origins.”3 It is this awe and astonishment that Gross deems the scientific sublime, a phrase he justifies in the first chapter by giving his readers a quick tour of the concept of the sublime in Western thought, ending with Adam Smith and C.P. Snow's glossing of the scientific sublime.In Part One of his book, Gross tackles the writings of five popularizing physicists. The first analysis spotlights Richard Feynman, whose work represents the subgenre of the “Consensual Sublime.” Gross explores Feynman's self-construction of the “scientist as raconteur” who delights in the practical puzzles suggested and solved by theoretical physicists.4 His second focuses on Steven Weinberg, who exemplifies the “Conjectural Sublime,” enticing us to follow his narrative in order to understand how the physicist explains to those less schooled in mathematics the very beginning of the universe while gracefully unifying others’ theories. Physicist Lisa Randall's writings represent the “Technological Sublime,” which we feel when confronted with exalted machinery like the Hoover Dam. Through imagery and analogies, Randall's prose leads the reader through abstruse theoretical physics, “a speculative sublime that depends for validation” on equipment like the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite, the supreme manifestations of the technological sublime.5 The penultimate chapter on the physicists considers string-theory pioneer Brian Green, who converts esoteric math into the physical and the visual with analogies that surround us with the familiar as he leads us into his sometimes far-fetched explanations. Gross rightly points out that Green's sublimity is not the result of “the wonder at the revelation not of how the universe works, but how it may possibly work.”6 As is fitting his stature as the most-widely known popularizer of physicists in our time, Stephen Hawkins rounds out Gross's analyses in Part One. In perhaps his most successful chapter, capturing many aspects of Hawkins's rhetoric, Gross argues that Hawkins represents the “Sublime Embodied,” the impression we are interacting with “a myth of genius and indomitable will, a man who has handicapped his handicap.”7 In reading the oracular Hawkins, we not only learn about science and its significance, we experience it through Hawkins, whose playful humor and mental dexterity highlights his own astonishment at the scientific sublime.Gross begins Part Two, on the sublime biologists, with another of his most successful chapters—on Rachel Carson and the “Ethical Sublime.” Showing the development of Carson as a writer and rhetor, “a progress from the love of nature to its defense, from environmental rhapsody to environmental ethics,” Gross not only summarizes the development of Carson's ethical position but also the stylistic techniques that grow from and inform her more mature appreciation of nature.8 Chapters eight, “The Balanced Sublime,” and nine, “Experiencing the Sublime,” cover Steven Jay Goud's books and his essays, respectively. In Gould's books, Gross argues, the biologist portrays a scientific sublime correctly conjured if an equipoise is found between two competing ideas so that our awe of nature has all its requisite complexity. In the survey of his essays in chapter nine, Gross finds that Gould plays the scientific cicerone who cultivates his readers’ curiosity then toys with it through meanderings, frustrations, and, ultimately, discoveries in a manner that parallels the scientific process, explaining nature, its patterns, and its laws. Steven Pinker's “Polymath Sublime” occupies Gross's tenth chapter. Gross argues that all of Pinker's works, when they don't fall into an authoritarian voice, captivate because of the evocation of a sublime that highlights not only the patterns of nature but how science can explain so many subjects beyond those studied in the lab. In chapter eleven, Gross tackles the “Mathematical Sublime” of Richard Dawkins, his rousing persona and the intellectual treasure hunt he brings you by means of his devotion to and knowledge of mathematics, despite the obvious problems of his evolutionary theory. The analyses are rounded out with a discussion of E.O Wilson's “Biophilic Sublime,” which explores the richness and limitations of his sociobiology, infused with his sublimic “love for all living things,” their diversity, and their preservation.9Considering the contemporary popularizers of science in the aggregate, Gross concludes his book with perhaps his most challenging claim, that scientists may be overly hasty in dismissing religion (and philosophy) as irrelevant to the task of understanding the natural world, a “haste galvanized by the populace's recalcitrant faith in a God of origins, the same faith that encourages them to believe that God is a delusion—a very unscientific manner of thinking.10 Gross essentially ends his book with a quiet call to the character trait that indeed he portrays throughout the book and what, incidentally, was a defining characteristic of early nineteenth-century natural philosophers—humility.But if Gross's persona in The Scientific Sublime seems to counterbalance the large egos of the popularizers, in many ways his work parallels their attitude to the natural world they study: he carefully and excitedly explicates those moments of awe in the popularizers’ explanations of the wonders of the world and their studies. Gross does for them what they do for nature and science. Yet, the modesty of Gross's claims may leave some readers asking for a bit more derring-do in the conclusions about what the scientific sublime actually is and what it does, especially after having followed him through his relatively separate analyses of the ten scientists in his book. For example, Gross well-documents those moments the scientists manifest (or even embody) astonishment or wonder from various aspects of science, but does that amazement actually rise to the level of the sublime? Does the scientific sublime require the terror typically associated with the sublime—if not, why not? What are some of the cultural or political consequences of utilizing the sublime when popularizing science? And finally, some readers might also desire grander and more thematic claims about how the feelings of the sublime are generated in general audiences and not simply those who are predisposed to find wonder in science.Like those whom he studies, Gross seems to write with a keen sense that scholars and readers should build off of each other rather than search after an Archimedean eureka. His is a book of exploratory essays. The Scientific Sublime plots not only those areas where the scientist or audience sense awe and astonishment but also those areas that are rich for future interrogations and investigations about the intersection of science, the public, and the sublime.

Abstract This essay examines the cybernetic rhetoric of Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a cybernetician and prominent Mexican intellectual. Published in a journal reaffirming Mexico's political image in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, his essay offered a counter to one of the government's rationales for the violence enacted against the movimiento estudiantil at Tlatelolco—the influence of el extranjero. Rosenblueth's essay evinced a mediating path between complete disavowal of Mexico's statist tendencies and support for the Mexican state in post-Tlatelolco Mexico. Yet, in invoking cybernetics as a rhetoric for public intervention in this moment of crisis, I argue that Rosenblueth's use of cybernetics both empowered his proposals calling for an adjustment to perceptions of el extranjero and supported the survival of a strong Mexican state enacting violence against it. I conclude from my reading of Rosenblueth's essay that the political possibilities of cybernetic rhetoric lie not only on the cybernetician's ideological commitments or political context(s) but by a plasticity constitutive of cybernetics.

As we write this, California is being ravaged by the second worst wildfire in its history (Dixie) and our fellow Utahns have experienced some of the world's worst air quality due, in part, to the smoke traveling east from the Dixie and other fires in the west. These consequences are just a few of the many ways in which the ongoing climate crisis is a threat multiplier: worsening extreme weather, droughts, wildfires, and, most significantly, the disproportionate inequities historically marginalized peoples experience as a result of the chaos resulting from human-caused climate change. The climate crisis is here; actions to justly and equitably transition away from fossil fuels are crucial. Although the climate crisis acts as only one backdrop to Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico, Catalina de Onís's book turns our attention to the significant but often less visible role of energy systems not only in the climate crisis but also in what she terms energy coloniality, or systems of power that maintain energy privilege for some and perpetuate energy injustices for many.Energy Islands enacts a decolonial approach to offer a deep and rich analysis of dominant and resistive discourse about energy politics in Puerto Rico. De Onís highlights the importance of a just transition away from fossil-fuel based energy toward centering decarbonization, decentralization, democratization, and decolonization. She argues that energy actors can create decolonial energy futures that support the intertwined wellbeing of people and the planet. De Onís's book “documents, assembles, and evaluates various discourses, narratives, naming practices, and metaphors” to research “the rhetorical efforts of energy actors [in Puerto Rico], particularly by drawing critical inspiration from individuals and groups communicating more sustainable existences.”1 In a rhetorical version of an energy ethnography, the book documents the metaphors that circulate in the discourse of both privileged and marginalized energy stakeholders.Energy Islands is a brilliant example of community-engaged rhetorical fieldwork that makes a difference in scholarly conversations and in ongoing energy transition. In addition to being theoretically keen and methodologically innovative, the book highlights the stories of successful energy justice practitioners in Puerto Rico and documents de Onís's extensive contributions as a scholar-activist to energy politics in Puerto Rico. The book makes significant contributions to conversations in rhetorical methods, decolonial rhetorics, environmental and energy communication, and Latinx rhetorics. It also makes important contributions to interdisciplinary energy studies, energy humanities, environmental justice, and Puerto Rican studies, demonstrating the importance of rhetorical energies in any analysis of Puerto Rico's energy past, present, and future.The introduction outlines the book's theoretical, methodological, and political commitments. Specifically, de Onís theorizes archipelagoes of power “as a network of entities/islands at various levels and hierarchical and horizontal nodes across and within structures and institutions that enable and constrain agency for diverse actors.”2 The archipelagos of power heuristic developed in the book robustly theorizes power vis-á-vis the various rhetorical energies and metaphors that animate resistance to colonial formations. In doing so, de Onís challenges normative definitions of energy as technology and contributes to ongoing theorization of rhetoric as energy. She writes: “this book seeks to convey capacious understandings of energy beyond a narrow focus on powering individual dwellings and workplaces, by addressing and amplifying the human energies required to create and challenge energy infrastructures and technologies.”3 Subsequent chapters focus on particular metaphors in this archipelago of power that enable and constrain energy justice.The main chapters of the book are interspersed with “Routes/Roots/Raíces,” interludes that focus on positionality, methodology, and narratives. The first interlude tells the story of de Onís's familial connections to islands and Puerto Rico and seeks to break down binaries between conquest and resistance and colonizer and colonized.In chapter one, de Onís lays out four key concepts in Puerto Rico's archipelago of power: energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, and energy actors. These constitute a rhetorical matrix “that provides a vocabulary for studying and communicating different energy controversies in Puerto Rico and Beyond.”4 Energy coloniality is a major theoretical contribution; though related to forms of resource colonialism, it hones in on the importance of energy technologies to relations of power within colonial systems. Another valuable contribution is the introduction of energy actors—a term used by one of her colaboradores—as a frame for understanding Puerto Ricans’ agency in energy politics.In the second interlude, de Onís narrates her encounter with the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO) on Puerto Rico's southern coastline (between Ponce and Mayagüez) as an early example of energy coloniality. She links the closure of the refinery and its lingering economic and environmental impacts with an art installation created out of the abandoned remnants.Chapter two traces colonial relations between the U.S. and Puerto Rico by focusing on metaphors of experimentation—“discourses of defense, disease, development, and disaster”—grounded in, and reinforcing, a view of expendability.5 The legacy of, and ongoing struggles under, experimentation are linked to embodied experiences, emplaced politics, and exigencies for resistance. De Onís concludes the chapter by documenting historical resistance to experimentation discourses while also highlighting how contemporary organizations like Casa Pueblo and Coqui Solar appropriate experimentation metaphors to refuse domination and enact transformations towards more just and equitable futures.Chapter three focuses on spatial metaphors related to methane gas (counter-)advocacy. De Onís focuses on the Via Verde Gasoducto Project and Aguirre Offshore Gas Port, both of which have since been defeated by energy actors. These resistances occurred prior to and during de Onís's fieldwork and are introduced into her fieldwork via colaboradores’ reflections and de Onís's emplacement. While proponents framed the projects as ostensibly cleaner fossil fuels serving as supposed bridges towards technological change, resistive energy actors used “tropes of way, path, expansion, and hub [to offer] an alternative focus.”6 The chapter highlights how energy actors can successfully resist energy coloniality and energy privilege, including by appropriating metaphors to open new ways of thinking.In the third interlude, de Onís shares how she grappled with writing about Puerto Rico as a member of the diaspora living at a distance. She argues that critical reflexivity about power relations, engaging collaboratively, admitting mistakes, and making amends are necessary to avoid replicating oppressive dynamics while performing much needed critical research.Chapter four offers a significant methodological intervention. De Onís conceptualizes the need to (re)wire one's alliances, preconceptions, and dispositions in the context of a place experiencing “extreme shocks [e.g., Hurricanes Maria and Irma] with already ongoing everyday stressors.”7 This (re)wiring is vital for successful coalitions among diverse actors to constitute a decolonial archipelago of power that can span across geographic locations and cultures. De Onís extends co-presence8 to “offer e-advocacy as both a concept and a practice for working coalitionally in electronic spaces.”9 The family of islands trope, she argues, holds promise in conceptualizing coalitions that span across geopolitical bodies.The final interlude articulates the interlinkages between mangrove habitats, historic Afro-Caribbean resistance, and ongoing community organizing based on convivencia. This interlude illustrates the value of archipelagos of power as an analytic to cut across time, species, art, and activism to compose a nuanced understanding of resistance in Puerto Rico.Building from energy coloniality, energy privilege, energy justice, energy actors, archipelagos of power, rhetorical energies, and the metaphors developed across the chapters, de Onís uses the conclusion to discuss the “four d's of energy justice.”10 Decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing, she argues, are key components of delinking from energy coloniality and enabling energy justice.Energy Islands’ foremost contribution is archipelagos of power, a theoretically rich heuristic that can energize and empower future analyses of energy politics, energy coloniality, and energy justice. The heuristic accounts for the uniqueness of Puerto Rico as an island and archipelagic formation in the Antilles but also exceeds a potentially limiting focus on Puerto Rico. Building from Tiara Na'puti's foundational work on archipelagic rhetoric,11 de Onís's archipelagoes of power can be used to analyze relational/technological energies across a variety of sites of energy struggle. This heuristic enhances the field of rhetoric's ability to engage with and sustain research that begins with the affordances of thinking archipelagically.Energy Islands is an exemplar of rhetorical fieldwork. De Onís seamlessly integrates textual analysis, interviews, ethnographic participation, e-advocacy, and critical self-reflexivity into a masterful documentation and amplification of energy actors, including herself, making meaningful change in Puerto Rico. The most explicit contribution to rhetorical fieldwork is the development of e-advocacy as a mode of sustaining ethical and political commitments and contributions when one cannot remain perpetually emplaced in the field. In a pivotal moment, de Onís narrates her hesitancy about writing this book due to concerns about speaking for colaboradores from the perspective of a diasporic Puerto Rican living in the U.S. and her ethical commitment to supporting Puerto Rican people in telling their own stories. This and other moments exemplify how de Onís models an ethical, participatory, and community-based methodology that puts care for the community first and challenges extractive models of research. Rhetorical scholars, even those who do not use fieldwork, would benefit from the methodological approach modelled in this book, as it can urge the field rethink dominant norms about the goals of publication, research, and advocacy.Energy Islands is provocative, suggesting future possibilities for research at the intersections of energy, race, and technology. It offers a substantial contribution by presenting a heterogeneous, complex, and nuanced picture of power relations in Puerto Rico. The book challenges homogenous generalizations about Puerto Rico by tracing how colonizer/colonized, north/south, privileged/underprivileged, and mainland/island relations work within Puerto Rico, not just between Puerto Rico and the U.S.; de Onís's analysis engages inequities within Puerto Rico based on, for example, class, location, race, and access to governmental power. Scholars seeking to expand on de Onís's research might consider, for example, how Blackness, stemming from Afro-Caribbean roots, relates to resistive energies in the archipelago; how inter-Island and inter-archipelago race relations relate to energy coloniality and energy justice; and how racial formations intersect with colonial formations. Furthermore, tracing the material forces that energy technologies themselves have in Puerto Rican energy politics would expand de Onís's focus on the rhetorical energies of decolonial energy actors.Energy Islands is a significant offering to rhetoric and public address scholars. It demonstrates how energy (in)justice is rhetorically constituted through the rhetorical energies of many actors and positions analysis of discourses of just transition, climate justice, and energy colonialism as central to rhetorical studies. In a world that is already suffering from the inequitable impacts of climate change, this book highlights the ongoing relevance of rhetorical scholarship to meaningfully addressing the climate crisis amid intersecting political instabilities, economic pressures, and coloniality. Energy Islands is essential reading for scholars across the broad field of rhetorical studies not only because of what it contributes to our understanding of rhetorical energy but also for how it demonstrates that rhetorical scholarship matters in creating a more just and equitable world.

Abstract Donald Trump's tweets on writing, whether his own or the print media's, typically employ an extreme form of rhetoric involving the manipulation of meaning and construction of self-serving arguments. The practice of close reading suggests that these tweets often display several types of rhetorical operation, which distort the message through the amalgamation, expansion, contraction, and reversal of meaning to create expressions like “the Fake News.” These polysemous expressions are then combined to form word groups, all centered on the self but each designed to meet a particular narcissistic need, from self-promotion and self-proclaimed victory to self-defense and self-casting as the Messiah. Trump's tweets often take the form of a triangular configuration, composed of the writer to proclaim, an adversary to be conquered, and a witness to validate the victory. By putting at least two of the three actors into play within its reduced space, the tweet becomes a miniature psychodrama—scripted, cast, and staged by the narcissist for an audience of kindred spirit.

Abstract When side-by-side photographs of the 2009 and 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration crowds circulated after President Trump's inauguration, few doubted what they saw: the crowd in 2017 was significantly smaller than it had been eight years earlier. Whereas popular discourse around the photo obsessed over size of the crowds, I argue that differences in contrast, color, and clarity suggest a different narrative than the logic of quantity: Trump will return an orderly, white national body, cleansed of Obama's unruly, sepia swarm. This essay re-reads a key moment of recent U.S. visual politics, turning what came to be read as either a joke or a preview of the “death of facts” as something more sinister: a visual harbinger of Trump's white supremacist program.

With precise phrasing and dramatic flourish, Laura Mielke's Provocative Eloquence1 invites us into the performance cultures of the late antebellum era, showcasing the interplay between theater and oratory, politics and entertainment, ethical imperative and prevailing opinion. Violence suffused culture, language, and everyday experience in a time that found melodrama, minstrelsy, and spectacle in the ascendant, racial hierarchies and American slavery at the epicenter of political debates and popular culture, and a troubled white masculinity asserting its heroism. Mielke's book documents anti-Black oppressions of the antebellum stage and oratorical platform, and it also takes a fresh perspective: Mielke argues persuasively that theatrical forms offered strategic resources for abolitionist argument, that oratorical provocations permeated the stage, and that the theater and the rostrum provided sites for antebellum Americans to think together about the power of words and the justifications for force in the cause of freedom.This nuanced argument challenges assumptions that form is conjoined to stable ideologies and instead highlights creative adaptation, recitation, revision, and “political portability.”2 Drawing evidence from a wide variety of source material, Mielke develops compelling, intricate case studies of print and performance that instruct and surprise. Before turning primary attention to the late 1850s, she sets the stage two decades earlier with Edwin Forrest, entertainingly described as a “theatrical star and noted egomaniac”3 best known for “yoking articulacy to brawn.”4 A deft, deeply contextualized analysis of Forrest's calm, reasoned 1838 Fourth of July address at New York's Broadway Tabernacle shows the intertextual and interperformative dimensions of Forrest's Democratic partisanship, available for audience interpretation in light of his heroic, explosive roles like Spartacus, Metamora, and Macbeth. The orator recommended deliberation and gradualism; the actor regularly linked speech to revolt. Forrest's varied performances probed free expression, white working-class populism, and militancy in word and deed, while they resonated with staged rebellions, Romantic poetry, and defiance of all sorts. Mielke asks of the “stubbornly elusive”5 Forrest and of U.S. performance cultures more broadly: “Does one who speaks of liberty for all necessarily attack slavery, even if inadvertently?”6With the stage thus set—with an analytic focus on paradox and opposition and an analytic method characterized by deep historicization and sophisticated, imaginative readings across genres—Mielke moves on to the 1850s. The dramatic readings of Mary Webb and William Wells Brown highlight the suasory potentials of African American performance in what Mielke elucidates as the “rhetorically strategic recasting of the antislavery lecture into the drama.”7 In an increasingly menacing political climate, performers like Webb and Wells Brown began to signal the potential for physical resistance to slavery. As they vocalized a range of tragic or comedic characters—enslaved captives, cruel slaveholders, or overwrought white abolitionists—these artists adapted popular caricature and imitative form to their own ends while exemplifying control, decorum, and performative skill. Mielke compellingly shows how the form of the dramatic reading created conditions for the presentation of highly incendiary words while deflecting physical threat.The viciousness of proslavery political argument crystallized in 1856 when Preston Brooks took a cane to Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate the day after Sumner's “Crime against Kansas” speech had maligned proslavery argument and proslavery senator Andrew Butler, Brooks's cousin. The famous lithograph of this scene by John Magee, which Mielke aptly identifies as a theatrical tableau, efficiently encapsulates a drama of violent villainy and oratorical martyrdom. Building from this scene—reproduced on the book's cover—Mielke analyzes the political oratory of Sumner and Butler before turning attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred and its stage adaptations. Whereas the senators drew analogies and interpretative frameworks from dramatic literature, Stowe's novel incorporates a significant amount of public speaking, “from school recitation and revival preaching to courtroom address and lynch mob inducement,”8 in service of a wide array of perspectives on slavery and violence. The stagings of Dred, whether they reinforce calls to action or suppress radical potential, whether they play for laughs or highlight prophetic voice, embody the oxymoron of a slaveholding democracy.John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry grounds Mielke's investigation of legal discourse as the nation pressed ever forward toward war. Dexterously combining Portia's ironic eloquence in Merchant of Venice with abolitionist argument and nineteenth-century racial melodramas like Neighbor Jackwood and The Octoroon, Mielke shows how Portia's “redirection of legal violence and challenge to the contractual claim on another's flesh”9 were adapted in the late antebellum period to interpret physical violence, from armed revolt to capital punishment. Readily available in educational texts of the time, Merchant's trial scene offered the possibility that eloquence in the courtroom might conquer opponents without bloodshed. This theatrical form, whether explicitly cited or only presented in “family resemblance,”10 offered scripts for thinking through speech and violence even as battle beckoned.Mielke's concluding chapter is less a conventional summation than a final act, rehearsing key questions and arguments presented throughout the book and then comparing instances of theater and oratory that responded to Brown's raid, trial, and execution, climactic scenes in the drama of word and violence of the 1850s. Developing an interpretive framework through analysis of statements of Brown's detractors and defenders, Mielke explores themes of oath-taking, vengeance, aggression, and martyrdom in Kate Edwards Swayze's play Ossawattomie Brown and Henry David Thoreau's speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Here, again, forms like the theatrical tableau and the speech of moral principle occur in multiple genres, and when they recur, revised and recited, they help to constitute a performance culture and a basis for belief and action.Mielke's Provocative Eloquence will be of abiding interest to scholars of rhetoric and performance as it offers compelling insights into the ways that cultures are created, maintained, and changed in and through performance practices and as it centers the fraught histories of eloquence and violence in the deeply racialized context of U.S. history. Mielke's analytic perspective offers instruction for scholars and students since her book enacts an adroit blending of history, theory, and practice as simultaneously text and context. The comparative analysis of Forrest's theatrical and oratorical productions, the thoughtfully imagined presentation of Mary Webb's polyvocal dramatic readings, and the demonstration that Portia's irony haunts so much nineteenth-century public commentary on the law—these were favorite sections of mine, although I learned much from every chapter. Mielke's book, engagingly written and filled with dramatic historical nuggets, provides foundational arguments and analytic methods, and it prompts further reflection on topics like the scope of an identifiable theatrical (or rhetorical) form and on the range of spectatorial response. Reading this book will also inspire questions about continuity and change in the enactments of eloquence and violence up to our own time, in the persistent struggles to realize the hope of Black freedom and democratic equality. Mielke asks, “Can a true distinction be maintained between rhetoric and force? Can words alone provoke or justify violence, and under what conditions and for whom?”11 Such questions, pertinent to the 1850s, reverberate today.

ABSTRACTCritiques leveled at epistemic decolonization call for a reorientation in theories of colonialism. The colonial imagination, a rhetorical tool that normalizes a sensible order of dispossession and appropriation, can be a reoriented site of contestation. By imagining an identity whose only means of relating is through opposition, the colonial imagination renders identities that inhabit a state of solitude. Two letters from Hernán Cortés to King Carlos V of Spain show how this colonial imagining aims to normalize dispossession and appropriation of the relations Originary peoples have with lands, waters, airs, and other-than-human relatives. Considering this argument, rhetorical studies needs to readjust its analytical timeframe beyond the times of settler-colonial nation-states and colonization.

ABSTRACTAssuming that withdrawal is ontological, no method of inquiry will breach the “essence” of an object. As such, this article raises a question of onto-epistemological access to complicate the development of recent rhetorical theories and rhetorical method/ologies informed by object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms. This article wonders about the drive to know and to feel forwarded in these rhetorical method/ologies without discussing how things hide from other things and from themselves, how things elude critics, and how scholars access others through ethnographic and embodied methodologies. Explicating epistemist and anti-epistemist approaches to the question of onto-epistemological access, this article makes a modest proposal for rhetoric scholars to conjure rhetorics of unavailable diversities to remake the gap between knowledge and reality again and again.

ABSTRACTSpeakers may argue in ways that facilitate cooperation, without really establishing unity. If emphasis is put on the word “composite” in composite audience, then the complementary act of addressing such an audience can be understood as an orchestration of different people, who may cooperate toward a conclusion. This brings attention to the multidimensionality of issues in pluralistic communities and the range of consequences proposals may have. Following Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric, I discuss how the compositeness of such argumentation can be fruitfully approached pluralistically. I argue that proposals on practical issues imply concomitant situations, wherein audiences are assigned different roles to play toward the ends of argumentation. This means that rhetorical argumentation performs implicit diplomacy, with implications for different audiences and the relationships between them. I conclude this article by discussing what this pluralistic and interactional account means for the analysis and evaluation of arguments and their rhetoric.

Modern thinkers long have been troubled by everyday talk. For example, one nineteenth-century Tory critic observes, “General small-talk” is any exchange “in mixed society, where men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, are all mingled together.” However available the occasion or obvious the topics, chatting is easy for the talented but awkward for the ungifted. On the other hand, “special, or professional small talk” is an exchange of words between persons of “the same mode of life, as between two apothecaries, two dissenters, two lawyers, two beggars, two reviewers, two butlers, two statements, two thieves, &c.&c.&c.; in short all conversations which are tinctured with the art, craft, mystery, occupation, or habits of the interlocutors” (Campbell et al. 1823). For those who can mingle, chat blossoms. For others, social occasions are always awkward, even dreaded. The traditional, elevated, polite arts of conversation were passing in the entrepreneurial, vernacular, and expert exchanges of urban living in the industrial, nationalizing nineteenth century. Newspapers headlined events, published speeches, and churned the talk of the town. Samuel McCormick’s excellent work beckons us to consider such things anew and attend: “The range of modernity’s chattering mind” (298).The Chattering Mind visits distinctions made between wasteful chatter and three sophisticated excurses. With care, he recounts “Kierkegaard’s existentialist critique of chatter, Heidegger’s phenomenological account of idle talk, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment of empty speech” (297–98). These careful interpretations percolate the book’s informed call to reconsider the standing of subjectivities in an “algorithmic era, where small talk now doubles as a resource for bit data, and big data as the lynchpin of our digital selves” (295). Thus, McCormick constructs “a study of how the modern world became anxious” because “many of the cultural anxieties that piqued their interest continue to inform individual and collective life in the digital age” (299). Chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are concepts embedded, respectively, in Kierkegaard’s subjective objecting, Heidegger’s ontological rhetoric, and Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourses of analysis.“Every day talk” is set within the history leading from nineteenth-century modernity to twentieth-century mass society. The “everyday” initially appears “in person and in print, among ordinary citizens and educated elites, with varying degrees of deliberateness and unawareness” (2–3). The industrial revolution paralleled development of the “ordinary, habitual, and frequently recursive kind of communicating that occurs in private and public setting alike” (4). Unsettled by varieties of uninformed talk of their day, McCormick’s philosophers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan, are nervous about the circulations of the masses and so distressed about the “gossip, babble, mumbling, and nonsense” that appear “especially pervasive” (4). These writers, McCormick observes, found a “motivational ingredient that has since become endemic to life in the digital age” (5). Yet, in the end “chatter, idle talk, and empty speech were neither means-turned-ends like phatic communion nor means-to-ends like political talk but, instead means without end like nothing they had seen before” (5). Ongoing, talk for talk’s sake manifested the worthy value of keeping flows of subjectivity streaming.The Chattering Mind builds a position in three parts with the conclusion following on. Each reads a philosopher in the contexts of the production of his discourse. Philosophical arguments are attuned to the reader’s understanding of “a conceptual history” that works with philological inquiry, the exposition of analytical positions, and the questioning of alternative views of public and crowd. McCormick unspools the dramas expressed by each philosopher who was irritated yet inspired by the contretemps-with a barber, rivals, officials, and town folk.Part I on Kierkegaard presents a grating event in which the Either/Or thinker observed, critiqued, and rebutted snak (“chatter”). Kierkegaard’s subjective-turn was initially occasioned by a dispute in the Copenhagen Post, where the naming of his own article as “amusement” unsettled him enough to differentiate his considered claims from “noise, wind, babbling” and the like. McCormick moves adroitly to analyze a source mentioned in Kierkegaard’s repost: The Talkative Barber. The chatterbox yaks and clips; so, repetition, intimacy, and banality fuse. The comedy discloses absent subjectivity through its and-another-thing, partner-less conversing. Ludvig Holberg’s one-act comedy was written in the early 1720s about excessive, thoughtless running talk that turns against the speaker himself. Like the Barber’s wagging tongue and moving jaw, chatting goes on without (a means to an) end.Part II unites Heidegger’s early lectures on rhetoric to his later publications and position in Being and Time. Aletheia and pseudos are illustrated in a model where deception, dissimulation, and distraction are equated with Sophists (Gorgias) and social figures of the Braggart, Stooge, and Babbler. Truth or aletheia reaches into pure perception, disclosive knowledge, the thinking through of the Theorist, Philosopher, and Dialectician. Speech and counterspeech is the domain of the orator, a higher form of bios politikos.Part III initiates an intricate, detailed response to Lacan’s reading of “the dream of Irma’s injection,” an initial episode that constituted a launch platform for Freud’s groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. McCormick carefully explicates Lacan’s criticism of Freud and the latter’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. McCormick points to facts and associations unpursued by Lacan and advances the observation that “the resistive, egocentric practice of empty speech is, in fact, an opportunity structure for its opposite, a transformative mode of discourse he fittingly calls ‘full speech’ (parole pleine)” (8).The collapse of distinctions between (elite reading) publics and (peopled) crowds comprises a central decentering argument. Chattering complicates. Lacan works through Freud’s interpretations of Irma’s dream together with his own search for colleague confirmations of his analysis of her lingering illness. Otto’s dirty syringe appears, too. Lacan shows these episodes to be a split-collapse of Freud’s unified (narcissist) ego. Likewise, McCormick takes us to Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5:1–30) where a moving hand burns writing onto the wall. With no decipherable meaning to the king or guests, the writing becomes interpreted by Daniel the prophet, who is mocked and ridiculed; yet, the message comes to completion overnight, with finality. Divine irony appears at hand. Thus, the composing ego is decomposed either at a health episode or at a banquet. In each case existence is at once “numbered, weighed and divided” (231). The costs of the ever-coding, perplexing self are expensive. “Freud’s acephalic, unconscious self interrupts the rambling dialogue of his peers to deliver a cryptic text addressed to us” (237). Yet in his turn to colleague confirmation, he joins the crowd (two colleagues combined with “nemo” as polycephalic being). Thus begins the pivot toward individual as crowd and public. Lacan’s master interpretative formulation of “being towards death” is not received as unalloyed wisdom by McCormick. “Like Daniel—conveyor of godly visions, interpreter of kingly dreams, master of all conjurers, diviners, astrologers and wise men—Lacan presents himself as the exclusive interpreter of this cryptic text” (237). Indeed, Lacan’s paraphrastic play wakes us from the sleeping to daylight’s assortments of te deums.Together sections 1 through 3 provide a powerful conceptualization of thinking and talking that recalls how the grounds are set for the contemporary “individual” of self and other. Everyday talk is turned from a marginal concept to a central puzzle. “As [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan] saw it, ordinary language use was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (8). Everyday talk “poses the challenge of attunement itself” (9).The “First and Final Words” (section 3) moves the discussion of chatter beyond Lacan and into challenges of communication to actors in what has been named network society. Le Bon, Tarde, and LaTour are assembled, and McCormick objects to twentieth-century thinkers’ distinctions between the crowd and the public, for each fuses (through talk) with the other, and it is in conversation (however apparently unproductive) that the important work of communication and subjectivity reprise. Thus, he observes that “the network revolution of late-modernity, which has increasingly transformed small talk into big data” is “uniquely poised to embrace, advance, and even radicalize” techniques of communicative practices, understood as “techniques of self-cultivation” (11, 293). Networked individuals do revolutionize, even though waves of message-generating techniques promote, if not induce and trigger, messages that troll, swat, sh*tpost, frape, out, grief, and catfish classmates, friends, and strangers (Leader in Me 2019). Well-intentioned internet off-ramps are available to those who have mastered caveat emptor. McCormick’s recollection of modern thinkers, their contexts, concerns, and analytical argument show how reflective appreciation and criticism of everyday talk uncovers “individuating potential” for network society. He invests hope in youth resistance, even as young people show disturbing rates of anxiety and loneliness. Particularly with COVID-19, renewing virtual ties has become necessary to, rather than a supplement for, the accomplishment of the everyday.The Chattering Mind animates a “conceptual history” of human science that brings forth a “usable” and contingent present. In the conclusion, McCormick’s “mind” artfully nudges communication onto more complex, circumspect, and ambivalent nests of inquiry. To communicate is to share, he shows, but it is also to contaminate (285). “We see a transhistorical assemblage of communicative practices and cross-hatched identities that are at once individual and collective, rational and irrational, normative and pathological—and thus just as likely to thrive in reading publics comprised of educated elites as they are to flourish in revolutionary crowds made up of lay citizens. Such is the range of modernity’s chattering mind,” he writes (298).To be sure, the Anglo-American communication field is no stranger to the everyday. But, across the twentieth century, it preferred pragmatic theories, robust engineering, and means-ends accounting. Group discussion and vernacular address, interpersonal and organizational success furnish objects of inquiry for democratized, industrial, electronics society. The goal of increasing skills for success furnishes a mission for communication studies. Critical rhetorical theories, too, contribute by exposing inefficient prejudices and hardened traditions. Communication in this vein is a resource to be mined incessantly by centers confederating social sciences and humanities methods. Alternatively, the modern human sciences emphasize interdisciplinary work among many fields such as cognition, philosophy, history, and anthropology as well as biology, biochemistry, and folklore. Mass communication and mass society furnished objects of concern for European researchers brokering individual, national, and mass relations. McCormick’s idea of a “a new form of networked individualism” (294) asks that the field reimagine communication in forms wider than expressions with phatic meaning or strategic vectors of political power.In beautifully written and deeply thoughtful reconstructions, McCormick orchestrates the philosophy of communication into resonances with the conceptual play of the human sciences. He speaks to hearing with attention and “seeing the world around us—a way of seeing well-attuned to what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all understood as the challenge of attunement itself” (9). And the resonance is important. As these thinkers “were all careful to insist, everyday talk is also the condition of possibility for alternate, more resolved ways of speaking, thinking, and being with others” (8). The modes of resistance and acts of transformation that McCormick discovers are powerful. But, coded “snake oil” and the spread of soothing “technobabble” conceal genuinely disturbing algorithmic carving, rendering and distribution of “fully traceable” communications. The networked “individual” seeks to “have” (a profile) rather than to “be” (a self), McCormick suggests (296). Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent releases of Meta (a.k.a Facebook) internal memos shows that communication scientists who work for a Black Box platform are entangled by “Flat-Earth” modeling that energizes a metrics-driven, message-commodity information society (Allyn 2021). Trace and transparency fail to link. Haugen points out that dissimilar entities are linked by profit-maximizing processes at the micro (anorexia promotion), meso (antidemocracy controls removed), and macro (genocide in Myanmar and Ethiopia) levels. The twenty-first-century “chattering mind” has its work cut out, AI notwithstanding. Sam McCormick’s inquiry on communication and its resonance with the human sciences offers an auspicious launch for inquiries into the entanglements of communication, subjectivity, and the Möbius geometries of data-fueled chat forms. We need to keep in mind that “everyday talk was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (292–293).

Catherine Chaput’s Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates places an affective and rhetorical emphasis on the vexatious question that she argues plagues the academic Left: Why is the capitalist mode of production so much more successful than its alternatives? Capital’s hegemony, the book argues, stems from its foundational theorists’ capacity to adroitly articulate the public’s bodily affects toward its regime of private property and wage labor. By contrast, its critics, be they revolutionary or reformist, are caught in a series of rhetorical traps or oversights that neglect the affective dimensions of capital, and hence are incapable of mobilizing effective (and affective) countermovements. She writes, “The market is an affective force that influences rhetorical action by linking bodily receptivities to economic persuasion. The market feels real because it is the nominalization we give to the very real affective energies circulating throughout our lived experiences” (2). To prove this claim, Chaput carefully pairs four sets of historical thinkers, in which a proponent of the capitalist mode of production is pitted against a critic thereof. With few exceptions, the thinker allied with the capitalist mode of production emerges victorious, for they are more adept at linking these unsymbolized/unarticulated bodily affects to the mode of production’s acceptable means of expression.Prior to the main event, Chaput first reviews how affect has been underthought or misconceived in the materialist tradition and traces a critical genealogy of affect from within the rhetorical tradition as a corrective. Via readings of Ancient and Renaissance thinkers, for whom “the passions [are] coextensive with the rational and understanding both as simultaneously embodied and transembodied” (23), Chaput advocates an affective materialism that aims to suture the noncognitive, the bodily, and the social to the realms of rhetoric, symbolic influence, and ideology. Chaput accomplishes this methodologically by proposing a schema for assessing the “materiality of affect and its rhetorical significance” (36) with rhetorical inputs and material outputs. For instance, rhetorical frequency and repetition lead to “push or pull identification,” which “shapes ideological context,” while “volume/intensity” raises or lowers affective energy, which then “motivates action or inaction” (37). Chaput returns to this framework occasionally in later chapters to demonstrate what makes certain authors more effective than others at channeling resonances between bodies and private property.Chapters 2 through 5 constitute the bulk of the book, in which Adam Smith / Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes / Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek / Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman / John Kenneth Galbraith are read both on their own terms and through the lens of affect, and I commend Chaput for providing a perspicacious reading of each thinker. Chapter 2, wherein Smith and Marx are pitted against one another, is the heart of the argument, from which every other chapter’s assessment flows. In Chaput’s reading, because Smith’s concept of sympathy, generated from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is “a richer, perhaps intuitive, understanding of the physiological work of affect” (42), arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production are more likely to be successful than criticisms thereof. Echoing the schema described above, Chaput writes, “The Wealth of Nations illuminates an affective structure that motivates capitalism such that market freedom opens one’s receptivity to capitalism, while participation pulls toward particular identifications within the system and the supply and demand of exchange mobilizes the fluctuating energies of specific actions” (53).In contrast, Marx’s diagnoses of the capitalist mode of production bend the opposite direction: “For Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them caricatures of capital” (57). Chaput reads Marx’s early writings on alienation as also implicitly theorizing affect, but because Marx was committed to a critique of political economy (rather than an affirmative case for it), his account is hopelessly impoverished when put alongside the thinker writing several decades prior. She writes, “Smith’s affect theory, which leaves its ultimate origins to the mythical invisible hand, trumps Marx’s affective account, which requires not natural instincts but arduous propositional thinking and scientific reason, forcing a reconsideration of critical political economic theory” (60). From this point on, the die is cast. Smith’s rhetoric of sympathy, freedom, natural instinct, and the invisible hand renders bodies conducive to wage labor; his expansive, positive affects triumph over Marx’s decision to emphasize capital’s dehumanizing and divisive qualities.Chapter 3, on Keynes and Veblen, poses two reformists against one another and is the only matchup that could be scored a draw. Because both thinkers “suffer from an inflated valuation of rationality” (85), Chaput concludes that their persuasive power is weakened, “and thus the receptivity of these thinkers” (86). Despite the fact that Keynes draws the public’s attention to the “animal spirits” that systematically throw off financial markets, and the fact that investors make decisions off of second-order rationality and not on the value of assets themselves, resulting in “mass affective practices untethered to concrete material realities” (80), his endorsement of deliberation, regulation, and probabilistic thinking as a palliative dooms his work. Yet it seems to me that Keynes’s fatal flaw for Chaput is his skepticism of neoclassical economics’ concept of equilibrium, or the supposedly natural functions that balance out supply and demand: “Emphasizing that equilibrium cannot be taken for granted, Keynes offers an inefficient version of affective identification as he relies too much on persuasion and not enough on the human capacity to synergistically combine around similar experiences” (79). Arguments that presume that exchange is “natural, inevitable, and perfect” are the more efficient case for readers, and thus, once again, the capitalist mode of production triumphs discursively.If the Smith/Marx dyad is the pediment upon which the book’s argument rests, the Hayek/Adorno dyad, in chapter 4, acts as its symbolic button-tie. (Historical events occur twice, as Hegel, via Marx, reminds us.) Here, Chaput generously reads Hayek’s work as emblematizing a sophisticated concept of affect that joins together arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production to the bodies that experience it. For Chaput, Hayek’s invocation of cognitive psychology counts as scientific proof of Smith’s intuitions surrounding sympathy and the invisible hand: “Adding cognitive psychology to Smith’s theory of moral connectivity, Hayek replaces sympathy with disposition and refines morality as political and economic liberalism” (94). Tracing the complexities of Hayek’s thought through his notions of language, of social order, and of human cognition, Chaput affirms that it is his capacity to blend the cognitive and the noncognitive in a story that renders economic liberalism more conducive to bodies than alternatives. In contrast, Adorno’s relentless negative dialectics, a ruthless criticism of everything existing, and the claim that his “body of work appears to attack people as unthinking” condemns his life’s work to a distant second place in this rhetorical matchup (112). In Chaput’s account, by asserting the moral value of economic liberalism and championing (rather than castigating) human ignorance in the face of enormous social and economic complexity, Hayek’s work completes a flawless victory over Adorno’s. Chaput concludes that this rhetorical triumph “set the path for the practical economic work of the late twentieth century and, ultimately, for the triumph of neoliberalism” (112).Chapter 5, in which Chaput sets two public figures of “the economic” against one another, Milton Friedman emerges victorious over John Kenneth Galbraith, but for a surprising set of reasons. Chaput’s overarching thesis is stretched to its limit in this chapter, for Chaput locates in Friedman’s relentless privileging of human beings’ capacity for rational economic behavior (and equally importantly, insisting that economists must interpret human behavior as if it were rational), a sublation, rather than a repudiation, of Hayek’s affect theory (117). Meanwhile, despite Galbraith, a bleeding-heart reformist and critic of unrestrained capital accumulation, arguing that corporations move individuals and the socius at the level of affect, his account is paltry in comparison because he cannot affirmatively endorse the positive affects that the capitalist mode of production generates in the production process. She writes that he “offers no energetic replacement for these negative affective situations” (120) and, later, that “Galbraith cannot theorize this identification [with corporations] as the embodied energy circulating among and thereby animating these employees and their projects” (121). And once again, much like Keynes, because Galbraith’s solution to corporate capture of the American political system is to encourage deliberative democracy, he is doomed to failure for naïvely adhering to a logic of representation that capitalist affects can overcome, divert, or recode.Those who have read thus far may be in a state of despair: not only is capital dominant, but it is persuasive, and not simply at the cognitive level. By describing procapitalist theorists’ ability to better articulate “the physiological energies inhabiting the world” (4), the capitalist mode of production is a resounding success—discursively, affectively, bodily. Every key thinker from Adam Smith onward better articulates affect, the “physical power that moves seemingly uncontrollably through human beings and other things to produce preconscious readiness” (33), toward capital’s contemporary dominance. But for those predisposed to a Foucauldian perspective, Chaput’s conclusion promises succor. Here, Chaput reads Foucault’s lectures, which focus on ethopoetic behavior and parrhesiastic speech, as a potential site of anticapitalist agency through “the cultivation of a critical subjectivity with the capacity for reflexive truth-telling” (150). From Foucault’s consent “to Smith’s explanation of the market as an ordering mechanism that exceeds full human understanding” and because he accepts “the invisible hand as a real power” (144), only the free individual, the parrhesiastic rhetor, can constitute a meaningful counter-power to the capitalist mode of production.For Foucault, “mental exercises designed to create free individuals—ones capable of assessing, mobilizing, and reorienting the fleshy impulses of their experience in the world” (151)—are vital to producing good parrhesia (rather than bad parrhesia, which acts on unearned certainty). Here, Chaput conveys Foucault’s suggestion that subjects sleep on a pallet, wear coarse clothes, eat little, drink only water, and play affectionately with one’s child while reciting the truth that this beloved individual will die (151–52). Only through cultivating this form of the self can the parrhesiastic rhetor speak disruptive truths such that the genuinely new can emerge.The turn to late-period Foucault may be unsatisfying to a reader who seeks nonindividualized remedies to the cascading inequalities and catastrophes that capitalism unleashes. Chaput frequently sets up binary oppositions (reason/passion, science/sympathy, cognitive/noncognitive) in which the procapitalist position carries the day, but a collective/individual binary is left unremarked upon. Because Chaput locates affective harmonics within discrete bodies (and crucially for her argument, bodies capable of coming to reasonable conclusions about the merits of the capitalist mode of production), individual bodies are prioritized over their being-in-concert. Take the assessment of Galbraith’s work: “Not surprisingly, Galbraith theorizes how corporations—and other large organizations—use identification to compel individuals but does not offer a productive counter-power for individual agents” (120). Despite noting that even for Foucault the invisible hand is “a manufactured ontology” designed to coordinate bodies in spaces as if they were rational economic agents, it is only sympathetically driven actors of “civil society” that can become an effective counter-power to capital’s hegemony (149).Ironically, Foucault’s insight, that what we call spontaneous order or natural inclination is manufactured, rather than discovered, ought to draw our attention to the rhetorical dimensions of each reconsidered thinker. Here, I wonder whether Chaput need have committed to a single through line, from Smith onward, as a process of discovering the unseen affective forces that sympathetically bond bodies, and not a story with rhetorical hinge points on how affect is theorized. Hayek’s role as a master-signifier would then work in two directions: First, his rhetorical interventions retroactively alter our perceptions of Smith’s own work, such that we cannot but help see him as incipiently Hayekian. Second, once a Hayekian vision of the social bond is secured, procapital rhetors need not agree on the importance of affect, sympathy, spontaneous order, and so on, to be rhetorically effective. This would help better ground the Friedman chapter, for as written, his rational choice theory, and dismissal of affect, is narrated as confirmation and not a rejection of Hayek’s position (118). By making Hayek’s monumentality central to the overall argument, it opens space for how scholars must navigate the politics of reading itself, how certain signifiers become ineluctable. This would also explain more precisely how one master-signifier, the assemblage we call “Keynes” or “Keynesianism,” functioned as the dominant mode of capitalist expression for nearly four decades, and precisely how it was thoroughly superseded by another signifying regime.Finally, Chaput devotes space in both the introduction and conclusion to the work of Dana Cloud, whose materialist commitment to ideological demystification and consciousness raising is (along with other Marxists, like James Arnt Aune) characterized as “futile” (18), and whose failure to “acknowledge affect as a semiautonomous ontology motivating our bodily instincts” renders her approach insufficient to the task of rewriting capitalist affects (159). Yet Cloud’s own 2018 work, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture, acts as a counterpart to Chaput’s. Cloud agrees that liberal approaches to capital-T Truth are feeble in the face of capital’s stranglehold on the enthymemes that organize our embodied common sense; she similarly agrees that “affect” and “embodiment” are necessary—as is struggle (51). I encourage readers to put these works in conversation with one another, for they locate similar lacunae in our thought, but conceive of the source and solutions thereto differently.Market Affect exemplifies the kind of intervention that a rhetorically attuned scholar can bring to pressing political-economic debates; I commend the work for both letting the chosen thinkers speak on their own terms and considering the status of affect in each. The book’s thesis is admittedly provocative: it upends much materialist social history by foregrounding the affective dimensions of procapitalist writing as that which explains the mode of production’s enormous success. Future critical work that resides in the intersections of rhetoric, affect, materialism, and economics must engage with the implications of this move, and rigorously inquire exactly when, where, and, crucially, for whom this case can be proven as true. Chaput also contributes methodologically to the field of affect theory by enjoining scholars to focus not just on the “physiological energies” that circulate among bodies, but through their representations in consequential writings; Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are welcomed into the ranks of affect theory scholars via this avenue. Scholars interested in this reconsideration now have a treasure trove of thoughtful interpretations of the most consequential thinkers in modern history (the readings of Marx, Hayek, and Adorno do deserve special mention). And as mentioned, rhetorical scholars eager for a Foucauldian political intervention will find the conclusion especially edifying, for she reads Foucault’s late work as fundamentally concerned with a rhetorical problem space. Finally, scholars ought to test Chaput’s models of affective circulation and rhetorical interpretation in future scholarship, in particular her claim that repetition, timbre, and “volume and intensity” have definable and predictable affective outcomes that influence action (37). It is a reminder to rhetoricians that we must listen as carefully as we read. As affect appears to increasingly dominate our understandings of how capital functions, this is an exciting time for inquiry on economics and the economy, and this is a powerful contribution from a notable scholar.

Other| June 01 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by 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 (2022) 55 (2): 215–221. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.2.0215 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 June 2022; 55 (2): 215–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.2.0215 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 © 2022 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2022The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

This article shows how high-achieving Appalachian college students engage in rhetorical (in)visibility to conceal their Appalachian identity and strategically deploy markers of difference in their writing. The article challenges the assumption that Appalachian students are empowered through visibility and offers an alternative framework for understanding how students negotiate stigmatized cultural identities.

This essay examines the discourse around the trigger warning through the analytic paradigm of racial literacy and the rhetorical frames of colorblind racism to illuminate how the trigger warning as currently conceptualized, even when framed as a means of equitable engagement, is mediated by and upholds the racial status quo.

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In this essay, I argue for more representations of Caribbean women in rhetorical studies. In the effort toward representation, specifically for Haitian women, I developed a framework named Caribbean women’s rhetorics (CWR). CWR creates an interdisciplinary, multicultural, Black feminist framework and space where Caribbean women’s lived experiences are the primary focus of making, producing, sharing, and recognizing underrepresented rhetorical knowledges that offer rich representations. To do this work, the features of CWR uphold that value via voicing, proverbs, storytelling, reflection, linguistic practices, and multimodal composing. In providing an approach for the application of CWR, I analyze my interactive digital book The Cultivation of Haitian Women’s Sense of Selves: Toward a Field of Action. With CWR, I hope to expand the existing body of work on Caribbean women’s knowledges to disrupt sociocultural inequalities and improve the quality of life for Caribbean women.

This essay focuses on writing assessment. Specifically, the author explores the embedded raced construction of writing assessment, rubrics, inter alia, commonly used in first year composition courses. The author posits that rubrics used to assess what Asao Inoue termed Habits of White Language cannot effectively assess and may be detrimental to assessing speakers from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically African Americans. The importance of Black Language (BL), rhetoric, and argumentation styles to rhetorical studies and American discourse must not only be recognized but also explored and taught as a style of argumentation. I implement an Afrocentric rubric using the principles of African American Rhetoric as a means for both expanding the rhetorical triangle and providing ethical assessment of BL in writing.

According to African women’s theorizing, nationalism can be nonpolitical. This is a novel approach to defining nationalism, which is usually seen as a purely political event. Women of the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Organizations (FNWO) developed a rhetoric of nonpolitical nationalism in the 1950s that has been ignored by the current politically elite male-led narrative of African nationalism. This marginalization of African women is mirrored in the Black rhetorical cannon as well because they are Africans in an African American-centered narrative. In order to address this double marginality and to understand their novel characterization of nationalism, this essay joins scholarly conversations in the field of women’s historical rhetorics by upholding two objectives. First, it highlights the unique rhetoric of Nigerian women in the FNWO. Second, it analyzes their words to uncover characteristics of nonpolitical thought and situate it within a broader African rhetorical tradition.

Given the influx in people of African descent immigrating to the United States from diverse national, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, the demographics of the US Black community has shifted significantly over the last several decades. As a result of these changes, it is imperative that approaches to rhetorical studies, especially African-centered cultural rhetorics, remain inclusive and representative of diverse Black experiences in the United States and abroad. Toward this end, the authors propose a new disciplinary subfield called Global Black Rhetorics (GBR). GBR emphasizes engaging similarities and differences across Black experiences, positions of power, and privilege, which includes acknowledging, studying, and prioritizing the histories, languages, rhetorical traditions, and practices of continental Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Europeans, and other people of African descent across the African Diaspora. The authors introduce a four-themed framework for GBR that includes: assessing methods of education about global Black experiences, studying and teaching Black language diversity, teaching and citing contemporary rhetors and texts from Africa and African Diasporic contexts, and prioritizing healing as a communal goal for all Black people. The essay concludes with an introduction to the contributors of this special issue whose research advances the authors’ call for a globalized approach to Black Rhetorics.

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

In this essay, Patterson continues the tradition of turning to analysis of family as a way to challenge asymmetrical power relations within academic discourse. Through an analysis of publications and performances from three members of the author’s family—Phillip Patterson’s The Serenity of Knowing, Michael Patterson’s Humanist Solutions to American Problems: An Apolitical Approach to Governing, and Morgan Deane’s “A Light in the Night: Reopening & Operating Nightlife Venues in the Time of Covid-19”—Patterson animates Tracie Morris’s theory of grace as an African proverb performance rooted in Black family rhetoric to make visible rhetorical traditions and strategies used to create literacies for working across difference and surviving and thriving despite racist hegemonic structures of oppression. Additionally, Patterson extends their family rhetorical practices as useful techniques for decolonizing curriculum in form and content.

In this essay, I explore the rhetorical strengths and limitations of the Black identity as experienced in varying geographic locations across the globe. I draw from the work of Ruth Simms Hamilton who asked, “[A]re there a broad set of experiences which link diverse communities of the African Diaspora, temporally and spatially?” (“Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” African Presence in the Americas 1995, 393). Hamilton believed the African Diaspora was connected via an “active site of cultural and political action and struggle,” as Black bodies remain racialized in a Western context where “being defined as an inferior race and in racial terms is pertinent to the people formation process” (404). Using the migratory/displacement narratives of the Somali diaspora as an example of a people who were, are, and are still becoming, this essay takes a geographic approach to consider the impacts of place on the Black experience, and to understand the existing nuances and diversity within it. Building on the works of Asante, Dotson, hooks, Kynard, Lorde, Royster, Sharpe, and more, I aim to examine how the Black experience feels and changes within and across geographies, and how this transforms us, “as we make a radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world” (bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 1989, 23). I also hope to contribute nuance in Black rhetorical studies for understanding the broadness, aliveness, and richness of the Black/African diaspora while highlighting the uniformity that can be found in the experience of Black racialization across the globe.

Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.

This paper considers some of the ways ethnography has been adopted in transdisciplinary rhetoric and also considers theoretical questions internal to rhetorical ethnography that can help transdisciplinary scholars navigate limitations and potential liabilities inherent in transdisciplinary work. I seek to more carefully consider transdisciplinary features of rhetoric though ethnographic study which, in its position as studying cultures both familiar and foreign to the researcher, mirror many of the disciplinary relations expressed in Marilyn Stember’s topology of disciplinarity. Noting that transdisciplinary rhetoricians engage with scholarship by experts in other fields, an ethnographic approach to transdisciplinary rhetoric recognizes that disciplinary experts might have expert knowledge that they struggle to communicate to non-experts, and rhetoricians should tread carefully in offering solutions to these communicative difficulties. I suggest rhetorical vulnerability and self-awareness expressed through standpoint as two strategies scholars of transdisciplinary rhetoric can use to adopt stances of transparent subjectivity rather than feigning scientific objectivity.

Over the past two decades, the predictive processing (PP) framework has emerged as an immensely influential research paradigm in cognitive science and beyond. This article analyzes the critical role that the notion of ‘pattern’ plays in the agenda-setting work of philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark on PP and considers the project to develop the framework into a unified theory of the embodied mind. It argues that pattern contributes to this project not primarily as a full-fledged concept but rather as a figure of knowledge that shapes PP theory at a rhetorical and aesthetic level. The article offers a definition of figures of knowledge as a critical concept and suggests to apply it more broadly to the study of pattern as “keyword of our times” (Franco Moretti).

In this essay, I examine the film Johanna d’Arc ofMongolia (1989), made by German director Ulrike Ottinger in the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I argue that it can be read as an anti-authoritarian articulation of a desire for radical public spheres better suited to serve minority interests, particularly at a time of drastic transformations of social and political conditions. The film’s narrative ambiguity should be read in the rhetorical situation of radical fairy tales in West Germany and their attempt to develop counterpublic spheres to resist the organization of experiences by the consciousness industry. Ottinger’s film, while shot mostly in Inner Mongolia during the crucial year for the reunification of Germany, is far from being escapist. The shock of the displaced lower-class heroine, so different from the “happy ending” imperative of traditional fairy tales, unveils the fiction of a neoliberal economy that considers people and land as mere commodities. Like Karl Polanyi, Ottinger wants to empower people to question the assumption that they had to accept major displacements and flexibility in the name of a self-regulating market. The fairy tale, as a contested genre related to education,&amp;nbsp;is a primary field for this struggle.

Obituary| May 01 2022 Jerry Murphy (1923–2021) Don Paul Abbott Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 109–110. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.109 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Don Paul Abbott; Jerry Murphy (1923–2021). Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 109–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.109 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In the prologue to the Rhetorica ad Herennium book 4, Cornificius boldly departs from tradition: he will create his own examples to illustrate styles and figures of rhetoric, rather than drawing from poets and orators, as Greek manuals typically did. This methodological discussion, which resembles a declamation, portrays itself as an exemplum in that it embodies the precepts exposed in books 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, this exemplary discussion partakes in a larger debate between philosophy and rhetoric and must be considered in its historical and cultural context.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 Sara C. VanderHaagen Sara C. VanderHaagen University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 213–215. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sara C. VanderHaagen; Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 213–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 211–213. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michele Kennerly; Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 211–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay explores a nexus of related concepts—authorship, authenticity, and authority—as they impinge upon one another and on the experience of reading, particularly in the case of “canonical” authors such as Aristotle. Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics are considered together in light of these concepts, as well as in terms of seven constraints that operated upon Aristotle as a thinker and writer. Twentieth-century theories of reading are adduced in an examination of the rhetorical dimensions of Aristotle’s own notion of authorship. The essay also examines the rhetorical forces entailed in the editing and publication of authors known only from ancient manuscripts, and in the reading of legal and sacred texts.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 Sarah Walden Sarah Walden Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sarah Walden; Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

An instructor of undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses creates a mind-mapping activity for syllabus review to engage her students.

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Editors' introduction to 5.1

Review of Translanguaging Outside the Academy; Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Urbana, Illinois: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2018. 161 pages, $29.99.

Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Zagreb University and online. The conference's theme was Rhetorical Research and Didactics. It consisted of two keynotes that opened both days of the conference, 18 papers presented by international scholars, a roundtable on rhetorical curricula, and parallel workshop sessions on different rhetorical skills and ideas.

Food is never just food; it is also an instrument of power in a Foucaultian sense. Food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. In this study I will examine how enslaved African Americans used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. While Michel Foucault produced the theoretical scaffolding that rethinks power and resistance, his theories can be placed in a productive dialogue with the rhetorical studies of Kenneth Burke, Gillian Symon’s general conception of rhetorical resistance, as well as more specifically with James Scott’s and Elizabeth Janeway’s theories of the everyday resistance of the “weak.” Through these analytical lenses, I will place particular focus upon the role of food in slave narratives as a rhetorical means of defining and disputing identity, of establishing and violating various boundaries, and of challenging the status quo of plantations.

Pierwotnie tworzone jako domowe nakrycia i dekoracje w domach białych właścicieli, afroamerykańskie quilty zostały naznaczone retoryką sprzeciwu w momencie, gdy czarnoskóre kobiety zaczęły produkować patchworki na własny użytek. Wówczas quilty jako medium przekazujące wartości kulturowe stały się nieodłączną częścią tradycji artystycznej czarnoskórych kobiet. Tradycja ta jest silnie związana z retoryką sprzeciwu i wytrzymałości wobec przeciwności losu. Chociaż quilty są zwykle definiowane jako niewolnicza forma artystyczna, ich znaczenie wzrosło w ostatnich latach, kiedy Ameryka mierzy się z licznymi konfliktami rasowymi. Quilty mogą wyrażać traumę związaną z dyskryminacją rasową Afroamerykanów, jednocześnie wskazując na istotną koncepcję ‘czarnej radości’. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje werbalne i wizualne strategie retoryczne stosowane przez autorów quiltów w ramach projektu We Are The Story (https://textilecentermn.org/wearethestory/), tworzonych w odpowiedzi na liczne przypadki śmierci czarnoskórych Amerykanów z rąk policji. Artykuł podejmuje próbę oceny skuteczności zastosowania quiltów jako narzędzi politycznych w trwającym procesie walki czarnych o równe prawa. procesie walki czarnych o równe prawa.

F.L. Wright’s written and oral statements are discussed with a view to showing the connection between his principles of “organic” architecture and the rhetorical efficacy of his verbal expression. His calculated, eloquent and dexterous enactment, or performance, of various communication strategies is presented as fully contiguous and consonant with his architectural thinking and substantiation of ideas through action. This makes him an important precursor of postmodern consciousness and praxis.

In visual risk communication, there has been a push toward using realism to show potential effects of sea level rise on coastal communities, often with the assumption that higher degrees of realism are more effective. We challenge this assumption by sharing the results of a user-based study exploring reactions to simulated images of flooded landmarks. The findings identify nuanced rhetorical and emotional responses, encouraging technical communicators to contribute to risk scholarship in psychology and cartography.