How does America feel? We could ask introspectively—how does it feel to identify with, think about, and generally be proximate to America—or haptically—how does this imperialistic nation-state feel when it impacts different bodies? In American Magnitude, Christa Olson answers both versions of the question: she parses affects associated with American pretenses towards grandeur and reflects on the material consequences of America's inflated public feelings. The book deserves attention from anyone whose work encompasses affective publics, visual rhetorics, borders/borderlands, and the practices and legacies of American colonialism.Olson contends that, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, “US Americans looking from the United States into the ‘other’ Americas to the south created, sustained, and circulated the United States as America through appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence” (6). Each of her chapters takes up a case study in the causes and consequences of the United States’ hegemony in relation to its neighbors. As her focus ranges across visual media from lithographs to animated films, she charts how public feelings accumulate, circulate in personal and national stories, and reinforce the self-importance of American self-representation. She also keeps an eye on the fragility of American self-aggrandizement and its failure to get non-U.S. audiences to take it seriously. The book not only carefully analyzes claims to national significance in rhetorical practice but also models how to write about hegemonic rhetorical patterns while decentering those pattern's own claims of importance.The introduction starts with Olson's “central assumptions”: that “American scenes” teach U.S. audiences the “contours and responsibilities of being American,” and that “becoming American . . . required looking not only within but also beyond US borders” (6). She develops those assumptions with three key terms: hemisphere, magnitude, and feeling. Describing her work as not strictly decolonial in practice, but as an investigation of how colonizing power functions, she focuses on “the history and consequence” (12) of U.S. habits of viewing the hemisphere as space to be controlled for gain. Magnitude names the rhetorical engine behind those habits and thus is the conceptual heart of the book. Magnitude, she argues, inheres in a variety of rhetorical practices for establishing importance and so appears in different guises across historical contexts. After defining its “close links to the sublime” (13), she rounds out the introduction by reminding readers that magnitude “rushes through a seeing-feeling body” (19). Locating magnitude in sensoria leads her to the final keyword, feeling. Magnitude's “normative common sense” is not an intangible idea but the lived reality in publics “formed through intensity of feeling and a need to monitor bodily borders both literal and symbolic” (23). Feeling, to Olson, constitutes publicness as such, as it keeps vivid the visceral qualities of what it is like to be in public. Magnitude, we might say, is not just a way of viewing, but a way of life.Chapter one offers both an origin story of hemispheric magnitude in American history and an innovative contribution to theories of visual circulation and public feeling. In it, Olson stories a wealth of archival material left behind by U.S. Americans trying to make sense of the Mexican-American war. She surveys the letters and lithographs through which the “war's implications—its aims, its triumphs, its costs—were before their eyes” (31). She theorizes “accumulation” to explicate why that archival material mattered, defining accumulation as “circulation's necessary counterpart,” involving “the buildup of material over time” regarding ideas and arguments, the slow gathering of “the stuff that sticks around and creates significance” (43). Accumulation innovates within extant disciplinary vocabularies of circulation and affect in that it allows Olson to discern affect mattering in moments when it moves too slowly to influence individual rhetorical encounters. Accumulation also lets her take a unique perspective on grandeur, describing it not as a single strike of sublime intensity but something that can gather too slowly to be noticed. American magnitude, she argues, did not occur overnight to Americans visualizing the Mexican-American war; it sedimented over time and across thousands of letters and ephemera of visual and material culture, and, like a mountain range, grew up gradually. Addressing why Americans accepted hemispheric hegemony as a dominant frame for viewing their place in the world, Olson claims that they acquiesced “to the precise shape of the nation as inevitable, as destined, and as exceptional” (65) largely by virtue of learning to take that shape for granted.The next chapter tells six stories about Frederic Church, the painter whose landscapes colored how Americans imagined “their” hemisphere. Trying to “defamiliarize the presumption of whiteness and [U.S.] Americanness that suffuses Church's paintings,” Olson tells “story and counterstory” (70) in a chapter that could have focused only on visual rhetorics. Expanding readers’ perspective on nostalgic paintings, the stories she tells contextualize, undercut, and complicate “the American stories” (71) and the landscapes of Church's that told them, that treat hemispheric hegemony as received fact. The chapter thus highlights the incongruity between magnitude's fictional “true American [white, Northern, masculine]” (81) and the character of the painter whose journeys south “left him gasping, itching, sweating, and shivering” (89). We get a picture of Church hiding his travails in tropical climates behind a more palatable painting of “placidity and tranquility” (87) that other white men could fantasize about conquering. Olson summarizes that “painting, in this retrospective, is colonization by another name” (99).Chapter three focuses on an irony of American magnitude: in an effort to be bigger than the rest of the world, American magnitude cannot recognize epistemologies other than its own, so it relies on tropes of “discovery, invention, and revelation” (105) to frame other cultures’ materials as spectacles for American eyes. Machu Picchu is the chapter's case in point for such rhetorical operations of “revealing discovery” (136). It follows Hiram Bingham, a mercenary adventurer dressed as a scientist, as he “went looking for greatness” to project to American viewers and “primed his methods to ensure he found it” (114). The chapter highlights not only how rhetorics of grand discovery “make the things that they bring to light” (137), but also how magnitude ignores entire epistemologies in framing the world as the measure of Americans’ greatness. Olson ends the chapter dwelling on the “opacity” of Bingham's “refusal to be held accountable by or to his Peruvian counterparts” (136), which Olson calls innate to rhetorics of grand discovery as such: “revelation, by necessity, hides” the “other possible understandings” (137–138) of what is being “revealed” as a discovery.The fourth chapter further develops the theme of magnitude's opacity, here from the perspective of people “looking askance” (171) at nationalistic paternalism. Olson investigates the Walt Disney Company's filmmaking work for the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a unit meant to sell America's image to people in Latin America through pseudo-educational films that, in truth, barely passed as bad propaganda: “a bad gift,” in Olson's words, “presented as charity” (142). Comparing the U.S. American intent behind, and reception of, Disney films to the films’ reception in Latin America, Olson emphasizes magnitude's fragility. International audiences always viewed the tropes of “normative white, settler vision” with justified derision, in the process “pulling [American magnitude] off-course and making use of it slantwise” (178). This kind of humbling claim—that adherents to American magnitude who presumed their point of view to be “the unquestioned center of America” were “imagining things” (145)—winds down Olson's content chapters with a detailed example of how American magnitude has often failed to spur any usable rhetorical invention at all, let alone to compel actually existing hemispheric audiences to take it seriously.The concluding fifth chapter offers advice about how to resist magnitude's claims. Olson advocates a turn to “post-magnitude rhetorical history, theory, and criticism,” a disciplinary future where rhetoricians have learned “to sit with limitedness” (188). Identifying magnitude's impetus towards grandeur with the American academy's need for scholarship to be big, important, and, yes, grand, Olson refuses sweeping statements about what rhetoric beyond nationalistic magnitudes must be and instead offers advice about where such rhetorics would start. Specifically, she councils us to “be partial . . . keep a messy slate . . . do the hard work of connection [and] care” (188–193). It's a fitting way to conclude. The book models how to deal with authorial positionality in the face of an archive of harm. Olson weaves different modes of narrative, sometimes traditionally foregrounding a historical event explicated by the expert author, and at other times writing transparently about her access to, and affective response in the face of, various archives of magnitude. The book rewards close readings that pay attention to when it speaks in first-person and when it speaks as an authorial expert. Which, again, means that the conclusion is fitting: if we take Olson's call for post-magnitude rhetoric seriously, there was no serious way to end this book in the authoritative, as opposed to self-reflective, voice.One question lingers for this reviewer: Does Olson give magnitude too much credit? She seems to treat magnitude like a problem inherent in claims about significance as such, and not a problem specific to U.S. American nationalism. Olson would probably, if asked, dissociate magnitude from other forms for signifying importance, significance, and/or worth, and stress that magnitude is a particularly American place from which to evaluate something. But there are moments in the text where the distinction does not appear, and she considers magnitude like an unavoidable status quo, or even a feature of any claim about significance by default. I wonder if saying we need to be “post” magnitude gives too much credence to American magnitude's own aspirations toward perfection. Put another way: non-magnitudinous rhetorics only look limited and partial from magnitude's own point of view. Do we, by calling for new disciplinary paradigms to get beyond magnitude, accidentally reify its impact and, in the process, hide how some scholars, writers, and activists all along have been beyond magnitude—and have, in fact, never had the luxury of taking magnitude seriously?Olson has written an attentive and meaningful book, a clinic in the writing of palpable history. American Magnitude accounts for how magnitude matters materially, in bodies and maps, in felt distance and implied relation. It steadily innovates in approach to common theoretical concerns—circulation, sublimity, and so on—helping our discipline continue to shift focus from the sudden effects of rhetorical genius to the gradual accretion of norms, values, and forms. It is one of several recent landmark books in rhetorical studies (think of Emerson Cram's Violent Inheritance or Catalina M. de Onís's Energy Islands) that reject sweeping conclusions in favor of much more locally focused and self-reflective answers to problems of baffling scope and duration. It therefore communicates a sense of the fragility of magnitude: the light touch of the conclusion resonates with a fact Olson demonstrates from the introduction, namely that all visions of grandeur contain the conditions of their own diminution. In its scope and balance, it is clearly a book, like her research subject, that sedimented over time, accruing layers, eroding jagged edges, building gradually. The care with which Olson balances theoretical nuance, detailed case studies, methodological rigor, and self-reflection evokes the steady grace of the landscapes her book's subjects inhabit. The highest compliment we could pay it is to imagine all the ecosystems of research beyond magnitude—critical of U.S. American hegemony, attentive to flows of movement and immobility across and between borders, breathing in various formal and informal archives—to which it will surely contribute.

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Book Review| December 01 2018 Propaganda Propaganda. Edited by Paul Baines and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy. 4 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Ltd., 2013; pp. 1,448. $1,190 cloth. Allison Niebaur; Allison Niebaur Pennsylvania State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Benjamin Firgens Benjamin Firgens Pennsylvania State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 740–743. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0740 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Allison Niebaur, Benjamin Firgens; Propaganda. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 740–743. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0740 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.