This article argues that a focus on racialized emotional economies is crucial to cultivating antiracist programs and an antiracist field. This study is framed around a racist fuck-up. We provide a framework and recommendations for ways that administrators, scholars, and educators can attend to emotions more directly within academic spaces.

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, travelers from the United States regularly shared pictures of their South American adventures with US audiences increasingly eager to imagine US influence spreading across the American hemisphere. Examining two well-received and broadly disseminated examples—a painting by Frederic E. Church and a photo essay by Hiram Bingham—this essay demonstrates how US viewers learned to see their own national greatness in scenes of the distant, yet still profoundly American, Andes. The essay draws attention as well to the role that such hemispheric claims to magnitude play in crafting arguments about US national import.

When Susan Jarratt asked me to write an essay that would invite RSQ readers to engage with all four articles in this issue, she described the task using the musical metaphor of “Counterpoint”—the t...

There is no entity that holds the essence of America, nothing blessed with this peculiar sense or significance. A real, true, literal America does not exist as such even though a mass of unsubmerge...

This essay draws attention to the vital role that the "other" America has played in the creation of (U.S.) American rhetorics. It examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world. In 1823, when James Monroe articulated what became the "Monroe Doctrine," the idea that the United States had a two-continent sphere of influence was novel at best. Over time, however, U.S. public discourse developed a ubiquitous common sense in which U.S. strength, security, and even national being have a hemispheric basis. From Monroe's assertion that actions against any American state would manifest "an unfriendly disposition toward the United States" to Theodore Roosevelt's lionized national virility and into the present moment, the figure of Latin America—present and absent—has become powerfully definitive for U.S. national image.

If there are rhetoricians who still profess The Rhetorical Tradition as a singular frame for the study of rhetoric, Alejandra Vitale and Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s collection, Rhetoric in South Amer...

Drawing on Douglas Powell's assertion that “region making [is] a practice of cultural politics” (8), this essay traces the nationalist force of mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorian appeals to America as a strategic ethno-historic region. It suggests that such arguments bound national, regional, and transnational concerns together, using indigenous roots and cultural landscape as their anchors. Ecuadorian intellectuals who made nationalist arguments by building a larger, American moral geography drew on a racialized sense of history and landscape to re-imagine their relationship with their Spanish ex-colonizer and to distinguish an autochthonous American Ecuador from its diluted American neighbors. These arguments from America gave their small country greater cultural weight through regional identification. Tracing those tactical claims to America as they played out within Ecuador and across its regional commitments contributes to a broader understanding of the rhetorical force of place. The Ecuadorian example of regional appeals that amplify national stature demonstrates how place-based claims to identity can simultaneously ground and circulate arguments; it shows as well how the cultural politics of a particular landscape invoke and move within larger complexes of meaning and force.