Abstract This introduction provides a brief context for the rebooting of the journal, including a history of the journal and the controversy that led to its reimagining, and offers brief synopses of the individual essays included within.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the importance of decolonization theory/practice outside of Latinx and indigenous literatures to understand how the African diaspora has produced rhetorical and philosophical interventions that have been understudied and ignored. The books reviewed all contribute to understanding the limitations of Western, white humanism through the concepts: Black reason, the undercommons, racial liberalism, the idea of the spill, and ontological terror. These texts function as entrees into a deep excavation of the limits of Kantian freedom and Rawlsian justice that recenters anti-Blackness as an animating force of governmentality (particularly governmental structures and regimes that enforce possibilities of life and death), rhetorical invention, and philosophical engagement.

Meta G. CarstarphenFigure 1: Screenshot of YouTube video depicting an image of Obama grinning with a gold dental grill and gold chain necklace (Downs).University of OklahomaKathleen E. WelchUnivers...

Book Review| December 01 2015 Executing Democracy, volume 2, Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835–1843 Executing Democracy, volume 2, Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835–1843. By Stephen John Hartnett. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012; pp. vii + 342. $59.95 cloth. Lisa M. Corrigan Lisa M. Corrigan University of Arkansas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 801–804. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0801 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa M. Corrigan; Executing Democracy, volume 2, Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835–1843. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 801–804. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0801 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. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractIn Blessed by Thunder: Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood, Flor Fernandez Barrios examines the consequences of Castro's Revolution and its silencing, censoring, and prohibitions on the writing, speaking, thinking, and performance of public rituals of communities and families. Barrios is able to use the history of storytelling and orality to integrate her roles as a daughter, granddaughter, and healer into a larger history of Cuban women who have preserved knowledge practices that exist outside of the state's masculine identity and its sanctioned social and medical institutions. As Barrios rewrites the Cuban Revolution through the collective memories of three generations of women in her family, she articulates her own Cuban-ness as well as her relationship to Afro-Cuban culture, an often-overlooked connection that tells us as much about upper-class culture on the island during this period in the early 1960s as it does about Afro-Cuban life practices such as Santería.

Abstract This paper examines the historical processes that spurred the Cuban feminist movement to articulate positions on suffrage, property rights, reproductive rights, marriage and divorce, children's issues, welfare, and education. It also discusses the changes in Cuban society during the Castro years and how the communist alignment of Cuban society influenced Cuban feminism. Finally, this paper suggests that one of the most interesting spaces to excavate women's history, women's voices and feminist activism is in exile. In exile, we see the hybridity and doubleness that has characterized Cuban life, particularly since the Soviet collapse. Writings by Castro's daughter, Alina Fernandez, help us understand where Cuban women are positioned at the beginning of the 21st century and the subject positioning of women writing in exile.