{"title":"Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education by Pamela VanHaitsma (review)","authors":"Mary Anne Taylor","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.4.0123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.4.0123","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"123 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42392422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Color Blind: Political Realism, Epistemic Racism, And Rhetorical Salience","authors":"R. Hariman, Francis A. Beer","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.4.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.4.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The rhetoric of any academic discipline can involve epistemic distortions and blind spots, including a tendency to obscure systemic racism. The doctrine of political realism from the discipline of International Relations is an influential example. Realism relies on several rhetorical devices, including a structural distinction between rhetoric and reality, a modality of abstraction, and the trope of anarchy/hierarchy. These provide both a compelling theoretical framework and a discursive program that obscures race and racism. Realist discourse operates further through several dimensions of rhetorical salience that are modulated by changes in context. Foreground, background, ambient, and ontic salience provide multiple registers for inscribing realism. Realism’s lack of reflexivity in disciplinary, governmental, and public arenas adds to its power and its defects. Exposing the rhetorical constitution of realism and its architecture of non-knowing raises challenges not only for realism but also for rhetoric. These include avoiding the inscription of realism and racism within rhetorical inquiry and avoiding epistemic hubris in the self-definition of rhetoric as a discipline.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"1 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47655858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife","authors":"Matthew Houdek, Lisa A. Flores","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"25 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48624928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the \"Illegal\" Immigrant by Lisa A. Flores (review)","authors":"Jimmy Lizama","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0192","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"192 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46872581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Rhetoric of Physical Violence","authors":"Jay P. Childers","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on \"The Rhetoric of Violence.\" In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41612782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plátano's Pharmacy: The Republic's Taste of its Own Medicine","authors":"José Ángel Maldonado","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0075","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, demanding the head of Vice-President Mike Pence while challenging the results of a fair presidential election. Amid the shock, US journalists—finding few words to describe the severity of the moment—dusted off the old term: \"banana republic.\" Banana republics are countries whose economy depends on the export of a finite natural resource, like bananas. By design, the ruling elites of banana republics work alongside foreign, multinational corporations to benefit from the republic's human labor. Banana republics are typically governed by a military dictator appointed by a foreign power and elected through illegitimate elections. Notably, dictators ascend to power through military and/or populist violence, like coups d'état and magnicide. Among the reckonings that US Americans encountered the days following the riots was the idea that their country had been relegated beside those so-called \"banana republics.\" Indeed, the public display of violence brought about by a populist insurrection indicated a failure of the highest rank. In this essay, I ask: \"What are the implications of treating violence seriously as a rhetorical event?\" I suggest that referring to the United States as a \"banana republic\" due to populist violence against sacrosanct, democratic institutions requires that US Americans open themselves to the possibility of unexceptionalism, a recognition that—like a medicine—few are willing to stomach. I offer the idea that Donald Trump is the first Latin American president of the United States, and, in turn, that the United States has opened itself to a vulnerability whose damage is unknowable. To do so, I revisit two works by Jacques Derrida: Autoimmunity (2003), an interview where he describes the paradox of post-9/11 counterterrorist violence as autoimmunity, or, how organisms attack themselves in a quasi-suicidal fashion; and Plato's Pharmacy (1968), where he demonstrates an approach to unveiling the unseen ideological traces that haunt particular words. I ask: what is the unseen, terroristic force concealed by the claim that the United States is a banana republic? I explore the Capitol riots as a new \"major event\" (a televised moment playing on loop and accompanied by specific phrases), where a new type of terrorist uses state-sanctioned freedoms to inflict violence upon itself. I then draw from Chilean poets to provide scholars a lesson on the role of violence in the forming of national identity.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"75 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47057303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Arguing with Numbers: The Intersection of Rhetoric and Mathematics ed. by James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes (review)","authors":"C. Tindale","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0181","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"181 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Violence and Nonviolence in the Rhetoric of Social Protest","authors":"Billie Murray","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0145","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The nonviolence so heralded in studies of protest has lost its strategic effectiveness; nonviolence has become, not a strategy in the pursuit of justice, but an end in itself, a telos. In order to better conceptualize violence and nonviolence in the contemporary rhetoric of social protest, this essay provides a review and critique of prominent rhetorical studies of protest violence that have placed violent tactics solely in the service of nonviolence. Rhetorical scholars are in a unique position to reconsider and reframe understandings of violence and nonviolence in social protest that persist both in rhetorical studies and in the popular imagination about how social change can and should happen. Violence and nonviolence have too often been divorced from the white supremacist history and context in which they operate, particularly in the United States—creating meaning structures that make the violent protest tactics deployed by non-dominant groups culturally illegible. This essay works to reframe the violent tactics most commonly deployed in the current moment by arguing that the looting, property destruction, and even the direct physical violence that is most often associated with various Leftist and anti-racist activists can work strategically to challenge the police-State's monopoly on violence. Drawing out the implications of these interconnected points, the essay provides a more nuanced understanding of violent tactics that can both help restore the disruptive function of protest rhetoric and better challenge white supremacy in the service of justice.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"145 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49218338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mapping Inter/National Terrain: On Violence, Definition, and Struggle from Afghanistan to Standing Rock","authors":"Heather Hayes","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0099","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars' battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"125 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45389068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Serial Murder as Modernist Ritual","authors":"Bryan J. McCann","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.3.0049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist ritual among many others, and its capacity to induce affective investment from consuming publics, just as surely as the killer himself, is a function of what I am calling sadistic form. To clarify this argument, the essay reads serial killer Ted Bundy's many crimes as ritualistic enactments of sadistic form, as well as the varied responses during his 1989 execution. In so doing, I illustrate how different rituals function to obscure or amplify the sadism to which they give expression.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"49 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43743127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}