Introduction: Rhetoric in Motu, Motu in Rhetoric

People move. Bodies move. Ideas move. Words move.The articles in this special issue of the Journal for the History of Rhetoric (JHR) emerged from the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) symposium conducted at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Baltimore. The theme—“Rhetoric in motu”—came from the energy we wanted to capture, a reason to move attendees to risk coming to an in-person conference in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.When we gathered as an organizing committee in early 2021, we wanted to connect to “Excess!!!! in/and the History of Rhetoric,” the 2020 ASHR symposium that never was, as well as to previous ASHR gatherings. The theme of excess resonated with—maybe rebounded because of—the limits and restrictions with which we were still living in 2021, even as the medical marvel of vaccines was allowing a return to, well, movement. Stillness, stuckness, immobility, had been defining academic life for most of us. We taught and met on Zoom or not at all.Another past symposium theme (one from 2016) echoed back at us: “Rhetoric in Situ” (see Lamp 2017). Place-based, topos-driven rhetoric we knew, but maybe it was the innate desire to move, finally, that got us to “Rhetoric in Motu.” As scholars of mobility, migration, textuality, public memory, presidential rhetoric, visual and textile rhetoric, and of course the history of rhetoric, we had already been thinking and moving, but we all felt the energy behind the kinetic force of words and ideas. Still no more, we wanted to give symposium goers a reason to show up, possibly for the first time since the pandemic began, not as they were before, but as driven (yes, moved) by energeia. Community, comradery, and togetherness were, we felt, what ASHR symposium goers wanted, alongside the rigor and readiness of rhetoric.We decided to look at the now for expertise, inviting early career scholars whose research into the history and practices of rhetoric had been building on and against existing theories and methods. During the pandemic, they had limited opportunities to engage others while advancing their scholarship. The ASHR symposium provided the academic space for discussion.This was not the first time that ASHR has had an intentional focus on emerging and energizing research, on newness/nowness, but we still embraced a careful look at the future of the history of rhetoric. We see the in motu aspect of rhetoric as the most exciting newness of very carefully grounded historical research. Defining rhetoric as contingent, flexible, provocative, is not new. Yet the authors whose work appears in this special issue engage rhetoric as a concept that accelerates, gains momentum, through the places, times, and people in their work.The theoretical contributions in this special issue speak to all historians of rhetoric in their everyday academic and civic lives. How and why do words move others? Amplify? Energize? Effuse? Amalgamate? Take off (lift/luft)? Many of the authors in this issue refer to this still-in-motion concept of rhetoric as kinetic and kairotic (Commer; Crosby and Richards), in opposition and possibly as resistance to the stillness of bodies, ideas, practices, histories (Ahmadi; Detweiler; Miller; Patia; Wetherbee) across and between time and locations (Itoh; Lv; Portz). The articles beautifully move from and across cardinal points, continents, and periods, all centering mobility as more than linear, topographic, or aggregational.Before we preview the contents of this special issue, we want to thank all the people who made the 2022 ASHR symposium and what is published here possible.First, the symposium and this special issue simply would not exist without the organizing committee: Natalie Bennie, Marissa Croft (whom we also thank for her uplifting visual designs), Jordan Houston, Michele Kennerly, Allison Prasch, and us, Jennie Keohane and Alessandra Von Burg. We Zoomed, dreamed, played, and planned together, and the result was as energizing as the effort.Second, we want to thank the ASHR steering committee, with a special note to the treasurer, Bjørn Stillion Southard, who kept us from moving away from our financial responsibilities. Ned O’Gorman, the editor of JHR, is allowing us to write and share this special issue, a semiestablished tradition that we do not take for granted. His attention to both large objectives and editorial minutiae is invaluable, and we are grateful. Another special note of gratitude is owed to IDEA committee cochairs Michele Kennerly and Martin Camper, whose support we received along the way; anything and all that ASHR does should be centered in their idea(l)s.Third, we deeply and truly thank the many reviewers. From proposal to published article, reviewers included ASHR steering committee members, organizers, scholars who submitted work (even when, regretfully, we were not able to accept everything), presenters, students, and friends of ASHR. We had three kinds of reviewers, starting with those who reviewed all submitted proposals for work to be presented. We also had a special kind of reviewer at the symposium, an innovation that we hope becomes tradition: active chairs. They read the papers before the authors presented, provided precise feedback in person and in writing, took their assigned panels to lunch during the conference, and in some cases followed up with mentorship after the symposium. We honor the inaugural active chairs: Natalie Bennie, Andre Johnson, Amber Kelsie, Michele Kennerly, Jennie Keohane, Jordan Loveridge, and Allison Prasch. Finally, the reviewers for this special issue are also special, and many served in roles outlined above. They attended the ASHR symposium. They knew who the authors were, and we asked them to let the authors know their identities. Pushing against academic practices of anonymity, we defined the review process as collaborative, inviting authors to write toward publication, and providing multiple opportunities to get there. The reviewers who read the articles published here are Natalie Bennie, Martin Camper, Jonathan Carter, Kundai Chirindo, Cory Geraths, Atilla Hallsby, Curry Kennedy, Jordan Loveridge, Allison Prasch, and Carly Woods.Fourth, we thank all those who attended the symposium and the reception. The questions and discussions were invigorating and energetic, often leading to advancements in the arguments. We developed an exciting program so authors could share and shine, and they did because audience members showed up.Finally, we thank all the presenters. From proposals to papers and, for some, to publication, the authors shared unique work, taking the invitation to connect to rhetoric in motu while staying grounded in their research.A special note of thanks to the three keynote speakers, whose presentations centered and catapulted the symposium: day 1 we heard from Karrieann Soto Vega about the reverberation of Lolita Lebrón in Puerto Rico, day 2 from Rudo Mudiwa about protest in Zimbabwe, and day 3 from Maryam Ahmadi, who offered a rhetorical intervention on histories of rhetoric from Iran. All the authors moved us to see and feel rhetoric in multimodal, interconnected, and pluralistic ways.Maryam Ahmadi’s article opens this special issue, returning to rhetoric as an archive of knowledge on the move. She argues that a semicolonial rhetoric neither develops from Western/imperial models nor stands outside them. Rather, it moves across national and imperial borders, making visible rhetorical forms that transpire at the edges of nominally sovereign body politics. “The play of speech emerges . . . as the play of empire,” Ahmadi shows us, elucidating a “rhetorical sphere of influence.”Similarly, if in a different time, what Ahmadi defines as semicolonial rhetoric becomes flexible mobility in Sri Lanka. Portugal, Britain, and Russia thought they had winning arguments to move those they were trying to control. Josie Portz reveals a phantom mobility pervasive in words and acts of resistance as the colonized in Sri Lanka spoke back to power using the tools at hand.Acts of resistance also animate Meg Itoh’s contribution, which explores “snake dancing” as a protest technique that brings down physical barricades erected by police. Weaving together rhetorical fragments that mirror the interlocked arms of snake dancers, from Zengakuren in Japan to Yippies in the United States, Itoh recovers a “transnational coalitional moment . . . bound by cultural trauma.”Travel in the service of social movements grounds Kaitlyn Patia’s article as well. Patia explores the “solidarity travel” of the Third World Women’s Alliance in the 1970s as a way to nurture feminist movement activity. Introducing rhetorical fluidity, she encourages us to see the movement of travel and bodies in labor as a transformative and fluid process.Junyi Lv illustrates what moves when landscapes are rebuilt in China’s Shanxi province. Putting the Jinhuagong National Mine Park in conversation with the Yungang Grottoes, two heritage sites carved out of mountains, she offers museum in motu as practice for reading these sites in embodied conversation.The movement of memory also drives Elizabeth Ellis Miller’s contribution. Exploring the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Miller shows how memory and prayer rhetorically catalyzed civil rights supporters’ trips to Washington, DC. Social, geographic, and spiritual movement intertwined as “leaders and activists moved together to realize a new national future.”From historical and global contexts, the articles move back to contemporary times and the United States. Unforgettable moments in time are the subjects of the articles by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards and Ben Wetherbee: a national insurrection and a global virus, respectively.These authors theorize desecration and metaphors of medicine to argue, differently, that, when we live through what become/already are historical moments, we can as scholars of rhetoric create new methods that intersect across the visual, sensory, linguistic, medical, and political spheres of our lives. From the perspective of now, the authors move us through images and figures that capture what is yet to come. Crosby and Richards show desecration to be a rhetoric in motu as when “the outside breaches the inside, befouling its sacred character,” as in the case of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Wetherbee introduces epideictic priming as motion that turns (or does not turn) us to deliberative action in the context of the pandemic.The two closing articles return to the pedagogical foundations of rhetoric, engaging the who and the how of teaching why words matter. Eric Detweiler critically engages the debate over how students’ feelings are “leveraged and circulated as both an ideological instrument and a deliberative topos.” In doing so, he invites us to look at what may be the other side of power. He argues that, when power takes compliance for granted, those ready to push against historical traditions often have the last word. Carolyn D. Commer closes this special issue with an exercise in invention. Using the Octalogs to teach rhetorical history can, she shows, move students to “question how we write histories, what counts in our discipline as knowledge, and what the uses of our histories have been.”The articles in this special issue move us in new, inventive, at times irreverent historical ways, all beautifully contextualizing and theorizing rhetoric as asking whose history, whose perspective, whose movement? As readers ponder these and the many questions the authors ask, we celebrate the rich history of rhetoric and our exciting future. Let’s go.