A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Artistic Methods for Contemporary Public Life by Elenore Long (review)

In chapter 2 of A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Artistic Methods for Contemporary Public Life, Elenore Long offers her readers some advice. She suggests that if we are uncertain about theory, we skip ahead to read chapters 4 and 5 first, which explain her real-world cases, then loop back to the earlier chapters for setting out questions and defining terms. Being sure of myself as a theorist—and being a cowriter with Elenore on a related project—I was certain I could read the book as it was ordered, and so I ignored her advice. But it was not until chapter 6 that I finally began to feel I had the sea legs for the journey that Long asks us to take. In that chapter, we meet the Gambian American student organization. We are brought to the scene of a beauty pageant, organized by the college students as a fundraiser for tuition for girls at the Sajuka Community School in the Gambia. At first glance, the event traverses the familiar contours of charity work. It is some kind of gala night, meant to get people out to raise money and good feelings. Epideictic speeches promote the cause. After, the money raised is donated to people in need. Surely a beauty pageant is not the setting of radical change that we in public rhetoric long to create. But as Long unfolds the story beyond this initial description, she reveals the complex performative work of these young people, who strive to make a world together. Yes, they contend with dominant aid-to-Africa discourses and neoliberal economics (95–100). While these discourses are pervasive and “sedimented,” they are not “cemented” (142), and it is in this difference that Long ekes out her methods for rhetorical world making. Long shows us how to see the possibilities for the “what next” in the rhetorical work of these independent, hopeful college students.