Precarious Rhetorics

Precarious Rhetorics
Author: Wendy S. Hesford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814213766

First work to couple materialist and rhetorical frameworks with interdisciplinary understandings of precarity to study pressing issues of our time.

Ecologies of Harm

Ecologies of Harm
Author: Megan Eatman
Publisher: Rhetoric and Materiality
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814214343

Examines lynching, capital punishment, and torture to investigate how rhetoric and violence work together to sustain inhospitable spaces and create challenges for antiviolence work.

Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood

Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood
Author: Allison L. Rowland
Publisher: Rhetoric and Materiality
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814255827

Examines gut microbes, fetuses, and gym-goers in three case studies to critique the discursive practices of inclusion into humanhood.

Rhetoric in Debt

Rhetoric in Debt
Author: Kellie Sharp-Hoskins
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2023-05-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271096519

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

Black or Right

Black or Right
Author: Louis M. Maraj
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1646421477

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.

Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric

Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric
Author: Lynda Walsh
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319512684

This book restores the concept of topology to its rhetorical roots to assist scholars who wish not just to criticize power dynamics, but also to invent alternatives. Topology is a spatial rather than a causal method. It works inductively to model discourse without reducing it to the actions of a few or resolving its inherent contradictions. By putting topology back in tension with opportunity, as originally designed, the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for post-critical practice in “wicked discourses” of medicine, technology, literacy, and the environment. Readers of the volume will discover exactly how the discipline of rhetoric underscores and interacts with current notions of topology in philosophy, design, psychoanalysis, and science studies.

Spectacular Rhetorics

Spectacular Rhetorics
Author: Wendy Hesford
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822349515

Scrutinizes spectacular rhetoric, the use of visual images and imagery to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners.

Rhetoric in the Time of Torture

Rhetoric in the Time of Torture
Author: Laura A. Sparks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2023-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1666921815

Rhetoric in the Time of Torture offers a renewed attention to the rhetorical and temporal dimensions of torture, in light of the U.S.’s post-9/11 reliance on heavy interrogation techniques. Laura A. Sparks highlights where rhetorical theory fits into a world in which people torture others to make them speak.

Inconvenient Strangers

Inconvenient Strangers
Author: Shui-yin Sharon Yam
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2019
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814214091

Examines how three transnational groups in Hong Kong use familial narratives to promote critical empathy and decenter the oppressive logics behind dominant citizenship discourses.

Constitutive Visions

Constitutive Visions
Author: Christa J. Olson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271063637

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.