Rhetoric & Public Affairs https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA <span><em>Rhetoric &amp; Public Affairs</em> is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the history, theory, and criticism of public discourse. Arenas of rhetorical investigation might include but are by no means limited to campaigns for social, political, environmental or economic justice; modes of resistance to those campaigns; situated instances of executive leadership; legislative and judicial deliberations; comparative rhetorics; transnational diplomacy; digital circulation and mediation of public discourse; and/or constitution of political and social identities. Critical, analytical, or interpretive essays examining symbolic influences in any historical period (including the contemporary) anywhere in the world are welcome. Of special interest are manuscripts that interrogate dynamics of power and privilege, voice and voicelessness, oppression and resistance as well as axes of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and class, as these take form in concrete rhetorical situations. Moreover, we welcome essays that explore the nexus of rhetoric, politics, and ethics–the worlds of power, persuasion, and social values as they meet in the crucible of public deliberation, debate, and protest.</span> en-US <p><span>Articles accepted for publication cannot go to print without a signed agreement:</span></p><p><a href="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/michigan-state-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/09183045/RPA-Author-Publishing-Agreement.pdf">Article Publishing Agreement</a></p><p><a href="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/michigan-state-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/09183854/RPA-Book-Review-Publishing-Agreement.pdf">Book Review Publishing Agreement</a></p> journals@msu.edu (R&PA Editorial Office) journals@msupress.org (MSU Press Journals) Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:41:13 -0400 OJS 3.3.0.5 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition. Edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen. Palgrave Macmillian, 2022; pp. ix + 246. $139.99. https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8054 <p>This is a review of <em>Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition</em>. Edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen.</p> Arthur Walzer Copyright (c) 2025 Arthur Walzer https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8054 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 Review: Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting: Elizabeth Ellis Miller https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8189 Andrew Booth Copyright (c) 2025 Andrew Booth https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8189 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands by Mary E. Stuckey (review) https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8047 Kyra Bowar Copyright (c) 2025 Kyra Bowar https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8047 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment by Casey Kelly https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8273 <p>N/A on account of book review editor feedback</p> Olivia Gellar Copyright (c) 2025 Olivia Gellar https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8273 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 “Choose Your Level of Diversity”: Troubling Progressive White Parents’ Uncritical Diversity Discourses https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7957 <p>This paper critically examines how the term diversity functions in progressive white parents’ school choice discourse. I draw from interview and focus group data with white, politically progressive, socioeconomically advantaged parents of K12 school-aged children living in the Madison, WI area. I demonstrate the significance of the racialized contexts in which the polysemous term diversity circulates to suggest how diversity produces contradictory “both/and” meanings. I argue that emphasizing the privileged positioning of white rhetors illustrates how diversity operates as <em>both</em> a well-intentioned discourse that celebrates multiculturalism <em>and</em> one that conceals inequities, revealing diversity discourses that function to maintain whiteness as center. My analysis demonstrates the varying degrees to which these discourses reinforce whiteness as dominant through exploration of how parents rhetorically position diversity in relation to their school choice decisions as a threat, as a distant other, as capital, and as commonplace. In troubling these uncritical diversity discourses, this paper contributes a nuanced and complex interpretation of how polysemous diversity discourses get employed by white rhetors in racialized contexts like school choice to produce paradoxical meanings.</p> Kelly Jensen Copyright (c) 2025 Kelly Jensen https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7957 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 The Rhetoric of Americanity in the Age of Empire https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7949 <p style="font-weight: 400;">This essay contextualizes and reads Albert Jeremiah Beveridge’s “Government for Porto Rico” in order to discern the ways in which he crafts a rhetoric of Americanity in the Senate debate over the 1900 Foraker Act relating to Puerto Rico . Drawing from textual and archival sources, I argue that Beveridge (operating within a complex political and personal context) crafts a vision of Americanity that articulates social Darwinist commitments to Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy, a reinvigoration of manifest destiny, and a unique elucidation of American civil religion. Beveridge draws from familiar tropes in his earlier, and more famous, speeches to argue for a logic of possession that would see Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans owned by the United States but not part of the nation, because such integration would contaminate the body politic.</p> Darrel Wanzer-Serrano Copyright (c) 2025 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7949 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 Greta’s Thunberg’s Gestures: Shame and the Affective Reception of a Climate Icon https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7686 <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What motivates the passionate admiration for and contempt of Greta Thunberg? This essay turns to affect theory to help answer this question, contending that it is Thunberg’s <em>gestures</em>, rather than the representational content of her speeches, that innervates such intense responses. We depict these gestures, which includes Thunberg’s school strike, speeches, and her refusal to fly, as gestures of shaming. We then illustrate how Thunberg deftly negotiates the rhetorical limits established by the affective dynamics of shame. Specifically, shaming demands rhetoric that is at once preeminently social but also individualizing or particularizing, since shame entails criticizing an individual for violation of a social norm or expectation. Shaming explains both the widespread identification and contagion Thunberg produced as well as the heated contempt of detractors, which are both common responses to shame. We conclude by discussing the limits and potentiality of shame, as well as gestures more generally. We contend gestures become particularly essential for social movements in a digital media ecology and argue that more scholarship is necessary to elucidate the rhetorical consequence of different gestures.</p> Eric S Jenkins Copyright (c) 2025 Eric S Jenkins https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/7686 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400 Choose the Good and Be Stubborn https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8010 <p><em>On April 7, 1989, on the north side of Taipei, magazine editor, free speech activist, and democracy advocate Nylon Cheng ignited himself on fire, hence defying the authoritarian KMT’s attemps to arrest him. The immolation rocked Taiwan and triggered waves of revulsion against the Chiang dynasty, helping move the nation toward new levels of freedom. Thirty-plus years later, Nylon is immortalized in the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation Memorial Museum, a site that merges memory work, activism, and myth-making. Situating our analysis within the Communication sub-fields of museum studies and memory activism, and celebrating Taiwan’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, we wonder what it means for a young democracy to imagine itself as the inheritor of this tragedy? How have competing versions of Nylon’s sacrifice shaped different narratives of Taiwan’s national identity? And what happens when a regime-challenging radical becomes a national icon? While tackling these questions about the complex representational challenges of memory work, we seek to introduce Nylon to western readers, for we believe he deserves inclusion in the pantheon of global activists working for justice.</em></p> Stephen J. Hartnett, Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge Copyright (c) 2025 Stephen J. Hartnett, Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge https://ojs.msupress.org/index.php/RPA/article/view/8010 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400