Rhetoric & Public Affairs

“Choose Your Level of Diversity”: Troubling Progressive White Parents’ Uncritical Diversity Discourses

Kelly Jensen — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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 both a well-intentioned discourse that celebrates multiculturalism and 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.

The Rhetoric of Americanity in the Age of Empire

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Greta’s Thunberg’s Gestures: Shame and the Affective Reception of a Climate Icon

Eric S Jenkins — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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 gestures, 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.

Choose the Good and Be Stubborn

Stephen J. Hartnett, Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition. Edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen. Palgrave Macmillian, 2022; pp. ix + 246. $139.99.

Arthur Walzer — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This is a review of Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition. Edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen.

Review: Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting: Elizabeth Ellis Miller

Andrew Booth — 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)

Kyra Bowar — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment by Casey Kelly

Olivia Gellar — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

N/A on account of book review editor feedback