Rhetoric, Politics & Culture

Guest Editors for Volume 1[60]_[2]

Andra Durham — 2024-10-22

We would like to thank our guest editors, who contributed to the production of Volume 1 of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.

Editors' Introduction

Bryan McCann — 2024-10-22

N/A

Cultivating Transnational Grassroots Solidarity: Tension, Tactics, and Appropriation between the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement and the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests

Shui-yin Sharon Yam — 2024-10-22

In this article, I perform what Wendy Hesford calls “intercontextual reading” to trace how the coalitional potential between the Hong Kong anti-authoritarian movement and the U.S. Black Lives Matter protests is eclipsed by appropriation, disinformation, and misalignment, fueled specifically by Beijing and apologists for authoritarian non-Western regimes, that pitch grassroots movements, activists, and potential allies against each other. I then examine the rhetorical strategies deployed by Hong Kong public intellectuals who to harness the “coalitional moments” between the two movements as they both struggle against state violence and police brutality. By doing so, I argue that as social movement discourse travels transnationally on digital spaces, we need to draw on methodologies in transnational rhetorical studies in order to fully contextualize the complex geopolitical, discursive, and political networks in which these rhetorical actions take place.

"Come into This Space and Take"

Zoe C Farquhar — 2024-10-22

This essay explores the racialized nature of publics and counterpublics alongside whiteness’s property value. Utilizing comedian Chelsea Handler’s documentary Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea as illustrative of whiteness’s property value, I argue that whiteness continues to be afforded access to otherwise protected and enclaved Black spaces for the purpose of bolstering whiteness and centering white voices. My analysis of the film and how Handler's whiteness is represented thorughout the documentary illustrates how whiteness is used as an all-inclusive pass to enter any and all spaces for the sole benefit of whiteness even under the guise of challenging racial hierarchies.

Muddying the Pioneer Past: White Settler Colonialism at Mormon Historic Sites

Ben Brandley — 2024-10-22

The Mormon Church is a religious organization that is immersed in coloniality, yet rhetorically downplays and erases its involvement in white settler colonialism. This essay explores how rhetorics of whiteness and settler colonialism operate within tours performed at two official Church Historic Sites—The Mormon Battalion Center and the Mormon Trails Center. Using settler colonialism as a theoretical framework, we offer three examples of how tours given at these sites reify settler colonial logics including object representations of family relationalities, the trading of a woven basket, and an interactive narrated map detailing U.S.-Mormon government and war policies. In all this, we argue that rhetorics of settler colonialism thrive through memories of Indigenous erasure and a strategic situating of Mormon settling as noble and morally good-willed. In so doing, this essay presents a critical case for how the Church does not just merely erase nor downplay memory, but that white Mormons materially and systematically shape memory by reconfiguring Indigeneity and reorganizing colonial pasts, a rhetorical strategy which recasts Indigenous land and Black bodies as property in order to secure white Mormonism and settler colonial development. To conclude, we offer solutions on how the Church and its members can structurally and interpersonally begin to change these rhetorics and embrace more decolonial, Indigenous-centric spaces and politics.

'Our Right to Travel’: Constructing an Internationalist Black Geography Through Rhetorics of Mobility and Containment in Paul Robeson’s 1952 Border Concert

Kate Siegfried — 2024-10-22

In 1952, Paul Robeson and the Canadian Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter workers held a concert at Peace Arch Park on the border of the United States and Canada to protest the State Department’s revoking of Robeson’s passport for his condemnation of U.S. imperialist foreign policy, racism, and colonialism. Through the use of place-based arguments as well as place-as-argument, Robeson’s concert utilized the interplay between containment, place, and mobility to trace a new black geography rooted in internationalist citizenship and the freedom of movement. Robeson’s border concert highlights how his ability to speak publicly was hindered through racialized state imposed physical blockages that fundamentally contained his ability to speak through containing his mobility. This demonstrates that mapping rhetorical containment requires an understanding of the political interplay between race and mobility to grasp how racialized mechanisms are employed to limit who can speak, where, and under what conditions, and how this ultimately comes to bear on the rhetorical resources available for arguments against racism, imperialism, and colonialism.

V. Jo Hsu and Jennifer Lin LeMesurier in Conversation

V. Jo Hsu — 2024-10-22

Hsu, V. Jo. Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics. The Ohio State UP, 2022.

LeMesurier, Jennifer Lin. Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption. The Ohio , 2023.