Critical Rhetoric

Through the strategic absence of discourse about race within the portrayed interracial relationships, the writers, creators, and producers of the modern TV medical drama Grey’s Anatomy strategically portray a racially progressive, postracial, and color-blind society. By utilizing Scott’s (1993) absence as presence, the creators, writers, and producers situate the characters as race neutral or White and enable the dismissal and forgetting of racism’s long history and its impact on the current structures that produce and reproduce racial inequality. By doing so, they obviate contemporary racism’s presence and its influence at both the societal and individual levels, thus contributing to postracism (Ono, 2011).

البلاغة النقدية  توجه مهم من توجهات البلاغية المعاصرة في أمريكيا، تنقل مركز الاهتمام من إنشاء الخطاب إلى نقده؛ حيث إن مهمتها تكمن في الانخراط في نقد مستمر ثابت للخطاب. هذا النقد يُمارَس بشكل أساسي على الخطابات العامة، مثل المقالات الصحفية والبرامج الإذاعية والتليفزيونية..إلخ. ويرى ريمي مكرو (المؤسس الأبرز للبلاغة النقدية) أنها - وإن لم تكن في حد ذاتها نصوصا راقية - تمارس تأثيرا كبيرا، خاصة في تشكيل الثقافات الشعبية. ويتخذ مشروع البلاغة النقدية من هذه الخطابات العامة مادة لتحليله، خاصة تلك التي تسهم في إنجاز القهر والقمع. والبحث المنشور في مجلة نزوى عام 2010 يقدم مراجعة نقدية لمشروع البلاغة النقدية، وإمكانيات الإفادة منه في البلاغة العربية.

يعالج البحث التضفير المعقّد بين السرديات الصغرى (سرديات الحياة اليومية) والسرديات الكبرى (خاصة السرديات الوطنية والتاريخية)، وارتباط ذلك بإنتاج تمثيلات متنوعة للواقع والتاريخ. ويحاول أن يجيب عن سؤالين بحثيين رئيسين هما:
1. ما أشكال العلاقة بين السرديات الكبرى والصغرى في المتن الروائي المدروس؟
2. ما أثر التقنيات البلاغية والسردية في المعالجة الروائية للسرديات الكبرى، وبخاصة سرديات الحروب؟
يوظف البحث عُدّة منهجية متنوعة للإجابة عن هذين السؤالين، تُستمدُ بالأساس من حقول التحليل البلاغي والسرديات وتحليل الخطاب. ويدرس تحديدًا أربعة أنواع من تمثيل السرديات الكبرى، هي:
1) تمثيلات الحرب الأهلية: بلاغة الكذب في رواية "مدائن الالتهاب".
2) تمثيلات الهزائم الوطنية: جدلية التاريخ والأسطورة في رواية "رجل من زمن منعكس".
3) تمثيلات الاحتلال العسكري: الذاكرة بوصفها مقاومةً في رواية "دوامة الرحيل".
4) تمثيلات التمييز: عقدة اللون وسرديات ما بعد العبودية في رواية "جارية".

Memetics, the emerging and contested ''science'' of the meme, has much to offer critical communication studies. The meme, a replicator that functions as the basic unit of cultural change, is a valuable practical tool for rhetorical critics, and it is particularly useful for critical/cultural analysts interested in the seemingly superficial and trivial elements of popular culture. In addition to its functional utility, memetics issues a productive theoretical challenge to that trajectory of communication scholarship that seeks to further the materialist rhetorical project by developing and deploying the ideograph, the only significant methodological tool developed for the purposes of materialist criticism. Through a contrast between the ''geographical'' meme and the ''historical'' ideograph, I explore the utility of the meme as a productive concept for the analysis of contemporary culture. Memetics, the emerging and contested ''science'' of the meme, has much to offer critical communication studies. The meme, a replicator that functions as the basic unit of cultural change, is a valuable practical tool for rhetorical critics, and it is particularly useful for critical/cultural analysts interested in the seemingly superficial and trivial elements of popular culture. In addition to its functional utility, memetics issues a productive theoretical challenge to that trajectory of communication scholarship that seeks to further the materialist rhetorical project by developing

Contributing to extant discourses about corporate environmental
advocacy, this paper argues that corporations can embed discursive
rhetorical strategies in material places and spaces. This argument
contributes to environmental communication by bridging divisions
between discursive and materialist approaches to corporate rhetoric.
Corporate materiality is realized in the study of Rio Tinto Kennecott
(RTK) at places of corporate community where RTK enunciates a
dominant environmental discourse about the necessity of the Bingham
Canyon Mine through strategies such as the technological shell game,
the hypocrite’s trap, and corporate heterotopia, which are made
manifest materially alongside cultural values such as epistemic trust,
technological progress, community, and home. Using participatory
critical rhetoric as a methodology, I analyse RTK’s material rhetoric at the
Natural History Museum of Utah, the Rio Tinto Soccer Stadium, and the
Daybreak suburban community. This case study reveals that
corporations are assemblages that assert many different, and sometimes
competing, arguments that can deflect environmental criticism, materially.

Queer Africans in diaspora often reclaim histories obscured by colonialism. Implicit in gay Nigerian activist Bisi Alimi's influential archival work is an anti-colonial, but strategically essentialist, claim of a historical place for queer African peoples. I submit "historical place" and "(dis)placing" to understand queer disidentifications with historical construction. The risks of strategic essentialism can become epistemological opportunities for identity building. My analysis first traces how strategic essentialism persuasively constructs historical place and then explores how (dis)placing unsettles epistemological constructions of queer African identity. Advocating for a recognition of multiplicity, I encourage scholars to understand (dis)placing as complex vernacular discursive strategy that produces further possibilities for belonging and anti-colonial imagination.

Critical rhetoricians are increasingly adopting in situ rhetorical methods such as participant observation at protests, consumer sites, and memorials. Despite their value, the ad hoc development of central methodological and analytic commitments of such approaches is cause for concern. In this essay, we synthesize these efforts to name a methodological approach—rhetorical field methods—for analyzing everyday rhetorical experience and articulate the commitments and concerns that motivate this approach, thus creating a focus for debate about in situ rhetorical study. We elaborate on three commitments, articulate some critical problematics, and identify heuristic questions and possibilities of this approach. We conclude by discussing rhetorical field methods' contributions to intradisciplinary communication research.

Although critical rhetoric scholarship foregrounds voices of oppressed communities and challenges systemic power imbalances, its doxastic and performative potential to affect social justice has lagged behind its conceptual (and, more recently, methodological and empirical) development. One reason is because that scholarship has privileged rhetoricians performing criticism as the end goal rather than using their criticism to conduct activism scholarship by engaging in and studying critically social justice interventions. This essay articulates a social justice activism approach to critical rhetoric scholarship that involves rhetoricians intervening collaboratively with oppressed communities and activist groups to make unjust discourses more just, and studying and reporting those endeavors.

This essay argues for the need to rethink dialectics as part of our understanding of power relations, and as a fundamental component of critical/cultural approaches in Communication Studies. As a first step in this project, I will critique the main contributions by Michel Foucault, highlighting his influential theorization of discourse, knowledge and power as intrinsically related constructs, as well as how this perspective has enabled the revisiting of other keywords in critical theory—such as Gramsci's “hegemony.” I will then (re)introduce the notion of dialectics as theorized in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. My goal is to emphasize underestimated aspects of these authors' contributions that, in my opinion, may help us construct alternative starting points for a critical/cultural project in communication scholarship and, more specifically, for a theory of power that can create the space needed to account for people's (in)capability to overcome adverse social conditions.

This is a chapter in the edited book, Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking: Blogs, Timelines, Feeds, and Community, which explores and critically analyzes the motivations and uses of social media by women of color. This edited collection seeks to determine how, and why, women of color make strategic use of social media as a social, professional, personal, and political tool for navigating the world. The contributors in this edited book uniquely address the motivations and pathways for establishing virtual communities by, and for, women of color. Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking contributes to dialogues concerning gender, race, class, sexuality, politics, and uses of social media.

This essay charts a critical intersectional rhetoric as a means for understanding the articulation of a Civil Rights Movement (CRM) analogy in marriage equality campaigns. Analyzing the campaign against Proposition 8, California’s version of the Defense of Marriage Act, I argue that the use of such analogizing elides difference, prevents meaningful and complex conversations about power and oppression, and makes visible the material intersectional tensions between and among communities of color and gay and lesbian communities and how these discourses further marginalize those that identify as queer people of color. Through criticism of campaign commercials, movement strategy, and the protest rhetoric after the proposition passed, I argue that CRM analogy discourse historicizes racism, privileges white gay identities, and exacerbates divisions that prevent coalition building.

Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.

In the fall of 1995, graduate student employees at Yale University withheld grades in the courses they taught to win recognition for their union. This essay offers a critical rhetori- cal analysis of the Yale Grade Strike. This essay argues that the labor identity constructed at Yale is predicated on the historical-material circumstances of graduate labor in the modern corporate university. The essay argues that critical rhetoric must focus on such material realities as the basis for developing an ongoing critique with the potential to work for social change.

How we interact with others is a vital part of the rhetorical practices of the sort of democracy the pragmatists hoped to create. This article examines growing evidence of the threat posed by partisanship to our attempts to critically analyze the claims of others, represented by “partisan perfect reasoning”—the habit of analyzing the claims of others in a fashion that preserves the presupposed reasonableness of our original positions. One path for dealing with the risk of such truncated habits of reasoning is the path of skepticism, represented by the “ironism” of Richard Rorty. This article constructs another possible path, the path of affirming all claims as a starting point for respectful dialogue and argument. Using the concepts of anekāntavāda and syādvāda from the Jaina tradition, this article argues that we can mitigate partisan perfect reasoning and foster respect for our conversational others through a novel orientation to rhetorical activity.

This article suggests that communication scholars take the reparatory turn in critical public memory studies. Using a case study based on the reparatory efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), we critique the affective materialization taking place at Montgomery's National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) in Montgomery, Alabama. We argue that the NMPJ invites visitors to experience both the magnitude of historical lynchings as well as the affective afterlife of racial terrorist pasts that are linked to those historical lynchings. Consistent with the EJI's goals, the NMPJ's reparatory rhetorics are aimed at revising lynching histories in race-conscious ways so that visitors from some of America's 800 counties might acknowledge, apologize, or even consider paying reparations for past lynchings as well as present carceral injustices.

Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.

Rhetorical analyses of foreign policy tend to focus on the president as chief executive and commander in chief. Yet the U.S. Constitution structures a struggle for power between the president and Congress. In this study of a 1994 federal debate, three discourse trajectories are assembled to show how President Clinton's actions in Haiti unsettled traditions of advocacy, opened questions of obligation within collective memory, and launched presidential supporters and opponents to create and debate public memories of war and race. Thus we offer a shared powers inquiry, as a complement to the rhetorical presidency, in the interpretation and critique of foreign policy discourse.

This chapter analyzes the Minuteman Project's (MMP) website and discovers that the MMP recovers mythic fragments and historical linkages to the revolutionary American minutemen. The MMP was founded in 2005 by James Gilchrist and Chris Simcox. The project argues that the government is responsible for the nation's safety and therefore should be responsive to the needs of those who experience the immigration problem near the border. Indeed, MMP members modified their vigilante-style militarism and nativism into a patriotic mission to save the American body politic from invasion by “invisible” Mexican immigrants who enter the United States by crossing the southern U.S. border. By doing so, the MMP's rhetoric transforms undocumented immigrants into would-be colonizers and oppressors, while denying and remaking histories of colonization in the Southwest United States.

This analysis refocuses attention to the relationship between
neoliberal government practice and co-conditioning rhetorical
consequence through examination of Electronic Benefits Transfer(EBT). Operating by a plastic card similar to consumer debit cards, EBT opens new possibilities of consumption for those receiving Food Stamps. Rather than simply signaling a disciplining governmentality, electronic food assistance functions as a technology of neoliberalization, proffering the potentiality of social equity while (re)instantiating class boundaries. I appropriate the finance term securitization to specify the disposal of liberalist logics that transform the poor from economic risk to state asset while also leaving the conditions of poverty and food insecurity unchallenged.