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Forthcoming by Belinda Walzer

“The Right Time: Human Rights, Temporality, and Rhetorical Invention” addresses notions of rheto... more “The Right Time: Human Rights, Temporality, and Rhetorical Invention” addresses notions of rhetorical temporality (the opportune time as dependent on the rhetorical situation) and material temporality (the conditions of violence as both crisis-event and lived everyday) in order to reimagine human rights claims, not through exhausted paradigms of representation and identification predicated on linear notions of violation, witness, testimony, redress, but through new materialist approaches that focus on the temporal relationship between assemblages and actants: the event, the everyday material infrastructure that both guarantees and/or violates rights, the claim and claimant, and frames of precarity, vulnerability, and recognition that define human rights norms and subjects. In other words, it examines modes of temporal invention under conditions of violence and extremity as they occur within and against material, legal, infrastructural, and discursive frameworks of recognition and normativity. As the first monograph of its kind in rhetorical studies to examine the temporal dimensions of human rights rhetoric through a new materialist lens, “The Right Time” proposes that rhetorical inventions of (un)timeliness, as they relate to existing human rights norms, mediate the parameters of precarity, vulnerability and subjectivity in human rights.

Published Essays and Chapters by Belinda Walzer

Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2020

The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and rhetorics of witne... more The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and
rhetorics of witness, visibility, recognition, and violence in human rights discourse. This essay articulates the ways in which the current pandemic is being framed rhetorically as a spectacular war, using rhetoric that obfuscates the structural violations
that leads to the virus disproportionately impacting the precarious. It argues for a
reframing of traditional paradigms of representation, recognition, and resistance
toward a notion of everyday violence that accounts for the accumulation of structural and material conditions of precarity as a human rights violation.

Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Moore, 2016

This essay provides a descriptive analysis of the discursive, disciplinary, and historical relati... more This essay provides a descriptive analysis of the discursive, disciplinary, and historical relationship of human rights and rhetoric in order to point out the complex foundational and potentially problematic role that rhetorical theory has played and continues to play in the enablement and critique of human rights discourse since the UDHR and to suggest that a rhetorical approach is ultimately necessary to parse the normativity that underlies and forms the discourse of rights.

Precarious Rhetorics, 2018

College Literature, Jun 22, 2013

Although the graphic narrative genre is increasingly being utilized to represent human rights atr... more Although the graphic narrative genre is increasingly being utilized to represent human rights atrocities in complex ways, scholarship on this topic tends to focus on the analysis of issues of historical representation. Therefore, this essay contributes to this conversation a nuanced understanding of contextual reading practices in human rights discourse by analyzing Joe Sacco's Palestine (2000 and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) through the rhetorical concept of kairos and current theories of comics narratology. If kairos draws attention to the layered historical contexts operating within Sacco's graphic narratives as they stake claims for human rights in Palestine and comics studies scholarship focuses on the spatiotemporal dynamics of the graphic narrative form, then together these critical approaches can disrupt the linear notions of time and bounded spaces involved in the denial of Palestinians' rights to property, land, and return. Such an approach draws attention to the urgency of Sacco's human rights project even while he questions its efficacy.

Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, Eds Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elizabeth Goldberg, 2014

Rendezvous Journal of Arts and Letters, 2017

Book Reviews by Belinda Walzer

Comparative Literature Studies, Jan 1, 2009

Philosophy and Rhetoric 48.1, 2015

Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights. By Arabella Lyon. University Park: Penn State... more Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights. By Arabella Lyon. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. 232 pp. Cloth $64.95.