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Articles by Matthew deTar

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2022

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021

Rhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies th... more Rhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, US normativity? Studying non-US, non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.

This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-US normativity.

Reframing Rhetorical History, 2022

Decolonizing Rhetorical History Matthew deTar O ver the past two decades, rhetorical studies scho... more Decolonizing Rhetorical History Matthew deTar O ver the past two decades, rhetorical studies scholarship has globalized. Special journal issues have challenged the singular unity of an idea of "América," refined methods of comparative analysis for global rhetorical study, and questioned the hegemony of a global human rights regime; and individual essays on global topics have expanded in many directions beyond US cases, Western paradigms, and/or attendant hegemonic analytic constructs. 1 These projects move rhetorical studies away from a singular focus on US history and politics and toward global cases, diverse forms of rhetorical practice, and non-Greek and-Roman traditions of persuasion. Although this disciplinary shift has been critical of some of the more traditional and even recently innovative methods and concepts that structure scholarship in rhetorical studies, it is only just beginning to address large-scale questions about the status and foundations of disciplinary knowledge in a global context. In many ways, contemporary rhetorical studies scholarship is beginning to explore the questions that animated postcolonial scholarship in a number of disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s. This recalibration toward global commitments has led to increasing explorations of decolonial politics in rhetorical studies. Drawing from this disciplinary trajectory, this essay asks: How does rhetorical history change when it is attuned to the colonialism of knowledge production? As scholars in rhetorical studies explore difference, race, non-Western cases, and transnational movements, it is imperative to be critical of the form this expansion takes, since expansion-as both a metaphor and a material emblem for physical and symbolic terrainis now nearly synonymous with colonialism. An important and wellanalyzed feature of expansion is the kind of historical teleology that accompanies and makes possible this expansion. In the nineteenth-and twentieth-century United States, expansion was founded on and left in its wake a teleology of progress of the European Enlightenment that justified slavery, settler colonialism, genocide against Indigenous peoples, and whole populations figured as prehistoric relics, backward, and thus .

Negotiating Identity and Transnationalism: Middle Eastern and North African Critical Cultural Studies, 2020

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2019

Theories of "margins" understand this topic in numerous different senses. From margin as insignif... more Theories of "margins" understand this topic in numerous different senses. From margin as insignificance, to law as defining its own outside, to the periphery of states, to the temporal logic of nations, to the limits of the self, margins come in a number of physical and conceptual forms. This essay explores how different senses of "margin" overlap in Europe's relationship with Turkey during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. Focusing specifically on Brexit and a 2016 agreement between the European Union and Turkey regarding Syrian refugees, the essay maps the fluid construction of Turkey as a variety of margins.

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2016

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2015

This essay analyzes the status of public memory surrounding the 1990 exoneration and reburial of ... more This essay analyzes the status of public memory surrounding the 1990 exoneration and reburial of former Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who was executed by a military junta in 1961. During this revision of official memory of Menderes's legacy, a coordination of the concepts state, nation, and military produce the meaning of the reburial ceremony at the same time that these concepts are themselves constituted through the event of the reburial. Approaching this event of public memory as an "inscription" in Derrida's sense, this essay argues that events of public memory simultaneously produce and rely on the conditions of their own possibility.

Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 2015

Book Reviews by Matthew deTar

International Journal of Turkish Studies, 2016

The early Turkish Republic is marked by a host of reforms that sought to modernize or nationalize... more The early Turkish Republic is marked by a host of reforms that sought to modernize or nationalize the remains of an empire. These reforms are well-worn areas of scholarship in Turkish studies: establishing a new capital, implementing radical policies to reform religion, dress, and language, violently displacing or eliminating vast numbers of people, developing a nationalist education platform, among many others. In Building Modern Turkey, Zeynep Kezer resituates these familiar reforms within the physical space of the Turkish Republic, focusing on the new spatial imagination inscribed in the land, in cities, and on streets through early Republican policy. Insisting on the interdependent nature of processes of dismantling and building (both physical and symbolic) that produce the Turkish nation, Kezer demonstrates the complex local, regional, and international political concerns that influenced the organization of space in the early Republic. The overall effect is a surprising reanimation of a familiar series of radical policies from the perspective of the lived space of the nation.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2014

Books by Matthew deTar

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Stan... more ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence Global Studies, the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, the Graduate School, and the Department of Communication Studies provided essential funding for initial archival research in Turkey. The Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy at Willamette University provided funding for the final phase of archival research. Archival research does not happen without librarians, who sometimes pursue your projects like their own. I am indebted to innumerable archival librarians at the Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi and the Atatürk Kitaplığı in Istanbul and to Fabio Vicini for helping me to navigate the latter. These libraries are incredible public resources. In addition, I thank Dillon Peck at the Hatfield Library of Willamette University and Jessica Hagman at the Alden Library of Ohio University. I am grateful for the support of many generous colleagues and mentors during all stages of this project, and I am pleased to thank them here. I am greatly indebted to the support, criticisms, questions, and interest of Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Robert Hariman when I began this project. I also appreciate the time and thoughts of