COM 607: Rhetorical Methods (Fall 2022) (original) (raw)
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COM 607: Rhetorical Methods (Spring 2024)
This course introduces and interrogates the role of method in rhetoric, particularly as it relates to structures of coloniality, racism, cisheteronormativity, and ableism. What does it mean to do rhetorical criticism in times of global neoliberal capitalist empire? How do we understand the critic, and how does our understanding affect the ways we relate to text and contexts? What constitutes a text or delimits a context? How have traditional rhetorical understandings of the boundaries of text and context replicated unjust power relations? How might we use rhetorical methods to reveal, trouble, and undermine injustice rather than reinforce it? In this course we follow the trajectories set by such questions to find ways of engaging in rhetorical methods that aim at liberation.
(Participatory) Critical Rhetoric: Critiqued and Reconsidered
International Journal of Communication, 2019
1 We thank Raymie McKerrow and Art Herbig for their patience and assistance on this article. Additionally, we would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who insightfully encouraged us to engage this project with a reflexive spirit.
Rhetorical Contexts of Colonization and Decolonization
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2020
Colonization and decolonization continue to be debated both in terms of their meaning and their efficacy in Communication Studies scholarship and across related fields of inquiry. Colonization is part of ongoing processes of subjugation that are linked to other forms of oppression including labor, occupation, and resource extraction. Inquiries about processes of colonization also involve examining corresponding efforts in decolonization processes. Decolonization entails an effort to critically reflect on colonialism and its impact upon colonized people and environments, it involves processes entangled with issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and territory, and so on. Indigenous Studies scholarship helps to foreground Indigeneity as a place from which broader inquiries on colonization and decolonization may be launched. The legitimacy of colonialism and its communicative dimensions has been a concern for scholars. Within the field of Communication, it notes particular contexts of colonization inquiry that overlap across topics and various areas of the discipline. Research on colonialism and its influence spans throughout rhetorical theory and critical/cultural studies to organizational communication and global communication. This scholarship has employed expansive methodologies from applied research to theoretical work and considered a wide range of issues from domestic, international, and transnational perspectives. The study of these powerful structures in rhetoric draws on interdisciplinary fields and raises challenges to intellectual traditions of the West, which have maintained the rhetoric canon. Rhetorical scholars call for the need to examine artifacts that exist at the “margins” and “outside” the imperial centers. They have theorized methods of rhetorical analysis that attend to the colonial and decolonial elements of discourse, power, and identity.
Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric
Rhetoric Review, 2019
Those of us gathered in these pages met at a Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute with the goal of creating knowledge that would help to replace the material, visual, and written rhetorics of Indigenous peoples within the contexts of their use. 1 We grappled with our roles as rhetoricians who work with Indigenous communities to make knowledge with them and with respect to them. This, our subsequent polyvocal symposium, heeds Ellen Cushman's assertion that translingual education functions as a site for "decolonizing knowledge" that can potentially "level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always indicate imperialist legacies of thought and deed" ("Translingual" 234-35). As a collective including two contributors who are citizens of the Cherokee Nation and several teacher-scholars who are responding to exigencies of place and time from a decolonial perspective, we use Cushman's work as a model relevant but not yet applied to additional sites of rhetorical research and teaching. We imagine that others mindful of Indigeneityin addition to other marginalized identities and sites of injustice-might struggle as we have with adapting methodological approaches and ethically bringing a wider range of experiences and voices into our classes and histories based on this mindfulness. 2 This symposium responds to our commitment to take seriously the need for scholars to embrace a decolonial methodology in order to contribute to the kind of world-changing scholarship that has been encouraged and, we think, that our field should continue to strive to realize (Baca; Baca and Villanueva; Quispe-Agnoli; Romano; Jarratt "Beside"; Olson and De Los Santos). Additionally, we agree with two propositions about the value of a wide application of Indigenous/settler colonial frameworks. Like Rachel Jackson, we contend that larger cultural problems such as "white racism" function within and are best interrogated vis-à-vis "Indigenous landscapes and settler colonial contexts" ("Decolonizing" 297). We also agree with Christie Toth who asserts that attending to concerns of settler colonial logics can "inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one's work focuses primarily on Native American issues" (497, emphasis added). In short, a decolonial approach extends far beyond Indigenous rhetorical concerns. Alongside Toth, however, we are also concerned that "confining such discussions to the subfield of Indigenous rhetorics perpetuates the very ignorance and erasures on which settler
Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage
Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage, 2020
Through a fusion of narrative and analysis, Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines how theater can enact critical discourse analysis and how micro-instances of iniquitous language use have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to marginalized groups of people. Drawing from Aristophanes' rhetorical plays as a template for rhetoric in action, the author poses the stage as a rhetorical site whereby we can observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Using critical discourse analysis and Judith Butler's theories of the performative body as a methodological and analytical lens, the book explores how a handful of American plays in the latter part of the 20th century-the works of Tony Kushner, Suzan Lori-Parks, and John Cameron Mitchell, among othersuse rhetoric in order to perform and challenge marginalizing language about groups that are not offered center stage in public and political spheres. This innovative study initiates a conversation long overdue between scholars in rhetorical and performance studies; as such, it will be essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students in the areas of rhetorical studies, performance studies, theater studies, and critical discourse analysis.
Toward Social Justice Activism Critical Rhetoric Scholarship
International Journal of Communication, 2020
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.
Why "Anticolonial" International Rhetorical Studies?
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Matthew Houdek - Introduction (292-299) *** Alexis McGee and J. David Cisneros - “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Dialogue on ‘The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism’” (300-305) *** Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo - “Beyond Drive-by Race Scholarship: The Importance of Engaging Geopolitical Contexts” (306-311) *** Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Calafell - “The Imperative for Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies” (312-318) *** Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma Chávez - “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism” (319-325) *** Martin Law and Lisa M. Corrigan - “On White-Speak and Gatekeeping: Or, What Good are the Greeks?” (326-330) *** Kristiana Baez and Ersula Ore - “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe” (331-336) *** Sara Baugh-Harris and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano - “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric” (337-342) *** Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires - “Who are we working for? Re-centering Black Feminism” (343-348) *** RESPONSE: Lisa A. Flores - “Towards An Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism” (349-357). OVERVIEW: The essays in this special forum respond to Lisa A. Flores' 2016 essay, "Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism," https://bit.ly/2E2cXGa. The forum includes eight pairs of junior and senior scholars who each collaborated on an essay plus a response piece by Flores. The forum was guest curated by Houdek and invited by journal editors Greg Dickinson and the late Robert DeChaine, and it was originally delivered as a roundtable discussion at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2018
The whiteness of rhetorical studies is outrageous. Outrageous (c. 1300, "excessive, extravagant," from Old French outrageus, outrajos; "immoderate; exceeding reason or decency; violent," from Modern French outrageux) 1 for a discipline concerned with the study of "audiences, of public and presidential address, of bodies and meanings, of politics, culture, and practice," and so forth-none of which, as Lisa Flores rightfully insists in the essay that inspired this forum, can be sufficiently understood without engaging how race is figured therein. 2 Yet the silence around race is palpable. And when spoken at all in rhetorical scholarship, such "work flourishes in the spaces between, outside, and beyond the 'canon,' tokenized in readers and syllabi in that familiar pattern of one is enough." 3 Flores's observation is bolstered by Paula Chakravartty et al.'s article, "#Com-municationSoWhite," where the authors measure and diagnose the absence of black and nonwhite scholars in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions within communication studies. "This has negative professional implications both for nonwhite scholars, in terms of contract renewals, tenure, and promotion, and for the field in general, in terms of the visibility of and attention to the knowledge produced." 4 Among the journals analyzed, rhetorical studies' primary outlets are the worst for perpetuating these disparities, recalling Darrel Wanzer-Serrano's long-running insistence that #RhetoricSoWhite. This is a result of how "we are socialized to perform … practices based on perceived attributions of authority, quality, rigor, and topical fit," and which "continue to institutionalize whiteness" as and through a disciplinary common sense and white habitus of scholarly praxis. 5 Although the numbers are clear, this does not merely highlight the absence of race and black and nonwhite scholars within rhetorical studies, or simply suggest we just need to add more and stir. Rather, and to borrow from Charles W. Mills, it evidences how "whiteness has become-in effect, if not de jure-… structurally central to the very self-conception of the field," and that such dynamics shape knowledge production, curtail certain lines of inquiry, and continuously push race to the periphery. 6 This ingrained constitution constrains the rhetorical imaginary and its (white) practitioners from seeing beyond the limited horizons of the epistemic terrain upon which the field is founded, while casting all that falls off the map into the unnamed excesses of intelligibility. This disciplinary epistemology has sedimented in the very structures of academia's institutional and departmental cultures that continue to fail our black colleagues and colleagues of color, as numerous studies have shown. 7 Rhetorical studies' "possessive investment in whiteness," to use George Lipsitz's term, 8 is indeed excessive and extravagant, immoderate and violent-it is outrageous-and the time has come to confront it.