Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics ed. by Jonathan Alexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics ed. by Jonathan Alexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch Matt Whitaker Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics. Edited by Jonathan Alexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. ix + 316 pp. Contributors, index. $32.95, paper. Protest has become an increasingly salient part of public life in the Great Plains. The resistance at Standing Rock Reservation, the Keystone XL pipeline protests, the teacher walkouts in Oklahoma—these events warrant the attention of scholars, inviting us to take seriously the use of disruptiveness as a rhetorical tactic and catalyst for social change. Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics, edited by Johnathan Alexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch, offers a timely meditation on these very issues, as it seeks to uncover the communicative possibilities of protest at a time when the most strident forms of activism are dismissed as "uncivil." In the introduction, Alexander and Jarratt establish a guiding framework for the book, writing that rhetorical unruliness "marks how speech, action, and bodies coalesce in time and space, enacting the work of politics" in ways that disrupt the flow of everyday life (13). Situating their study at the intersection of continental philosophy and queer rhetorics, the authors draw from the work of Jacques Rancier and Judith Butler, theorizing political action as an embodied rhetorical performance inherent to the order and function of democracy itself. Their approach foregrounds not only written and verbal expressions of dissent but also embodied forms like dancing, marching, singing, and even playing. In these fifteen carefully crafted chapters, readers will find plenty of philosophical wrangling about the nature of protest in a society that has become increasingly hostile toward it, and yet each chapter is grounded in a specific case study. The book, then, reads less like a theoretical treatise and more like a series of snapshots, each revealing a moment in time where activism, politics, and public assembly converge. Organized into three sections on embodiment, civility wars, and the limits and potentials of unruliness, the book surveys various sites of rhetoric-in-action, exploring instances of unrest like the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Arab Spring, and student sit-ins at Syracuse University. Authors of these chapters include notable figures from the field of rhetoric and composition such as John Trimbur, Kevin Mahoney, and Dana Cloud. Some of the book's contents deal directly with Plains-related protests. In chapter 2, "Walking with Relatives: Indigenous Bodies of Protest," Joyce Rain Anderson analyzes the resistance campaign Idle No More, a movement against infrastructural projects like the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. She discusses how the rhetorical tactics of Idle No More bring Native bodies into public consciousness, thereby making visible their precarity in the face of cultural exploitation. Similarly, in chapter 5, "SlutWalk Is Not Enough: Notes Toward a Critical Feminist Rhetoric," Jacqueline Rhodes argues that while SlutWalk, as an act of protest, offers a stinging rebuke to sexism, victim-blaming, and entrenched patriarchal culture, it ultimately fails to bring about an inclusive feminism where intersectional differences are valued and contextualized. Themes of embodiment, civility, and public space extend across the book, animating its various chapters. While most authors take up protests outside the Great Plains, readers should have no trouble extending the book's [End Page 178] insights to those occurring within. Unruly Rhetorics is not only compelling reading, but also vital in understanding how the circulation of critical perspectives depends upon rhetorical disruptiveness. Discussions like these are particularly resonant in today's times when critical perspectives are often constrained by political power and economic privatization, to the detriment of our democracy. [End Page 179] Matt Whitaker English Department University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln