This article examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.

“Bio warfare” describes a digital rhetorical tactic used by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard Leo EnosRichard Leo Enos, Emeritus Piper Professor (State of Texas) Quondam Holder of the Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Texas Christian University.

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

Despite calls to give greater attention to bodies and infrastructures, and despite the development of facial recognition software and face replacement apps, not to mention medical face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic and a long history of political faces in the news, rhetoric has not directly nor adequately dealt with the face. I offer a new materialist rhetorical theory of the face, drawing on the concepts of hyle and iwi to argue that the face is a bio-social conglomeration both human and nonhuman. I look specifically to biometric data collection and to artist Zach Blas’s algorithmically designed masks from his project, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” to illuminate how the face is rhetorical and how faces might resist facial recognition suppression. The study urges rhetoricians to think carefully and ecologically about the face.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays of prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines the long-term importance and impact of the 1982 MLA volume The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing edited by James J. Murphy. Dedication: This Rhetoric Re-View essay is dedicated to the memory of James J. Murphy, who edited The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing and, in addition to his impressive scholarship, served for many years on the editorial board of Rhetoric Review. Professor Murphy was 98 years old when he passed away shortly before Christmas 2021.

Martial arts organizations can become Foucaultian institutions that discipline and punish practitioner bodies to enact ideologies of violence. In this article, I describe how these institutions function by examining the rhetorical history of one specific martial art, Taekwondo. My analysis extends Hawhee’s examination of Ancient Greek athletics to include modern martial bodies and the associated non-Western rhetorical traditions underpinning these practices. Martial arts institutions operate in the following ways: (1) Invent traditions for rhetorical purposes, intended audiences, and desired effects; (2) produce discursive systems of control (like training manuals) to communicate institutional standards, expectations, and authorized methods of practice; (3) ascribe rhetorical/symbolic significance to body types and martial techniques; (4) and persuade global audiences through mass media and embodied performance.

This article examines how “crisis” declarations resonate within and reinforce a national imaginary that commonly configures the U.S.-Mexico border as under threat by migrants. Drawing on Karen Barad, the author approaches crisis declarations as phenomena produced via their entanglement with, and exclusion of, particular configurations of the border, a process that contributes to the ongoing sedimentation of “crisis.” The article specifically analyzes how a mix of digital practices and dominant understandings articulate a 2019 USA Today online project as being about an immigration and border “crisis” despite attempts by people involved to complicate crisis narratives.

This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.