Abstract This article offers a rhetorical perspective on the often-overlooked direct democracy movement that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the origins of the movement to identify themes of direct democracy that became an important part of early twentieth-century democratic discourse. It argues that the origins of the initiative and referendum movement and its early implementation provide lessons for contemporary democratic practice and contribute to ongoing debates about deliberative democracy. It concludes by highlighting the potential for direct democracy to initiate a more deliberative rhetoric and advance issues important to the American electorate.

Abstract This article provides an English translation of Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “Comique du discours et connaissance” (Comic discourse and knowledge), published in 1977. The accompanying introduction discusses Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the New Rhetoric project and the connections between her work on the comic and the theory of argumentation she developed with Chaïm Perelman. “Comique du discours et connaissance” discusses the autonomy of the comic, comic competence, the status of the universal audience, the difference between argumentation and demonstration (and why the comic can exist only in the former), arguments of reciprocity, and the comic in notions of agreements and presuppositions.

Abstract The “shock and awe” of the 2024 election has so laid bare the vacuity of the rhetoric of American liberal democracy that it has elicited a new, coarsened public rhetoric. FAAFO (F—ed around and found out) is a trope to which even the respectable discourse of the mainstream media has resorted. FAAFO is the irrepressible rhetoric in which we now speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie, as Walter Benjamin observed of surrealism. This ruin had already come under the gaze of Black millennial counterculture that originated in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era of the 1980s and 1990s when Blacks experienced that smashing of the ruins of American democracy. Although it was less to liberate themselves from the ruins of American liberal democracy than to give voice to an unapologetic rhetoric damning the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberalism, a new social rhetoric, namely, rap and hip-hop, spoke, not sang, in the most prosaic terms urban odes to the collapsed welfare state that revanchist political elites had been trying to overturn for more than two generations (e.g., the Clinton-era “end of welfare as we have known it”). At the center of this enterprise that lies in ruins is the rhetorical de/construction of the American Dream.

Abstract This article uses the fate of four signs to reflect on the power of irony-assisted recall. Between 2008 and 2019, the four signs were erected sequentially on the same spot: the eastern bank of the Tallahatchie River, two hundred miles south of Memphis, where the body of Emmett Till was recovered from the water. The first three signs were vandalized; the fourth is bulletproof. All of them demonstrate with striking clarity the power of irony as a resource of commemoration.

Abstract This article uses the competing visions of land of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to show the rhetorical operation of the human relationship with land. Telling two stories of the same land’s entanglement with diverging modes of relationship, it explains the concept of rhetorical sedimentation. Rhetorical sedimentation describes how certain rhetorics and discourses bury others, much as new dirt becomes stratified on top of old. With the aid of this geological metaphor, this article demonstrates the intersection of land relations with broader matters of cultural politics. Lee, it argues, follows the goals of settler colonialism and attempts to bury Indigenous peoples’ land relations with the Bears Ears National Monument. Through rhetorics of land relations, Lee claims the settler Utahn as “indigenous” and portrays federal ownership of public lands as a new form of colonialism. This article also argues that the coalition’s advocacy for Bears Ears serves to center its tribes’ land relations in public discourse about federal lands. Through such rhetorical work, the discursive terrain of Bears Ears and federal public lands gains new rhetorical strata. Attending to rhetorics of land relations, this article contends, affords rhetoric studies opportunities to resist complicity in colonial power.