American Rhetoric Research Articles

“To Furnish Specimens of Negro Eloquence”: William J. Simmons's Men of Mark as a Site of Late-Nineteenth-Century African American Rhetorical Education

This study features Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, William J. Simmons's 1887 collection of short biographies of 178 prominent African American men, as a significant, yet overlooked site of post-Reconstruction-era African American rhetorical education. Making good on his opening promise “to furnish specimens of Negro eloquence, that young men might find … handy for declamations and apt quotations”—including speeches, resolutions, narratives, editorials, epistles, poems, sermons, and petitions that serve as models of powerful rhetoric worthy of emulation—Simmons sets forth a practical, inclusive pedagogy of civic engagement based on exemplars for imitation and general guidance, rather than textbook principles, abstractions, or theories. He also provides additional texts and commentary to help readers understand the value of his subjects' rhetorical practice. Furthermore, Simmons constructs an approach to acquiring rhetorical power emphasizing activist, progressive, primarily secular discourse and constitutive race pride.

“I’m on a Stage”: Rhetorical History, Performance, and the Development of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum

This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

Cross-border terror networks: a social network analysis of the Canada–US border

American rhetoric has repeatedly painted Canada as a conduit for terrorists to enter the USA. But what actually happens at Canada's borders? This article analyses open-source, cross-sectional data on Canadians convicted of terrorism offences between 1999 and 2011. It applies social network analysis (SNA) – investigating stochastic networks by means of the structure of human groups using pairwise links among their members – to (1) identify the drivers, nature and direction of Canada–US extremist cross-border traffic; (2) generate hypotheses from a limited data set that can be subjected to further empirical scrutiny with the aim of modelling cross-border extremist networks more generally; and (3) assess the risk they pose by measuring the extent to which such networks increase or reduce marginal costs. SNA of nine cases involving 14 subjects between 1997 and 2011 finds no systematic terrorist threat directed at the USA emanating from Canada. That finding is reinforced by the simple structure of cross-border networks. Terrorist traffic actually runs both ways, exploits countervailing transaction costs in the form of markets of opportunity on either side of the border, and much of the effort is in support of terrorist activity outside of North America. Most subjects crossed the Canada–US border legally at ports of entry, suggesting that enforcement resources are better spent on flows than controls at the actual border.

The “Nasty Effect:” Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies

Uncivil discourse is a growing concern in American rhetoric, and this trend has expanded beyond traditional media to online sources, such as audience comments. Using an experiment given to a sample representative of the U.S. population, we examine the effects online incivility on perceptions toward a particular issue-namely, an emerging technology, nanotechnology. We found that exposure to uncivil blog comments can polarize risk perceptions of nanotechnology along the lines of religiosity and issue support.

Engines of Second Creation

We are in a position today to appreciate the ambiguity of technologies: that they are good, and bad, and neutral and present challenges in different ways. Reading U.S. national nanotechnology documents and histories of nanotechnology, one finds that rhetoric idealizing progress without serious consideration of negative side-effects remains unfortunately fixed within stories constructed about technology. Though we should be better aware of the potential for unintended consequences and negative social effects (and, if anything, we should expect these things), the narratives about nanotechnology today still center on unlimited power over nature, much like technological narratives of eras past. David Nye, in America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings, explains how American narratives during the 19th century focused on technology as both transformative and stabilizing. In this time, it seemed as if nature was ready and waiting to be transformed and made useful for the new Americans. While negative effects are predicted and worried about by some elements, the overwhelming voice in discussions of nanotechnology come from the funding agencies, governments, and businesses that seek to profit from it. This article gives us reason to be more skeptical about the types of rhetoric used in this field. The rhetoric used in nanotechnology mimics that of earlier rhetorics of progress. By focusing specifically on narratives of progress within the United States, this article reveals the odd correspondence of rhetoric about nanotechnology with earlier American rhetoric on other technologies.

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

ABSTRACTThis article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

This article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

Review Essay: Writing Inside and Outside the Margins

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Appreciating Mrican American Rhetoric Through the Lens of Afrocentricity

本文透过非洲中心主义这个视角来讨论美国黑人话语的丰富性。这种美国黑人话语主要体现在诺莫人(Nommo)这个首要概念上,以及该概念的对于理解非洲中心世界观极其关键的各种特质上。本文将从理论上考察非洲中心主义的修辞,并阐释非洲中心主义的理论/哲学层面以及非洲中心主义与欧洲中心主义在话语理论化方式上的差异。本文指出理解诺莫人(Nommo)这个植根于非洲哲学和本体论的核心概念对有效分析和深入理解美国黑人话语至关重要。

The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History

The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History Jeremy Black (bio) Anticipating substantial bicentennial interest in a conflict that Donald R. Hickey once claimed was America's "most obscure war," American publishers have rolled out numerous titles on all aspects of the War of 1812. In this issue we offer perspectives on the war from two of Britain's leading naval-military historians. Jeremy Black, no stranger to these pages, places the War of 1812 into the larger context of military history. And Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge: Britain against America in the Naval War of 1812 (Faber & Faber, 2012), focuses on British representations of the war. We conclude this section with senior editor Donald Yerxa's interview with Lambert, conducted in July 2012. The War of 1812, the Anglo-American conflict of 1812-1815, does not bulk large in most treatments of military history. Indeed, outside the history of North America it is generally ignored. 1812 means Borodino, 1813 Leipzig, 1814 Napoleon's abdication, 1815 Waterloo. To be less Eurocentric, we might look at the conflict between Egyptian forces and Wahhabis in Arabia, where in 1813-1814 the Wahhabis suffered serious defeats. Moreover, the War of 1812 appears indecisive, at least militarily, as far as the Western world is concerned. There were no great battles to compare with Trafalgar or Waterloo and no decisive siege comparable to Yorktown. American independence was already established, expansion to the Pacific was settled in the 1840s, and the fate of the country was fought out in the 1860s. In contrast, relatively little occurred in the 1810s. Furthermore, the war scarcely determined the fate or reputation of the British Empire. Yet the conflict was important politically and also was (and is) instructive militarily. For the first, it helped establish the relationship between the two Anglophone empires. Despite repeated attempts to invade Canada, America was not able to end the partition of British North America that had occurred in 1775-1783. Nor were the Americans strong enough at sea to support effective and sustained transoceanic power projection. American warships could inflict considerable damage, but there was not going to be an amphibious force attacking Bermuda or Jamaica, let alone Ireland. In contrast, the British could mount such attacks, but their success varied. More significantly, it proved impossible for Britain to sustain effective cooperation with Native Americans and the defeat of the latter in the Old Northwest and the Southeast transformed the balance of power east of the Mississippi, altered the strategic position of Canada, and ensured that Britain's future options were restricted, and notably so on land. Thus, at one level, the War of 1812 was part of a sequence, beginning with the arrival of Howe's expeditionary force at Staten Island in 1776, continuing with the French failures to suppress the Haitian revolution, rising to a peak with Spanish (and more briefly Portuguese) efforts to defeat the Latin American Wars of Independence, and culminating with Napoleon III's attempt to create a new Habsburg empire in Mexico, a sequence in which the powers of the Old World tried, and failed, to stop or limit the independence of those of the New. While each attempt was distinctive, both politically and militarily, there were also common elements that are instructive. Click for larger view View full resolution A detail from an 1817 print "Battle of New Orleans and death of Major General Packenham [sic] on the 8th of January 1815." Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-62]. But this approach also illustrates the problems with pattern-building. The British intention in 1812-1815 was very different from the other episodes, and not least from British policy in 1775-1783. Despite American rhetoric to the contrary, there was no attempt to end American independence, and, indeed, the British government neither wanted the war nor declared it. Moreover, Britain had a more serious opponent to fight, in the shape of France, and, faced with an unprecedented national debt, the government wanted to cut its costs, not least in order to end the wartime expedient of income tax. The conflict showed the difficulties of fighting a successful "detached" limited...

Digital griots: African American rhetoric in a multimedia age

Digital griots: African American rhetoric in a multimedia age

Public Desires, Private Desires: The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley Cavell

Public Desires, Private Desires:The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley Cavell Rachel Malkin We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form. —Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" VIII Wallace Stevens first read "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" at Mount Holyoke College in 1943 as a participant in "Pontigny en Amérique," a series of seminars held under the auspices of the French philosopher Jean Wahl. Stanley Cavell's only sustained engagement with Stevens to date commemorates these colloquia, which housed Jewish intellectuals in flight from Nazi-occupied Europe seeking refuge in America. Motifs of desire and satisfaction echo through the text of Cavell's "Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke." Meditating on what philosophy and literature might want from one another, Cavell defines the condition of being human as that of inhabiting "the maze of infinite desires in finite circumstances" (78), a phrase that also identifies the play of contingency and necessity at work in writing. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty famously argued that literature takes the part of contingency, providing exemplary private perfections, whereas philosophy, in privileging necessity, strives to establish the grounds of community. Rorty considered the attempt to reconcile the private with the public erroneous. But an examination of the relationship between Stevens and Cavell, the most innovative American inheritor of ordinary language philosophy, allows for a more nuanced disciplinary comparison than Rorty's division of labor suggests. Cavell proposes a philosophy that incorporates desire, and finds in this possibility the basis of a non-instrumental vision of community. While Stevens, too, finds something common in contingency, their communities may not be entirely the same. Critics of poetry have begun to notice affinities between Stevens and Cavell. In what follows, I hope to show the two authors have much in common: a remarkable convergence of intellectual and cultural influences, the sense of an epistemological crisis that involves, or equals, an aesthetic one, and powerful reverberations of the American liberal public discourse of Stevens' time. I will suggest, however, that their profound similarities are, in some ways, misleading. The differences between Cavell [End Page 105] and Stevens may seem at first like mere differences of stress—the pressure each puts on two halves of the same equation. But these stresses might very well turn out to be definitive. They bear on the question of where poetry and philosophy stand in relation to desire and community. The terminology of the ordinary and experiential plays an important role in contemporary critical discourse. In this discourse, an interest in the ordinary conditioned by an American rhetoric from the 1930s and 1940s and by liberal ideals, on the one hand, seems to meet with a resurgence of interest in the affective dimension of art and philosophy, on the other. I would suggest that this happens through an investment in a liberal ideal of community that sometimes converges, at other times conflicts with a vision of community derived from the aesthetic. Two questions I would like to raise here, though perhaps not fully answer, are how much of a resource for the idea of liberal community Stevens can be, and relatedly, whether what Cavell wants from the aesthetic is always compatible with the implicit political aims of his project. In recent years, Stevens critics have begun to combine a philosophically oriented, phenomenological understanding of the ordinary with the historically inflected "democratic" uses to which it has been put, often routing their arguments through a discussion of American pragmatism. Thus, the emergent criticism seems to find common ground between phenomenological and American liberal indices of value. To this end, it mobilizes ideas of the diurnal or everyday, and an emphasis on experience, alongside a focus on the common, humble, and shared. While valuable, I believe that this approach sometimes entails an invisible investment, one that might extend to existing discussions of Stevens and Cavell. In general, Stevens has been viewed mostly either as an American poet of his time or as legitimately philosophical. Where recent commentators have addressed both, the two elements seem to be brought together unproblematically. But the phenomenological and American sides of Stevens might have a more convoluted relationship than this suggests.1 American and...

Shelf Life

Shelf Life Matthew P. Brown (bio) Leave your screen for a moment, please. If you would, walk over or bike over or bus over to the university or college library you most frequent. Once there, do your best with the windowlessness and the fluorescent lighting, the aged carpeting and bad art, the—let’s face it—smell. And do enjoy the buzz of human labor, the student workers and sunny staff, this stunning and sometimes curmudgeonly reservoir of good will and deep knowledge, this collective, this workshop, this hive. Make your way to the Library of Congress catalogue system’s F 7 area within the, I hope, open stacks. (Stop checking your gadget!) Chances are—insofar as you are reading this article and this symposium—you know where the F 7 section is. If the library had an adequate budget in the mid-1970s, go straight to F 7 .B48. There it is. The first edition of The Puritan Origins of the American Self. Pull it down from the shelf. Leaf through it. I’m serious. Read no further until you’ve done that. Are you back? Great! And thank you! It was nice, wasn’t it, getting away from the screen? Anyway, you may have found, in the first edition, an errata sheet. Yale University Press issued Puritan Origins with three errors that it corrected with a tipped-in leaf found, in my library’s copy, loudly dressing the table of contents page. But good on Yale for alerting early readers of Bercovitch to these errors, which the press corrected in all later printings, including of course the second edition the symposium is now honoring.1 What were the errata? One added nineteen words to page 77, another requested quotation marks be removed from page 126, and the third goes like this: “On page 156, the word personal in line 33 should not be italicized.” In the early modern period the use of italics and capitals for emphasis was called “pointing.” I would like to use the errata sheet’s concern for pointing and the term personal as an occasion to explore certain larger meanings of Puritan Origins. I will begin by describing ways that Puritan [End Page 421] Origins valuably prophesies, as it were, paradigms of inquiry following in its wake, not least the field of book studies, which, in part, investigates the kinds of textual variants displayed on the errata sheet. Next, I summarize the monograph’s argument in terms of content, but also with an eye to method, lighting on a signal, audacious achievement, for Bercovitch, of Cotton Mather’s life writing and the ideology it seeds: that it converts rhetoric into fact. Then, I will return to the question of pointing and variants, noting how early modern writers, contemporary readers, and Bercovitch himself address the importance of typography to meaning. However we construe the denial of history that constitutes the American rhetoric of personhood in Bercovitch’s argument, I will suggest that rhetoric itself has a material history, communicated through the physicality of books. The errata sheet, variants between copies and between editions, the textual afterlife of Puritan Origins itself—all open out on to a cavil I have with Bercovitch’s grander designs and a case I make for the history of the book. The field of book studies awakens us to error, surprise, and contingency in the historical record, in contrast to a seamlessness in Bercovitch’s argument that tends to settle meaning in advance. Books live volatile, animate lives on the shelves of our cultural repositories. They tell stories in their material composition that can unsettle the stories they tell in words. Over the last forty years, Sacvan Bercovitch’s influence on the study of American letters is perhaps unparalleled—and rightly so. His posts at Columbia and Harvard; his searching monographs such as The Office of the Scarlet Letter and Rites of Assent; his editorship of the Cambridge History of American Literature, with, to name just one example, the extraordinary set of essays in volume 1—all have redefined our corner of humanities criticism and research. It is hard for them not to loom over the revisiting of his early work...

Specters of democracy: blackness and the aesthetics of politics in the antebellum U.S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION. IN THE SHADOWS OF CITIZENSHIP: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE ALTERITY OF DEMOCRACY VERSION AND SUBVERSION: THE AURALITY OF DEMOCRATIC RHETORIC 1. Frederick Douglass's Glib-tongue: African American Rhetoric and the Language of National Belonging 2. Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in Clotel 3. Rhythm Nation: African American Poetics and the Discourse of Freedom 4. . Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation IMAGINING THE NATION AND DEMOCRATIC VISUALITY 5. Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and the Aesthetics of Nationalism 6. The Spectacle of Disorder: Race, Decoration, and the Social Logic of Space 7. The Colored Museum CONCLUSION. SHADOW AND ACT REDUX WORKS CITED

Review Essay: Ethnic Rhetorics Reviewed

Reviewed are: Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing Damián Baca Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE Damián Baca and Victor Villanueva, editors Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric LuMing Mao and Morris Young, editors Writing in Multicultural Settings Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler, editors American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic Ernest Stromberg, editor

Writing Removal and Resistance: Native American Rhetoric in the Composition Classroom

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological and intellectual comfort zones. As a deeper benefit, the study of Native American rhetorical strategies renders the Western rhetorical tradition not only as a framework for inquiry but as an object of analysis and critique itself.

Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature

This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of “functional Blackness,” which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self.

Incommensurability and survivance: Native North American literature and federal law

This essay analyses the frequent portrayal of courtroom scenes by Native American writers in which Native American rhetoric is employed subversively by fictional defendants and witnesses. I argue that these portrayals challenge the assumptions and power of federal legal rhetoric, with an insistence upon the cultural difference between European American and Native American belief systems. By employing Homi Bhabha’s concept of incommensurability in dialogue with Gerald Vizenor’s concept of Native American survivance, the essay proposes that the employment of Native American rhetoric is a performance of cultural difference that challenges dominant American ideology in an act of survivance.

Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (review)

Reviewed by: Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric Sue Hum Mao, LuMing, and Morris Young, eds. 2008. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State University Press. $29.95 sc. xv + 320 pp. An edited collection of fourteen original essays, Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric is divided into two major sections. The first provides a much-needed exercise in the discovery and recovery of Asian American voices within local contexts, and the second offers a fine array of challenges to the stereotypical representations of Asian Americans within popular discourses in the mass media. The collection—a valuable resource for scholars interested in Asian American rhetoric—expands the scholarly landscape, providing bibliographies on fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship by and about Asian Americans. Utilizing a cultural-rhetorical studies framework for analysis, all essays confront institutional racism and power-knowledge dynamics that privilege certain ways of knowing and speaking while marginalizing and suppressing others. Even though Asian American rhetoric is currently defined against dominant discourses, its practitioners have aimed to engender transformative meanings and effects within the larger American narrative through situated performances and contextualized discursive strategies. This collection characterizes such strategies as a "rhetoric of becoming," a generative rhetoric that is "always situated in particularizing situations and … always generates new meanings and significations at every discursive turn possible" (323). Editors LuMing Mao and Morris Young choose the singular "rhetoric" in the book title purposefully, seeking to capture within that term, despite the risks of essentialism, a "systematic, effective use and development by Asian Americans of symbolic resources" deployed in contexts that are "regularly imbued with highly asymmetrical relations of power" (3). The tensions and conflicts resulting from hegemonic power relations are most clearly and interestingly depicted in Haivan V.Hoang's elegant analysis of the use of racial slurs, such as John McCain's use of "gook" to refer to North Vietnamese soldiers, to reinscribe Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and to ignore the historical processes of racial formation. Hoang proposes articulations of counter-memories as productive ways of responding to the racist discourses, as exemplified by Duc, a local university student belonging to the student [End Page 205] organization Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC). Seeking to promote a shared communal activism, Duc shows how the word "gook" encourages a "psychology of racism and racial violence," pointing to the hate crime murders of Vincent Chin and Thien Minh Ly. He also describes the range of responses to McCain's use of "gook," describing the internal conflicts within southern California's Little Saigon community and the VAC at a local university. Hoang argues that Duc's memorial retracing of the term "gook" represents one way of destabilizing the primacy of racism within a sign: "memory is a complex art that entails critically interpreting a sign's past and varied utterances, selectively weaving memorial compositions, and sharing cultural memories to foster social engagement" (81). Counter-memory matters in Asian American rhetoric because it provides a rich venue for participants to undermine hegemonic racial formations. Other performances of Asian American rhetoric across a variety of contexts are collected in section one, which also comprises a kind of sampler of rhetorics of race and ethnicity. Rory Ong examines three auto-documentaries, describing the challenges of avoiding essentialist portraits and the struggles in developing a transnational Asian American identity within the context of an American empire. Tomo Hattori and Stuart Ching argue against the use of the "between-worlds" trope within national, institutional, and disciplinary spaces because it alienates and excludes by freezing differences. Terese Guinsatao Monberg excavates the rhetorical legacy of Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the founder and executive director of the Filipino American National Historical Society, through an oral history methodology that prioritizes listening rather than seeing. Subhasree Chakravarty critiques North American Hindu nationalist movements that employ an aggressive, exclusivist rhetoric in their reproduction of past events and popular myths. Mira Chieko Shimabukuro recovers through archival research a "resistant ethos" in the response to Japanese mass incarceration during World War II. Robyn Tasaka explores how social location and class influence students' conceptions of themselves as Asian Americans in their autobiographical essays. Section two illustrates the multivalent tactics for confronting and transforming popular discourses, such as the myths of...

African American Rhetoric of Greeting During McKinley's 1896 Front Porch Campaign

African American speakers who participated in William McKinley's 1896 Front Porch campaign events used epideictic rhetoric to address the issues of racial equality. They praised McKinley but presented few arguments on policy matters. This rhetorical strategy helped them to advocate policies in a manner that would superficially appear to be ceremonial more than deliberative. Paradoxically, in doing so, the speakers advocated their views to ameliorate the injustices of the Jim Crow era, while adapting to the campaign's rituals.