Rhetoric Of Violence Research Articles

Cultural and Rhetorical Violence in Cambodia-Focused Anti-Trafficking Films

Cultural and Rhetorical Violence in Cambodia-Focused Anti-Trafficking Films

‘Rhetoric of Violence’ and Representation of the Self: A Study of Select Dalit Women’s Writings in Malayalam

‘Rhetoric of Violence’ and Representation of the Self: A Study of Select Dalit Women’s Writings in Malayalam

The Voice of Our Sister to the Frenemy among Us: Psalm 55

The violence and discord of contemporary experience find resonance in Psalm 55. Awareness of multiple voices in the psalm reveals nuances in the rhetoric of violence and discord as microaggressions and acts of more explicit violence and abuse, including murder. Psalm 55 includes the language of taunt and insolence, what we sometimes refer to in contemporary parlance as gaslighting. The language of the sword represents not only war but intimate violence and abuse. The careful reader of Psalm 55 finds multiple voices in the ancient past that prefigure and amplify multiple voices in the conflicted present.

“Catachresis at the Origin”: Names and Power in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract: Toni Morrison’s fiction is replete with characters who carry nicknames, who rename themselves, or are renamed by others. Some misnamings carry the stories of histories of marginalization and oppression—as with the “drunken yankee” responsible for the naming of Macon Dead in Song of Solomon . Morrison’s characters also rename themselves to resist the legacy of American slavery and institutionalized racism. What ties Morrison’s namings, misnamings, and renamings together is the sense that there is no path to the recovery of true names for many African American people. The consequence is not powerlessness; rather, the “catachresis at the origin” that Gayatri Spivak refers to is intuited organically by many Morrison characters, who embrace misnaming and rename themselves as a mode of claiming self-ownership. Catachresis may begin as rhetorical violence imposed from without, but in Toni Morrison’s fiction, it can end as an opportunity to assert power, autonomy, and a boundless creativity.

Islamophobia and Conversion: The Role Anti-Racism Plays in White Converts’ Experience of Islam Post 9-11

There are prominent stories in the media, as well as countless personal stories in the greater Muslim community, of white people whose response to Islamophobia, for varying reasons, has been not to reject Islam but to embrace it. The contradictory nature of this response reinforces the complexity of knowledge production and the critical subject in the post 9-11 world. The rejection of the media narratives both undermines the perceived power of Islamophobia, as well as highlighting the tendency of Islamophobic representations of Islam and Muslims to drive people towards Islam rather than away from it. Using a case series, this article seeks to explore the connection between Islamophobia as a media and societal narrative and the conversion stories of white converts post 9-11. The hypothesis of the article is that the violence of Islamophobic rhetoric is a form of knowledge production that regularly produces the opposite effect that it intends in white people, due to its tendency towards misinformation and misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims. As part of the discussion of the case series, the article seeks to illuminate connections between anti-racism and the stories of white converts to further clarify the nature of their path of conversion to Islam and the impact of Islamophobia on white converts self-understanding. The article also explores the consequence of anti-racist white converts producing pro-Islamic narratives following their rejection of Islamophobic tropes, memes, and disinformation as a form of knowledge production functioning as resistance.

Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis (review)

Reviewed by: Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis Dana Robinson Christine Luckritz Marquis Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022 Pp. 212. $65.00. Death of the Desert begins and ends with a single incident: Theophilus of Alexandria's raid on the monks of Nitria and the expulsion of the Tall Brothers in 401 c.e. In the pages between, we are guided through an exploration of multiple modes of violence: prayer and psalmody as weapons against demonic powers, memory sanctions as violent erasures toward others and toward the self, and the Roman discourse of "barbarians" and the boundaries of empire as real and rhetorical violence toward the imagined Other. All these modes coincide in Theophilus's raid and in the ways it was later remembered; in Luckritz Marquis's reading, this moment was the real end of any monastic Golden Age and the beginning of a selective rehabilitation of memory that in itself did violence to the monastic past. Luckritz Marquis frames the project by arguing that the Sayings of the Desert Fathers cannot be taken as straightforward historical witnesses for events of the late fourth and early fifth centuries and, perhaps more controversially, that fourth-century witnesses such as Palladius, Cassian, Rufinus, and Theophilus himself are more valuable despite (or because of) their political, personal, and theological entanglements. Most pointed of all is her claim that many modern scholars of this period have been so formed by colonialism that they are uncritically ready to accept fifth- and sixth-century claims that the monastic Golden Age was violently brought to an end by outsider, "barbarian" attack. Instead, she suggests, the built-in violence of Christian asceticism and Roman imperialism created the conditions under which Theophilus's violent raid served as flashpoint. The individual chapters strike out into a varied landscape of theoretical discourses while attempting to keep the overall trajectory in view—an organizational challenge, especially given current expectations that book chapters should [End Page 259] function as reasonably free-standing units. Luckritz Marquis provides summaries of the argument at the beginning and end of each chapter, which is helpful for the reader to keep track of the multiple layers of analysis as they unfold, but can also produce a repetitive feel for a reader of the whole book. But this is a complaint about how current publishing conventions push authors in unfortunate formulaic directions, not about Luckritz Marquis's argumentative coherence, which is strong throughout. Chapter One treads some familiar ground regarding the desert as a locus of ascetic imagination, but raises the stakes by casting the relationship between monk-settlers and demon-inhabitants as one of violent colonization. This violence extends to the ascetic body, as monks attempt to transform both self and desert. Despite the usual contextualization of Theophilus's raid as part of the Origenist controversy (and the book blurb highlighting this context), the immediate theological stakes of this dispute remain subordinate to the political and rhetorical. Origen's thinking itself surfaces only in this chapter's discussion of demonic bodies (although his influence through Evagrius is also clearly present). Chapter Two takes up the subject of prayer and psalmody, again through the lens of violence and materiality. Prayers are weapons against the demons, but they are also instruments of divine violence against the self. Luckritz Marquis turns to Evagrius and Cassian on pure prayer and angelic bodies, portrayed with images of fiery transformation in the later retrospective of the Sayings. The monk in states of true prayer becomes fire, with all its purifying and destructive potentialities. Thus "divinized embodiment was understood as inherently violent" (72). Chapters Three and Four turn to the relationship between ascetic training and modes of violence against human others. The mapping of internal and external violence becomes even sharper in Chapter Three, which identifies parallels between the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, the violent Christian destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria (instigated by Theophilus), and monastic memory training. Chapter Four turns to the Roman discourse of the "barbarian" Other and...

Review: Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity, edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle

Review: <i>Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity</i>, edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle

The Rhetoric of Physical Violence

Abstract This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on “The Rhetoric of Violence.” In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.

Inconvenient Horror: Violence as Rhetoric and the El Paso Shooting

Abstract This essay considers rhetorical violence and the nature of violence as rhetorical in the language and actions of Patrick Crusius, the shooter charged with attacking a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The language in the Crusius manifesto is the preface to the violence Crusius brought to El Paso resulting in the deaths of twenty-three people: United States citizens, Mexican citizens, and a German national. The essay advances a framework from which to evaluate violence as rhetorical and illuminates the intersection of the shooter's rhetoric and his act of violence.

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

“The Johnson Method”: Violence, Self-Defense, and the Revolutionary Union Movement of Detroit

Using the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) as a case study, this essay explores the physical and epistemological violence waged against Black automotive workers and the violent conditions at the point of automotive production of the era. Surveying the history of Black labor’s uses of protective defense, as well as the rhetoric of violence in Detroit’s Black community, this study elucidates the use of armed self-defense during the Black Power era. The intersection of anti-Black violence on the shop floor and in the community led a militant and radical subset of Black automotive workers to advocate for protective violence against auto manufacturing corporations, which the LRBW articulated as the “Johnson Method.” James Johnson Jr.’s July 15, 1970, violent outburst on the shop floor was presented by the LRBW as a revolutionary act of self-defense against white supremacy and anti-Black violence and as a prescribed new direction of the Long Black Freedom Struggle.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Hester Baer and Alexandra M. Stewart In her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed calls attention to the politics of citation. Arguing that citational practices often perpetuate the institutions of white heteropatriarchy, she instead cites work that is committed to naming and dismantling those institutions, especially work by feminists of color, and adopts a strict policy of citing no white men. “I think as feminists we can hope to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths,” Ahmed writes (148). By invoking scholarship that has contributed significantly to feminist and antiracist thought but has often been abandoned prematurely in favor of novel intellectual objects, Ahmed departs from “the official paths laid out by disciplines” to pursue alternative genealogies (15). Together with awareness about the politics of citation, renewed attention to the consequences of syntax, orthography, and register is crucial for disrupting normative discourses. While it may seem patently obvious to reiterate the point that language and discourse shape systems of meaning and thought, recent debates over and shifts in stylistic choices concerning the naming of gender and race underscore how the politics of language continues to be a key arena for negotiating social and cultural change. In 2019, Merriam-Webster named the English-language pronoun “they” as its word of the year, responding to a surge in searches in its online dictionary for the definition of the pronoun’s usage in the singular to refer to a nonbinary person (Harmon).1 During the same period, the Gendersternchen (gender star) was increasingly adopted as a typographic style in German: the placement of an asterisk in between the conventionally gendered forms of a noun (for example, Autor*innen, or authors) allows the writer to refer to all genders and to nonbinary people, while also highlighting the constructedness of grammatical gender and gender [End Page xi] categories more broadly.2 Last year the New York Times changed its house style to capitalize the word Black when referring to people of African origin in order to better reflect their shared culture and history, a change that reflected the embrace of this orthographic choice in journalistic and popular usage (Coleman). In the US and in Germany, the terms BIPoC and BPoC have increasingly been adopted in mainstream discourse; originating as terms of self-identification, BIPoC and BPoC reference the collective experience of racism shared by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including those previously colonized and enslaved. These brief examples demonstrate how linguistic shifts index, and help to instill, changing sociocultural norms. They also reflect the imbrication of language, embodiment, and knowledge, exemplifying how the naming of bodies shapes the way they are perceived and understood. When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 as an analytical lens for highlighting the complex and interlocking ways in which racial and gender discrimination are experienced by Black women, she created new language that enabled the articulation of critical insights about the interactions of power and identity.3 Reflecting on the significance of the term intersectionality for her own life and work, Sharon Dodua Otoo highlights the matter of language: “I am grateful to all Black feminists who continue to teach us the importance of coining words to spotlight, critique, and challenge dominance” (“Language Matters,” our emphasis). As Otoo suggests, coining words offers one strategy for combating the rhetorical violence to which Black women are disproportionately subjected. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have notably emphasized the limitations of language when it comes to activism and advocacy, arguing that the easy adoption and appropriation of decolonizing discourse neutralizes what is unsettling about decolonization and evades its actual goal of repatriating Indigenous life and land: “decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (3). Robbie Richardson likewise cautions that the land acknowledgments now offered by many institutions and invoked regularly by speakers at conferences and events may serve as feel-good gestures that do not benefit dispossessed people (“Some Observations”). These caveats pose crucial...

Braiding Borders: Performance as Care and Resistance on the US-Mexico Border

Braiding Borders, a site-specific performance in which women from both Mexico and the US braided their hair together across the US-Mexico border, challenged exclusionary geopolitical demarcations and physical and rhetorical violence against female, immigrant, and Latinx bodies. As a collective, performative mobilization of bodies, it dismantled and reinvented mobilities of belonging and body politics of dissent.

The weaponization of narratives and the rhetoric of violence in the Counterterrorism discourse against Boko Haram

The weaponization of narratives and the rhetoric of violence in the Counterterrorism discourse against Boko Haram

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

“Rapt Auditors!” Burke and the Revision of Rhetorical Violence in Wordsworth’s The Prelude

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I return to Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Burke in book 7 of the 1850 Prelude, arguing that this passage is best understood as a revisionary meditation on rhetoric. The address to Burke thus does not require that we leave behind the poetic to broach the question of the political, but instead forces us to examine rhetoric as the overdetermined crossing point of the political and the poetic. This conceptual frame becomes clear when one reads the passage immediately preceding, a skeptical account of a scene of political rhetoric; in this light, the plea for forgiveness from Burke is also legible as Wordsworth’s own forgiving of rhetoric. The essay thus proceeds in two parts: the first section takes up the 1805 “critique” of political rhetoric (with reference to Empson’s classic essay on “‘Sense’ in The Prelude”), arguing that Wordsworth in fact aims to save rhetoric from politics and thus institute a critical cut between poetry and politics; the second section addresses the 1850 “rehabilitation” of political rhetoric, arguing that Wordsworth’s pointed usage of apostrophe and epideixis functions by contrast to demonstrate the irreducible intertwining of the poetic and the political.

СЕКС І НАСИЛЬСТВО В ПОВІСТІ «КАМІННА ДУША» ГНАТА ХОТКЕВИЧА

Стаття присвячена аналізу повісті Гната Хоткевича «Камінна душа», написаної на початку ХХ століття. Незважаючи на виражений етнографічний елемент, твір доцільно розглядати в контексті актуальної модерністської проблематики, зокрема проблеми сексуальності, у тому числі й жіночої, з одного боку, й посиленої маскулінізації світу, що супроводжувалася рито-рикою насильства та жорстокості, – з іншого. Психоаналітика «Камінної душі» актуалізує нераціональний, тілесний і біологічно конкурентний бік людини, виявляючи близькість до «філософії життя» з її ідеєю чуттєвого, інстинктивного буття. Сексуальний натуралізм повісті Хоткевича виявляється не лише в змалюванні пристрастей усередині любовного трикутника, у творі знаходимо зображення випадків сексуальних девіацій – оргії, німфоманії, садизму. Загалом, атмосфера культурного й повсякденного життя на межі століть була просякнута ірраціональними хвилями агресії – страйки, демонстрації, вуличний терор, революційні заворушення, агресивна політизація суспільства тощо. Захоплення агресивною «життєвою силою», романтизація хаосу й насилля як джерел цієї сили створюють передумови для міфологізації агресії й насильства (насамперед в авангардній культурі) напередодні Першої світової війни. «Камінна душа» є надзвичайно жорстоким твором, що містить багато сцен насилля; часто насильство спрямоване проти беззахисних людей – жінок і дітей. Головні чоловічі персонажі повісті демонструють сильний садистський потяг як сексуального, так і несексуального характеру, адже садизм може сублімуватися в деспотизм, жадобу абсолютної влади над іншою істотою. У розвідці ми намагалися з’ясувати психологічні й соціальні причини такої деструктивної поведінки поза романтичною ідеалізацією. Окремим напрямом подальших досліджень може стати проблема домашнього насильства, легалізованого патріархальними нормами.

From the Editor

From the Editor John Nieto-Phillips (bio) This issue of Chiricú Journal is unique from its predecessors; it is the first that is not limited to a particular theme. Our first six issues centered, sequentially, on cinema, language, folklore, literature, spatiality, and race. For this number, however, we announced an open call for material covering any aspect of Latinx lived experience, and the response (in terms of submissions) was overwhelming. We received scores of scholarly and creative works that spoke to the exquisite complexity of Latinx lives. From these, we reviewed and selected pieces that, while not directed toward a predetermined theme, do provide a lens into Latinx conditions and identities, as expressed through music, literature, testimonio, and the visual arts. The result is a collection of scholarship and creative production that illuminates the vast and varied topography of our Latinx América. Contained in this issue are scholarly contributions by Daniel Arbino, Laura Elena Belmonte, and Shane D. Hall that, collectively, speak to the power of literature to reveal strategies of survival, resistance, and self-acceptance in the face of colonial, physical and rhetorical violence, and environmental degradation. Articles by Ande Davis and Steven Osuna suggest ways that film and music can help us imagine a future beyond the confines of neoliberal ideologies and state-sanctioned violence. Laís Lara Vanin's moving essay and Mauricio Ramírez's interview of the muralist Juana Alicia render powerful stories of migration and adaptation and political agency. In the Creative Works section, guest editor Alfredo Franco has assembled a magnificent collection of contributions by both established and emerging artists, poets, and prose writers. The stunning artwork of Maria Lau and poignant essay by Eileen Sosin Martínez provide snapshots of a contemporary Cuban landscape imbued with vibrancy and nostalgia. We also are treated to: an inventive set of five poems by Randy John Koch inspired by historical personages and epochs; the abstract digital creations of Argentine artist Rosana Fernández; a fascinating interplay (by way of a blog) between the Puerto Rican poet and scholar Margarita Pintado and the late Cuban poet and novelist Lorenzo García Vega; the spare and potent verses of Brazilian poet and editor Francisco dos Santos; an ingenious reflection, "15 Ways of Looking at a Latina," by Cuban American poet Michelle Lizet Flores; and, not least, a heartbreaking short story, "Katy Kola," by the Peruvian American writer Sara Márquez Durst. The many voices in this creative [End Page 1] section offer readers new frames for comprehending the diversity and complexity of Latinx lived experiences spanning time, distance, languages, and cultures. [End Page 2] John Nieto-Phillips John Nieto-Phillips is Associate Professor of History and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he also is Vice Provost for Diversity & Inclusion. The author of The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity, 1880s-1930s (UNM Press, 2004), he is the founding editor of Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Indiana University Press). Copyright © 2019 Trustees of Indiana University

The Rhetorics of Violence in Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi’s Violence(s)

Based on rhetorics of violence and discourses of gender supported by the theoretical works of Pierre Bourdieu, A. Ballinger, and Bertolt Brecht, this article first investigates the concept of violence through the performance of Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi’sViolence(s) (2015).In this play an examination of the new forms of violence helps us pay particular attention to violence enacted by men and women against their minoritized groups, and how, when harmed, these groups go against the grain. My purpose in this article is to demonstrate how such forms of violence appeal to the audiences’ emotions and intellect. A Brechtian reading of Violence(s)with reference to Tsunami (2013) and Fear(s) (2017), also by Baccar and Jaïbi will assist comprehension of the development of violence and the resulting frustration provoked by the Arab Spring’s ongoing political, ethnic, economic, and religious conflicts and its subsequent impact on the Arab citizen’s daily behaviours and attitudes.