Uses of the Past in Refugee Documentaries in Sweden and Germany

Migration not only entangles people, cultures and societies but also histories and memories of diverse groups across national and cultural boundaries. The article focuses on mediated memory cultures of migration both theoretically and empirically. The first part discusses how cultural memories of migration in cross-medial flows of remediation can entangle ‘mnemonic imaginations’ of diverse groups within societies across time, cultures and media. In response to the conceptual framework of ‘entangled media histories’ this theoretical part explores entangled media histories of migration from the angle of memory studies. The second part of the article gives selected case studies. They reveal how media have historically mediated migratory memories and how they make use of this media history in contemporary productions. The examples are two Swedish documentary films of 2011 and 2015 and two German television documentaries of 2015 and 2016. With this theoretical and empirical approach the article shows how media actively contribute to debates about contemporary migration movements by the help of time-travelling migratory memory and media history.     

Public Libraries as Rhetorical Devices: Reimagining Print,Dewey, and Memory as Invention in the Digital Age

This article frames the public library and its system of organization as rhetorical tools. By providing an historic overview of libraries and their formation, the author recognizes the severed connection between library systems and the field of rhetoric, specifically the rhetorical canon of memoria. He seeks to reconnect memoria to the public library by recognizing the place-based nature of both classical memoria and library classification systems. The implications, he contends, run deep in libraries as seemingly neutral entities shape collective memory and education. Finally, the author provides a section that focuses on how digital-age libraries could be shaped, maintained, and managed in a way that recognizes memory as a rhetorical tool that aids in knowledge formation.     

The rhetorical functions of consciousness‐raising in third wave feminism

The rhetorical practice of consciousness‐raising has changed since communication theorists first began to apply its functions and style, as a small group, face‐to‐face practice, in the early 1970s. In this essay, we argue that in feminist activism and theory, the practice of consciousness‐raising has evolved in response to shifting cultural conditions. Our examination of consciousness‐raising rhetoric produced by self‐labeled “third wave” feminists reveals how contemporary social contexts have generated different rhetorical problems and discursive responses for feminists. Specifically, we show how third wave feminist consciousness‐raising instills a critical perspective that focuses on personal and social injustices. We argue that these rhetorical responses raise consciousness in the public sphere, through mass media, popular culture, and college classrooms, fostering both public and private dialogue about gender inequities that aims at self‐persuasion.     

MAKING TELEVISION HISTORICAL

This article considers the role of cultural memory in the interpretation of a long-standing television programme by analysing the development of cultural memory on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) on Finnish television and print media from 1961 to 2005. Following a cultural historical approach to television history, the article identifies four memory discourses on the ESC: Eurovision history as a national narrative of disappointment (from the 1960s onwards); histories of decline (from the 1970s onwards); the ESC as part of a national heritage of popular culture (from the 1980s onwards); and camp readings of Eurovision history (increasingly in the 2000s). The case study illustrates how even a live television event like the ESC, although not explicitly concerned with history, produces a wealth of memory discourses. The article also shows how the ESC has been commemorated increasingly since the 1980s, anticipating the current memory boom in television culture.     

窥探欲望互联网:中国网络空间的色情文化变迁史

本文通过对色情网络公共话语实践的分析,检视了中国网络色情文化的变迁史,描摹了作为当代社会意识形态重要症候的色情文化,如何参与到中国政治、经济、文化的社会整体性变迁之中。“色情”在互联网的话语建构中,是信息自由流动、绝对自由市场的象征,是分享文化、兄弟情谊的载体,是被征用成为政治反对的话语工具、互联网新经济发展的欲望引擎,也是形塑支配性男性气质的文化力量。以高知青年男性为代表的新中间阶层既在掌握数字技术的过程中培育了群体意识与媒介表达能力,成为了网络集体行动的重要力量;也沉浸在“信息自由流动”的赛博迷思之中,试图接管文化生产与阐释权的同时摒弃了性别平等的文化政治安排。当被新经济所征用的软色情消费文化蔓延之时、“性别战争”泛起之刻、“裸贷”激发剧烈争议之际,中国社会亟需新的文化政治以促成新的社会共识。     

Who said what: Subject positions,rhetorical strategies and good faith

The first part of this paper briefly sketches out the idea of subject position by advancing two general types of subject position, showing how they differ and overlap. The second part discusses subject position as it is employed in argumentation, and specifically how it is used as a rhetorical trope to claim or disclaim legitimacy. The third part offers the concept of “good faith”; to address how future research/theory along these lines may provide useful contributions to rhetorical theory and practice.     

Bordering Populism in Immigration Activism: Outlaw–Civic Discourse in a (Counter)Public

This study involved a rhetorical ethnography and textual analyses of an anti-immigration group over a six month period. I argue the collective engaged in a deleterious form of bordering populism, in which communicators continually attack and praise the same targets. This populism was generated by outlaw–civic shifts between marginalized, outsider stances, and more official, general cultural logics. The group demonstrated a fragile, fracturing approach to a public issue, and local, vernacular practices that are employed to bridge pressures for agitative and integrative movement communication in a pluralistic, globalizing environment. Overall, each of the group's stark rhetorical shifts for and against the government, businesses, and immigrants concurrently crafted and dismantled rhetorical borders, creating an unstable (counter)public forgoing the possibility of democratic communication and community.     

Spaces of emergent memory: Detroit’s 8 Mile wall and public memories of civil rights injustice

This article introduces emergent memory, a conceptual extension to rhetorics of public memory, to describe memory’s genesis in sites built without commemorative commitments. Examining Detroit’s “8 Mile Wall,” a site built to reinforce segregated housing, this project argues the rhetorical tenets of emergent memory present in this space. As a relic of segregated history, the wall symbolically recalls the city’s controversial past, but has recently been the subject of a local mural project to redefine the wall’s purpose. Some consider this a step toward reclamation, as it visually repositions the disturbing remnant. For others, the murals simply cannot overwrite troubling memories of the city’s discriminatory history. This essay uses emergent memory to describe how the wall’s complicated mnemonic legacy simultaneously harkens to a difficult history and how the mural additions use that same legacy to convey an optimistic future for Detroit and those marked by this urban space.     

Nostalgic longings,memories of the "Good War," and cinematic representations in Saving Private Ryan

–This essay focuses attention on some of the polysemic and polyvalent dimensions of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The author argues that this film needs to be viewed as an intertextual fragment, where audiences, rhetors, and critics co-produce their interpretations of the rhetorical meaning of D-Day and the “Good War.” The essay advances the argument that critical memory studies help us understand how various representations and absences in the film allow for a number of different nostalgic and oppositional readings of the film. Because of the ambiguous nature of this cinematic representation, both supporters and detractors could claim that this was a realistic film that supported their own views on warfare.     

记忆场、传统村落与我们的责任——档案部门参与村落记忆场保护的价值与策略

传统村落拥有丰富的自然和文化资源,凝结着历史的记忆,是社会文明的直接见证者。随着城镇化进程的推进,传统村落逐步消融在时代的印迹里。为促进传统村落在新时代的焕发新生,文章借助法国历史学家皮埃尔·诺拉的记忆之场理论,指出传统村落在历史、时间、变迁中凝聚成具有象征意义的记忆场。在此基础上文章剖析了档案部门参与村落记忆场保护的意义,阐释了村落记忆场赓续乡村记忆、留住乡情乡愁、传承文化遗产的功能,并提出了档案部门就如何推动村落记忆场实现功能最大化的策略,以期使档案部门更好地承担起传承、保护、赓续传统村落的主体责任。     

Instructional Dissent as a Function of Student Conflict Styles

The purpose of this study was to examine how students’ conflict styles (i.e., integrating, avoiding, dominating, obliging, and compromising) were related to the expression of instructional dissent (i.e., expressive, rhetorical, and vengeful). Participants were 160 undergraduate students, who completed a questionnaire measuring their conflict-handling communication with an instructor and how frequently they engaged in instructional dissent throughout the semester. Results of a canonical correlation revealed that (a) when students used the integrating, dominating, and compromising conflict styles, but did not use the avoiding style, they communicated more rhetorical dissent, and (b) when students used the dominating style, but not the integrating or obliging styles, they communicated more expressive, rhetorical, and vengeful dissent.     

The bear in the back yard: Myth,ideology, and victimage ritual in soviet funerals

A longitudinal myth analysis of American news magazine reports on the USSR reveals a pattern of image‐clusters that endures from the time of Stalin's funeral to Brezhnev's, almost 30 years later. A Russophobic worldview is explored through a symbolic vocabulary in which clusters of images cohere into a few dominant, generative myths. It is argued that the resultant rhetorical vision, which chains out across three major news magazines over a 30 year period, functions as victimage ritual. Through this rhetorical form, a society that repeatedly espouses peace can cathartically be relieved of the guilt it might otherwise feel as it drifts into another Cold War. It is dramatistically purified by imagining an enemy that is coercive, irrational, visceral, cunning, animalistic, thus simplifying the complexities of culpability. What remains to be studied is how recurrent myths are perpetuated over long periods of time, and how the ideologies they fashion produce an effect on individual consciousness.     

The Political in Cultural Journalism

This article explores how nine Swedish cultural editors and managers in mainstream media institutions define cultural journalism and its political dimensions during times of increased digitization and media convergence. Swedish cultural journalism is aesthetic and political critique applied to subject areas (music, literature, etc.) and contemporary societal and ethical issues. Drawing on Zelizer we ask whether there is a common interpretive community of cultural journalists in different media regarding: (1) how they define their scope, (2) how they understand “the political” in cultural journalism and its implications for democracy, and (3) how they view media convergence and digitalization. We find that although editors/managers from different media share a basic understanding of cultural journalism as an alternative perspective to news, “the political” in cultural journalism is approached differently in the press and the public service broadcast media. Furthermore, due in part to structural conditions, they also see the effects of digitization differently, forming sub-communities on two counts. This study thus contributes new knowledge to a field previously focused almost exclusively on newspapers.     

Subscribing to Governmental Rationality: HBO and the AIDS Epidemic

Between 1987 and 2013, HBO produced or distributed over twenty HIV/AIDS programs. These films trace a cultural shift from an early focus on AIDS as a public health issue to be dealt with through individual “safe-sex” practices and ethical citizenship to a later focus on AIDS as a global pandemic where the explicit strategy becomes a reliance on non-state actors to combat AIDS. This article argues that HBO's HIV/AIDS films are embedded within a cultural approach to AIDS that relies on governmental logics and neoliberal solutions – not direct action, but directing action.     

Visualizing the Rhetorical Presidency: Barack Obama in the Situation Room

On the night of May 1, 2011, almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama announced on live television that Osama bin Laden was dead. The next day, the Situation Room photograph was released, revealing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how tense it was at the White House while the mission was underway. Building on previous scholarship about the rhetorical presidency and visual rhetoric, this essay analyzes how the photograph, combined with the context of Obama's speech the night of the raid, contributes to the increasingly visual aspect of the rhetorical presidency and creates an image of Obama as a strong commander in chief.     

Re-Imaging an Ancient,Emergent Superpower: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games,Public Memory,and National Identity

On August 8, 2008, Beijing orchestrated a grand opening ceremony for the Twenty-Ninth Olympic Games. Amid the People's Republic of China's inexorable emergence as a superpower in the world, the ceremony provided a valuable glimpse into contemporary Chinese political and social circumstances. Employing public memory as the conceptual framework to unravel this momentous spectacle, this essay argues that the Chinese government erected a new national identity, through historico-cultural invocations and reconfigurations of Chinese and global memories. Yet such rhetorical exploits also betrayed the Chinese government's intense pursuit of politico-ideological legitimacy in the globalizing world, which has increasingly been challenged by Chinese and global publics.     

Archipelagic rhetoric: remapping the Marianas and challenging militarization from “A Stirring Place”

Engaging critical rhetorical fieldwork in the Mariana Islands archipelago, this article destabilizes colonial naming projects and US federal control that dispossess island places from Indigenous peoples. On Euro-American and military maps, archipelagoes are depicted as distant, tiny, empty, or merely (is)lands for US geostrategic control. I argue for a remapping of the Marianas as expansive, oceanic sites of resistance to colonial cartographic violence and US militarization. Fieldwork in the Marianas demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies function as archipelagic rhetoric enacted through a Chamoru sense of place. I examine these fluid relational connections to place and their implications for decolonization.     

Symbolic convergence and special communication theories: Sensing and examining dis/enchantment with the theoretical robustness of critical auto ethnography

This study answers 4 research questions as it explicates the SCT's ability to explain how special communication theories come into being as the product of rhetorical visions that contain the norms, conventions, and customs for exemplar participation in a specific communication style. This study demonstrates that the concept of rhetorical vision yields insights into the creation, rise, and potential for demise of a style‐specific, special theory of communication named the critical autoethnography special theory (CAST). The study reports that the CAST itself is a symbolically created product of the critical autoethnographic rhetorical vision (CARV). The study's findings indicate that CARV's life‐cycle is congruent with those of other rhetorical visions and would predict that the CARV may well implode upon itself as it contains the seeds of its own destruction.     

Managing Masculinities: The Metrosexual Moment

In this essay, I explore the historical moment of metrosexuality in popular culture that, I argue, rather than simply a fad, constituted a logical premise vital to assuaging the “crisis” in masculinity engendered by the phenomenon of commercial masculinity. I trace the ways in which the fleeting trend of metrosexuality was articulated rhetorically in US popular culture in such a way as to rationalise commercial masculinity in targeted, explicit ways. I argue that metrosexuality served a crucial rhetorical function for the reconciliation of commercial masculinity with normative masculinity by organising homosociality in strategic ways. Accordingly, I suggest that apparently transient popular cultural trends might best be understood in terms of their location in—and strategic rhetorical function for—broader cultural discourses.     

赓续文化记忆:公共图书馆参与数字人文与口述历史的实践与启发

保存人类文化遗产是公共图书馆的社会职能,将数字人文与口述历史引入公共图书馆工作实践,在赓续城市文化记忆、创新公共图书馆服务内容等方面具有丰富的可能性。文章从数字人文角度介绍和分析中美两国公共图书馆参与数字人文与口述历史的实践案例。在此基础上,从价值分析、路径设计两方面展开论证,对广州图书馆参与文化记忆保存与传播工作展开初步设想:整合既有资源、创新资源收集渠道与方法、培养专业人才队伍、加强整理开发与推广应用。