Coverage of the Surgical Strike on Television News in India

On 29 September 2016, the Indian army conducted a surgical strike along the India–Pakistan border. The mainstream news media in India followed the event with assertive nationalistic rhetoric. What was supposed to be a covert military operation against terrorism became morphed into political rhetoric aggravated by the unwarranted jingoism of television news channels and social media. The coverage of the strike on television news is typically characterized by a confluence of militant nationalist discourses, and the ideologically imbued labelling of specific communities. Within this context, drawing from the close reading of the coverage, this article analyses how Indian television news sustains the construction of a fictive “we”, conflated with the government policies and military strategies, and speaks for a supposedly homogeneous national consensus that also consciously obscures the dissent through minority voices. The article emphasizes the relationship between communities, formal politics, and the supposedly non-political spaces and practices of news media in India.     

Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront

ABSTRACT

This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial consciousness articulated with communal belonging, common sense, and pride. On Stormfront, affect is mobilized discursively to challenge colorblindness, construct rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white supremacy, and strategically negotiate white (dis)comfort with direct discourse on race to compel affective investments in white nationalism.     

The SANU Memorandum: Intellectual Authority and the Constitution of an Exclusive Serbian “People”

Through this essay, I assert that the intellectual authority of prominent cultural intellectuals can affect a form of “cultural pedagogy” that can essentially re-educate an audience through constitutive discourses that can re-articulate that audience's identity, cultural framework, and historical references, and in so doing can normalize mass violence. Serbian intellectuals and cultural elites played a prominent role in initializing the extreme nationalist mindset that increasingly polarized Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) drafted a Memorandum, the publication of which in the Serbian newspaper Vjecernje Novosti is retrospectively the precipitating event that awakened Serbian national consciousness. This essay critiques the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences with regard to its role in constructing an exclusive and politically charged Serbian identity. Beginning with an examination of the Memorandum's central claims, this essay asserts that the dominant mythic themes that emerge in the document were part of a deliberate teleological reordering of historical events that provided the foundation for the constitutive rhetoric of Serbian intellectuals-turned-politicians. This essay allows for a deeper understanding of the effects of constitutive discourses, rooted in a mythos of victimization, on the emergent nationalism and mass violence in the former Yugoslavia.     

Figuring Radicalization: Congressional Narratives of Homeland Security and American Muslim Communities

This essay focuses on the language of domestic radicalization as it has been invoked in recent debates regarding homeland security and the specter of homegrown Islamic terrorism. The language of radicalization is not new. However, beginning in 2004 and 2005 this language began to be appropriated into legislative and law enforcement discussions of domestic terrorism and national security. Using the rhetorical figure of polyptoton as a critical frame, this essay explores how the language of radicalization has evolved and how it has come to shape available arguments and define the legitimacy of participants (and non-participants) within recent congressional hearings and legislation.     

The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism

This essay examines The Man Show as a contemporary example of blatant sexism. A growing body of feminist criticism documents the emergence of subtle forms of sexism in popular culture. Such forms may be characterized as an accommodation or hegemonic negotiation in which dominant discourses must become flexible in the face of pressure from oppressed groups. Yet blatant sexism abounds in contemporary culture. I argue that The Man Show provides viewers with rhetorical resources to imagine their viewing practices as an act of protest against an imagined dominant female authority, and that those resources potentially allow viewers to accept the sexism of the program at face value.     

The Smile of Mona Lisa: Postcolonial Desires,Nationalist Families,and the Birth of Consumer Television in India

This paper examines how the inception of consumer television in India during the late 1980s facilitated both market liberalization and a conservative politics of class, gender, and religio-cultural community. As reflected in the discourses and images in the English press, consumer television made room for novel figures of desire, changing forms of cultural citizenship, and new spaces of governance. Advertised through images of postcolonial whiteness that glamorized capital and technology, television also brought with it anxieties regarding westernization, consumption, and gender reform. These conflicting discourses produced the nationalist TV family as part of a new gender politics and as a new form of cultural governance that sought to forge tighter links between market, state, and conservative notions of community.     

The vortex of multiculturalism in South Korea: a critical discourse analysis of the characterization of “multicultural children” in three newspapers

This study investigates how multicultural children have been portrayed by the Korean media, where the term is typically used to mean a child of an underprivileged Korean man and a female marriage migrant from a less industrialized neighboring country. Adopting the theoretical lens of critical discourse analysis, I examine news articles published from 2009 to 2013 in the Hankyoreh, the Hankook Ilbo, and the Chosun Ilbo: three daily newspapers representing a full range of progressive, moderate, and conservative political perspectives within society. Analysis reveals that multicultural children have been characterized as a marginalized group, as a threat to the future Korean society, or as global human resources. Given that these discourses are manifestations of underlying ideology, I also explore how these three discourses are conjoined with three competing ideologies in Korea; namely, democracy, nationalism, and neoliberalism. This study concludes by discussing how multiculturalism serves as a discursive framework through which democratic, nationalist, and neoliberal ideas gain their effectiveness.     

“The FEMEN body can do everything”: Generating the agentic bodies of social movement through internal and external rhetorics

ABSTRACT

Recent theorizing recognizes the body’s importance in resistant performances characterizing the streets and screens of contemporary activism. In this essay, we examine how the transnational feminist organization FEMEN constructs embodied agencies through material and mediated means. Rather than focusing only on public appearances, we draw from fieldwork with FEMEN, utilizing participatory critical rhetoric to also examine the internal rhetorics shaping protest activities. Analyzing how FEMEN’s training prepares and produces individual, collective, and entangled bodies extends the communicative study of social movements by attending to corporeal molding behind the scenes. FEMEN constructs a gestural routine that enables activists to reexperience their bodies through rhetorics of powerful vulnerability, challenging gendered discourses while increasing rhetorical agency through enacted resistance and embodied solidarities.     

Contextualizing musical rhetoric: A critical reading of the pixies' “Rock Music”

Rhetorical studies of popular music have privileged formalist analysis of musical score and lyrics, suggesting a need for greater inclusion of contextual factors. By explicitly attending to the rhetorical context, critics are more likely to warrant critical judgments within social and cultural discourses, reconceptualize musical texts in intertextual terms, and actively reflect on critical performance. Such a strategy is illustrated through the critical study of the Pixies’ “Rock Music,”; a song whose meaning as an anti‐anthem can be found at a nexus of rhetorical contexts, including punk taste culture, surrealist art, musical argument, post‐punk alternative rock, and anthem rock.     

Making a Case for Restorative Rhetoric: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani & Mayor Ray Nagin's Response to Disaster

This analysis of the rhetorical styles of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin—in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—and the former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani—following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11—outlines the characteristics of what we term “restorative rhetoric.” We demonstrate how restorative rhetoric functions in situations of natural disasters and acts of terrorism, and we distinguish it from other crisis response frameworks. Through this examination, we establish the features of restorative rhetoric that reflect a clear process for managing these unique crisis situations—whereby image restoration is not the primary goal. Further, we argue that these unique types of crises prompt a unique type of rhetorical response; one that combines strategic communication—to alleviate risk and restore public safety—with a deeper, more humanistic communication—to focus on more substantive issues of crisis leadership. It is this unique response that exemplifies restorative rhetoric. Features of this form of rhetoric include: (1) initial reaction; (2) assessment of the crisis; (3) issues of blame; (4) healing and forgiveness; and (5) corrective action and rebuilding through a rhetorical vision. Finally, we conclude that both Giuliani and Nagin employ restorative rhetoric in an attempt to restore hope after tragedy.     

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.     

On the aesthetic production of atmospheres: the rhetorical workings of biopower at The CELL

Drawing upon Foucault's notion of biopower and Böhme's theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enlists their bodies in its cause. This largely material rhetoric utilizes the design aesthetics of controlled movement, simulation, interactivity, and pseudodialogue. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for rhetorical and security studies.     

The Rhetoric of War and Remembrance: An Analysis of President Bill Clinton's 1994 D-Day Discourses

This close textual analysis of President Clinton's discourses in ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, held on June 6, 1994, considers the rhetorical context and discursive strategies of the president on an international stage. It argues that Clinton employed generational comparisons to emphasize the gifts bequeathed by an older generation and the obligation to advance the goals of democracy in a new era. The four speeches analyzed provide evidence of the force of prudential reasoning in commemorative situations.     

Sitting in Silence: Managing Aural Body Rhetoric in Public Restrooms

Proposing an enhancement to the concepts of verbal and corporeal rhetorics, this article offers the concept of aural body rhetoric, arguing that nonvocal sounds produced by the body can also provide rhetorical messages, create rhetorical challenges and prompt the conscious management of bodily sounds, particularly in panopticonic spaces (panauricons) in which the body is hidden from view. Using the urinary sounds made by transsexual men in public restrooms as an example, this article examines this space as a panauricon that creates a rhetorical challenge for these men and has prompted the dissemination of various rhetorical strategies within the community of transmen in the United States.     

Defining the scientific community: A rhetorical perspective on demarcation

Long traditions of philosophical and sociological research have addressed questions of the demarcation of science, i.e., how to identify the “unique and essential” characteristics of science which are taken as ostensibly distinguishing it from other forms of human conduct. In contrast, this essay argues that demarcation is most usefully viewed as a practical matter, rhetorically negotiated by scientists (and other social actors) in particular interest‐driven rhetorical contexts. A case study of the 1989 cold fusion controversy illustrates an implicit demarcation rhetoric which grew out of the professional physics community's interest‐driven need to provide a plausible explanation for the errors committed by the Utah cold fusion team. Close analysis of the discourses in the controversy reveals the active construction of working definitions of science and suggests that those definitions ultimately circumscribed the evidential grounds on which the ontological status of cold fusion was a judicated by the scientific community.     

Practical Patriotism: Camp Fire Girls,Girl Scouts,and Americanization

Drawing primarily on discourses and events from the period surrounding World War I, this essay examines the methods deployed by Camp Fire Girls and Girls Scouts to recruit the daughters of immigrants and, upon joining, acculturate these new members to the American way of life. The argument begins by analyzing those discourses describing the so-called “new immigrant” from southern and eastern Europe as a threat to national unity. Turning to the ways in which the new immigrant problem was gendered through the rhetorical construction of a “girl problem,” this author argues that the advocates describing the girl problem leveraged the presumed cultural rift between foreign-born parents and their new-world children in order to induce the daughters of the foreign-born to perform as American. The essay closely analyzes the discourses of two groups committed to the project of Americanizing the daughters of immigrants: the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts. The article contends that these groups, the two most popular of the period, Americanized the daughter of the foreign-born by using recruitment tactics that invited her to dissociate from an old-world ethnicity, deploying legendary heroines re-figuring the girl's American belonging, and engineering patriotic regimens habituating her to American customs. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how these groups rhetorically refigured the cultural and social belonging of their members in order to assuage public concerns about national unity.     

Fueling and delinking from energy coloniality in Puerto Rico

In September 2017, Hurricane María rattled Puerto Rico and its Caribbean neighbors. To study this US colony’s post-hurricane crises, long-time histories and present experiences with what I call ‘energy coloniality’ and ‘energy privilege’ must be foregrounded. This approach allows for an understanding of this unnatural disaster as just one of countless systemic colonial and neoliberal entwined cruelties, driven by disaster capitalism. Informed by fieldwork and years of ‘e-advocacy,’ I critique four rhetorical problems that shape everyday and extraordinary emergencies in Puerto Rico. While I focus on this archipelago, hegemonic emergency discourses are widespread and linked to what I term the ‘emergency manager effect.’ This shock doctrine outcome is constituted by neoliberal and colonial governance and discourses, whereby undemocratically appointed overseers manage local places and peoples, who are perceived as anachronistic and incapable of solving problems independently. Delinking from these exploitative strategies and systems requires intervening in the entanglements of energy coloniality, energy privilege, and neoliberalism, as reckless extractivism continues to disproportionately target frontline communities.     

The Self-Governing Journal

This article offers a distinctively rhetorical perspective on civil society that critically evaluates the relevant communication networks and informal associations in terms of their ability to mediate citizen understandings of public issues and facilitate effective public advocacy and rhetorical action. Particularly important is the role of rhetorical invention. By providing the space in which citizens collaborate, deliberate on issues of public importance, and plan courses of action, civil society acts as a type of incubator for rhetorical invention. The Highlander Folk School serves as an exemplar of how associations of civil society facilitate political awareness and democratic action. The conclusion considers potential advantages of studying civil society from a rhetorical perspective, using the Highlander case and its contributions to the civil rights movement as a starting point from which to address the interrelationships among civil society, democratic action, and rhetorical invention.     

Feeling bad can be good?: audience research on Korean reality makeover shows,Get It Beauty and The Body Show

This paper investigates the feelings of individuals who have been exposed to the continuous demands for managing and beautifying the body. Through audience research on Korean reality shows about body/beauty, Get It Beauty and The Body Show, we attempt to understand how the discourses of body care work at the individual level. Our interviewees’ feelings of being stressed, burdened, and annoyed about the discourses in the shows signify their (un)conscious acknowledgment of the false promises of the self-care rhetoric. However, the discourses of willpower and the embedded voyeuristic pleasure of watching the shows make it difficult to place such feelings in the public domain. We conclude that individuals’ feelings lose their potential as resistant voices when “feeling bad” is discounted as personal, while a feeling of individual achievement is excessively celebrated.     

Rhetorical sensitivity and social interaction

Contemporary attitudes toward communication can be viewed as two‐dimensional—expressive and instrumental. The argument of this article is that the instrumental, or as we would label it, the rhetorical approach, best promises to facilitate human understanding and to effect social cohesion. Five characteristics of rhetorical sensitivity are described. These are features which, if incorporated and operationalized in discourse, can help men make the most of social interactions. The rhetorically sensitive person (a) tries to accept role‐taking as part of the human condition, (b) attempts to avoid stylized verbal behavior, (c) is characteristically willing to undergo the strain of adaptation, (d) seeks to distinguish between all information and that information acceptable for communication, and (e) tries to understand that an idea can be rendered in multi‐form ways.