At the Interface: The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy

This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bomb-wielding “rogue states” can function as inventions that rationalize America's claim to nuclear hegemony. Through a critical account of the “competent” gestures of the state-sanctioned nuclear operator at the interface, and the “incompetent” gestures of the state-repudiated nuclear terrorist, we argue that that the rationalization of nuclear weapons, in a psychoanalytic sense, has depended on rationalization in the Weberian sense.     

“A banquet for all the world”: democracy and consumerism in Disney’s Food Will Win the War

This essay considers Food Will Win the War, an animated short made early in World War II by Disney Studios for the United States Department of Agriculture. Through a fantastical catalogue of hyperbolic images, the film shows how the mass production of American agriculture becomes the first wave of a new American-style consumerism of plenty that will transform the social order. The analysis blends contemporary theories of affective politics to show Food Will Win the War as a threshold text, revealing the post-war economy at its formation. Using food as a symbolic field, this film ultimately links the endless expansion of consumer desire to national identity and global colonization.     

Publishers,United States foreign policy and the third world, 1960–1967

One phase of the United States government's attempts to counteract the Soviet psychological offensive in the 1960s was the forging of a partnership with U.S. publishers. Within that framework, the United States government rectified its tainted record on the international flow of information by legislating the Florence and Beirut Agreements; revised its attitude towards international copyright legislation, sorted out issues confronting the American book industry abroad, and consolidated U.S. government agencies' book activities. The aggregate activities unfolding within that banner culminated in the United States' adoption of the National Policy on International Book and Library Activities in 1967—a policy which was never fully implemented. Those 1960s initiatives constitute a framework for formulating a post-Cold War cultural relations policy. Rosemary Ntumnyuy Mokia earned a Ph.D in Library and Information Science from Indiana University. She has worked as a librarian at the University of Yaounde Library (Cameroon, West Africa) and is currently an acquisitions librarian at Grambling State University.     

The declaration of war in World War I: An instrument for socio‐political enactment

The declaration marking the transition from peace to war gives individuals new roles by redefining correct behavior during a period of hostilities. Five specific naming strategies identified in the declarations of war in World War I are investigated in this essay     

Mestre Piranga - study and conservation of Brazilian religious sculptures from the eighteenth century

Abstract

Known today only by the name of the region where he lived, Mestre Pirang-a, an eighteenth-century santeiro (saint-maker), is considered a great artist by afficionados of Brazilian sacred art. Part of the present work consisted in a survey and cataloguing of the surviving religious imagery in the region of the Piranga river valley. A considerable number of these images could be attributed to the master. Three sculptures were analyzed with regard to form, style, iconography and technique of execution (support and polychromy), using scientific methods. Their state of preservation was investigated and a proposal for conservation was drawn up.     

Visual Framing of the Early Weeks of the U.S.-Led Invasion of Iraq: Applying the Master War Narrative to Electronic and Print Images

A content analysis of 1,822 images from U.S. mainstream media—network and cable television news outlets, news Web sites, newspapers, and news magazines—revealed that the visual framing of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 shifted from conflict to human interest. During the campaign's first 5 weeks, 5 distinct scenarios—shock and awe, conquering troops, hero, victory, and control—often coalesced around iconic images and supported a “master war narrative” identified by other scholars. These visual frames reflected a government-promoted patriotic perspective seen in media content at the outset of previous U.S. wars, from the Civil War through the Gulf War.     

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.     

Have You Played the War on Terror?

The media paradigm by which we understand war is increasingly the video game. These changes are not only reflected in the real-time television war, but also an increased collusion between military and commercial uses of video games. The essay charts the border-crossing of video games between military and civilian spheres alongside attendant discourses of war. Of particular interest are the ways that war has been coded as an object of consumer play and how official productions aimed at training and recruitment have cast video games as players themselves in the War on Terror. The essay argues that this crossover has initialized a “third sphere” of militarized civic space where the citizen is supplanted by the figure of the virtual citizen-soldier.     

Richard Nixon's April 30, 1970 address on Cambodia: The “ceremony” of confrontation

This essay examines President Nixon's April 30, 1970 address announcing the American incursion into Cambodia. Examining the perceptual patterns of the speech, the authors found that Nixon's remarks led to a climax which justified the war on ritualistic rather than Cold War premises. The last third of the speech was content analyzed. The resulting term clusters were then interpreted for their symbolic significance. The authors found the President's remarks in conformity with the potlatch ceremony of the Kwakiutl Indians. The essay concludes by relating the perceptual patterns and analogical matrix of the potlatch to trends which may be developing on the international scene, and calls for the rhetorical critic to become aware of ritualistic elements in public communication.     

Character sketches: The curious propaganda careers of Mary,Jane, and Willie

This article draws on the concepts of narrative interactivity and closure to investigate three World War II-era print media characters. The analysis details how Al Parker’s Mary & Jane and Norman Rockwell’s Willie Gillis developed a perceived authenticity that invited fans to envision the propaganda drawings as having lives beyond their artistic origins. The essay concludes that the narrative arcs of these characters prefigured the imagined relationships that subsequent generations developed with televised characters.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

It is not well known that the mountings of Tibetan paintings have an iconography and a cosmogeneric relationship to the painting. Hence, a painting without its mounting is incomplete. The iconography is described and the cosmogeneric relationships are discussed, leading to the suggestion that, where possible, the original mounting should be conserved or a logical replacement made. The structure and manner of construction of mountings is shown and described in order to provide a basis for repairs. Four major style varieties are shown as an additional guide in reconstruction. A glossary of Tibetan terms is included for reference.     

The rhetoric of unconditional surrender: Locating the necessary moment for coercion

This essay reworks the classical notions of kairos and to prepon to suggest that coercion can only be defended when the degree of human urgency exceeds the opportunity for further meaningful discourse. Unconditional demands are cast as thinly veiled elements underwriting a rhetoric advocating coercion. To illustrate the theoretical claims, the proposed criteria are used to critique U. S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf War, one of the most dramatic examples of American military power widely accepted by the American public as an instance of justified coercion.     

Not Just the Hangars of World War II: American Aviation Museums and the Role of Memorial

Abstract In aviation museums throughout the United States, World War II aircraft have become crucial objects in shaping a narrative of memorial for millions of people. The museums' warehousing function allows them to be both the long‐term home of these wondrous and resonant airplanes, and the collective “hangar” of our commemorations. These museums offer reasons for serious study, since in many respects our mental images of World War II are constructed within aviation museums. This article explores the narrative of memorial through illustrations from four representative institutions, and examines one of the anomalies, the case of the Enola Gay.     

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.     

Global risk,domestic framing: coverage of the North Korean nuclear test by US,Chinese, and South Korean news agencies

Comparative framing analysis on coverage of the North Korean nuclear test in the US Associated Press, Chinese Xinhua, and South Korean Yonhap news agencies identified four major media packages. First, a common ‘threat’ frame dominated coverage by all news agencies, represented by reconfiguration of geopolitics and an emphasis on global cooperation in both perception and resolution of the nuclear test. Second, with each nation positioning itself differently in the world power system, the issue was notably domesticated in the news, with Associated Press connecting the nuclear test to the broader ‘War on Terror’ framework found frequently in US media, Xinhua promoting a negotiation principle in handling the issue, and Yonhap framing the test with a ‘Cold War’ perspective. In all three cases, national political interests exerted important impacts on the construction of frames. The compatibility of the seemingly opposite packages (globalizing vs. domesticating) signifies both intensification of worldwide social relations and reassertion of national stands. This finding lends support to the transformationalist view of globalization, which suggests that the nation state still matters in a globalized world, but is being recontextualized in a more complex world of politics and culture.     

Soviet Photography in America: An Introduction to the New York Public Library’s Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Slavic,East European,and Baltic Collection

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to the New York Public Library’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary Soviet and East European photography holdings. It outlines the materials available to researchers from both the large and smaller collections, particularly those that are useful for studies of Revolutionary Russia and the History or World War II in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of particular note is the NYPL’s wealth of images documenting Poland during the Second World War and the Bessie Beatty album The Russian Revolution: An Album of Photographs.     

Disciplining the Virtual Home Front: Mainstream News and the Web During the War in Iraq

Considered by many to be the first war of the Information Age, the 2003 War in Iraq provided a unique opportunity for observing how the American mainstream press defined the Web's journalistic value and how it reacted to the competition from alternative online news sources. In an attempt to exert control over the Web as a journalistic space, the mainstream press used rhetorics of “professionalism” to discipline online news seekers into conforming to the definition of “news” favored by the mainstream press. This essay analyzes these tactics and their implications for the Web's journalistic potential, and concludes with a call for a more collaborative online journalism that maintains journalistic credibility while also incorporating a wider variety of perspectives.     

Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War: George W. Bush on Iraq and the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Japan

This essay explores the relationship between epideictic discourse and war through the analysis of George W. Bush's August 20, 2005, address at the Naval Air Station near San Diego, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. The case also serves as an exemplar for how Bush routinely interwove epideictic appeals with collective memories of World War II in order to promote the Iraq war and deflect criticism of his policies there. Bush praised the greatest generation and linked it to the current generation; blamed and dehumanized enemies of the past and present; advocated for war based on “lessons” from the past; and reinforced a shared identity to instill both obligation and confidence.     

Presidential rhetoric's visual turn: Performance fragments and the politics of illusionism

This essay explores the aesthetic and rhetorical implications of prudent and imprudent presidential performance fragments embodied in photo‐opportunities, thereby addressing presidential rhetoric's “visual turn. “Assembled as a critical rhetoric text, this essay posits that presidential performance fragments privilege the dominant ideology and its power relationships. In addition, this project argues that prudent presidential performances signal a chief executive's consubstantiality with the mythic presidency, centralized authority, and active political leadership. Imprudent photo‐opportunity performances, by contrast, impact negatively a president's image, agenda, credibility, and authority. The essay concludes with a discussion of how political images symbolically affect the citizenry and democratic processes, and advances foundational issues for the critic.     

Metaphor and the rhetorical invention of cold war “idealists”

This paper presents a five‐step procedure for identifying metaphorical concepts guiding the rhetorical invention of three Cold War idealists”;: Henry Wallace, J. William Fulbright, and Helen Caldicott. The source of their collective failure to dispel threatening images of Soviet savagery is located in a recurrent system of metaphorical concepts (including MADNESS, PATHOLOGY, SICKNESS, AND FORCE) that promotes a reversal of the enemy‐image rather than its transcendence. By decivilizing America's image, “idealists”; turn the victimage ritual inward upon a self‐righteous nation and provoke “realists”; to regress further into decivilizing images of the Soviet Union.