Review Essay: Assessing Rhetorics of Social Resistance

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful suggestions and insights of book review editor Cara A. Finnegan and the careful editorial assistance of Courtney Caudle. Notes 1. Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952): 184–88. 2. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” 185. For a concise and accessible history of the study of SMR, see Robert Cox and Christina R. Foust, “Social Movement Rhetoric,” in The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 605–27. 3. Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne, eds., Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2006), 8. 4. See, for instance, Ralph R. Smith and Russel R. Windes, “The Innovational Movement: A Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 140–53. 5. On counterpublics, see Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, ed., Counterpublics and the State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Mark Porrovecchio, “Lost in the WTO Shuffle: Publics, Counterpublics, and the Individual,” Western Journal of Communication 71 (2007): 235–56; and Melanie Loehwing and Jeff Motter, “Publics, Counterpublics, and the Promise of Democracy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42 (2009): 220–41. On image-based movements, see Kevin M. DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999) and Kevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–51. 6. This definition is adapted from Brian L. Ott and Bill D. Herman, “Mixed Messages: Resistance and Reappropriation in Rave Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 67 (2003): 251. 7. Riley's argument is consistent with Morris and Browne's view that, “words are deeds, that language has force and effect in the world” (Readings 1). 8. The first or “private” stage in Riley's rhetorical trajectory resonates with James Scott's discussion of the ideological insubordination that the dominated often perform offstage—behind the scenes, or openly in the disguised form of “hidden transcripts.” See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 9. See, for instance, Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jonathan Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 2000); Charles S. Maier, “Civil Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons From the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989,” in Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Ghandi to the Present, eds. Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 260–76. 10. Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–48. 11. See Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 133; Michael Payne, ed., A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 239; and Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 59. 12. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 118. 13. Erasure of the “social” explains Foust's interest in anarchism, which is the best (perhaps even the only) example of an asocial movement. Anarchism is a movement in the sense that it is rooted in a shared philosophy (though admittedly there are various strands), but asocial inasmuch as that philosophy is opposed to any kind of state authority. 14. Shugart and Waggoner's analysis of camp's double-voiced character would have benefitted greatly from Charles Morris's work on the fourth persona, and in particular his notion of the “textual wink,” which accounts for why certain textual cues are apprehended by some audiences and not others. See Charles E. Morris III, “Contextual Twilight/Critical Liminality: J.M. Barrie's Courage at St. Andrews, 1922,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 207–27. 15. In light of the ever-expanding availability of information made possible in a digital, networked world, Jodi Dean regards publicity as “the ideology of technoculture.” See Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 4. 16. On rhetoric and affectivity, see D. Robert DeChaine, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience,” Text and Performance Quarterly 22 (2002): 79–98; Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice, “About Face/Stuttering Discipline,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 215–19; Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke At the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); and Brian L. Ott, “The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27 (2010): 39–54. See also Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 17. On resistance and spatiality, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). On rhetoric and spatiality, see Carole Blair, “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16–57; Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 271–94; Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, eds. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 1–54; Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbuck's,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 5–27; Greg Dickinson and Casey M. Maugh, “Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 259–76; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47; Elizabethada A. Wright, “Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 51–81. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrian L. OttBrian L. Ott is a teacher–scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver

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