Editor’s Message

I’m writing this note on 18 June 2020, for publication in fall. Such is the pace of academic publishing, although this turnaround is quicker than our authors usually experience, since it can take up to a year to go from first submission to revision to more revision to publication.

Right now, we are in the midst of an anti-racist movement that presses white people (academics and nonacademics alike) to do more than performative allyship in the face of anti-Black violence. Such allyship is often found in statements issued by universities, programs, boards of directors, companies, and so on. The virtue signaling is thick now. But active allyship requires action—specific, embodied action—that works against the ongoing presence and legacy of anti-Black violence. We also find ourselves at either the peak of the first wave or in the beginning of the second wave of COVID-19, with over 8,000,000 cases worldwide, 2,000,000 of which are in the United States. People are dying, and there are no vaccines or effective treatments in clear sight. The virus disproportionately affects people of color (Johns Hopkins Medicine).

And so, in addition to the 2 June statement from the Rhetoric Society of America board of directors, I’d like to think with Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ) readers about how this journal can more actively “[center] Black voices in our ongoing efforts to address racial justice in our organization, our professional networks, our communities, and beyond” (Rhetoric Society of America). Some initial actions:

1. I will continue to work to diversify our editorial board.

2. I will actively solicit manuscripts that engage critical race studies and seek out Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) authors at conferences (online and in person).

3. I will continue to actively push authors to account for race in their manuscripts, trying to ensure that race is not siloed as a topic for race studies only.

4. I will actively forward work from BIPOC voices and that speaks against anti-Black violence and systemic racism—physical, psychological, linguistic, and rhetorical.

5. I recognize that such work needs to be reviewed by scholars inside and outside rhetorical studies. I realize that RSQ needs to expand its pool of reviewers radically, and so will work actively to network, research, and populate the database with reviewers with content expertise and a commitment to developmental (not just summative) commentary and review. If you are such a scholar and have not reviewed for RSQ, please let us know at [email protected] and I’ll add you (thanks in advance).

6. RSQ will focus book reviews more specifically on recent work by BIPOC scholars. As of this writing, we do not yet have reviewers for work such as April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Lisa Corrigan’s Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties, or Aja Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. There are more! If you’re interested in reviewing these books or others, please e-mail our book review editor, Damien Pfister, at [email protected].

I invite suggestions for more actions—e-mail me at [email protected].

I will work harder. I’ll mess up. And then I’ll work harder. My thanks for your patience. #blacklivesmatter

***Announcement: Kneupper Award, 2020

The Charles Kneupper Award is given annually to recognize the essay published in the previous year’s volume of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ) that the editorial board and the editor consider the most significant contribution to scholarship in rhetoric. The award is named in honor of Charles Kneupper (1949–1989) to honor his many contributions to the scholarly mission of the Rhetoric Society of America. The members of the 2020 Kneupper Award committee were: Barbara Biesecker, Joshua Gunn, and Jim Jasinski (chair). They reported that there were multiple outstanding essays published in RSQ during 2019 that made significant contributions to the study of rhetoric. But one essay rose to the top during their deliberations. RSQ is pleased to present the Kneupper Award for the best essay in the 2019 volume of the journal to:

Joe Edward Hatfield for “The Queer Kairotic: Digital Transgender Suicide Memories and Ecological Rhetorical Agency,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 49, pp. 25–48.

The award committee observed that Hatfield’s essay elaborated how the emergent queer suicide letter genre can be read as an opportunity to coalesce queer communities beyond death. The award committee noted that Hatfield creatively advanced a concept that fruitfully combined ancient and contemporary thought in ways that should pique scholarly interests in the field, from queer theory and social movement work to digital rhetorics and genre studies. Finally, the committee concluded that the essay enacted a sophisticated way of queering rhetorical studies and that the author’s deft rhetorical sensibility made itself felt throughout the essay, but perhaps never as economically as when they wrote, “within the parenthetical lies an unrealized future.”

Congratulations!