Complicit in Victimage: Imagined Marginality in Southern Communication Criticism

Abstract

Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insider-outsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.

Notes

1. The authors wish to thank the RR editor and RR reviewers Andrew King and David Timmerman for their helpful and encouraging edits that improved the final manuscript tremendously. We would also like to thank James Darsey for a Southern States Communication Association Conference panel on regionalism that brought the authors together, and Mary Stuckey for introducing them in that same room, which not only resulted in scholarship, but also friendship. Dan Grano, Melody Lehn, and Kathleen Turner were significant readers of the essay between that first meeting and final submission. Y’all are the best!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brandon Inabinet

Brandon Inabinet (Associate Professor, Furman University) researches circulation and rhetorical ethics, and has been published in Southern Communication Journal, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs. Christina Moss (Assistant Professor, University of Memphis), researches the rhetoric of southern identity, with an emphasis on memory, race, and gender. She has published in the Southern Communication Journal and recently co-edited (with Ron Jackson) a volume entitled We March Lest We Forget: Intersections of Commemoration, Civil Rights, and Social Justice. The authors are working on an edited volume on southern regionalism. They may be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]