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Abstract
In this paper, the author reconsiders the historical narrative of Rhetorical Studies as a citizenship narrative and thus argues that much rhetorical theory works to uphold the value and ideal of citizenship, while often ignoring or reframing appeals that challenge the very bases of citizenship and the nation-state. This account of Rhetoric's intellectual history reveals the very parameters for what deserves attention in disciplinary history. The author suggests that this account also reveals the necessity to break from that history, not in order that Rhetoric become more inclusive but so that Rhetoric may be something entirely different, something constituted through non-normative, non-citizen, non-Western perspectives and ways of knowing and being.
Notes
[1] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric's Future,” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (1998): 315.
[2] E.g., Olga Idriss Davis, “A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic: Validating Self and Violating the Space of Otherness,” Women's Studies in Communication 21, no. 1 (1998): 77–90; Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Pedro Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8, no. 3 (1998): 245–70; Charles E. Morris III, ed. Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007); Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59; Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee's Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57.
[3] Amy L. Brandzel, “Haunted by Citizenship: Whitenormative Citizen-Subjects and the Uses of History in Women's Studies,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 505.
[4] Kenneth Rufo and R. Jarrod Atchison, “From Circus to Fasces: The Disciplinary Politics of Citizen and Citizenship,” Review of Communication 11, no. 3 (2011): 195.
[5] “From Circus to Fasces,” 199.
[6] “From Circus to Fasces,” 203.
[7] “From Circus to Fasces,” 208.
[8] “From Circus to Fasces,” 208.
[9] Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
[10] Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States,” Current Anthropology 37, no. 5 (1996): 737–62.
[11] Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 402–11; Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
[12] “citizenship, n.” OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/33521?redirectedFrom=citizenship& (accessed June 20, 2014).
[13] “citizen, n. and adj.” OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/33513 (accessed June 20, 2014).
[14] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
[15] A reader can visit McKerrow's reference lists to see the scholars he centers in his historical reviews. Certainly, these scholars are vast and varied in their approach to rhetorical theory and in their subjects of study. Nonetheless, to take one example, even just a glance at the scholars of social movement emphasized in “Research in Rhetoric,” it is clear that scholars such as Griffin, McGee, Zarefsky, Lucas, Cathcart, Andrews, and Simons devote much of their scholarly attention to citizen-based movements in the United States.
[16] Brandzel, “Haunted by Citizenship,” 505.
[17] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric: A Glance at Our Recent Past, Present, and Potential Future,” Review of Communication 10, no. 3 (2010): 205.
[18] He also mentions the debate over “Disciplining the Feminine,” but does not give sustained attention to the arguments or the implications for rhetoric's intellectual history. See: Carol Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 4 (1994): 383–403.
[19] Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
[20] Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 145.
[21] Flores, “Creating Discursive Space,” 145.
[22] Flores, “Creating Discursive Space,” 147.
[23] Flores, “Creating Discursive Space,” 149.
[24] Flores, “Creating Discursive Space,” 151.
[25] Davis, “Black Woman,” 78.
[26] Davis, “Black Woman,” 86.
[27] Davis, “Black Woman,” 87.
[28] Davis, “Black Woman,” 79.
[29] Davis, “Black Woman,” 82.
[30] Davis, “Black Woman,” 82.
[31] Davis, “Black Woman,” 85, emphasis in original.
[32] Olga Idriss Davis, “In the Kitchen: Transforming the Academy through Safe Spaces of Resistance,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 3 (1999): 366.
[33] Davis, “In the Kitchen,” 367.
[34] Davis, “In the Kitchen,” 378.
[35] E.g., Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 220–26.
[36] E.g., Celeste Michelle Condit, “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion,” Women's Studies in Communication 20, no. 2 (1997): 91–116.
[37] Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 5.
[38] Foss and Griffin, “Invitational Rhetoric,” 5.
[39] Foss and Griffin, “Invitational Rhetoric,” 7.
[40] Foss and Griffin, “Invitational Rhetoric,” 10.
[41] Foss and Griffin, “Invitational Rhetoric,” 17, emphasis mine.
[42] Cindy L. Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere: A Feminist Critique,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 1 (1996): 21–39.
[43] Even Michaela Meyer's essay on forty years of feminist contributions only mentions Flores and Foss and Griffin. Davis has been effectively erased. Michaela D. E. Meyer, “Women Speak(ing): Forty Years of Feminist Contributions to Rhetoric and an Agenda for Feminist Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2007): 1–17.