https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5818-7942
ABSTRACT
In this forum, several rhetorical scholars revisit Steve Schwarze’s 2006 essay, “Environmental Melodrama,” and the scholarly conversations his work inspired. The five essays featured in this forum not only remember Schwarze as a supremely gifted, insightful, and kind rhetorician, environmentalist, activist, teacher, colleague and friend; as he would have wished, they engage anew with his recuperation and regeneration of the concept of melodrama in a variety of settings: activist movements, resistance, controversies, ethnographic encounters, public speeches, and political campaigns. In doing so they not only re-establish the crucial importance of melodrama as a rhetorical form, genre, mode, or tactic, they underscore the enduring legacy of Schwarze’s work itself.
On November 30, 2023, the 28th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) was convened in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The gathering, held in a different city each year to demonstrate the importance of multinational collaboration, was the latest to assemble leaders from around the globe to assess progress in combatting climate change and negotiate agreements for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. From the start, the COP28 meeting was embroiled in controversy following remarks by Sultan Al Jaber, an Emirati oil executive leading the conference, that questioned whether fossil fuel phase outs were necessary to meet climate targets. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,”Footnote1 Al Jaber claimed during a panel discussion two weeks before the start of the COP meeting. The remarks, which seemed to fly in the face of years of climate negotiations and strategy, were immediately met with condemnation by global climate leaders. For instance, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore claimed that Al Jaber’s remarks evince “the most brazen conflict of interest in the history of climate negotiations” that have been in preparation for “one of the most aggressive expansions of fossil fuel production, timed to begin as soon as he bangs the final gave to conclude COP28.”Footnote2
It is perhaps fitting that this public controversy—with seemingly familiar villains and heroes engaged in a moral conflict—is unfolding as I prepare the introductory comments for this special forum on environmental melodrama. Originally published in 2006, Steve Schwarze’s “Environmental Melodrama”Footnote3 has been generative for those working at the intersection of environmental communication and rhetoric theory. Schwarze’s essay explores the use of melodrama in environmental controversy, portraying it as a potent rhetorical tool for environmental activists. Melodrama, Schwarze argued, should be distinguished from tragedy by the location of conflict: “Melodrama constitutes social and political conflict rather than personal, inner conflict.” Schwarze’s essay thoughtfully critiqued the limited theoretical attention given to melodrama, advocating for a more nuanced understanding that recognizes both its transformative and reifying potential. Centering on the town of Libby, Montana, and its history of asbestos contamination, the essay challenges the privileging of the comic frame over melodrama in rhetorical studies, encouraging a flexible and context-dependent evaluation of rhetorical frames beyond environmental controversies.
In the years since its publication, Schwarze’s regenerative work on environmental melodrama has proven to be exceptionally prescient, offering rhetorical critics an important tool for exploring public controversy. Environmental rhetoric scholars, in particular, have been attentive to the possibility of melodrama for understanding the intensifying climate crisis. For instance, despite offering a critique of Schwarze’s conceptualization of melodrama, Tarla Rai Peterson writes, “Perhaps environmental melodrama will enable us to both imagine and galvanize the global community that must act to mitigate climate change.”Footnote4 Despite being written over 15 years ago, Schwarze’s essay underscores the potential of melodrama for sustained social critique. As Schwarze asserts, “Melodrama can situate conflict on the social and political plane, clarifying issues of power that are obscured by privatizing rhetoric.”Footnote5 At a time marked by increasingly catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, the weakening of democratic institutions worldwide, widening wealth inequality, and myriad other vexing social problems, Schwarze’s theorization of melodrama might be precisely what is needed in the contemporary moment as a response to totalizing rhetorics that seek to limit emotion and moral outrage, particularly in the context of social and environmental injustice.
The essays in this special forum honor the life and work of Steve Schwarze, who passed away in the summer of 2022 following an extended struggle with colon cancer. Speaking personally, I met Steve as an undergraduate student attending the National Communication Association conference. I was immediately struck by his kindness and, over the following years, I came to appreciate his outstanding scholarship and intellectual spirit. The five essays in this collection – written by friends and peers of Steve – highlight not only the importance of his recuperation of the concept of melodrama but also the continued salience of the idea for understanding contemporary public controversies. Deeply engaging with the 2006 essay, forum contributors address a variety of topics such as how early engagement with rhetorical theory shaped Schwarze’s approach to melodrama (Marilyn DeLaure); affect theory and critiques of Schwarze’s melodramatic conceptualization (Norie Singer); the function of suffering in melodrama and tragedy (Shiv Ganesh); distinguishing features between democratic and authoritarian forms of melodrama (Pete Bsumek, Jen Peeples, and Jen Schneider); and the role of empathic indignation as a component of social justice-oriented melodramas (Terence P. Check). These essays do a tremendous service in honoring Steve’s work and extending his ideas in new, provocative directions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lisa Friedman, “Climate Summit Leader Tries to Calm Uproar Over a Remark on Fossil Fuels,” The New York Times, December 4, 2023, sec. Climate. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/climate/cop28-aljaber-fossil-fuels.html. 1.5 in the quotation refers to the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for limiting the effects of climate change.
2 Ibid.
3 Steven Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (2006): 239–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630600938609.
4 William J. Kinsella et al., “Narratives, Rhetorical Genres, and Environmental Conflict: Responses to Schwarze’s ‘Environmental Melodrama’,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (2008): 101. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030801980242.
5 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 245.