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ABSTRACT
This essay aligns Steve Schwarze’s notion of melodrama with Richard B. Miller’s call for “empathic indignation” and Louise Knops and Guillaume Petit’s notion of indignation as “affective transformation” to argue that indignation is a key component of democratic melodramas designed to address social injustice. Using the controversy over military exercises in Vieques, Puerto Rico, which resulted in the withdrawal of the U.S. Navy from the island, the essay shows how empathy and indignation within melodrama can foster meaningful social change.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Steve Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama: Explorations and Extensions,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (2008): 102.
2 Richard B. Miller, Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
3 Louise Knops and Guillaume Petit, “Indignation as Affective Transformation: An Affect-Theoretical Approach to the Belgian Yellow Vest Movement,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2022): 169–92.
4 Steven Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (2006): 244.
5 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama: Explorations and Extensions,” 104.
6 A full accounting of the Vieques controversy is beyond the scope of this tribute essay. For a history of the Naval exercises in Vieques, see Katherine T. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2002). I recognize my own positionality as a white, male, Midwesterner from the continental United States, who cannot speak for Viequenses about their experiences. I am indebted to other scholars for telling these stories. Puerto Rican citizen activists were not invited to present oral testimony at the congressional hearings I cite frequently in this essay, so I have referenced scholarship that recounts diverse Puerto Rican voices.
7 Catalina M. de Onís, Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2021).
8 de Onís, Energy Islands, especially 72–7.
9 Report to the Secretary of Defense of the Special Panel on Military Operations on Vieques, U.S. Senate, Vieques and the Future of the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility. Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services and the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support. S. Hrg. 106–419. 106th Congress. September 22 and October 19, 1999 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), 74. (All citations from these hearings are hereafter referred to as “U.S. Senate hearings.”)
10 Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, “Vieques: The Facts,” U.S. Senate hearings, 46.
11 James M. Jasper and Lynn Owens, “Social Movements and Emotions,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II, ed. Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 529.
12 César Akim Erives Chaparro, “The Role of Indignation and Other Moral Sentiments in the Construction of a Common (and Solitary) Sense of Justice,” Nordicum-Mediterraneum 17, no. 5 (2023): 4.
13 Louise Knops, “Towards an Affective Turn in Theories of Representation: The Case of Indignation,” Representation: Journal of Representative Democracy 59, no. 2 (2023): 279.
14 Knops citing Sean Grattan, in “Towards an Affective Turn,” 279.
15 Jean Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment, and Hatred,” in Forgiveness and Mercy, ed. Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 59.
16 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925; Internet Classics Archive, n.d.), bk. 2, pt. 9, https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html.
17 Gregory Desilet, “Nietzsche Contra Burke: The Melodrama in Dramatism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 76.
18 Herbert W. Simons, “Burke’s Comic Frame and the Problem of Warrantable Outrage,” Kenneth Burke Journal 6, no. 1 (2009), https://www.kbjournal.org/content/burke%E2%80%99s-comic-frame-and-problem-warrantable-outrage#:~:text=Earned%20outrage%2C%20warrantable%20outrage%2C%20must,limitations%3B%20of%20our%20own%20foolishness.
19 Joseph Burgo, “The Populist Appeal of Trump’s Narcissism,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shame/201508/the-populist-appeal-trumps-narcissism.
20 Erika Tucker, “Hope, Hate and Indignation: Spinoza and Political Emotion in the Trump Era,” in Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Civic Virtue, ed. Marc Benjamin Sable and Angel Jaramillo Torres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 142.
21 Mark Lenker, “Indignation in Political Discourse: Thoughts toward an Information Literacy Curriculum,” in Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization, ed. Andrea Baer, Ellysa Stern Cahoy, and Robert Schroeder (Chicago: ACRL Publications), 323, 324.
22 Miller, Friends and Other Strangers, 147.
23 Giuseppe Ugazio, Jasminka Majdandžic, and Claus Lamm, “Are Empathy and Morality Linked? Insights from Moral Psychology, Social and Decision Neuroscience, and Philosophy,” in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 160.
24 Heidi L. Maibom, “Introduction: (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Empathy,” in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9.
25 Miller, Friends and Other Strangers, 114.
26 Robert G. Bringle, Ashley Hedgepath, and Elizabeth Wall, “‘I Am So Angry I Could … Help!’: The Nature of Empathic Anger,” International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement 6, no. 1 (2018): Article 3, 1–17. Stefanie Hechler and Thomas Kessler, “On the Difference between Moral Outrage and Empathic Anger: Anger about Wrongful Deeds or Harmful Consequences,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 76 (2018): 270–82.
27 Knops and Petit, “Indignation as Affective Transformation.”
28 Lucy Osler, “WTF?! Covid-19, Indignation, and the Internet,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (February 2023). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9889945/.
29 James M. Jasper, “Constructing Indignation: Anger Dynamics in Protest Movements,” Emotion Review 6, no. 3 (2014): 210.
30 Amílcar Antonio Barreto, “Vieques and the Politics of Democratic Resistance,” CR: The New Centennial Review 8, no. 1 (2008): 141–2.
31 U.S. Senate hearings, 98.
32 U.S. Senate hearings, 73. Although Rosselló’s congressional testimony in 1999 aligned with the perspectives of most Puerto Rican citizen groups at the time, he later participated in negotiations with U.S. President Bill Clinton to allow military activities in Vieques, a move that activists denounced and successfully thwarted.
33 U.S. Senate hearings, 100.
34 Knops, “Towards an Affective Turn,” 282.
35 Knops and Petit, “Indignation as Affective Transformation,” 187.
36 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 254.
37 John J. Drummond, “Anger and Indignation,” in Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance, ed. John J. Drummond and Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 21.
38 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 244 (emphasis in original).
39 U.S. Senate hearings, 104.
40 These quotations about melodrama are from: Steve Schwarze and others, “Environmental Melodrama, Coal, and the Politics of Sustainable Energy in The Last Mountain,” International Journal of Sustainable Development 17, no. 2 (2014): 111. Katherine T. McCaffrey discusses the Vieques Women’s Alliance in Military Power and Popular Protest, especially 162–6.
41 Katherine T. McCaffrey, “Social Struggle against the U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico: Two Movements in History,” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 1 (2006): 94.
42 Louise Knops, “Stuck between the Modern and the Terrestrial: The Indignation of the Youth for Climate Movement,” Political Research Exchange 3 (2021): 1–30.
43 Elizabeth A. Brunner and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace’s Panmediated Global Detox Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 52 (2016): 290.
44 Nancy E. Snow, “Empathy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2000): 72.
45 McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, especially 160–1.
46 Katherine T. McCaffery, “Environmental Struggle after the Cold War: New Forms of Resistance to the U.S. Military in Vieques, Puerto Rico,” in The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, ed. Catherine Lutz and Cynthia Enloe (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 228.
47 Knops and Petit, “Indignation as Affective Transformation,” 187.
48 Barbara Warnick, “Argument Schemes and the Construction of Reality: John F. Kennedy’s Address to the Houston Ministerial Association,” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1996): 183–96.
49 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 249.
50 U.S. Senate hearings, 44.
51 For a discussion of ideographs of military necessity, see Marouf Hasian, Jr., In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
52 U.S. Senate hearings, 82–3.
53 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 250.
54 Chaparro, “The Role of Indignation,” 4–5.
55 U.S. Senate hearings, 129.
56 U.S. Senate hearings, 64.
57 Jasper and Owens, “Social Movements and Emotions,” 539.
58 Jasper and Owens, “Social Movements and Emotions,” 539.
59 Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257–82.
60 J. Robert Cox, “The Die Is Cast: Topical and Ontological Dimensions of the Locus of the Irreparable,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 3 (1982): 227–39.
61 U.S. Senate hearings, 19.
62 McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 155.
63 Quoted in McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 152.
64 Quoted in Katherine T. McCaffrey, “Because Vieques Is Our Home: Defend It! Women Resisting Militarization in Vieques, Puerto Rico,” in Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, ed. Barbara Sutton, Sandra Morgen, and Julie Novkov (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 168.
65 Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 268.
66 Miller, Friends and Other Strangers, 82.
67 Catalina Maíre de Onís, “‘Es una Lucha Doble’: Articulating Environmental Nationalism in Puerto Rico,” in Racial Ecologies, ed. LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 190.
68 U.S. Senate hearings, 174–5.
69 Miller, Friends and Other Strangers, 141.
70 Maria Miceli and Christiano Castelfranchi, “Anger and Its Cousins,” Emotion Review 11, no. 1 (2019): 19.
71 Martha C. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 35–6.
72 Charles L. Griswold, “The Nature and Ethics of Vengeful Anger,” in The Ethics of Anger, ed. Court D. Lewis and Gregory L. Bock (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 9–49.
73 Michelle Mason, “Contempt as a Moral Attitude,” Ethics 113 (2003): 234–72.
74 Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
75 Miller, Friends and Other Strangers, 119.
76 Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 44.
77 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 252.
78 Murali Balaji, “Racializing Pity: The Haiti Earthquake and the Plight of ‘Others,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 1 (2011): 51.
79 Snow, “Empathy,” 66.
80 Balaji, “Racializing Pity,” 51.
81 Osler, “WTF?! Covid-19, Indignation, and the Internet,” n.p.
82 Martin L. Hoffman, “Empathy, Justice, and Social Change,” in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 94.
83 de Onís, Energy Islands; Marie Cruz Soto, “In Vieques, Life amid Devastation,” NACLA: Report on the Americas 50, no. 2 (2018): 160–2.
84 Valeria Pelet, “Puerto Rico’s Invisible Health Crisis,” The Atlantic, September 3, 2006, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/vieques-invisible-health-crisis/498428/.
85 General Accounting Office, Defense Cleanup: Efforts at Former Military Sites on Vieques and Culebra, Puerto Rico, Are Expected to Continue through 2032, March 2021, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-268#:~:text=DOD%20estimates%20cleanup%20efforts%20will,waters%20totals%20nearly%20%24800%20million.
86 Hoffman, “Empathy, Justice, and Social Change,” 98.
87 Drummond, “Anger and Indignation,” 29.
88 Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” 245.