Editor’s Message

Welcome to 2020, to volume 50 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and to a new set of editors and editorial board members. My thanks to Susan Jarratt and her editorial assistant, Allison Dziuba, for their gracious and efficient help in making this transition go as smoothly as it could.

In her first “Editor’s Message” in 2016, Susan noted the “editorial challenge presented by [the] glorious profusion” of/in rhetoric, and laid out a compelling case for furthering that profusion, for maintaining rhetoric as an open concept but also for finding ways to build alliances, bridges, archipelagos of increasingly fine-grained scholarly islands (1). These last few years have been successful on that score. Special issues like “La Idea de la Rétorica Americana” (45.3), the “Counterpoint” feature, and regular-issue discussions of “bullshit,” for example, have considered the place of the Rhetoric Society of America. Whose Americas? Whose rhetorics? I’d like to continue facilitating these discussions, with intention and care for all that RSQ already does well: encouraging good writing by both new scholars and established ones; insisting on carefully contextualized research; and furthering the discussion of such writing’s implications for the worlds both inside and outside academia. My vision for RSQ doesn’t rely on changing that good focus. In fact, my sense of RSQ as it is brings to mind Wordsworth’s call in his famous preface to maintain a regular meter both for the pleasure of experiencing it and to better amplify the moments of “vivid sensation.”

I propose this at the risk of acknowledging the pleasures of “straight” time, the regular meter like a heartbeat. But what about vivid sensation? Fast forward a couple of centuries from Wordsworth to Jose Esteban Muñoz, who in Cruising Utopia writes that moments of “collective temporal distortion” (in which we give in to the propulsion of queer potentiality) might lead us to “ecstasy” (185). What might such distortion, such ecstasy, look like at RSQ? Some ideas we’re working on:

• More emphasis on the Americas (including the multiple Americas within the United States) and transnational and/or comparative studies in rhetoric. I’d like to see RSQ offer a site for focused exploration of our ecologies of meaning, our overlapping and yet incommensurable histoires, our counterstories, our generative spaces.

• More synergy between the communication side and the English/composition side of rhetoric. RSQ has been successful, historically, making sure that the inter-discipline is represented, but I’d like to see more intentional, direct engagement. This move would take targeted calls for papers that emphasize cross-discipline collaboration and behind-the-scenes work with reviewers, but it’s exciting to contemplate what we have to say to and with each other.

• More variety in genre. More multi-generic (even multimodal, in a textual sense) pieces. More Counterpoint. More manifestos.

Part of moving RSQ toward this vision means looking actively for submissions of work not found enough in the pages of the journal, but a big part of it is also finding reviewers for that work. If you’re interested in reviewing for us and are not yet part of our database, please e-mail me with a brief curriculum vitae and keywords on your area of interest/expertise.

The inaugural issue of volume 50 starts with Dominic Manthey’s “A Violent Peace and America’s Copperhead Legacy,” which explores the legacy of US violence at the intersection of white masculinity and peace rhetorics, focusing in particular on the nineteenth-century Copperhead peace movement. Next is “Visualizing Birth Stories from the Margin: Toward a Reproductive Justice Model of Rhetorical Analysis,” by Shui-yin Sharon Yam, in which the author offers a reproductive justice model of analysis for portrayals of birth stories in the YouTube series Doula Diaries. Yam concludes that “Attunement toward intersectionality in methodology … may translate into overt effort to include, respect, and amplify voices of marginalized individuals whose reproductive decisions do not conform to white heteronormativity.” Kendall R. Phillips and Connah Podmore, in “The Scale of Our Memory: Spectacle in the Commemoration of Gallipoli,” take us to New Zealand’s Te Papa Tongarewa museum to complicate the intersections of spectacle, memory, and curation at an exhibit commemorating the 1915 Gallipoli offensive. Finally, in “‘A Social Movement in Fact’: La Raza and El Plan de Delano,” José G. Izaguirre III highlights the fashioning of racial identity in El Plan de Delano, arguing that “the farm workers movement invented its ‘Mexican’ race at a particular time and place and … in doing so, their verbal and visual rhetorics stretched the limits of racial discourse in the 1960s” and that the “farm workers’ manifesto harnessed the topos of race and increased its bodily and geographic range in the United States.”

Enjoy!