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A Rhetoric that Breathes, a Rhetoric that Heals: In/coherence, Storytelling, and Abolitionist Futures
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In 1925, Herbert Wichelns published The Literary Criticism of Oratory. By many accounts, the essay would become the founding document of the academic study of rhetoric and public address. However, in that same year, historian Carter G. Woodson published Negro Orators and Their Orations, which focused on the study of the African American oratorical tradition. In this essay, by way of speculative history and using my sanctified imagination, I wonder what an alternative or speculative history would look like if we can conceive Woodson as challenging the dominant (exclusively white) notions of public address and rhetorical praxis. By paying particular attention to Woodson’s introduction in Negro Orators and Their Orations, I submit that not only would we have been introduced to the richness and power of the African American public address tradition earlier but, more importantly, who we start to see as scholars and what we call scholarship would be different as well.
I examine this by first, offering an examination of Woodson’s text, paying close attention to the introduction, where Woodson develops his theory of oratory. Second, I examine the African American rhetoric and public address scholarship between 1925 and 1960. Finally, I offer a speculative history of what could have been and what we can still do if we would include some of these voices and their scholarship in the public address canon.
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, uses rest as a “healing mechanism” and a form of resistance. With a vibrant social media following, the Nap Ministry builds upon a strong history of Black feminist activism that centers the lived experiences of Black women. According to Hersey, rest is personal and political, a fight against the commodification and exploitation of laboring Black folks from chattel slavery to contemporary grind and hustle culture. This article explores how Hersey builds upon a lineage of Black women’s activism in digital spaces while also exploring rest, “soul care,” and communal healing as ideologies rooted in Black (cyber)feminism. I argue that Nap Ministry constellates Womanism, Black (cyber)feminism, and Black liberation theory by promoting the power of rest, encouraging resistance against what bell hooks describes as the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that exploits Black women’s labor and renders their voices invisible.
This short essay introduces the reader to the special issue, Speculative Fiction, Criticality, Futurity, featuring original short speculative fiction, flash fiction, graphic novels, and visual art–each of which critically imagines liberatory futurities. Each submission contributes to a different component of futuristic world-making. Some of the pieces tend to the messy fight against neo-fascism by speaking to the various tactics to dismantle supremacy. Other pieces situate their protagonists in post-apocalyptic worlds where the fight for liberation has ended with new equitable systems. Other pieces revise historical moments in an effort to reimagine what our current lives could be like without injustices chaperoning our existence. Regardless of the approach, each piece pushes us to imagine the fight and future ahead.
This essay is organized around four claims, which when taken together, demonstrate that it is time for the field of Communication Rhetoric in the United States to rethink the way it does rhetoric: (1) US American rhetoric is the way settler colonialism organizes, (2) assemblage theory can frame US rhetoric as an organizing logic of Settler Colonialism, (3) anti-colonial social movement knowledge production is akin to theory, and (4) rhetoric must find a better method to engage with these anti-colonial movements. I end the essay with a challenge to rhetorical scholars to learn, rather than try to teach.
Racial trauma, an ongoing consequence of historical trauma, has deleterious effects on the well-being of Africana communities. The psychological literature primarily reflects individual processes in the relationship between racial trauma and healing. Going beyond individualistic approaches, we present a community healing framework informed by multidisciplinary scholarship: Community Healing and Resistance Through Storytelling ( C-HeARTS). Three major components of the framework are delineated: (a) justice as both a condition of and an outcome of community healing; (b) culturally syntonic processes (i.e., storytelling and resistance) that direct the renarrating of trauma and act as conduits for transformation; and (c) psychological dimensions (i.e., connectedness, collective memory, and critical consciousness) that promote justice-informed outcomes. In the C-HeARTS framework, community is advanced as an agent of change while centering justice and the important role of cultural practices to facilitate community healing.
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.
This essay proposes a theory of human communication based on a conception of persons as homo narrans. It compares and contrasts this view with the traditional rational perspective on symbolic interaction. The viability of the narrative paradigm and its attendant notions of reason and rationality are demonstrated through an extended analysis of key aspects of the current nuclear war controversy and a brief application to The Epic of Gilgamesh. The narrative paradigm synthesizes two strands in rhetorical theory: the argumentative, persuasive theme and the literary, aesthetic theme.
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