The Black God Trope And Rhetorical Resistance

In The Black God Trope and Rhetorical Resistance: A Tradition of Race and Religion, Armondo R. Collins theorizes Black Nationalist rhetorical strategies as an avenue to better understanding African American communication practices. The author demonstrates how Black rhetors use writing about God to create a language that reflects African Americans’ shifting subjectivity within the American experience. This book highlights how the Black God trope and Black Nationalist religious rhetoric function as an embodied rhetoric. Collins also addresses how the Black God trope functions as a gendered critique of white western patriarchy, to demonstrate how an ideological position like womanism is voiced by authors using the Black God trope as a means of public address. Scholars of rhetoric, African American literature, and religious studies will find this book of particular interest.

African American Women's Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor deals with the rhetoric of African American women from enslavement to current times, examining slave narratives and contemporary print, music, and other media surrounding the lives of African American women. Covering a variety of specific women and their rhetoric within the context of a historical period, the book provides central themes and strategic and social concerns of African American women and their environment. It frames, in some, cases, the rhetoric of contemporary women in politics and other fields of prominence--including Condoleeza Rice and Barbara Lee, among others. Deborah F. Atwater explores how African women today who engage in speech in the public sphere come from a historical line of active women who have been outspoken in politics, education, business, and various social contexts; heretofore, these women have not been studied in a comprehensive manner. Specifically, how do these African American women discuss themselves, and--more importantly--how do they represent who they are in various communities? How do these women persuade their diverse audiences to value what they say and who they are?African American Women's Rhetoric will be an invaluable contribution to upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric, African American Rhetoric, History, and Women's Studies.

Rhetoric and the Responsibility to and for Language: Speaking of Evil relocates the “problem of evil”— the question of why God would allow for the existence of evil—and surveys it as a rhetorical problem. It raises this question: if we speak evil, how shall we speak of evil? When we communicate, we are naming, and evil as the corruption of language plays a central role in that naming. Evil freezes our words, convinces us we have the sole right to their definitions, and generally stifles the dynamic gift of language. By looking at how people in different eras and situations have named evil, this book suggests how we can better take responsibility for our words and why we owe a responsibility to language as our ethical stance toward evil.

A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment critiques current antiracist ideology in rhetoric and composition, arguing that it inadvertently promotes a deficit-model of empowerment for both students and scholars. Erec Smith claims that empowerment theory—which promotes individual, communal, and strategic efficacy—is missing from most antiracist initiatives, which instead often abide by what Smith refers to as a "primacy of identity”: an over-reliance on identity, particularly a victimized identity, to establish ethos. Scholars of rhetoric, composition, communication, and critical race theory will find this book particularly useful.

Antiracist Discourse in Brazil: From Abolition to Affirmative Action follows Teun A. van Dijk’s earlier studies on racist discourse in Europe, the USA, and Latin America. This book focuses on antiracist discourse, focusing on the history of the discourse against slavery and racism and in favor of abolition and affirmative action in Brazil. After a theoretical chapter on antiracism and antiracist discourse, the author studies Jesuit texts of the 17th and 18th century criticizing the abuses against slaves and the texts of black and white writers in the 19th century advocating abolition. The author analyzes discourses of 20th century scholars, journalists, and activists who explicitly combat prevalent international eugenicist and racist ideologies as well as post-abolition discrimination of black people all while challenging the dominant myth of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy.’ After the historical study of these antiracist discourses, this book offers a detailed case study of contemporary debates on affirmative action in Brazilian parliament.

This book analyses the public discourse of Elizabeth Dole. It explores the way in which this trail-blazing public figure navigated the double binds that confront women who obtain and exercise political power. The text argues that Dole crafted a conservative, feminine persona in which she depicted herself as a selfless public servant. This sense of servant was defined through Dole’s appeal to the transcendent moral purposes of Christianity. She used this image to great effect in her most noteworthy public addresses, especially her 1996 Republican National Convention speech in support of her husband’s presidential campaign. In her 2008 unsuccessful North Carolina U.S. Senate reelection campaign Elizabeth Dole’s political style unraveled in the face of a series of effective attacks by her opponent, Kay Hagan, and her own desperate rhetorical appeals to stave off defeat.

Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluenceexamines how individuals and communities have responded on a global scale to present day water crises as matters of social justice, through oratory, mass demonstration, deliberation, testimony, and other rhetorical appeals. This book applies critical communication methods and perspectives to interrogate the pressing yet mind-boggling dilemma currently faced in environmental studies and policy: that clean water, the very stuff of life, which flows freely from the tap in affluent areas, is also denied to huge populations, materially and fluidly exemplifying the currents of justice, liberty, and equity. Contributors highlight discourse and water justice movements in nonofficial spheres from activists, artists, and the grassroots. In extending the technical, economic, moral, and political conversations on water justice, this collection applies special focus on the novel rhetorical concepts and responses not necessarily unique to but especially enacted in water justice situations. Scholars of rhetoric, sociology, activism, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly useful.

This book honors the advocacy of Dr. Wangari Maathai, acclaimed environmentalist and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. Dr. Maathai was a gifted orator who crafted messages that imagined new possibilities for human agency and social justice and who inspired action to protect our natural habitats. This collection explores the various strategies Maathai employed in her speeches to create memorable images and arguments for audiences in Kenya and around the world. Specifically, authors examine Maathai's use of storytelling, her creative use of metaphor and local cultural knowledge, and her use of sharp social-political analysis. Authors approach Maathai's rhetoric from both African and Western ways of knowing.