{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"RSQ--Journal Roundup!","description":"What do a mid-century photographer, a fresh new work, politics and poop jokes, solitary confinement and a music video all have in common? Why it must be time for a rhetoric journal roundup! This week we are going to take a little journey through the quarter\u2019s last issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, otherwise known as the RSQ. The RSQ is the official publication of the Rhetorical Society of America, otherwise know as the RSA. So the RSA published the RSQ and now it\u2019s time for the intro for you-know-who!   [intro]   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history and I\u2019m Mary Hedengren and I\u2019ve finally finished the spring issue of the RSQ.   Before I give you a summary of this quarter\u2019s issue, let me just give you a little context on the RSQ. The RSQ has been rolling out for decades and is probably one of the most prestigious and longest-running journals for rhetorical studies. If you become a dues-paying member of the RSA--and it\u2019s pretty cheap for students--, you can receive your own subscription to the RSQ, and you\u2019ll find that it has some of the same focus as the RSA conferences held every other year--it\u2019s focused on the rhetoric side of comp\/rhet, usually with a big dose of theory. You won\u2019t find a lot of articles in the RSQ about first-year composition, but you will find archival research, cultural artifacts, history and more.    So let\u2019s take a walk through the Spring 2020 issue of RSQ.   First off, we have an article from PhD candidate Emliy N. Smith because, yes, grad students can get published in RSQ. Smith has looked into the photograph of Charles \u201cTeenie\u201d Harris, an African American photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith argues that Harris\u2019 photography counters other mid-century depictions of Black people in two important ways: first, the iconic form of photography--iconic photography, as Smith points out, are high performance. Think, as Smith says, of the photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It\u2019s dramatic, semi-staged and capital M Meaningful. Harris had some pictures like that, but Smith is more interested in the other type of photography he did, the so called idiomatic image, colloquial and conversational. She describes photographs of Harris\u2019 that show Black people creating their own lives as they are \u201csimply moving about in a world suffused with structural racism\u201d (85) like one picture showing kids at a Halloween party, part of their own community, and that community building its own future through its children. The \u201cidiomatic, everyday work of building and sustaining ...Black community,\u201d Smith argues, is itself a powerful mode of visual rhetoric, not less than the iconic mode.   Romeo Garcia and Jose M. Cortez wrote  the next article \u201cThe Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.\u201d If you wondered what a third of those words mean, you are not alone. I had to read the abstract three times before I understood what the article was about, but then I began to see that those words I didn\u2019t understand were exactly what the article was about. In rhetoric we talk a lot about postcolonialism, but these authors are seeking new theories andnew terms--one term is decoloniality. Instead of positioning, for example, the Latin American experience in terms of its difference from Europe, how about just \u201cactually theorizing  rhetoric from the locus of non-Western \u2026 space\u201d (94)? The authors give an example of the kind of contrastive rhetoric that really gets their goat. Don P Abbott wrote an article about rhetoric in Aztec culture where he  says, \u201cIt is possible that Aztec discourse, both practical and conceptually, would have continued to evolve as the culture itself developed\u201d (qtd 99) and Garcia and Crotez are like\u2026\u201dwait what\u2026? So you think Aztec culture was \u2018undeveloped\u2019? Do you think that logocentrism is the only way to figure rhetoric? Uh, no..!\u201d This brings us to the other term in the title that might not be familiar--anthropoi. As you might guess, this word has a connection to anthropology, with the idea that the anthropoi are people you study, \u201cthat which cannot escape the status of being external to the subject and being gramed as object\/nature\u201d (97).  But wait! de-Colonialism has its own flaws. How can modern rhetoricians ever hope to reconstruct the rhetorics of people in radically different cultures living thousands of years ago? \u201cDecoloniality,\u201d the authors say, \u201ccannot carry out its promis of decolonization while adopting the language and conceptual apparatus of propriety\u201d (103)  If post-colonial thinks about the other and decoloniality gets caught in a loop of using western logocentrism to approach non-Western rhetorics, what\u2019s the solution? Well\u2026.they propose an alterity symbolized in the letter X, both as the end of Latinx, and also as in the symbol you use to signify your name if you aren\u2019t literate. They \u201cmove past decoloniality without completely giving up on its ground of intervention\u201d seeking \u201c (104). Whew. That is some heavy stuff!   Don\u2019t worry, the next article includes potty humor! Richard Benjamin Crosby at Brigham Young University (Go Cougs!), digs into the Rhetorical Grotesque, especially in the 21st century policial arena. He argues that leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro and Hugo Chavez and Silvio Berlusconi all \u201cenact in rhetoric the kinds of incongruous combinations, comis distortions and corporeal excesses that scholars in art and literature have long associated with grotesquerie\u201d (109, original emphasis). The grotesque, if you remember your Baktin, focuses a lot on the body, and bodily excess--eating, pooping, reproducing. As Crosby says. \u201cThe groteque\u2019s only true allegiance is to transgression of the presumed order of things\u201d (112) and it is in this way that politicians like Trump exemplify the grotesque-- positioning themselves as transgressive, shaking up the old foundation, and being grotesque is part of that. \u201cA political cutlass\u201d (112) as \u201ca mode of communication, the essence of which is transgression of or deviation from and degradation of that which is presumed to be normal\u201d through being 1- incongruous, 2- mocking, and 3- corporal. Crosby gives examples of political discourse of the grotesque from several different countries and political positions, but Trump is the clearest example for us, especially during the Primary campaign. Trump\u2019s grotesque rhetoric argued that \u201cTrump is real, because he is uncontained\u201d (115) as Trump mocks  accusations that he calls women he doesn\u2019t like \u201cfat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals\u201d and says \u201cthe big problem this country has is being politically correct\u201d (116). Distrust in political institutions have led, says Crosby, to a \u201cgrotesque kairos\u201d (119) of wanting to mock and dismantle social norms. And although we rebel-rousing rhetoricians often get excited about breaking social norms, Crosby points out that demagogues like Trump demonstrate that the grotesque is \u201ca neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone skilled enough to use it\u201d (120) and sometimes it can be disasterous.   From Trump\u2019s consolidation of power we then move to the powerless--prisoners on hunger strikes in California\u2019s Pelican Bay Prison. Chris S Earle writes an article called \u201c\u2018More Resilient than Concrete and Steel\u201d: Consciousness-Raising, Self-Discipline and Bodily Resistance in Solitary Confinement\u201d where he argues that the \u201cwidespread, multiracial coalition emerged through years of organizing between prison cells, a process rendered nearly impossible by solitary confinement\u201d (124). \u201cAgainst the odds,\u201d he relates, these prisoners \u201ccreated a discursive space\u201d in prison across racial boundaries in three collective hunger strikes opposition prisoner conditions (125). These hunger strikes took place in a Supermax prison and solitary confinement, among the prisoners termed \u201cworst of the worst,\u201d yet they exemplified \u201cstrict regimes of self-discipline\u201d (132) as the prisoners \u201cturned their bodies into weapons of resistance\u201d and made \u201ca moral critiques of solitary confinement\u201d (133). Earle concludes his article by saying that making distinctions between nonviolent and violent offenders undermines prison reform efforts and justifies \u201ceven more inhumane conditions for many people in prison\u201d (134).   In the next article, Jennifer Lin Lemesurier (li-mis-i-ur) walks us through the \u201cracist kinesiologies\u201d in Childish Gambino\u2019s \u201cthis is America.\u201d If you haven\u2019t seen the music video of \u201cThis is America,\u201d pause this podcast, fire up the YouTube and watch it now. You\u2019ll thank me. [....] Aaaaaand we\u2019re back. Lemesurier describes what Childish Gambino\u2019s body is doing in this video as embodying two racist assumptions about black male bodies--that they are hyper talented and hyper violent. She takes us deep into the history of Black dance as seen through the filter of white eyes, as slavers demanded slaves dance on demand across the middle passage (141) and slave owners exhibit the \u201csavage wildness\u201d of Black dance (142), but it\u2019s one figure of the Black male body that Childish Gambino especially channels--the 1889 figure of The Original Jim Crow, a minstrel figure who danced with a knee bend, elbow bend and naive amusement. Lemesurier, a dancer herself, describes how uneven the position is in body weight and posture, how it \u201cdoes not valorize linear pattern or gentle arcs\u201d (144)--it is a stark and mocking other. As all of my listeners have now seen the video--RIGHT?!-- you know that in the video Childish Gambino transitions seamlessly between depictions of performance and violent. \u201cThe emphasis on dance,\u201d Lemesuir writes, \u201cis key to the critique of how Black embodiment serves white audiences\u201d (145). \u201cGambino\u2019s chorerographed performance of violence is a metaperformative moment that asks viewers to question the naturaizationof Black bodies as always dancing or shooting and the impact of such portrayals on  broader relations that are possible between racialized bodies\u201d (146). Lemesuir ends by recommending that we in rhetoric continue studying moving bodies, \u201cRhetoric needs more clarity on how bodily hierarchies are always present, not only in visuals or discourses, but in the very steps we take through the world, toward or away from one another,\u201d (149).   And there you have it! Those are the main articles from RSQ this quarter. I\u2019m skipping over the book reviews, even though it includes a review by my Casey Boyle, one of my faves from the University of Texas at Austin (go Longhorns!), Dana Cloud and Steve Mailloux\u2019s new book. But you, as they say, don\u2019t have to take my word for it!     ","author_name":"Mere Rhetoric","author_url":"http:\/\/mererhetoric.libsyn.com","html":"