Cal M. Logue

Transcending coercion: The communicative strategies of black slaves on antebellum plantations

This study investigates the coercive controls imposed upon blacks by whites during slavery, and the rhetorical responses of slaves to those harsh constraints. To survive plantation life, blacks perfected two rhetorical strategies: a defensive posture of accommodation and a more aggressive behavior of exploitation.

Rhetorical status: A study of its origins, functions, and consequences

Rhetorical status is a feature of all communicative interaction. It is the relative standing or positioning of parties to communication or, defined cognitively, it is this standing as reflected in the identities that interacting parties assign to themselves and to others as communicators, as each takes account of salient qualities of self and others. Rhetorical statuses are mutable and context‐specific, yet quite often durable and consistent across time and place. The concept of rhetorical status is distinctive to communication studies, and it is vital for explaining the efficacy of communication—its power or persuasiveness. To show how rhetorical status enters into everyday communication, we examine a protracted set of interactions between two sisters and a small‐town mayor over disputed water bills.

From ambiguity to dogma: The rhetorical symbols of Lyndon B. Johnson on Vietnam

The authors analyze and evaluate President Johnsons casting of political policy into evocative symbols, the invention and operation of those rhetorical forms, the resulting conflict over the symbolization of the Vietnam War, and the theoretical and ethical implications of those rhetorical choices.

The rhetorical appeals of whites to blacks during reconstruction

The emancipation of slaves placed new rhetorical demands upon white spokesmen in the South. To maintain their racial authority, whites refined two rhetorical appeals conceived in slavery: a rhetorical bribe and a rhetorical threat.

Shift in rhetorical status of blacks after freedom

Blacks and whites in the South before the Civil War exercised influence in society in proportion to the range of authoritative communicative behaviors available to them. The authors define and contrast the rhetorical statuses of some blacks and whites under slavery, and analyze the more powerful forms of persuasion employed by many blacks during Reconstruction and beyond.

Communicative interaction and rhetorical status in Harriet Ann Jacobs’ slave narrative

The potency of speech and nonverbal signs depends vitally on rhetorical status, or ones relative standing in communication with others. The record of dialogue in Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl demonstrates how persons of low social standing can achieve high rhetorical status through advantages of character and clever initiatives. Jacobs successfully resisted the coercive sexual advances of her master, Dr. James Norcom, and eventually gained her freedom by capitalizing on advantages that elevated her rhetorical status, relative to his, and by exploiting Norcoms rhetorical vulnerabilities.

Gap‐bridging, interaction and the province of mass communication

Communication is not made of gaps, as John Durham Peters has recently maintained, but of more or less successful attempts to bridge the spatio‐temporal and interpretive distances that attend our individuality as embodied beings. Starting from the idea that communication is an activity of sharing through the mediation of signs, we try to bring out its gap‐bridging potential and to indicate why all communication presses towards completeness of sharing through interaction. We pursue this important question through Peters essay: Can one embrace interaction models without depreciating or demeaning the various forms of mass communication?

Gubernatorial campaign in Georgia in 1880

This campaign was a rare departure from the solid Democratic South which evolved in Georgia after 1865. Although the Republicans decided not to run a candidate in 1880, incumbent Alfred H. Colquitt, unable to get the necessary two‐thirds majority at the nominating convention in his bid for a second term, confronted Thomas M. Norwood, the minority Democratic candidate, in a state‐wide battle involving blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Teaching black rhetoric

This article tells a story about the need for better understanding between blacks and whites and suggests how these needs can be partially met through a course in black rhetoric. The first section attempts to portray in narrative form the alienation between blacks and whites. The second portion describes the authors course in black rhetoric.

Civil liberties: The expansion of white women's communicative activities from the antebellum south through the civil war

This study analyzes the communicative behaviors and discourse of women in Georgia during the Civil War to determine how women were able to broaden and extend their rhetorical influence during this period. We argue that women increased their authority and impact in communities by strategically balancing what might be considered an “unfeminine” degree of self‐assertion with other, seemingly conciliatory behaviors that appeared to satisfy societal expectations. Faced with the contradictory demands of a society that insisted upon their helplessness while demanding their participation, these women made a unique rhetorical contribution both to the war itself, and to the rhetorical history from which they have too often been excluded.