Dana L. Cloud

“To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the U.S. war on terrorism

This article explores the role of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001–2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan. Emphasizing images of women, I argue that these representations participate in the more general category of “the clash of civilizations,” which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the “white mans burden.” Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for the war. These contradictions have a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime.

Hegemony or concordance? The rhetoric of tokenism in "Oprah" Winfrey's rags-to-riches biography

This article examines television and print biographies of television talk show host and producer Oprah Winfrey. Conventional biographical narratives construct a token “Oprah” persona whose life story resonates with and reinforces the ideology of the American Dream, implying the accessibility of this dream to black Americans despite the structural economic and political barriers posed in a racist society to achievement and survival. The article develops theories of tokenism, biography, autobiography, and hegemony to analyze both racial and gendered dimensions of tokenist biography. It describes tokenism as a rhetorical mechanism of liberal hegemony with regard to race and class. The essay challenges recent redefinitions of hegemony as happy “concordance” and suggests that critics cannot assume that black stars and texts automatically represent difference and resistance in popular culture.

The materiality of discourse as oxymoron: A challenge to critical rhetoric

Recent rhetorical theory has adopted two versions—variously idealist and relativist—of the proposition that discourse is influential in or even constitutive of social and material “reality.”; This idea, which underpins much critical communication scholarship, I am calling the “materiality of discourse hypothesis.”; This essay documents and criticizes the idealism and relativism of the materiality of discourse idea in postmodernist and post‐Marxist rhetorical theories, illustrates the critique with an extended critical analysis of Persian Gulf War news coverage, and defends materialist ideology criticism as an alternative to a critical rhetoric that has become increasingly affirmative of the social order and detached from reality.

The rhetoric of 〈family values〉: Scapegoating, utopia, and the privatization of social responsibility

This article performs an ideographic analysis of the bipartisan political deployment of the slogan during the 1992 Presidential election campaign. The analysis shows that talk functioned during that campaign to scapegoat Black men and poor Americans for social problems. However, the ideograph also is invested with a gendered utopian narrative that makes its scapegoating less apparent and more persuasive. Ultimately, in constructing the family as the site of all responsibility and change, the rhetoric of privatizes social responsibility for ending poverty and racism.

The limits of interpretation: Ambivalence and the stereotype in Spenser: For hire

A structural analysis of the racial oppositions in the television program Spenser: For Hire challenges the interpretivist media studies claim that popular culture texts are necessarily polysemic. The article argues that representations of racial difference, in particular, are not polysemic but are rather ambivalent within the structure of the racist stereotype. The character Hawks oppositional stance and persona, though subject to contradictory critical evaluations, serve the needs of the dominant culture to depict blacks in stereotypical ways.

The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality

Invitational rhetoric espouses communication based on the immanent value and self-determination of interlocutors. With regard to theories that posit persuasion as a goal, an invitational model posits the dialogic encounter as ethically superior. We contend that the suitability of the invitational paradigm presupposes conditions of economic, political, and social equality among interlocutors. However, such conditions of actual equality are rare in both political controversy and interpersonal relations. Furthermore, the appeal to civility is a form of gender discipline; thus we advocate theorizing the uncivil tongue.

Fighting Words Labor and the Limits of Communication at Staley, 1993 to 1996

This article performs a narrative analysis of a newsletter published over a period of 2 years by locked-out workers during an industrial conflict. The analysis of a unique archive of worker documents points to the significance of battle metaphors and their shifting deployment over time. Early in the lockout, Staley workers rhetorically constructed themselves as warriors fighting a heroic battle. However, later in the struggle as defeat approached, the role descriptions in the newsletter emphasized the workers’ victim, refugee, and martyr status. The analysis of workers’ narratives is situated in this study in the context of narrative studies, critical organizational communication studies, and social movement studies.

Doing Democracy, Engaging the Material: Employee Participation and Labor Activity in an Age of Market Globalization

This colloquy results froma series of discussions between the authors concerning issues of (a) the status of labor activity in organizational communication study, (b) the dimensions of and prospects for workplace democracy in practice, and (c) the need for the discipline of communication to attend more seriously to the material world. The authors write this essay using three voices: each of theirs plus a joint expression of interests. Above all, this conversation seeks to strengthen engagement of possibilities for robust democratic practices in the work of todays globalizing market economy and to challenge communication scholars to see economic and labor phenomena as more than can be perceived through the lens of unbridled discursive and symbolic constructionism. Although this essay ranges across questions of ontological status, epistemological choices, disciplinary mythos, and theoretical preferences, it is ultimately practical with a call for (organizational) communication scholars and activists to engage the misguided pursuits, injustices, and hopes surrounding contemporary corporate-consumer capitalism.

The Matrix and Critical Theory's Desertion of the Real

This article uses the narratives of the popular films The Matrix, Matrix: Reloaded, and Matrix: Revolutions as a lens through which to discuss the problems of the real and human agency in contemporary critical theory. Alongside a reading of the films’ invocations of social theory, the article describes parallel academic theories whose strongest structuralist and poststructuralist manifestations abandon conceptions of the real and willful human agency. In a field whose pessimistic narrative of Marxism often begins with anti-humanist structuralism, classical Marxist discourse theories offer a viable standpoint-based concept of reality upon which to found solidaristic human action.

Introduction: W(h)ither Ideology?

Although Marx and Engels did not use the word ‘‘ideology’’ as often as many of us assume, they described the relationships among wealth, consciousness, interests, and history in a way that has influenced Marxist scholars of communication ever since. The term ‘‘ideology’’ was first advanced by Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy in 1797 as the name for the study of the regulation of cooperative society through ideas (Heywood 6; Kennedy 356; Nobus 134). When Marx and Engels appropriated the term in their discussion of The German Ideology, it took on a pejorative connotation. In a trajectory including Trotsky, Luckacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Althusser, critics of ideology since Marx have accounted for the production and circulation of dominant ideas in terms of their class belonging or their representation of class interests. From a classical Marxist vantage, Terry Eagleton suggests that the general consensus is that ‘‘the study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness’’ (xiii). Such a view, first, depends on a Marxist understanding of dialectical materialism. A classically Marxist approach posits a dialectical and mutually conditioning relationship between ideology and lived experience, such that reference to experience serves as a resource in the creation of oppositional consciousness. Second, the ontological basis for class-consciousness is one’s location at the material intersection of economic relations and forces. The contextualization of consciousness at this nexus is key to