Eric King Watts

Theorizing Cyberspace: the Idea of Voice Applied to the Internet Discourse:

This article offers the idea of voice as a way to think of cyberspace and the internet. It is argued that web pages represent the presence of individuals and institutions representing what they have to say. Consequently, we would argue that a robust construct such as voice might offer an unique theoretical lens through which to examine the internet and cyberspace phenomenon. This article argues that cyberspace can be conceptualized as a discursive space, and calls for a textual/discursive/rhetorical analysis focusing on the eloquence of representation as a principal means by which people and institutions voice themselves in this space.

The Spectacular Consumption of "True" African American Culture: "Whassup" with the Budweiser Guys?

–Spectacular consumption is a process through which the relations among cultural forms, the culture industry, and the lived experiences of persons are shaped by public consumption. This essay examines how the spectacular consumption of “Whassup?!” Budweiser advertising is constitutive of white American ambivalence toward “authentic” blackness. The essay argues that Budweisers hottest ad campaign benefits from a tension between the depiction of “universal” values and the simultaneous representation of distinctive culture. The illustration of blackness as sameness and blackness as otherness arises out of conflicted attitudes toward black culture. Thus, Budweisers strategic attempts to regulate and administer “authentic” blackness as a market value also reproduce this ambivalence. Furthermore, as an object of spectacular consumption, the meaning of “authentic” black life and culture is partly generative of mediated and mass marketed images.

Voice and voicelessness in rhetorical studies

This essay begins with the observation that the term “voice” is frequently used in rhetorical studies literature. Interestingly, rhetorical “voice” means different things to different scholars. This essay seeks to accomplish two tasks related to “voice.” First, it clarifies the conceptual confusion regarding “voice” found in the literature by relating it to a tension between “speaking” and “language.” Second, to avoid this tension, this essay presents a case study in which a notion of “voice” is posited that is constitutive of the public acknowledgment of the ethical and emotional dimensions of public discourse.

What Is This “Post-” in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

An exploration of spectacular consumption: Gangsta rap as cultural commodity

Gangsta rap narratives are treated as testimonials that provoke conflicted strategies for constituting urban African American male identity and social intercourse. I argue that hard‐core rap artistry participates in a complex and fluid set of economic exchange relations among the lived experiences of artists, the operations of a consumer culture, and the dictates of rap music industry. The concept of “spectacular consumption” is posited as a discursive template for understanding how rhetorical strategies of self‐promotion in gangsta rap artistry alter and are altered by the sophisticated interdependence among private, public, and economic spheres.

Border Patrolling and “Passing” in Eminem's 8 Mile

This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying “Rabbit” as “white trash,” a discursively “dark” (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to raced and gendered struggles. Through real and symbolic violence, Rabbit battles “dark” villains and grapples with “dark” women, initiating a rite of passage. The film grounds Eminems hip hop authenticity in Rabbits discursive darkness, but attaches to this image the marketable allure of mythic whiteness. I conclude by contemplating how the films conservatism reifies “blackness.”

African American ethos and hermeneutical rhetoric: An exploration of Alain Locke's The New Negro

This essay explores the ways through which Alain Lockes anthology of African American art and criticism, The New Negro: An Interpretation, constituted an African American ethos during the Harlem Renaissance. Loche enacted a hermeneutical rhetoric that reinterpreted black folk tradition, African artistry, and modem pragmatism as topoi for rhetorical practice, and his discursive strategies appropriated and modified divergent cultural traditions to invent a “New Negro. “Lockes hermeneutical rhetoric exhibits an aesthetic praxis that is sensitive to the ways in which the emotions habituate rhetorical and cultural practices, which inform the achievement of propriety.

Critical Cosmopolitanism, Antagonism, and Social Suffering

This response will contemplate how the fluid mechanics managing the dialectic between nationalism and cosmopolitanism were imbricated with the affective registers of racialized forms of conceptualizing and categorizing the discipline. I want to suggest that the manner in which claims of belonging to and eviction from national dwelling places can be historically coordinated with this nations emergent racial imaginaries. I will argue that this history has forged important critical capacities that we should cultivate more actively to meet current and future challenges from within and without the academy. Also, I will embark upon a brief trial of critical cosmopolitanism in terms of how it might shape and guide an assessment of a difficult challenge being mounted by Afro-Pessimism to some essential presumptions of Communication Studies in general and Rhetorical Studies in particular.This response will contemplate how the fluid mechanics managing the dialectic between nationalism and cosmopolitanism were imbricated with the affective registers of racialized forms of conceptualizing and categorizing the discipline. I want to suggest that the manner in which claims of belonging to and eviction from national dwelling places can be historically coordinated with this nations emergent racial imaginaries. I will argue that this history has forged important critical capacities that we should cultivate more actively to meet current and future challenges from within and without the academy. Also, I will embark upon a brief trial of critical cosmopolitanism in terms of how it might shape and guide an assessment of a difficult challenge being mounted by Afro-Pessimism to some essential presumptions of Communication Studies in general and Rhetorical Studies in particular.

Politics, the Police, and Anti-Blackness

Chris Rock’s monologue on Sunday night February 28, 2016 to open the Academy Awards contained more than a stinging series of observations regarding, to adapt a phrase from Jacques Rancière, the distribution ofWhite sensibility (Rancière, 2004); it seemed tome to be also an invitation to think about the relations among presidential politics during the lastmonths of the reign of theObamaAdministration,modes of Black visibility, and the police. Rock began by welcoming viewers to the “White people’s Choice Awards,” calling attention to the controversy over a lack of nominations for persons of color.1 Some Black, Brown, and Asian commentators have deplored facets of Rock’s performance, calling it petty, offensive, and dismissive of the motivations driving a boycott of the Oscars.2 These comments tend to ignore, however, Rock’s joke about how a whole lot of the folks gathered that evening to celebrate themselves have also flooded into fundraisers for President Obama. Rock bore personal witness to a contradiction: that the nicest White people on the planet that passionately support a Black president “don’t hire Black people.” Some observers have called this moment (and others like it) political; there was that night a sense in which time seemed to stand still for a moment: suspended animation. I offer two theses regarding this aporia: First, a definition of “to hire:” an engagement between parties involving the exchange of services rendered and forms of currencies. Rock noted how Obama and White elite liberals entered into a kind of contract where Obama gained financial and symbolic support, whileWhite liberalism strengthened its antiracist ethos through strategic displays of Blackness projected and verified via photographic evidence—a mode of visibility we might call “Standing with Obama.” Second thesis: This mode of visibility has been deployed and contested in the 2016 Presidential campaigns, highlighting different senses of “to hire:” that is, to rent, to lease, rather than fully employ; we also are confronted with its antonym: “to fire.” Among the Republicans this mode of visibility is staged for target practice, literally if one braves the gun show and survivalist circuits.3 It is not difficult to ascertain the anti-Black sentiment that accompanies this mode of visibility and that animates fierce hostility and violence. Alt-Right conservatives do not merely wish to “fire” Obama; such feelings bring up alternative senses of “fire:” a destructive burning, an intense attack. Although the GOP establishment and Trump bumped heads

Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies

ABSTRACT The essay mainly performs a structural and formal analysis of the logics and affective economies of postracial fantasies so as to eventually offer the Zombie trope as a mode of analysis figuring alternative ways of thinking race relations. The essay contends that the Zombie, when articulated with discourses and feelings of the postracial, signifies the unleashing of black bio-threat bodies upon a population; and that enjoyment of the postracial and the Zombie Apocalyptic genre obscures and resuscitates this signification. As a brief case study, the essay discusses the display, materiality, and “bloody” enjoyment of the “Zombie Obama” target mannequin by gun enthusiasts and preppers.ABSTRACTThe essay mainly performs a structural and formal analysis of the logics and affective economies of postracial fantasies so as to eventually offer the Zombie trope as a mode of analysis figuring alternative ways of thinking race relations. The essay contends that the Zombie, when articulated with discourses and feelings of the postracial, signifies the unleashing of black bio-threat bodies upon a population; and that enjoyment of the postracial and the Zombie Apocalyptic genre obscures and resuscitates this signification. As a brief case study, the essay discusses the display, materiality, and “bloody” enjoyment of the “Zombie Obama” target mannequin by gun enthusiasts and preppers.