Lester C. Olson

On the margins of rhetoric: Audre lorde transforming silence into language and action

Audre Lordes speech, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “sheds light on the margins of rhetoric in the sense of the public speech because she examines factors that may cause some people to remain silent while enabling others to speak and act. “Margins” refers both to the parameters employed for defining a practice and the relative place or value of varied activities exemplifying the practice. Lorde interweaves her commentary on the silence surrounding breast cancer with insights about silence drawn from her experiences as a member of several subordinated communities, especially as they relate to the misuse of power to silence those who are different. Her speech comments on silencing and power, sexism, verbal abuse, violence and sexualized aggression, shame, the taboo, and hostile social environments. Paradoxically, Lordes speech is as much about the possibilities of rhetoric as its limits.

Intellectual and Conceptual Resources for Visual Rhetoric: A Re-examination of Scholarship Since 1950

This essay articulates a history of visual rhetoric scholarship during the last half century by describing the nomenclature employed by speech and communication researchers for designating germane scholarship, by specifying some landmark moments, and by identifying recurring patterns in the intellectual and conceptual resources. Because the pluralism of definition and emphasis are invaluable for ongoing projects in visual rhetoric, the essay is less concerned with identifying a center that holds visual rhetoric together than focal points for substantive conversations and dialogues to advance current visual rhetoric scholarship. The conclusion suggests some open-ended questions concerning components of one overarching question: How might the study of visual rhetoric be better institutionalized within colleges and universities in the United states?

Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference

Distortions around the naming and the misnaming of human differences are the central foci of Audre Lordes speech entitled “Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” which she delivered at Amherst College in Massachusetts on April 3, 1980. Lordes speech at Amherst exemplifies her deep understanding of what she refers to in an earlier speech as “that language which has been made to work against us.” Paradoxically, by scrutinizing some liabilities that language may pose for members of subordinated communities, Lordes speech enacts specific and often subtle means for reclaiming language, exemplified by “difference.” Lordes speech undertakes a fundamental transformation in a commonplace understanding of “difference” as domination by redefining it as resource, while calling attention to how complicity inheres in language. She contends that a focus upon relational practices across human differences is more fundamental than demographic categories for people in promoting the human liberation of dive...

Benjamin Franklin's pictorial representations of the British colonies in America: A study in rhetorical iconology

This essay attempts to explain the underlying reasons for a fundamental shift in Benjamin Franklins pictorial representations of the British colonies in America, by exploring the hypothesis the “Magna Britannia” was both a deliberative work directed to the British Parliament and an apologetic work directed to a conservative segment of the colonial public. Although the rhetorical tradition originates in the study of public speeches about civic matters, this analysis of “Magna Britannia” illustrates how concepts from the rhetorical tradition can illuminate pictorial persuasion, so contributing to a growing body of literature that explores the interdisciplineary value of the rhetorical tradition.

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

This essay argues that Audre Lordes 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lordes subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lordes speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activists advocacy. The essay suggests that Lordes speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.

Special Issue on Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing

Rhetoric scholars have developed approaches to both civil and human rights as political, ethical, and academic discourses. Such approaches include examining the development and reproduction of hierarchies, the politics of representation, and the relationships among symbols, audiences consisting of disparate communities, rights, and rights events. After an overview of rhetorical contributions, as well as risks and limitations of a rhetoric approach to human rights, this introduction turns to the focus of the special issue: testifying and witnessing as a way to scrutinize the roles of bystanders to rights atrocities and the responses of listeners who may be rights committed or not.

Concerning Judgment in Criticism of Rhetoric

Drawing on John Deweys classic definition of criticism, this essay centers on judgment as a necessary culmination for criticism of rhetoric. Concentrating primarily on the use of touchstones and analogs in aesthetic appraisals of rhetoric, the essay reconsiders and reshapes insights from scholarship on criticism by Edwin Black and Michael Leff to argue that touchstones and analogs can reveal rhetorical possibilities from a range of situated standpoints. A rhetorical shift to the judgment of touchstones can move us from the artifact to the public disclosure of a critics narratives and reasons concerning the possible in rhetoric, regardless of whether the artifact is considered an exceptional masterpiece.

Human Rights Rhetoric

Statues portray ‘‘Freedom from Want’’ and ‘‘Freedom of Speech’’ for a United Nations exhibit by the Office of War Information in Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. This exhibit featured a copy of the Atlantic charter, with amplifiers at each end broadcasting speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek every half hour, and surrounded by statues of the four freedoms. Segment from a larger photograph by Marjory Collins, March 1943. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and Flickr.com. (Retrieve from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/item/fsa1992001537/ PP/ or http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179127293/.) Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 290–293