Readings

Question 1

McKinnon

Answer 1

• Citizenship and the Performance of Credibility: Audiencing Gender-based Asylum Seekers in US Immigration Courts
• Allows immigration judges to make asylum decisions based on credibility alone.
• I.D. card has biometric information (blood type, etc.) to distinguish US citizens.
• Asylum seekers come in small groups and claim asylum.

Concepts:

• Rhetorical Audience shapes the possibility of access to US citizenship.
• Ethos/Pathos/Logos

Major Findings

• Judges were looking for 3 things:
  1) To have a rational narrative. (Narrative Rationality)
  2) You had to embody your emotions. (Embodied
  3) Good speaker (ethos)
  4) Consistencies

Question 2

Frank

Answer 2

• The National Eulogies of Barack Obama

Concepts

• Epideictic discourse: Speech of praise/blame
• Call to action
• Genre

Major Findings

• Newton address was stronger because it refers to the bible and has call to action.
• The better address, contrary to public opinion, should have call to action.
• National Eulogies have a common pattern of reasoning:
  1) Identify clear cause of trauma speaker faced.
  2) Position traumas as serving a teleological purpose.
  3) Deploy those who died as martyr who require action on the part of the audience.
  4) Assume God has clear purpose for the US.

Question 3

Stuckey

Answer 3

• The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion
• Text: the history & story of the 1846 Donner Party’s expedition to California
• Previous Scholarship: frontier myths, US national identity

Concepts
- Narrative

Major Findings
- The Donner Party story reveals important aspects of rhetorical development of American national identity through western frontier myths.

Question 4

Stuckey (4 National Myths): Erasure

Answer 4

• When we listen to the story, the Native American communities the Donner Party interacted with are erased.
• No presence of NA

Question 5

Stuckey (4 National Myths): Civilization

Answer 5

• Donner Party fighting for the primal need of civilization.

- Struggle between civilization and need for food.

Question 6

Stuckey (4 National Myths): Community

Answer 6

• Being together, community is what prevails, helps you get through
• Family structure is important
• Myth is that community is what prevails.
• Fight between individualism and community

Question 7

Stuckey (4 National Myths): Democracy

Answer 7

• It is a tale of the centrality of democracy.

- The movement west is used as a way to solve political problems & to signal problems.

Question 8

Cloud

Answer 8

• Afghan Women and the Clash of Civilizations in the Imagery of the US War of Terrorism
• Focus of analysis: Images of Afghans in US news magazines and their websites in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.
• Thesis: these images create binary opposition between a white, western, modern actor/savior and between an abject foreign object of surveillance action
• Images rely on orientalist depictions of Afghanistan as backward and Afghan women as in need of saving
• Ideographs include: ,

Concepts

• Visual rhetoric: images can create ideas, persuade people
• Ideographs: short-hand references to big ideas
• Photographs can enact ideographs visually and point to verbal slogans

Major findings

• Binary of East vs. West
• Depicts white men as against portrayals of Afghan men as terrorists
• Dark people as needing recusing from lighter skinned

Question 9

Guo & Lee

Answer 9

• The Critique of Youtube- based Vernacular for Asian Am.

Concepts

• Vernacular discourse: rhetoric of people challenging the status quo, “home grown” in their political agency
• Analyzes content, agency, and subjectivity
• Agency: the capacity of an agent (a person or entity) to act in the world of Youtube
• Cultural syncretism: in protesting the mainstream discourse, the vernacular discourse also constructs its own community’s rhetoric
• Pastiche: the process in which members of vernacular communities use scraps from other discourse (particularly mainstream) to construct subjectivity
• Hybridity (subjectivities): agencies that generate Youtube-based vern. discourse are hybrid in that personal and institutional agencies are intertwined on the website

Major Findings

• Constraint: limited to entertain because they’re using youtube
• Tension between vernacular ideas and expectations
• Had revolutionary potential
• Remixing messages we commonly hear

Question 10

Brouwer

Answer 10

• Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines

Concepts

• Counterpublics: sphere where marginalized people can voice their concerns, and define their identities
• Corporeality: the specific ways in which social actors render bodies as important to communication, persuasion, identity

Major Findings
- The men created a counterpublic for conversations to happen by illustrating bodies of those with AIDS

Question 11

Steward

Answer 11

• Evolution of a Revolution: Carmichael and Rhetoric of Black Power
• Focus: Carmichael & black power as an effort to transform civil rights movem.
• Transition from reformist to revolutionary power model (evolution)

Question 12

Evolutionary Rhetoric (Carmichael- Black Power)

Answer 12

Carmichael’s vision:

• Control of language and definitions
• He was flexible, adapted speech to different audiences
• Vision of finding liberation
• Credibility as rhetor
• Return to one’s community
• Take care/control one’s community
• Retain heritage of black commun.

Question 13

Chavez

Answer 13

• Embodied Translation
• The way in which people and groups are positioned through dominant discourse as actors/non-actors
• Scholarly contributions:
  a) Understand the ways bodies are read in particular moments
  b) Sometime a subject who is positioned there is an object or abject- not represented as people who act/speak
  c) Brown bodied people in Arizona
  d) Develops framework from translation theory
• Chandler Round up- undocumented migrants/ US citizens

Question 14

6 Scapes of Translation (Chavez)

Answer 14

• Textual Signifiers: of body (race, gender, ethnicity)
• Nonverbal communication
• Verbal communication
• Primary Context: literary or historical text that scholar seeks to translate
• Historical Context: translations always come with a cultural and regional/national history
• Metaphysical communication: the ideological/spiritual assumptions that come with comm. engagement

Question 15

Shome

Answer 15

• Global Motherhood/ White Femininity
• Focus: White women as global mothers
• Question: how do representations of ‘global mothers’ make new transnational formations of whiteness?

Argument

• Global motherhood is wrapped up in white, patriarchal, heterosexual nationalism.
• Global motherhood demonstrates family desires and masks w. colonial violence that impacted families in the global south.

Concepts

• Visual Codes of Global Motherhood: light around faces to produce ‘halo effect’
• Ethics of Care: produces image of western caring
• Infantilized Cosmpolitanism: Idea of global unitism/citizenship