Submission: Call for Submissions: Rhetoric, Race and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage

Submission: Call for Submissions: Rhetoric, Race and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage
Rhetoric Review: Special 2017 Symposium

Rhetoric, Race and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage

Rhetoric Review journal has committed to publishing a special symposium in 2017 entitled “Rhetoric, Race and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage”.  Symposium editors are Meta G. Carstarphen and Kathleen E. Welch, both from the University of Oklahoma.

While much scholarly inquiry has explored what goes into the construction of racial pathways of identity, little of that inquiry has considered the deliberate ways in which rhetoric has been used to foment racial hate and dissension. These expressions often reveal themselves, not in the grand occasions of celebrated oratory, but in the familiar expressions surrounding us.

This special symposium seeks to push harder past our understandings of what racism is, or how it manifests itself, to explore questions about how rhetoric has been used, with intentionality and skill, to disrupt a sense of “order and rightness,” even when these are in direct opposition to a public discourse that states otherwise.

Yet because the constructions of race and racism are inextricably tied to structures of power and privilege, it is important that communication scholars peer deeply, even uncomfortably, into the ways that discursive, semiotic and symbolic skill is being used to maintain those power structures at all costs.

The intent of this special issue will be to examine the symbolic use of images, symbols and texts as part of the rhetorical construction of racial resentments. And, as the presidential administration of the first African American U.S. president comes to a close, and the battle for his successor intensifies, rhetorical scrutiny around shifts of power beg for incisive examinations too.

Some of the questions this section wants to illuminate are:

-      How can we recognize racist discourse in the public sphere?  What are the new codes, symbols and representations?

-      What do ancient strategies—including classical schemas from African, Chinese, Greek and Roman rhetorics—offer to inform us about the craft and structure of hate speech?

-      What does it mean to be racist and democratic?

-      How have marginalized voices developed and used counter-rhetorics in response to racial resentments?

-      What does it look like to speak boldly into the public sphere through media, exhorting philosophies of hate, while simultaneously championing the right to free speech?

-      How have the contexts of new media contributed enhanced, or complicated these difficult conversations?

-      How do visual media contribute to interpretations of identity and social status?

Scholars using critical, cultural and rhetorical approaches who want to be considered for this special issue are invited to submit a five-page proposal, with bibliography (MLA) by May 31st, 2016.  Deadline for final manuscript drafts will be in December 5, 2016.  All submissions will be peer-reviewed.  Send proposals and inquiries to Meta G. Carstarphen at  mcarstarphen@ou.edu