On "Containment" as a Rhetorical Strategy

From "Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld's “Idea of China”" by Anjali Vats* & LeiLani Nishime, Quarterly Journal of Speech Volume 99, Issue 4, 2013

As a rhetorical concept used in analyses of public address and social protest, containment refers to discursive strategies that protect the power investments of the status quo through the constraint of Otherness. Michelle Smith argues that rhetorics of containment actually neutralize purported threats associated with out-groups—her case study of the Amana Society highlights the tendency of rhetorics of containment to “have direct (and dire) material consequences for the imagined group.”11 With the exception of Smith's focus on non-dominant religious communities, studies of rhetorics of containment have primarily centered on issues of gender. Karrin Vasby Anderson, for example, points to the use of the word “bitch” in political rhetoric as a means of “disciplining women with power.”12 Poirot builds on this understanding, focusing on the confining effects of radical/lesbian feminist social movements on self-identification.
Here, we are concerned with the role of rhetorics of containment in a different context, namely confining the subjectivities of racial and colonial Others...