Book Announcement Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars

Book Announcement

Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror
Wars

Rhetoric, Politics, and Society series
Palgrave MacMilllan UK Press

This work examines violence in the age of the terror wars with an eye
toward the technologies of governance that create, facilitate, and
circulate that violence. In performing a rhetorical cartography that
explores the rise of the U.S. armed drone program as well as moments of
resistive violence that occurred during the Arab Spring directed at
generating a counter-hegemony by Muslim populations, Hayes argues that
the problem of the global terror wars is best addressed by a rhetorical
understanding of the ways that governments, as well as individual
subjects, turn to violence as a response to, or product of, the post
September 11th terror society. When political examinations of terrorism
are facilitated through understandings of discourse, clearer maps emerge
of how violence functions to offer mechanisms by which governing bodies,
and their subjects, evaluate the success or failure of the "War on
Terror." This book will be of interest to public policymakers and
informed general readers as well as students and scholars in the fields
of rhetoric, political theory, critical geography, U.S. foreign
relations/policy, war and peace studies, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Rhetoricoviolence

2. The Materiality of Rhetoric and Violence

3. Rhetorical Cartography: Mapping the Terror Wars

4. Violent Subjects

5. The Buzzing of the Drones

6. Mapping the Disposal of Terrorist Bodies

7. Occupying Tahrir: Resistance, Violence, and Political Change

8. The Terror Wars Drone On...Or Don't They?

"Heather Hayes has produced a careful, well-reasoned, and thoughtful
analysis of what she terms "rhetoricoviolence," the multi-layered ways
in which rhetoric and violence can be understood as traveling together.
Deeply embedded in the materialist turn, Hayes' analysis also relies on
theories of rhetorical cartography to provide a cogent analysis of the
war of terror. In so doing, she deepens our understanding of rhetorical
theory and method, contributes to our knowledge of the ways in which
violence and war are deeply rhetorical, and adds to the scholarly
conversation on empire and colonialization. Scholars of politics,
rhetoric, and history will find much of value in this work." (Mary E.
Stuckey, Georgia State University USA)

"Heather Hayes has developed an innovative approach to interrogating the
global terror wars by theorizing violence as a rhetorical form and using
case studies to map the circulation of what she calls
'rhetoricoviolence.' She examines how violence produces, articulates,
and reconfigures subjectivities and rhetorical situations (with
rhetorical situations redefined to consist of assemblages of people,
spaces, and technologies). Focusing on the violence of the U.S. drone
program, Hayes's critical rhetorical cartography documents the use of
this kind of power to colonize the Arab world into 'good Muslims.' Her
project invites and opens a way for further cartographies aimed at a
better understanding and productive critique of transnational empire."
(Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University, USA)

"Claiming that the remaking of the world during "the terror wars" has
been a fundamentally rhetorical project, this book offers a new and
provocative thesis on the rhetoric of violence. There is no such thing
as "mere rhetoric," Professor Hayes argues. Rhetoric is all, and so
rhetorical scholars have a lot of work to do." (Jeremy Engels, The
Pennsylvania State University, USA)