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Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protestsecond edition PREFACEThe second edition of Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, like the first, is designed for instructors and students in courses that study social protest from a rhetorical perspective. On the basis of our own classroom experiences and our conversations with colleagues who have similar teaching goals, we agreed that we wanted a book that would offer ready access to a rich and disparate literature on the subject in a single volume; highlight key theoretical, historical, and critical developments; and provide a basis upon which students could extend their own explorations and insights. Since publication of the first edition, we have benefited greatly from those colleagues who, having used the book, provided valuable feedback that confirmed our belief in the volume's utility and suggested ways in which it might be enriched to serve their students better. Our new selections, arrangement, and commentary reflect a desire to meet such pedagogical needs and to account for recent scholarly developments. Our purpose in the second edition, as in the first, is to offer some of the best work in the discipline and to bring it together in a cogent, clear, and productive format. We believe that both instructor and student will find in these pages a wide range of provocative issues, intriguing personalities, and suggestive lines of scholarly inquiry. The rhetorical analysis of social protest is as diverse as the phenomena it seeks to explain. Instructors, no less than students, are therefore confronted with a potentially bewildering array of approaches, topics, and questions. What, precisely, is a rhetorical movement? How does one go about identifying, analyzing, and evaluating such movements? Why is it important to study them? What are the proper objects of our study? What can we learn about movements and rhetoric generally from attention to case studies? This collection of readings provides a map of sorts, first to assist students into the field and then into those more specific areas that have demarcated the scholarship. At the same time, we have sought through our selections to allow for free exploration across several domains. To this end, we begin with a general introduction that orients students to the rhetoric of social protest as a field of study. We detail its key assumptions and explain the sections and chapters of the book, as well as its arrangement. We also include chapter introductions that acquaint students with authors, issues, and movements; in addition, we encourage readers to observe points of similarity and difference, to note key developments, and to consider prospects for further study. ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOKThe readings are arranged in two major sections, "Orientations" and "Critical Touchstones," reflecting theoretical and critical approaches to the study of social protest rhetoric. We do not mean to suggest that theoretical essays lack critical dimensions, nor that critical case studies do not advance theories of social movements. Rather, the division represents the prominence of these two scholarly approaches over time within the discipline. It also provides students with two distinct perspectives from which they may explore the rhetoric of social protest. We believe that as students become comfortable with the scholarship, theoretical and critical questions and insights will emerge across the readings. Within the two major sections, we have organized essays into chapters that address more specific themes and issues. Each chapter is arranged in chronological order to suggest an unfolding series of conceptual concerns, allowing students to identify patterns and transformations and to develop an increasingly sharpened and sophisticated approach to the subject. Section I: Orientations. For the first section, we have selected essays that explicitly create and then debate the rhetorical nature, purpose, and functions of social movements. Chapter 1, "Foundations," presents a group of essays that speak directly to ways in which social protest movements may be conceptualized as an area of rhetorical inquiry. The stress, accordingly, tends toward matters of definition and scope. Students are encouraged to consider what it is that defines social movements as rhetorical phenomena, the types of rhetoric at work in social protest, the ethical and psychological dimensions of such rhetoric, and the dynamics of social action. Chapter 2, "Competing Perspectives," includes essays that take a critical view of the precepts established in the first chapter. These essays emphasize some of the limits imposed by the first generation of movement scholars and offer alternatives as a means of advancing scholarly inquiry. They stress, in particular, the interplay of history and theory, and bring into sharp relief such questions as whether movements are best understood with reference to the former or the latter. Students are here encouraged to identify and differentiate between scholarly approaches and assumptions. Section II: Critical Touchstones. To illustrate the possibilities of social movement criticism, the second section offers a selection of critical touchstones, or case studies, in the rhetorical action of social protest. Individually, these studies take up a rich variety of historical and contemporary movements, including abortion, civil rights, environmentalism, gay liberation, labor, and other significant campaigns for social reform. In addition to providing a view of many movements individually, we offer a means of conceptualizing social protest rhetoric beyond the contextual and strategic particularities of a single movement, spanning movements, time, space, texts, and intellectual approaches. In the new edition, we have reorganized these essays into four thematic chapters, in order to encourage the comparative analysis and theory building that comes from a multiplicity of scholarly perspectives and cases linked together by a designated conceptual focal point or rhetorical issue. This broader perspective should also assist deeper analysis of protest rhetoric within individual movements. Chapter 3, "Tactics for External Audiences," offers essays that examine how rhetoric is directed from a movement outward to expose oppression, to unsettle the norms and policies enabling that oppression, and to persuade those not already part of the fold to embrace its transformative ideals and agenda. What rhetorical situations may face protest rhetors? What tactical means, both conventional and innovative, are selected in specific historical circumstances to appeal to or confront complex audiences consisting of potential recruits, opponents, publics, and institutions? Within the framework of social protest, in short, what are the available means of persuasion? Chapter 4, "Tactics for Internal Audiences," addresses similar questions related to how movement rhetoric is directed at members and sympathizers for purposes of recruitment, mobilization, conflict resolution, and retrenchment. How is rhetoric used to entice potential members? Craft a coherent and sustaining vision and identity? Invigorate the movement in times of frustration and fatigue? Resolve conflicts among members? Adapt collective goals and maintain unity to shifting circumstances? Chapter 5, "Tactics of Control," considers the rhetorical responses of those against whom a movement has mobilized. These essays explore how opponents of social movements work rhetorically to undermine, contain, or accommodate protest discourse. What are the available rhetorical means of controlling protest rhetoric? How do power arrangements shape those responses? How do those responses change movement strategy? Do movements engage in tactics of control against their own members? Can we understand protest rhetoric and its oppositional counterpart as being interdependent? Chapter 6, "Tactical Modifications," considers the influence of time on social protest rhetoric. Given that social transformation never occurs overnight, how do changing circumstances, shifting demographics and dynamics of membership and opposition, and cultural change itself shape rhetorical tactics for the duration of the movement? How do developments over time exhaust favored tactics or inspire new tactics? In what sense does protest rhetoric succeed or fail according to its long-range tactical vision and capacity for modification? Our chapter divisions reflect our assessment of those concerns and interests that occur in many movements and that are prominently featured in the study of social protest rhetoric. No doubt other configurations will come to mind. We do not mean to endorse any one approach to the study of social protest, nor focus on any particular movement or movements, but rather highlight the diversity and directions of current scholarship. We provide a wide range of examples that indicate the theoretical, historical, and critical assumptions that drive the work of practicing critics. Over all, the goal with this section--as in the book as a whole--is to draw attention to patterns and allow students to range across categories, topics, and methods. As editors, we have made every effort to reproduce the essays exactly as they appeared in their original publication. Exceptions include the correction of minor typographical errors and the insertion of "[sic]" to indicate accuracy where the original phrasing was unusual. All unitalicized appearances of "[sic]" are in the original essay. In addition, footnotes have been moved to the end of each essay. The Selected Bibliography is designed to serve several purposes. Students may use it to help them link and extend their projects to existing work in many fields on many different movements; explore in greater detail, depth, and scope key issues related to the study of rhetorical movements; and find models of scholarly writing for their own projects. For each movement, we include selections that reference primary materials and historical contexts, as well as critical analyses from the scholarship of various academic fields studying social protest. The bibliography has been updated and expanded in this edition. Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest provides instructors as well as students access to a long and productive tradition of rhetorical scholarship. Our hope is that this collection may serve both as a basis for introducing students to this tradition and as inspiration for scholarly investigation of their own. FEATURES OF THE NEW EDITIONIn this second edition we have attempted to incorporate new scholarship and provide a more articulated organizational framework. While retaining most of the excellent essays we included in our first edition, we offer here recent work, and some established work not previously included, that complements and supplements earlier selections. In response to many helpful recommendations, we have also rearranged the essays in groups that make common themes and issues more accessible. As we note above, the volume is now organized into two major sections. Section II, "Critical Touchstones," with its four individual chapters, represents the most significant revision. We wanted to organize the material according to key concepts that recur in the rhetorical study of social movements and that inform much of the scholarship on individual movements. Our thematic framework should help illuminate conceptual links across movements and scholarship, enhance critical practice by modeling the use of key concepts by several scholars, and encourage theory building by illustrating how scholars complement and supplement previous work on social protest. All the revisions represent our attempt to achieve greater theoretical and critical coherence among the selections and across the sections and chapters, and to deepen students' intellectual experience of the material. In Section II, we also offer recent essays that extend and enhance our original compilation. These new essays provide a broader view of individual movements, including American independence, labor, Chicano/a, abolitionism, disability rights, democratic globalization, AIDS and breast cancer activism. We do not attempt to be comprehensive in our coverage of the numerous significant movements in American history, although we believe these additional movements deserve representation, discussion, and analysis. The new selections do provide fresh and challenging insights regarding race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. They also reflect emerging and growing theoretical perspectives, such as counterpublics theory, and concerns about mediated and global influences on social protest rhetoric. Finally, in order to further account for scholarly developments in specific areas of social protest, and in social movement theory more generally, we have extended and updated the Selected Bibliography. Additional sources are included in each section. We have also included new sections on several significant movements: AIDS, Anti-Globalization, Anti-Lynching, Disability Rights, and Right Wing Movements. Two new sections, "Interdisciplinary Perspectives" and "Media and Social Movements," guide students to the larger theoretical discussions that are occurring in multiple disciplines and provide additional resources for those students particularly interested in the relationship between protest and media in its various forms. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSGreat projects, by which we mean those that ignite our passion and are greeted with passionate support, are rare indeed. We begin therefore by acknowledging our exceedingly good fortune at having been involved in this great project not just once, but for a second time. Our own deep commitment to the rhetoric of social protest is given eloquent voice in these pages, by turns edifying and vexing and inspiring us. The eloquent voices beyond these pages that advised and nurtured and challenged us as we envisioned and completed this project were no less edifying and vexing and inspiring. We can say now, as we did in the first edition, that in every way this volume has been a collaborative project, one which has heightened our appreciation for each other and left us with a deep sense of gratitude to those who have helped us bring it to fruition. The impetus for Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest began in our classrooms, and our best rationale for offering a second edition remains there. As important as we believe scholarship to be, activism's promise rests in large part with those students who can and hopefully will labor to achieve social and political transformation. We thank our students at Denison, Penn State, and Vanderbilt for articulating the need for and engaging in spirited discussion of the voices of discontent. They sustained us as we once more compiled, scanned, and edited materials for the volume. We thank again those who deserve so much credit for helping bring about the first edition: Dana Cloud, University of Texas at Austin; Thomas J. Darwin, University of Memphis; Bonnie J. Dow, University of Georgia; Steven R. Goldzwig, Marquette University; Richard J. Jensen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Gordon Kirby, Denison University; James F. Klumpp, University of Maryland; Molly Mayhead, Western Oregon University; and Ronald J. Stephens, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Our second edition benefited beyond measure from the insightful advice and hearty encouragement of generous colleagues who reviewed or commented on this volume: Angela Aguayo, Eastern Illinois University; Beth S. Bennett, University of Alabama; Jim Cherney, Miami University of Ohio; Lynn Clarke, Vanderbilt University; Dana Cloud, University of Texas at Austin; James Darsey, Georgia State University; Bonnie Dow, University of Georgia; Michael Hogan, Pennsylvania State University; Randall Lake, University of Southern California; Roseann M. Mandziuk, Texas State University-San Marcos; Becky Michele Mulvaney, Florida Atlantic University; Sandra J. Sarkela, State University of New York at Potsdam; John Sloop, Vanderbilt University; Mary Stuckey, Georgia State University; and Kathryn A. Wiss, Western Connecticut State University. For us, Strata means excellence, and friendship. Many thanks to Brian Henry for all that he did for this edition. His professionalism is only surpassed by his company at business dinners. And they don't get any better than Kathleen Domenig. Her knowledge of the field and subject matter, her vision, her eye for editorial detail, and her sense of humor--just for starters--are unmatched. She has embraced and invigorated us at every turn, and our pride and pleasure in this edition bears her unmistakable signature. Finally, and most important, we again dedicate this book to Scott Rose and Margaret Michels, our mainstays, with our love and deepest thanks for everything. Copyright © 2006 Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne.
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