Alex McVey

For the first time in the history of the address, the 2011 State of the Union was accompanied online by an enhanced version, which gave viewers the option of experiencing the speech alongside a display providing images, charts, graphs, outlines, and data visualizations. This paper examines the visual rhetoric of President Barack Obama’s 2011 enhanced State of the Union, locating this rhetoric in an aesthetic regime of neoliberal temporality. I argue that the visual rhetoric of the Enhanced Address articulates between conservative and progressive temporalities in order to promise a future economic victory prefigured by the economic logics of the past. Working between Svetlana Boym’s understanding of a restorative nostalgia that seeks to return to a lost, mythic origin, and a reflective nostalgia which looks to the past to open up new possibilities for the future, I argue that the temporal rhetoric of neoliberalism stylizes the return to the past as modality of progression in the future. I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sarah Sharma to argue that the aesthetics of the enhanced State of the Union invite viewers into a recalibrative nostalgic temporality which works reciprocally between restoration and reflection, allowing viewers to adjust their relationship to a deflated political scene without fundamentally altering the political coordinates that produce the conditions of economic exchange.

http://ir.uiowa.edu/poroi/vol11/iss2/2/

We will not seek change, nor oppose the fixed and the mobile; we will seek what is more mobile than the mobile: metamorphosis... We will not distinguish the true from the false; we will seek what is more false than the false: illusion and appearance (Baudrillard, 2002: ...

This thesis examines President Barack Obama’s use of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to establish authority for the exercise of sovereign power. I perform a close reading of three speeches to examine how Obama uses American exceptionalism to garner authority on issues of race, the economy, and national security. Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech demonstrates how Obama deploys the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to limit the rhetorical force of racial anger. The 2011 State of the Union illustrates how Obama rhetorically manipulates time to defend neoliberal economics through the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Obama’s “Our Security, Our Values” speech shows how Obama uses the rhetoric of the rule of law to establish American exceptionalism as a durable rhetorical framework for ongoing actions in the war on terror. Together, these speeches demonstrate the importance of understanding how American exceptionalism functions in Obama’s rhetoric as a foundation for sovereign power.

... Jeff Roberts is Assistant Instructor of Argumentation and Academic Debate at Baylor University where ... He is currently focused on the integration of Jean Baudrillard's writing into academic policy ... Alex McVey is an undergraduate student in Communication Studies at Baylor and a ...

This seminar examines the role of rhetoric and media in the public life of race and racism. We will explore how race is constituted through symbolic practices, how race is negotiated through the use of media technologies, and how rhetoric and media have been used to both perpetuate and challenge racism. We will learn about theories which help us explain what race is, how race functions, who race benefits and disadvantages, and the ways in which race manifests historically, politically, and performatively. This class will encourage you to think about the role of rhetoric in the perpetuation of racial violence, about rhetoric as a form of racial violence, and about ways rhetoric challenges and intervenes in the violence of racism. This course will interrogate the fraught and complex relationship between race, and racism, and how symbolic and mediated practices work to sustain and challenge this relationship.

terms of rhetorical style. To make such research easier, I would suggest that when they issue a second edition, Baylor University Press should consider integrating the three volumes mentioned in this review into a chronological anthology so that scholars would no longer have to shuffle among the three volumes to follow the themes I have suggested here. For example, the current volume contains only one speech from 1954, ostensibly because the other important speeches from that year are contained in the preceding anthologies. It would make more sense to have all of the speeches from each year in the same volume. Such integration would enhance our understanding of the context and interrelationships of these speeches.

This article examines the rhetorical strategies of microcelebrity in the reality TV show Live PD. Live PD is an important text for understanding how police work with the entertainment industry to create selective strategies of self-presentation in the wake of the media challenges posed by the Black Lives Matter movement. It shows how police draw on new media and social media to shape public discourse about police and promote alternative images of police officers. It also shows how police mobilize the techniques of reality TV, fan engagement and social media to respond to emergent crises of police credibility. This article argues that Live PD’s rhetorics of microcelebrity use intimate visual access and fan engagement to create new modes of cultural attachment to police power while also substituting affective sensations of intimacy for substantive demands of police accountability.

While the use of memes as a persuasive strategy by the alt-right in the 2016 election gave rise to the notion that the left had been thoroughly outflanked in the meme wars, this project argues that the left can meme. Attending to the mimetic practices of anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist online publics reminds scholars and practitioners that reactionary forces do not monopolize memetic persuasion. We are interested in how left-wing publics constitute themselves and gain adherents through memetic labour or the work of inventing, sharing, remixing and commenting on images, objects and slogans. This exploratory essay charts a nascent rhetorical research agenda on leftist meme culture, tracking previous interventions such as the anti-fascist meme Gritty and speculating on generative terrain for scholars interested in examining the memetic labour of the left. This essay posits that if we are interested in actualizing more democratic and egalitarian futures, providing assessme...

This thesis examines President Barack Obama’s use of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to establish authority for the exercise of sovereign power. I perform a close reading of three speeches to examine how Obama uses American exceptionalism to garner authority on issues of race, the economy, and national security. Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech demonstrates how Obama deploys the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to limit the rhetorical force of racial anger. The 2011 State of the Union illustrates how Obama rhetorically manipulates time to defend neoliberal economics through the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Obama’s “Our Security, Our Values” speech shows how Obama uses the rhetoric of the rule of law to establish American exceptionalism as a durable rhetorical framework for ongoing actions in the war on terror. Together, these speeches demonstrate the importance of understanding how American exceptionalism functions in Obama’s rhetoric as a foundation for sovereign power.M.A

This article examines the rhetorical strategies of microcelebrity in the reality TV showLive PD. Live PDis an important text for understanding how police work with the entertainment industry to create selective strategies of self-presentation in the wake of the media challenges posed by the Black Lives Matter movement. It shows how police draw on new media and social media to shape public discourse about police and promote alternative images of police officers. It also shows how police mobilize the techniques of reality TV, fan engagement and social media to respond to emergent crises of police credibility. This article argues thatLive PD’s rhetorics of microcelebrity use intimate visual access and fan engagement to create new modes of cultural attachment to police power while also substituting affective sensations of intimacy for substantive demands of police accountability.

Buchanan’s Mother/Woman spectrum by considering how certain women—the disabled, the young, single, and, nonwhite—have been encouraged, indeed in some instances coerced, not to become mothers. What rhetorics of motherhood inform these campaigns intended to prevent motherhood, and what rhetorics emerge in the resistance to them? Buchanan’s theoretical and critical work in Rhetorics of Motherhood sets the stage for investigations of these questions. Indeed her persuasive case about the rhetorical resonance of maternalism in discourses by and about women makes Rhetorics of Motherhood an indispensable read for rhetorical scholars no matter their particular area of interest.

This essay tracks how Gritty, the new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, emerged as a memetic icon for antifascism and the sometimes-contradictory ethos of far-left online publics. Emerging through expressive sharing, remixing, and appropriation of widely recognizable figures, memetic icons come to embody the ethos of publics, helping them foment dissent. Gritty specifically came to embody antifascists' incivility towards fascism, as well as their desire to create a more just world. This article demonstrates how memes serve as an organizing tool for anti-capitalist politics and how tracing the circulation of images within publics shows how they produce icons.