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The redesign and revitalization of traditional urban centers is the cutting edge of contemporary urban planning, as evidenced by the intense public and professional attention to the rebuilding of city cores from Berlin to New York City's "Ground Zero." Spanish and Latin American cities have never received the recognition they deserve in the urban revitalization debate, yet they offer a very relevant model for this "return to the center." These cultures have consistently embraced the notion of a city whose identity is grounded in its organic public spaces: plazas, promenades, commercial streets, and parks that invite pedestrian traffic and support a rich civic life. This groundbreaking book explores Spanish, Mexican, and Mexican-American border cities to learn what these urban areas can teach us about effectively using central public spaces to foster civic interaction, neighborhood identity, and a sense of place.

Herzog weaves the book around case studies of Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Mexico City and Querétaro, Mexico; and the Tijuana-San Diego border metropolis. He examines how each of these urban areas was formed and grew through time, with attention to the design lessons of key public spaces. The book offers original and incisive discussions that challenge current urban thinking about politics and public space, globalization, and the future of privatized communities, from gated suburbs to cyberspace. Herzog argues that well-designed, human-scaled city centers are still vitally necessary for maintaining community and civic life. Applicable to urban renewal projects around the globe, Herzog's book will be important reading for planners, architects, designers, and all citizens interested in creating more livable cities.

Engaging a broad spectrum of ecological thought to articulate the ethical scale of global extinction

As global rates of plant and animal extinctions mount, anxieties about the future of the earth’s ecosystems are fueling ever more ambitious efforts at conservation, which draw on Western scientific principles to manage species and biodiversity. In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that these responses not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, ultimately contributing to the destruction of unique life forms and ecosystems.

Critiquing the Western discourse of global extinction and biodiversity through the lens of diverse Indigenous philosophies and other marginalized knowledge systems, Revenant Ecologies promotes new ways of articulating the ethical enormity of global extinction. Mitchell offers an ambitious framework—(bio)plurality—that focuses on nurturing unique, irreplaceable worlds, relations, and ecosystems, aiming to transform global ecological–political relations, including through processes of land return and critically confronting discourses on “human extinction.”

Highlighting the deep violence that underpins ideas of “extinction,” “conservation,” and “biodiversity,” Revenant Ecologies fuses political ecology, global ethics, and violence studies to offer concrete, practical alternatives. It also foregrounds the ways that multi-life-form worlds are actively defying the forms of violence that drive extinction—and that shape global efforts to manage it.

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Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting—as agents of abhorrence and disgust. Yet if we think about “revolting” in a different way, Kathleen LeBesco argues, we can recognize fatness as not simply an aesthetic state or a medical condition, but a political one. If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about health, beauty, and nature. 

Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. 

LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually “desirable” subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency—in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant—has implications not only for our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. 

Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways. 

Rhetoric and Guns advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity.

A timely collection of essays by prominent scholars in the field—on the past, present, and future of rhetoric instruction.

From Isocrates and Aristotle to the present, rhetorical education has consistently been regarded as the linchpin of a participatory democracy, a tool to foster civic action and social responsibility. Yet, questions of who should receive rhetorical education, in what form, and for what purpose, continue to vex teachers and scholars.

The essays in this volume converge to explore the purposes, problems, and possibilities of rhetorical education in America on both the undergraduate and graduate levels and inside and outside the academy. William Denman examines the ancient model of the "citizen-orator" and its value to democratic life. Thomas Miller argues that English departments have embraced a literary-research paradigm and sacrificed the teaching of rhetorical skills for public participation. Susan Kates explores how rhetoric is taught at nontraditional institutions, such as Berea College in Kentucky, where Appalachian dialect is espoused. Nan Johnson looks outside the academy at the parlor movement among women in antebellum America. Michael Halloran examines the rhetorical education provided by historical landmarks, where visitors are encouraged to share a common public discourse. Laura Gurak presents the challenges posed to traditional notions of literacy by the computer, the promises and dangers of internet technology, and the necessity of a critical cyber-literacy for future rhetorical curricula.

Collectively, the essays coalesce around timely political and cross-disciplinary issues. Rhetorical Education in America serves to orient scholars and teachers in rhetoric, regardless of their disciplinary home, and help to set an agenda for future classroom practice and curriculum design.

Exposing the politics of seeing: how documentary photographs confront inequality and reshape public understanding.

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice. Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs—often now called “imagetexts”—both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.

Carter’s carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal qualities of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis’s heartrending photos of Manhattan’s poor in late nineteenth-century New York, Walker Evans’s iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama, Ted Streshinsky’s images of 1960s social movements, Camilo José Vergara’s photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick’s portraits of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.

While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. Carter argues that social documentary photography has the powerful capacity to disrupt complacent habits of viewing and to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a “rhetoric of exposure” that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objects. His framework enables the analysis of photographs as heterogeneous records of the interaction of social classes and expressions of specific built environments. Rhetorical Exposures also discusses how photographs interact with oral and print media and relate to creations as diverse as public memorials, murals, and graphic novels.

As the creation and dissemination of new media continues to evolve in an environment of increasing anxiety about growing financial inequality, Rhetorical Exposures offers a very apt and timely discussion of the ways social documentary photography is created, employed, and understood.

Exploring how language shapes sexuality, power, and belonging.

Davin Allen Grindstaff, through a series of close textual analyses examining public discourse, uncovers the rhetorical modes of persuasion surrounding the construction of gay male sexual identity. In Part One, Grindstaff establishes his notion of the "rhetorical secret" central to constructions of gay male identity: the practice of sexual identity as a secret, its promise of a coherent sexual self, and the perpetuation of secrecy as a product and strategy of heteronormative discourse.

Grindstaff continues in Part Two to examine major issues related to contemporary conceptions of gay male identity: overturning sodomy laws; public debates over same-sex marriages; medical and social responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the rhetorical power of hyper-masculine body images and homoeroticism to creative communities; and, finally, what Grindstaff considers to be the most mysterious and significant rhetorical practice of all: coming out of the closet.

By investigating the public discourse--texts and images that circulate, produce knowledge, and become means of persuasion--surrounding the constructions of sexual identity, Grindstaff challenges heteronormative concepts of sexuality itself, thus creating new maps of social power and new paths of resistance.

A remarkable anthology of key writings that parallels the history of fashion with modern life

Writing more than a century before Vogue, no less a figure than G. W. F. Hegel reviewed the fashion of his day and found it wanting because, in becoming outmoded so quickly, it drew attention away from the timeless beauty of the human form. And Hegel is not unique among philosophers in his interest in fashion’s role; for more than 250 years, social thinkers have considered fashion—its transitive nature, the conformity it inspires, the vast range of its influence—as a defining feature of modern life.

Merging literary analysis with cultural criticism and biographical study, Patricia R. Schroeder explores Johnson's ongoing role as a cultural icon. Schroeder's detailed analysis engages key images and myths about the blues musician (such as the Faustian crossroads exchange of his soul for guitar virtuosity). Navigating the many competing interpretations that swirl around him, Schroeder reveals the cultural purposes served by the stories and the storytellers. The result is a fascinating examination of the relationships among Johnson's life, its subsequent portrayals, and the forces that drove the representations.

Offering penetrating insights into both Johnson and the society that perpetuates him, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is essential reading for blues fans and cultural critics interested in a foundational musical figure.

Histories of American rock music and the 1960s counterculture typically focus on the same few places: Woodstock, Monterey, Altamont. Yet there was also a very active college circuit that brought edgy acts like the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground to different metropolitan regions and smaller towns all over the country. These campus concerts were often programmed, promoted, and reviewed by students themselves, and their diverse tastes challenged narrow definitions of rock music.  

Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s. Analyzing campus archives and college newspapers, historian James Carter traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities in the 1960s. Furthermore, he finds that these progressive students refused to segregate genres like folk, R&B, hard rock, and pop. Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower gives readers a front-row seat to a dynamic time for the music industry, countercultural politics, and youth culture.