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  • Rhetorics of Engagement and Activism:Questions Moving Forward
  • E. Johanna Hartelius (bio)
Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement. Edited by Seth Kahn and Jonghwa Lee. New York: Routledge, 2011; pp. vi + 205. $100.00 cloth; $39.95 paper.
Democracies to Come. By Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008; pp. vii + 121. $60.00 cloth.
The Public Work of Rhetoric. Edited by John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010; pp. vi + 308. $49.95 cloth.
Rhetorics for Community Action. By Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011; pp. vii + 325. $80.00 cloth.
Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists. By Jason Del Gandio. Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers, 2008; pp. v + 235. $17.95 paper.

Engagement" has in the last 15 years become a leitmotif of American academe. Sometimes attributed to Ernest Boyer's 1996 summons to reconnect higher learning institutions to society, the concept exerts considerable rhetorical force in research, teaching, and administration. Many universities and colleges have a center, institute, or initiative for civic, community, social, or political engagement. As a transdisciplinary educational project, or "productive coupling of the academy's intellectual resources with the enterprise of generating solutions to current real-world challenges," engagement resonates powerfully within rhetoric, communication, and composition.1 In a recent forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech dedicated to "engaged scholarship," Joshua Gunn and John Louis Lucaites explore the concept's intersections with rhetorical studies.2 They chronicle the historical development of engaged scholarship in the United States, emphasizing the controversies, risks, and systemic constraints, even penalties, that politically oriented work entails for academics. These issues, and others central to the QJS forum, appear in the books reviewed here.

Evidence of the exigency for academic engagement abounds; this is to say that dire circumstances—geopolitical turmoil, social tensions, recession, record unemployment, environmental degradation, and so on—make demands on scholars. The books reviewed in this essay take up the notion of engaged rhetorical scholarship. Specifically, they explicate why and how rhetoricians (in departments of English and Communication) mobilize their academic expertise beyond the university, and conversely, how and why they bring the public into their research and pedagogy. Assuming a democratic orientation to this project, the authors assign rhetoric a kind of mandate to (re)discover its civic functions and purposes. Of particular interest to readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs is that, in each book, rhetoric is defined quite differently in relation to what the authors call engagement and/or activism.

I begin this review introducing each of the books individually. I then proceed to a more thematic treatment of the authors' recurring concerns, offering comments and reflections. In this commentary, I deliberately emphasize and conclude with questions rather than answers; I articulate some of the questions prompted by the books, and leave others to readers' imaginations and motives. I hope that vigorous discussion of difficult questions will strengthen and sharpen rhetoricians' work in the still-emerging project of engaged scholarship. At stake in this movement, it seems to me, is nothing less than rhetoric's academic and sociopolitical purpose." [End Page 782]

The Books

Activist Rhetorics

In Activism and Rhetoric, editors Seth Kahn and Jonghwa Lee present essays by rhetorician-activists from various generations and academic positions. This diversity of approaches, interventions, and definitions of activism reflect well the subject's complexity. Contributors' activism takes place in the Cherokee Nation (Cushman, 56-61), in composition and the writing process (Kahn, 91-99), in contemporary Russia (Feyh, 100-12), in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Abraham, 115-24), in the "armchair" (DeBlais and Grettano, 170-78), and in the Ivory Tower (Jones, 179-89). Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is its scope. Junior faculty speak to the precarious prospect of disrupting a department's or university's expectations of civility and decorum, while senior scholars locate a lifetime of on- and off-campus work in a well-developed theoretical corpus, reflecting diachronically on the phases of politically inflected scholarship throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part I of Activism and Rhetoric frames theoretically the project of activism relative to...

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