Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At a Christmas party in 2008, in discussing the recent election of Barack Obama, a stranger expressed both his pleasure at the election’s outcome and his concern for who the man might prove to be. I was surprised; I thought the election said less about Obama and more about the character of the American citizen. A majority of voters had examined their nation, its problems, and their interests and voted for a man of color, a man seemingly outside the machines of media and party, and a man with ties to Africa and Islam. That is, many Americans voted for someone who was not like them; they embraced the natural and endless occurrence of strangers, and they accepted the unpredictable and impure plurality that is real politics. In repudiating torture, war, and economic frivolity, voters performed acts of citizenship. At that point, I had stopped writing on deliberation, democracy, and rights. The election of Obama revitalized my writing on performative deliberation , and so the book owes its greatest debt to the majority of the U.S. electorate. Even so, this project required the individual help of many people. Perhaps the biggest backers were the scholars who asked me to contribute to their projects in a variety of ways, enriching my thinking and keeping my fingers on the keyboard. I am grateful for the opportunity to write with Roberta Binkley, Elizabeth Flynn, Carol Lipson, LuMing Mao, Eileen Schell, Edward Schiappa, Jan Swearingen, Hui Wu, and always Andrea Lunsford. These scholars are all committed to broadening the Western rhetorical tradition . I particularly remember Carol Lipson’s encouraging me to write on comparative rhetoric, and when I protested that I couldn’t, as I was leaving soon for a Fulbright year in China, she replied that I must contribute for just that reason. Working with Wendy Hesford, Wendy Kozol, and Lester Olson taught me so much about the connections between rhetoric and human rights; I often felt like a student at their feet. Keeping me grounded in rhetoric, Janet Atwill, Brenda Brueggemann, Suresh Canagarajah, James Fredal, Lynee Lewis Gaillet, Cheryl Glenn, Deborah Hawhee, Krista Ratcliffe, and Jack Selzer have given me important opportunities to think and speak. On more than one occasion, Carol Colatrella, Robin Grey, and Alan Nadel viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS have given me directions. Always, the crowd at the SUNY Council on Writing gave me plenty on which to ruminate: I have grown from my work with Pat Belanoff, Cynthia Davidson, Tom Friedrich, jil hanifan, John McGinnis, Kelly McKinney, Michael Murphy, and Melissa Tombro. The project benefited from my seminars on human rights and the thoughtful engagement of my graduate students, especially Banu Ozel, Hyeon Jeong Lee, Swati Bandi, Anita Song, Yvonne Fulmore, Jonathan Fernandez, and Laura Felschow. A conversation with Nilufar Muhammedova initiated a discussion on the different origins of women’s rights. My brilliant colleagues Carrie Bramen, Tom Burkman, Ken Dauber, Roger Desforges, Carine Mardorossian , Alex Reid, Jeff Stadelman, and Jiyuan Yu are the Steinways of intellectual sounding boards. Each gave me strength at the right moment. Steven Mailloux and an anonymous reviewer helped me summate and refine Deliberative Acts. At Penn State Press, Kendra Boileau helped me envision the manuscript as a book, and the eloquent copyediting of Laura Reed-Morrisson aided that vision. Laura Taddeo offered me the chance to speak on Amy Tan, one of my very few forays into literature. Cindy Anderson lent me her issue of Marie Claire, and the Petrocellis introduced me to popular books on political lies. Maeve O’Neil offered her precocious knowledge of language games. These friends have made my work and my mind better. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the opportunity to participate in three summer seminars on politics and political theory, two particularly on China. The seminar with Roger Ames at the East-West Center in 2001 has influenced my thinking ever since. My time in Asia broadened my understanding of deliberation and rights; for that time I thank the Fulbright program, especially David Adams, for an opportunity to live and work at Sichuan University, and University at Buffalo’s Vice Provost of International Education, Stephen Dunnett, for my year teaching at our Singapore campus. Portions of the chapter 3, “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” first appeared in Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. I thank them for the opportunity to write...