Identity's Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion (review)

Dana Anderson's new book masterfully weaves together new understandings of identity and Burkeian theory through the analysis of four public conversion narratives, or "stories of transformation that would transform us as well" (57). Anderson believes that identity is a rhetorical achievement, salvaging the concept from naive modernist essentialism that "mortifies the self at play" (168), or poststructural readings that simply reduce the term to fluid fraudulence. Identity is conceived as a doxastic performance and persuasive strategy grounded in cultural needs to attribute a sense of self to both others and ourselves.

Using "The Dialectic of Constitutions" and "Dialectic in General," from Kenneth Burke's difficult, understudied third section of The Grammar of Motives, Anderson builds a model of identities as substantial "constitutions." In the first three chapters, he notes how Burke's penultimate project to appraise identity in the unfinished work, A Symbolic of Motives, relates to "the power of a constitution" to "define substance" (42). Anderson uses Burke's theories to illustrate how individuals "round out" their own substance from the "interactions of constitutional principles" (52), or the unique process of dialectical, terminological adjustments that are both the means and ends of identity. Thus, "identity is a rhetorical situation" (168) that "can never simply 'be' for rhetorical inquiry. It must do" (165).

In the fourth chapter, we are introduced to Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, a conversion narrative that seeks "to transform public understanding of how religious faith can inform radical social intervention" (17). Anderson argues that Day wrote her autobiography to defend her ambiguous identity as a radical journalist and Catholic convert. Day also wrote her story to face the fading public interest in and understandings of the Catholic Worker Movement, of which she had been a leader for years. She worked through the seeming contradictions between her radicalism and religion, using scenic changes to construct a new substance of self, and dialectically merged the two competing principles into the synthesis "Catholic social activist" (85), a reformed identity (or constitution). Ultimately, Day "depict[s] the religious radicalism she embodies … as a vital force for social transformation" (76), extending the invitation for her audiences to work for religious social justice based upon her account.

Next, Anderson turns to Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, the political autobiography of journalist David Brock. Brock was infamous for his polemic conservative writings against Anita Hill and the Clintons throughout the 1990s, and his subsequent party switch to the progressive movement in later years. Anderson uses Brock's account to argue that ethos and identity mutually imply one another, as "articulations of who you are create expectations about how you act," and vice versa (94). In this implication, "identity is more limited than character in its ability to shape itself to … situations, constrained by our cultural expectations about the realness of identity" (97). In short, "when identity fails, it is a lie," because of common attributions of its trans-situational character (98). Anderson finds that Brock's preconversion ethos of a vacillating, tortured identity invites reader sympathy, whereas his postconversion ethos, which should have exemplified a change in character given his newly substantiated identity, was betrayed by his postconversion acts. Brock's "competing ethos of tell-all insider complicates the clean break of conversion Brock asserts" through his continued use of tactics such as name-calling and tabloid-esque gossip (113). Anderson leaves open the question of Brock's ongoing public standing, and states that ultimately "what makes identity interesting is its ever-present potential for change and transformation" (117).

The subject of the sixth chapter is Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir, an account of gender transformation by the famous professor of economics and history (formerly Donald McCloskey). McCloskey contends "that there are limits to our agency in determining who and what we are" (18), and that her journey from male to female involved finding a real gender identity beneath gendered social practices. Anderson identifies "agency and gender" (123) as...