Unruly Rhetorics: Protests, Persuasion, and Publics ed. by Johnathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch (review)

The panoptic hegemony of neoliberalism and the question of whether it can be effectively resisted hangs over the whole of Unruly Rhetorics: Protests, Persuasion, and Publics, edited by Johnathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch. The book's authors not only celebrate the democratic potential in specific recent movements of dissent. Many also assert something similar to what Yanira Rodriguez and Ben Kuebrich report of the student protests at Syracuse university, namely that the movement "was not enough," was not even sufficient to meet the core demands of the activists involved (171). Against such discouraging signals, John Ackerman and Meghan Dunn invoke what they call "the grand lesson" of Henri Lefebvre, namely "that we do not lose the battle so much as [expose] the conditions for renewed political energy" (267). Their chapter, "On Democracy's Return Home: The Occupation of Liberty/Zuccotti Park," makes a tentatively hopeful case for the recovery of democracy, offering the occupy movement as answer to Wendy Brown's downbeat prognosis that "we are everywhere homo oeconomicus and only homo oeconomicus" (264). In the context of neoliberalism's all-encompassing engines of privatization, the volume itself makes a similar move. It says specific movements and recent tactics can be recorded and considered, and doing so makes a claim for democracy's potential. Beyond this move to record the textures and materialities of recent protest movements, the editors also extract from the collection's various examples the principle of unruliness as a point of theory. They make it function as a signpost for political hope, arguing that unruliness represents a constitutive element of the ethical and the democratic, which not only "permeates discussions of contemporary protest" but politics itself (8).

Sometimes unpredictability counts as unruliness in the book. The volume consistently refuses the temptations of either place-based or technological determinism, instead repeatedly registering how histories, material conditions, and tactics re-emerge in different contexts, reinventing themselves in familiar patterns, but also in potentially new ones. In the occupy movement, for instance, according to Ackerman and Dunn, "the residua of everyday" exceeds the law or has the potential to disrupt what the volume's editors call neoliberalism's "smooth affects" (4). Likewise, activism's messiness functions in Nancy Welch's final chapter as a resource for rhetorical invention, described by John Trimbur elsewhere as the "unruly poetics" of politics, which don't always conform to ideals of deliberation. At the same time, according to Welch, that messiness also precludes settled theories about how unruliness functions in activism. In a related vein, Kevin Mahoney echoes the volume's editors, who question uplifting hymns to the internet's democratizing potential, asserting that technology merely amplifies political currents on the ground (150). Even as the book resists platitudes about technology and new media, it still asks the genuine question, "Are we seeing new modes of protest?" (4).

If we are to discover anything genuinely new or disruptive in recent protest movements, we will find it in their materiality, which helps to account for the book's emphasis on bodies and places. Speaking to that theme, Joyce Rain Anderson considers the Standing Rock protest of 2016 to protect the water and the land threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline. She sees "the Indigenous body as deeply rooted to place," and offers the Wampanoag word "akeem" as an example. As she explains, the "m" on the end of the word always indicated connectedness between the land and the body, but appropriately, the "m" was dropped from the word in the aftermath of contact with white settlers. Colonial maps, by contrast, demonstrate their ideology by representing Indigenous land as vacant or empty of bodies. The chapter shows how these differences in worldview played out in the nature of the Standing Rock protests. Native understandings of bodies connected to land not only positioned the protestors as water protectors, providing the impetus to...