Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action

Published by Berghahn Books 2015

Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric

The Texture of Political Action

Edited by: Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron

Volume 7 in the series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782387473

Overview
Contents

About this book

This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

Author / Editor information

Robert Hariman is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Political Style: The Artistry of Power and, with John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, and The Public Image: Photography: Photography and Civic Spectatorship.

Ralph Cintron is Professor in the Departments of English as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday; Democracy as Fetish; and co-editor/PI of 60 Years of Migration: Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland.

Robert Hariman is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Political Style: The Artistry of Power and, with John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, and The Public Image: Photography: Photography and Civic Spectatorship.

Reviews

“This volume’s editors, Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron, along with their contributors, have produced a rich source of ideas for ethnographers of political economy. The introduction and conclusion are extraordinarily powerful in themselves, and the contributors respond sensitively to that framing, making for an unusually unified collection.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Each of these essays makes ‘visible’ just how entrenched modernity has become in a globalized society. Hariman and Cintron’s volume provides access points for uncovering the depths of modernity’s reach through a variety of methodologies. For those who study public rhetoric, this collection demonstrates how we might more productively study the local vis-à-vis the global by taking into account how rhetoric responds to moments of ‘catastrophic’ contingency.” • Rhetoric & Public Affairs

“The undoubted value of this book is how it shows a variety of actions, which can be understood as rhetorical.” • Res Rhetorica

“…the contributors here have given us a great deal to think about, especially the importance of rhetoric in the ‘texture’ of political discourse, and anthropologists can apply our methods and concepts to further elucidate and elaborate those processes and their rhetorical and practical consequences.” • Anthropology Review Database

“…an excellent collection and a fitting contribution to both the Rhetoric + Culture series and to the field as a whole… The range and inventiveness of methodological innovations in the volume is one of its primary strengths.” • Michael Kaplan, Baruch College, City University of New York

“This is a splendid collection, coherent and framed in two magisterial overviews, and so is greater than the sum of its parts. It has the capacity to enhance the subtlety and clarity of argument in the study of politics and political action across a wide variety of sites in today’s world. Both of the key ideas, the texture of political action and the primacy of catastrophe over revolution in today’s world, are very well argued and richly illustrated throughout.” • Michael Carrithers, Durham University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Introduction Robert Hariman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Communal Dilemma as a Cultural Resource in Hungarian Political Expression David Boromisza-Habashi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. Chronotopes of the Political: Public Discourse, News Media, and Mass Action in Postconflict Macedonia Andrew Graan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. The In-Between States: Enduring Catastrophes as Sources of Democracy’s Deadlocks in Kosovo Naser Miftari Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
4. Occupy Wall Street as Rhetorical Citizenship: The Ongoing Relevance of Pragmatism for Deliberative Democracy Robert Danisch Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
5. Contemporary Social Movements and the Emergent Nomadic Political Logic Peter N. Funke and Todd Wolfson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
6. “Project Heat” and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing Catherine Fennell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
7. Reading between the Digital Lines: The Political Rhetoric of Ethical Consumption Eleftheria J. Lekakis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
8. The Uncertainty of Power and the Certainty of Irony: Encountering the State in Kara, Southern Ethiopia Felix Girke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
9. Grassroots Rhetorics in Times of Scarcity: Debating the 2004 Locust Plague in Northwestern Senegal and the World Christian Meyer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
10. Too Too Much Much: Presence and Catastrophe in Contemporary Art Monica Westin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	220
Conclusion: What Next? Modernity, Revolution, and the “Turn” to Catastrophe Ralph Cintron Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256