A collection of essays providing insights into new directions in rhetorical history
 
Kathleen J. Turner’s 1998 multicontributor volume Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases quickly became a foundational text in the field, and the studies in the book have served as an important roadmap for scholars undertaking such scholarship. In the decades since its publication, developments in rhetorical-historical research, engaged scholarship, and academic interventionism have changed the practice of rhetorical history tremendously.

To address this shift, Turner and Jason Edward Black have edited a much-anticipated follow-up volume: Reframing Rhetorical History: Cases, Theories, and Methodologies, which reassesses both history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice. This new book attends to a number of topics that have become not just hot-button issues in rhetorical scholarship but have entrenched themselves as anchors within the field. These include digital rhetoric, public memory, race and ethnicity, gender dynamics and sexualities, health and well-being, transnationalism and globalization, social justice, archival methods and politics, and colonialism and decoloniality.

The sixteen essays are divided into four major parts: “Digital Humanities and Culture” introduces methods and cases using twenty-first century technologies; “Identities, Cultures, and Archives” addresses race and gender within the contexts of critical race theory, gendered health rhetoric, race-based public memory, and class/sectionalism; “Approaches to Nationalism and Transnationalism” explores ideologies related to US and international cultures; and “Metahistories and Pedagogies” explores creative ways to approach the frame of metarhetorical history given what the field has learned since the publication of Doing Rhetorical History.

CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew D. Barnes / Jason Edward Black / Bryan Crable / Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels / Matthew deTar / Margaret Franz / Joe Edward Hatfield / J. Michael Hogan / Andre E. Johnson / Madison A. Krall / Melody Lehn / Lisbeth A. Lipari / Chandra A. Maldonado / Roseann M. Mandziuk / Christina L. Moss / Christopher J. Oldenburg / Sean Patrick O’Rourke / Daniel P. Overton / Shawn J. Parry-Giles / Philip Perdue / Kathleen J. Turner

 

Expanding the scope of religious rhetoric  

Over the past twenty-five years, the intersection of rhetoric and religion has become one of the most dynamic areas of inquiry in rhetoric and writing studies. One of few volumes to include multiple traditions in one conversation, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century engages with religious discourses and issues that continue to shape public life in the United States.  

This collection of essays centralizes the study of religious persuasion and pluralism, considers religion’s place in U.S. society, and expands the study of rhetoric and religion in generative ways. The volume showcases a wide range of religious traditions and challenges the very concepts of rhetoric and religion. The book’s eight essays explore African American, Buddhist, Christian, Indigenous, Islamic, and Jewish rhetoric and discuss the intersection of religion with feminism, race, and queer rhetoric—along with offering reflections on how to approach religious traditions through research and teaching. In addition, the volume includes seven short interludes in which some of the field’s most accomplished scholars recount their experiences exploring religious rhetorics and invite readers to engage these exigent lines of inquiry.  

By featuring these diverse religious perspectives, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century complicates the field’s emphasis on Western, Hellenistic, and Christian ideologies. The collection also offers teachers of writing and rhetoric a range of valuable approaches for preparing today’s students for public citizenship in our religiously diverse global context.