Category: All blog entries
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Race and justice
“Yet we continue to use the term ‘race,’ even though many of us are very careful to set it off in quotation marks to indicate that while we do not take seriously the notion of ‘race’ as biologically grounded, neither are we able to think about racist power structures and…
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In defense of visible rhetoric
I recently ran into a college professor–someone I very much respect–who was of the opinion that rhetoric does not include the visible. I suppose it all depends on how you define certain key terms, one of them being rhetoric. I adhere to the classical definition; rhetoric is the art of…
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On David Spurr’s “The Rhetoric of Empire”
“The nomination of the visible is no idle metaphysic, no disinterested revealing of the world’s wonders. It is, on the contrary, a mode of thinking and writing wherein the world is radically transformed into an object of possession.” (Spurr 27) Picking up where I left off in my last post,…
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Presidents and chimps
I’ve enrolled in a course called “Race, Rhetoric and Technology” this semester, and our very first course reading really got me thinking. (A good sign!) It was an article on race in America by Victor Villanueva. Although I certainly didn’t agree with everything in the article (especially the notion of…
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What is rhetoric? What is race?
“Racism engulfs an ideology that does not require the presence of empirically determinable cultural differences. It substitutes … a fiction and a mystique about human behavior for the objective realization of true similarities and differences …” (Smedley 31) The question “What is rhetoric?” is one that I consider every day;…
Erin Anne Clark 