This book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing. In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century. This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.

This book arises from a symposium held in Oxford to consider the most fruitful trajectories of rhetoric in the 21st century. The gathering comprised an international delegation of leading scholars convened to assess—from an array of perspectives – the various possible futures of the ancient discipline of rhetoric as it responds vitally to the evolving contexts of the new millennium. This collection commemorates that event by extending its scrutiny into a number of specific fields of inquiry. It includes a foreword by Prof James J. Murphy, an introductory article by the editors, and six further articles commissioned from among the participants. The introduction provides a detailed account of the symposium, and foregrounds the delegates’ articles with a résumé of their arguments and consequent relevance to the overarching theme. Each contribution is a freshly minted and original piece of scholarship, true to the generative and interactive spirit of the enterprise, and speaking pertinently to the field of international rhetoric studies at the present time. Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century addresses a spectrum of concerns. Scholars and students of rhetoric and language-use will naturally find much of interest here, and the inclusive ambit of the work will also appeal to students of ethics, religion, comparative literature, intercultural studies, and the growing field of communication studies.

Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Through a fusion of narrative and analysis, Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines how theater can enact critical discourse analysis, and how micro-instances of iniquitous language use have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to marginalized groups of people. Drawing from Aristophanes' rhetorical plays as a template for rhetoric in action, the author poses the stage as a rhetorical site whereby we can observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Using critical discourse analysis and Judith Butler’s theories of the performative body as a methodological and analytical lens, the book explores how a handful of American plays in the latter part of the 20th century – the works of Tony Kushner, Suzan Lori-Parks, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others – use rhetoric in order to perform and challenge marginalizing language about groups who are not offered center stage in public and political spheres. This innovative study initiates a conversation long overdue between scholars in rhetorical and performance studies; as such, it will be essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students in the areas of rhetorical studies, performance studies, theatre studies, and critical discourse analysis.

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

As the rich words from the African proverbs resonate into the twenty-first century regarding the importance of identity and telling the stories of people of African descent through the eyes of the people, the grand rhetorician and griot of the twentieth century Dr William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s infamous problem remains so today – “the problem of the colour-line.” After the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president of the United States; after the Civil Rights Movement; after Brown versus the Board of Education; after the students’ right to their own language; after Plessy versus Ferguson; and the murders of innocent, young African American males, including Emmett Till, Timothy Thomas, Trayvon Martin, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, people of African descent are still battling with being labelled a “problem in one’s own country” while the USA continues to strive for a post-racial era. W.E.B. Du Bois’s rhetoric and motives in general are more relevant today than ever in reassessing what he so eloquently describes and unveils through the phrase “double consciousness” in Souls of Black Folk (1903), through which he reveals the feeling of a problem. This ground-breaking volume, featuring contributions from W.E.B. Du Bois’s great-grandson, Arthur McFarlane II, among others, is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on the foundation of Du Bois’s Africana Rhetoric through the origins of Africana Studies, Pan Africanism, and Africana Critical Theory. Part II focuses on Du Bois’s rhetorical strategies and rhetorical analyses in his scholarship and life. Part III focuses on gender and sexuality in Du Bois’s selected works. This work, the first of its kind devoted exclusively to Du Bois’s rhetoric and motives—can serve as a blueprint for today as the struggle toward a post racial society continues.