The Rhetorics of Social Justice
SPCM538
Stephen Hartnett
2:00-5:00, Tuesdays

These are dangerous, heartbreaking days. Terrorists slaughter innocents, storms and government incompetence wash away cities and even regions, imperial invaders level countries in the name of democracy; and lurking beneath these spectacular stories, the most deadly killers of all—dirty water, lack of food, and diseases easily prevented—relentlessly drag millions of innocents to premature deaths. While the U.S. government prosecutes its bungled war on terrorism abroad, the drug war—budgeted at over $20 billion this year—rolls on at home, leading to over-crowded prisons, the militarization of police forces, and the undermining of democratic checks-and-balances. The president chirps about economic justice in the form of foreign aid, yet U.S. agricultural tariffs alone produce profits roughly six times the amount the U.S. gives to developing countries in aid each year. Terrorism, war, imperialism, economic colonialism, health catastrophes, natural disasters, environmental degradation—on and on it goes in a terrible catalogue of suffering. . . and where are the academics? How many articles in leading academic journals tackle these topics? Isn’t our collective silence on the most pressing issues of the day embarrassing, even shameful? Isn’t it time for all of us to rethink what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and why we do it?

To see how some of our colleagues have answered these questions, this course will examine works by scholars and activists responding to imperialism, terrorism, disasters, the drug war, monopolistic media, and other topics as chosen by students. Each week we’ll read a seminal historical or theoretical text on a chosen topic; this text will be accompanied by an essay that provides rhetorical analysis the problem, speeches that address it, and examples of how activists have tackled it. Given student interest, we may also supplement our readings by viewing films, listening to music, and considering other art forms. We will therefore construct a constellation of the available means of persuasion, hoping to map the contemporary rhetorics of social justice.

Here is an example of how we’ll proceed each week (in this case in week 2): to think about the ways concepts of agency, action, and responsibility have been complicated by recent cultural and economic transformations, we’ll read parts of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; to think about agency in a postmodern rhetorical frame, we’ll read Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean” [from Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 2:1 (March 2005): 1-19]; to study how questions of agency are understood by the architects of neoliberal capitalism, we’ll read speeches by representatives of the World Bank and IMF; to watch how activists have responded, we’ll study documents from and events led by 50 Years is Enough, MoveOn, and Global Exchange. We’ll thus approach the question of agency from theoretical, rhetorical, economic, and activist perspectives.

Some of the books we’ll rely upon this semester include: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Iraq War Reader (NYC: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969); Kathy Kelly, Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (Chicago: AK, 2005); Robert Jensen, Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); and Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994).