Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric

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.

“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

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroductionRobert HarimanChapter 1. The Communal Dilemma as a Cultural Resource in Hungarian Political ExpressionDavid Boromisza-HabashiChapter 2. Chronotopes of the Political: Public Discourse, News Media, and Mass Action in Post-Conflict MacedoniaAndrew GraanChapter 3. The In-Between States: Enduring Catastrophes as Sources of Democracy’s Deadlocks in the Balkans: The Case of KosovoNaser MiftariChapter 4. Occupy Wall Street as Rhetorical Citizenship: The Ongoing Relevance of Pragmatism for Deliberative DemocracyRobert DanischChapter 5. Contemporary Social Movements and the Emergent Nomadic Political LogicPeter N. Funke and Todd WolfsonChapter 6. “Project Heat” and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public HousingCatherine FennellChapter 7. Reading between the Digital Lines: Narrating the Political Rhetoric of Ethical ConsumptionEleftheria J. LekakisChapter 8. The Uncertainty of Power and the Certainty of Irony: Encountering the State in Kara, Southern EthiopiaFelix GirkeChapter 9. Grassroots Discourses in Times of Scarcity: Debating the 2004 Locust Plague in Northwestern Senegal and the WorldChristian MeyerChapter 10. Too Too Much Much: Presence and Catastrophe in Contemporary ArtMonica WestinConclusion: What Next? Modernity, Revolution, and the “Turn” to CatastropheRalph CintronContributorsIndex