Regional Rhetorics

Regionalism is a term that has been used to describe many different kinds of phenomena, including political, geographical, architectural, and literary. This collection examines "rhetorical regionalism," or the relationships we have to physical regions and the idea of regionality. Regional rhetorics are more than simply the fact of local conditions in certain spaces. They are the ways people produce feelings of belonging and discourses of normalcy within those spaces. The authors in this collection bypass familiar narratives of nationality and localism in order to imagine regions as interfaces that help us to negotiate everyday life. Regions are more than physical spaces, therefore. Regional rhetorics can provide different narratives in order to help us invent new kinds of connections to place and publics. They give us new descriptions of relationships, a power that merges together the tectonic (spatial) and the architectonic (discursive) impulses of rhetoric. The book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

This collection examines "regional rhetorics," or discourses relating to both geographical and imagined regional spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

1. From Architectonic to Tectonics: Introducing Regional Rhetorics Jenny Rice 2. The Meanings of Kansas: Rhetoric, Regions, and Counter Regions Dave Tell 3. "Raices Americanas": Indigenist Art, America, and Arguments for Ecuadorian Nationalism Christa J. Olson 4. "A Child Born of the Land": The Rhetorical Aesthetic of Hawaiian Song Gregory Clark 5. "From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow": Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power Ronald Walter Greene and Kevin Douglas Kuswa 6. Regionalization and the Construction of Ephemeral Co-Location Andrew Wood 7. Book Reviews Timothy Oleksiak, Diana I. Bowen and Isabel Gardette