Papers by Christina L Moss
Lexington Books, 2025
Amending our Pasts and Futures: Observing Media and Place as Means to Memory is an edited volume ... more Amending our Pasts and Futures: Observing Media and Place as Means to Memory is an edited volume presenting original research from established and emerging scholars of public and collective memory. Contributors focus on topics including the memory of race and slavery, wars of oppression, and regional and ethnic identities to interrogate how we as collectives remember, commemorate, discuss, forget, and question what is historically revealed, appropriated, silenced, or concealed from public discourse. Through analyses of a wide range of cultural texts and contexts, contributors to this volume demonstrate the crucial role of communication and media in shaping public opinion—and our collective present more broadly—in an effort to amend our painful histories.
This essay analyzes the interconnectivity of regional, political party, and national identities a... more This essay analyzes the interconnectivity of regional, political party, and national identities and their association with cultural hegemony. The 2004 Republican National Convention Keynote Address by Democratic Senator Zell Miller coupled with his book A National Party No More (2003) created an event that displays how the Southern regional narrative and its role in the national narrative reinforce a white hegemonic view of Southerners and “the South.” This analysis shows that Zell Miller's keynote address and book provided an opportunity for a renewed and more inclusive version of Southern and national identity. However, Miller, political party spokespeople, and media representatives never capitalized on the opportunity but, instead, further entrenched white hegemony into both regional and national identity narratives during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Book Reviews by Christina L Moss
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2014
Rhetoric Amp Public Affairs, 2013
Guest Lectures by Christina L Moss
Articles & Book Chapters by Christina L Moss
Rhetoric and Public Affairs
The case of Southern regionalism shows both the problems with current treatments of regionalism-i... more The case of Southern regionalism shows both the problems with current treatments of regionalism-illustrative of the problem of colonialist perspectives more generally-and the path forward. That path forward involves rethinking whose ancestors count as members of a place, the issue of whose voices are centered, memory and trauma, and counterpublics. The authors advise (1) embracing the field's interest in local identities and identity movements-therefore, interrogating rhetoric as symbol systems carried in intergenerational, relational identity; (2) pushing further against colonialism, as the world is more layered by global systems of trauma and memory; and (3) admitting that nation-building rhetoric is an imperfect paradigm compared to resistive counterpublic discourse. A t least since the turn of the century, rhetoric graduate programs and journal spaces like this attempted to internationalize and diversify the study of rhetoric and public address. The process can be painfully slow and often relies on one set of scholars or one set of works "doing international studies" and another set of scholars or journals "doing
Charley Bordelon has returned to Louisiana after the death of her father. She finds Ernest Bordel... more Charley Bordelon has returned to Louisiana after the death of her father. She finds Ernest Bordelon, family patriarch and sugarcane farmer, had not been able to farm for two years due to financial problems. As Charley and her siblings work to deal with their grief and put their father's affairs in order, they come to realize just how much the farm means to them and each other. The final scene shows Charley walking an untended field at dusk. A careful breeze blows as Charley stops, looks out, and somberly and defiantly says: "I'm sorry Daddy. I will fix this" ("First things First"). 2 Thus, the first episode of Queen Sugar ends. With Charley's declarative "I will fix this," the land becomes a representation of the solutions and challenges to current day racial and social injustices. While the viewer has some idea of the "this" in Charley's statement, revelations throughout the series indicate there is much that needs fixing for this Louisiana Parish, the South, and its Black residents. Plantation mentalities, police brutality, incarceration, white exploitation of Black farmers, drug abuse, and toxic masculinity are just some of the challenges that top the list. The scene of Charley's defiant statement is somewhat reminiscent of a white Southern female who also stood in a desolate field and said "as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again." However, unlike Scarlett O'Hara, Charley takes on not just a personal problem, but a systemic one. We watch as Charley, her siblings, and the land disrupt the hierarchies and distinctions of what Scarlett's white South created and maintained. Over the next four seasons Charley Bordelon and her siblings, Nova and Ralph Angel, fight to keep the farm going, meet challenges of white supremacy, and battle against
In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mam... more In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner's responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown's conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.
Rhetoric Review, 2019
Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional iden... more Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical
regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insideroutsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.
Books by Christina L Moss
Through ruined monuments and museums, storied traditions of food and music, Southern oratory and ... more Through ruined monuments and museums, storied traditions of food and music, Southern oratory and racism, architecture and brotherhood, the Southern United States is a powerful resource for reckoning with historical trauma on a global scale. Moss and Inabinet present a reconstruction of the South from this viewpoint, asking how a more diverse set of texts and voices, a more inclusive notion of geography, and a more critical analysis of power moves this reckoning forward. Toward this end, the book advances in three sections: a disruption of nostalgia, a decentering of old martyrs to carve out new archetypal identities, and communicative interventions to heal wounds against the marginalized. The South becomes not an exceptional, unique place, but a model for reinterpretation of regional rhetorics and who gets to speak for their place and time.
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Papers by Christina L Moss
Book Reviews by Christina L Moss
Guest Lectures by Christina L Moss
Articles & Book Chapters by Christina L Moss
regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insideroutsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.
Books by Christina L Moss
regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insideroutsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.