Rhetoric and Public Culture

To trace the complex “passion for meaning” (Barthes) that animated the consumption and interpretation of Yearnings, a television melodrama that aired in China just a year and a half after the Tiananmen demonstrations, requires moving beyond a dichotomy between “the political” and “the popular.” This article argues that Yearnings became a nationwide controversy because it allegorizes post-Tiananmen dilemmas of national identity in relation to socialism and in relation to the diverse class and gender positionings of the characters as well as the viewers. Textualist and reader-response analyses of popular culture need to be broadened by an ethnographic approach that asks sociodiscursive questions about the operations of popular culture as a site for the constitution of national subjects, one that offers complicated possibilities for oppositional practices. [China, national identity, popular culture, gender and class, politics of representations, the state]

Social movements often deploy place rhetorically in their protests. The rhetorical performance and (re)construction of places in protest can function in line with the goals of a social movement. Our essay offers a heuristic framework—place in protest—for theorizing the rhetorical force of place and its relationship to social movements. Through analysis of a variety of protest events, we demonstrate how the (re)construction of place may be considered a rhetorical tactic along with the tactics we traditionally associate with protest, such as speeches, marches, and signs. This essay has implications for the study of social movements, the rhetoricity of place, and how we study places.

ABSTRACT This paper critically appraises the rhetoric of marketing management texts. Its interpretive frame is informed respectively by critical management and discourse analytic theoretical traditions. Its main data set is drawn from popular
textbooks written for taught university courses but it also draws attention to similar rhetorical strategies in leading academic marketing journals. In addition, parallels are drawn with other popular management and consulting fields. In this way the paper
attempts to mark out an initial topology of the ideological influence that is enabled and mobilized by marketing's rhetorical strategies. Marketing rhetoric often escapes critical attention precisely because it is platitudinous. Marketing management axioms have become slogans and the slogans have become cliches regularly employed in organizational, educational and political settings. But the prevalence of platitudinous rhetoric in management consulting schemes does not necessarily hinder their popularity or inhibit the deployment of their rhetorical/ideological strategies in other settings. Popular marketing management rhetoric is a special case because it positions itself not only as a prescriptive management-consulting framework but also as a legitimate academic fleld. It is in the latter guise that the success of managerial marketing's rhetorical/ideological strategies has proved most striking.

In February 1862 numerous celebrations of George Washington's birthday commenced with ceremonial readings of the Farewell Address.  With heightened public interest, Harper's Weekly published a flag display in its reporting of the event.  This essay explores how the illustration functioned as an epideictic vision to reconstitute the meaning of the Farewell Address within the context of competing Civil War ideologies and disparate strategies of commemoration.  Moreover, this study demonstrates how epideictic visions like the Harper's Weekly image work as public pedagogy that aid audiences in understanding the civic virtue relevant to ceremonial repetition.

Winner of the Charles Kneupper award from Rhetoric Society of America (the "most significant contribution to scholarship in rhetoric" in 2016), this article explores the role of rhetoric in an American West town that embraced prostitution as integral to its sense of identity from 1884-1991, when its economy began to shift from silver mining to tourism. The circulation of social values negotiated through gossip enabled a century-long period during which brothels flourished in an illegal yet decriminalized way. Even though the madams and sex workers were subject to spatial restrictions and the whims of local political and regulatory power, they managed to harness the available means of opportunistic discourse often overlooked in rhetorical analysis. I highlight the influence of the semi-private exchange of rumor and normative small talk. Arising out of spatial and qualitative public memory, gossip can be a persuasive force that harmonizes community needs across past, present, and future.

This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze book 6, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught.

Frederick Douglass spoke to a multiracial public sphere by engaging in "antagonistic cooperation" with white and black abolitionists. He served as an "integrative ancestor" for all those trying to help build a multiracial democracy. Douglass'  interracial rhetoric was developed to engage the different constituents of his multiracial audiences. I examine some rhetorical strategies Douglass employed in his "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” speech order to communicate with the different constituents of his multiracial audience. Since many of these strategies were derived from Bible stories and
Enlightenment/ "natural rights" philosophy, I  focus on the  streams of Christian and political egalitarianism which fed Douglass' vision, with three main goals:
1) to give a sense of Douglass' stature in his own time;
2) to deepen our understanding of Douglass' biracial identity and political philosophy, and of how this makes him an "integrative ancestor"; and
3) to illustrate the continuing timeliness of Douglass' critique of American racialism.

For a period, in the run up to the election (2007–2008) and the months after the election, the name ‘Obama’ signified hope for millions, not just in America but across the world. As the hope turned to disappointment, the financial crisis deepened and the Arab Spring renewed a call for a ‘humanity’ that could transcend the differences of nations and faiths. What can be learnt from such events about the pedagogies of hope, disappointment and public action? Are there lessons for a transformative pedagogy, an education that could underpin and continuously create the conditions for a politics of freedom and social justice? A range of print, broadcast and digital/Internet news media is analysed to explore the political/rhetorical/pedagogical strategies already set into play that ‘manufacture disappointment’ in order to undermine and negate the transformative, transgressive symbolic significance of ‘Obama’ and thus manage the theme of change to reassert the same.

This project examined comedic representations of US Vice President Joe Biden to analyze persona rhetoric in a media environment filled with circulating personae, or the many roles both created by and attributed to such figures. While sometimes supportive of the politician's intended roles, we found that circulating personae can disrupt the first persona, complicate the invitations and control exerted over the second persona, propel strategic and non-strategic authorships deflecting or silencing a third persona, and provide an undertow of multiple meanings supplementing a fourth persona. Several implications are drawn, including how circulating personae may neuter roles important to political rhetoric and public culture.

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

The literature on "Public Understanding of Science" addresses the difference between scientific claims and their public representation in the media, and the problems arising from this difference. Sometimes scientists themselves are seen as popularizing, even distorting, their findings in order to get public attention. One part of this literatureassumes that scientists use a different rhetoric to communicate with the public than they use with their peers. However, another strand (e.g. Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Hilgartner, 1990; for a general overview see Lewenstein, 1995) takes a different view, which we will draw upon. Drawing on these accounts, we try, first, to challenge the assumption that scientists have only recently begun to address broader audiences. Second, we call into question the assumption that scientists make simplifications only for purposes of public communication. We focus on the relationship between the scientist, the public (academic and lay) and political power. We identify a double intrinsic relation that exists between the logic of scientific discovery and the attempt to address and persuade (multiple) audiences.

This essay argues that recent male performances of disaster
preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model
of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world”
conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for
collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain
times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate
anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final
resolution to male alienation. An examination of Nat Geo’s
Doomsday Preppers illustrates how these staged performances of
everyday life cultivate a dangerous vision of apocalyptic manhood
that consummates a fantasy of national virility in the demise of
feminine society.

Political science struggles, sometimes more than it knows, to study religion’s relationship with politics, democratic and otherwise. The difficulty is in part theoretical. This paper synthesizes diverse strains in recent scholarship on religion to propose a theoretically attuned definition well suited for empirical political science. Religions are defined as systems of shared activity organized around transcendental signifiers. Transcendental signifiers are readily identifiable in public discourse and are “god terms” that organize (or rest at the center of organized) systems of shared activity. This parsimonious definition admits both belief-oriented and practice-oriented phenomena and allows political scientists to study religion as it shapes political acts, interventions, and possibilities. For illustrative purposes, the paper examines a key speech delivered by Sukarno at Indonesia’s founding moment, in which naturalistically observable transcendental signifiers mark the mobilization of religion. Revising older histories that discover a contest between “secular” and “religious” actors, or that are keen to determine the sincerity of Sukarno’s own belief, we contend that Indonesia’s founding is best understood in terms of competing religious discourses that merge in the development of a new civil religion.

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2012. Public battles and private takeovers: Academies and the politics of educational governance. Journal of Pedagogy, 3 (1), 11-29

Introduced to the British education system under the Education Act 2002 and later enshrined in the New Labour government White Paper Higher Standards, Better Schools for All (DfES, 2005), the Academies policy was set up to enable designated under-performing schools to ‘opt out’ from the financial and managerial remit of Local Authorities (LAs) and enter into partnerships with outside sponsors. A radical piece of policy legislation, it captured New Labour’s commitment to (further) private sector involvement in public sector organisation – what might be termed a neoliberal or advanced liberal approach to education reform. A consequence of this has been the expansion of school-based definitions of ‘public accountability’ to encompass political, business, and other interest groups, together with the enlargement of the language of accountability itself. In this paper I address the importance of rethinking conventional public/private, political/commercial divides in light of these developments and foreground the changing nature of state power in the generation and assembly of different publics.

This essay examines how political leaders apologize for historical injustices.
Specifically, we analyze Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for
the head tax imposed upon Chinese immigrants. The prime minister’s apology was
historic in that it marked the first time a Canadian Prime Minister formally
apologized for the head tax. We argue that Harper used a combination of the
frontier myth and collective apology rhetoric in his expression of remorse toward
the Chinese-Canadian community. While controversial, this rhetoric created a
discursive space for a constructive and strengthened relationship between the
Chinese-Canadian community and the Canadian government.

The author examines community-focused apologies within international affairs. Specifically, he argues that this form of rhetoric functions as a rhetorical first step to healing relationships that have been hurt by the transgressions one group committed against another. In international affairs, transnational actors, typically nation-states through their political leaders, articulate community-focused apologia to mend relations between peoples, which may serve build a common path toward peace and deepen relationships between these actors. To illustrate this idea, he uses Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's 1995 apology for crimes Japan committed during its wartime past. Murayama's apology was an important step in mending relations between Japan and its neighbors. This article provides a better understanding as to the motives and options rhetors may use in apologizing for past injustices and serves to broaden the way we conceptualize the rhetorical genre of apologia.

This essay analyzes the Obama administration’s policy and policy rhetoric on immigration, showing that it works around and rearticulates neoliberal visions of race/ethnicity, culture, and U.S. identity. Obama’s stories of exemplary assimilated immigrants foreground values such as entrepreneurialism, responsibility, and neoliberal multiculturalism. These stories idealize certain forms of subjectivity and regulate the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of citizenship. Through the logic of neoliberal exception, Obama argues that American identity is both open to all who strive for it and also limited to the “right” kinds of immigrants. Critically analyzing President Obama’s celebrated immigration rhetoric, particularly in light of his administration’s restrictive immigration policies, can contribute to studies of race, citizenship, and immigration in the neoliberal era.

This essay illuminates the rhetorical contributions of Walter Benjamin, a critical intellectual whose insights about the liberatory role of the engaged social agent warrant closer attention in our discipline. In his written discourse, Benjamin attempted to develop a powerful means of social critique, the ethos of which I argue is propelled by a revolutionary rhetoric of redemption. Infusing a radical Messianic vision of a return to wholeness and purity with a concern for the living, breathing, historically situated actor, Benjamin made a unique case for the decisive function of critical intervention. As a forerunner to contemporary critical rhetorical studies, his ideas provide fruitful avenues for examining contemporary texts and rhetorical issues.

This article is about the cultural heritage of a men’s movement,
called PickUp, which gained momentum in the United States
during the 1990s. It finds that the seduction techniques they use
can be traced back to historical seducers. The discourse of
seduction is reconstructed by identifying four stages in seduction
culture from early modernity to the present. Thus contextualized,
the article interpretatively examines three cases of three famous
seducers: Don Juan, Giacomo Casanova, and Søren Kierkegaard,
while highlighting their changing masculinities as connected to
class position and affectual control. Providing insights into
particular social constellations and emotional dynamics of
seduction, the study finds a number of ‘social tropes’ that play a
pivotal role in all the scenes portrayed. Moreover, they have
strong structural equivalencies within the actively applied means
of seduction that the PickUp-Artist’s methodology prescribes,
which is outlined in several advice books that are part of the
contemporary self-help discourse. The conclusion comes back to
seduction’s complicated history, the theory of social tropes, and
problematizes the changing faces of masculinity within them.

This essay traces the rhetorical history of ''socialized medicine,'' offering an explanation for, and critique of, its pervasiveness in contemporary health care debates. My analysis focuses on the well-organized and well-financed lobbying effort by the American Medical Association aimed at defeating reforms during the New Deal era. I focus on how the persistence of ''socialized medicine'' as a naturalized term in contemporary discourse functions to reinforce a mythic perspective of U.S. democracy as primarily individualistic and resistant to programs aimed at benefiting the larger community. Ultimately, the essay seeks to facilitate critical reflection on this problematic term for the sake of enriching democratic practice in the present.

This essay examines Texas representative Ron Paul’s foreign policy discourse during
the 2008 presidential campaign. The author argues that Paul encased his opposition
to America’s foreign policy within a secular jeremiad. Although Paul failed to win
any of the Republican primaries, his opposition to America’s involvement with Iraq
and other parts of the globe is a microcosm of a larger debate occurring among U.S.
foreign policy elites on the extent of America’s role within the world and about the
very nature of its exceptional status. This analysis informs a theoretical understanding
of American exceptionalism and interrogates a larger debate in U.S. foreign policy.

This essay theorizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme, an emergent argument formation surrounding analogico-digital photography. Instead of presuming the naturalism of images, we contend that contemporary audiences have a heightened awareness of the ways that digital photography is altered. Drawing on the quadripartita ratio, or four categories of change associated with rhetorical figuration, we explore a series of image controversies that denaturalize assumptions about photographic realism. We examine how contemporary protesters respond to this shift in interpretive conventions by making the unnaturalistic enthymeme visible through culture jamming commercial billboards. The unnaturalistic enthymeme does not supplant the naturalistic enthymeme, but instead enables a “hypersophistic” attitude in visual culture—one that decides the veridicality of photographs through argument instead of assumptions about technological objectivity.

"Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions; rather, it would be as natural, spontaneous, and total as with those ideal prototypes of communication, the theologian's angels, or 'messengers.'" --Kenneth Burke, _A Rhetoric of Motives_ (22)

Note: I am making this paper available here because since its publication in RSQ 1995, it has been missing the diagram, "The Diaspora of Western Philosophy,"  discussed in some detail within its pages.  One could attribute its disappearance to mystical processes... but I prefer to make that (more recently designed) diagram available here. With apologies to the Rhetoric Society of America.

This article considers how venereal disease campaigns during World
War II offered a warrant through public health discourse for the
mass incarceration of American women in an era of shifting gender
expectations. During the war years, at least 30,000 American women
detained without documentation were held in domestic quarantine
camps under suspicion of transmitting venereal diseases to unsuspecting
soldiers and thereby undermining the war effort. Analyzing
public health campaign posters from this period, I argue that the
U.S. government achieved the rhetorical transformation of allegedly
promiscuous white women into state enemies through visual tropes
of the “public woman.” The conclusion considers how analyzing less
prevalent detainment discourses, such as those embedded in public
health, may aid in understanding contemporary detainment issues.

Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s alignment of ethics and potentiality, this essay questions the ethical dimension of gesture in the field of dance as an eminently potentiality-bound art form. This draws on Daniel Sibony’s concept of law and dance, according to which the body simultaneously repels and longs for the law as a nexus of heteronomous structures. I frame this through a revision of Aby Warburg’s rhetorical concept, pathos formula, into the corollary term, ethos formula, as the encoded movement patterns of ethical attitudes or comportments which are motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content. Do gestures and their citation in dance bear an ethical dimension similar to the encoded transmission of emotions through movement?

This new concept of ethos formula finds an excellent example in the work of the American choreographer Ted Shawn (1891–1972). His strikingly hybrid use of ethos formula from the 19th century Catholic theorist François Delsarte and his parallel practice of quoting liturgical gestures from Protestant church services, pursues the ambiguity and uncanniness of modernity itself. For Shawn—like many other protagonists of modernist dance—argues on the one hand for freeing the body from the boundaries of classical ballet in the name of individual expression, and on the other hand for an instrumentalized body that still clings to principles of taxonomy and normativity.

This article examines coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake on the Oprah Winfrey Show. I argue that the Oprah Winfrey Show attempted to deploy therapeutic discourse to warrant what Naomi Klein (2008) calls the "shock doctrine": an argument for the demolition of "failed" societies and states so that they can be rebuilt in the neoliberal image of private capitalism. Thus, Winfrey's discourse might be described as "shock therapy." However, celebrities featured during these episodes worked as shock absorbers, engaging in an ideological tug-of-war with the therapeutic narrative, oscillating between personalistic and more broadly critical perspectives on crisis.

This essay (re)presents my own experiences living with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as a child and adult to provide a radically historical, contextual, and critical autoethnographic conceptualization of this “learning disability.” Specifically, by building upon Ragan Fox’s “auto-archeological” method, a critical perspective that “unite[s] autoethnography and Foucault’s
theories of discourse,” I draw upon institutional artifacts, psychiatric diagnoses, and interviews with close family members to show that ADD is a “technology of the self” that economizes the body in accordance with a distinctly neoliberal temporality. This temporalizing process, I show, is reinforced by a range of other neoliberal technologies of selfhood and ultimately cultivates the very “deficit framework” that ADD diagnoses are aimed at healing. The conclusion questions the legitimacy of ADD outside of the various technological interfaces that make the disability visible as a public problem and considers the intimate connections between neoliberalism, ableism, and the contemporary university.

Situated within a contemporary context of U.S. immigration politics, this essay seeks to track the term illegal as utilized in public discourse to understand how the public has codified
and employed it; more specifically, the essay investigates the social implications of the grammatical shift of the term illegal from an adjective to a noun. I track the plural use of the
word<illegal>in public discourse before, during, and after the 2006 protests and argue that a clear and solidified ideograph of <illegal> has emerged in the public discourse fraught
with negative associations and maintain that the grammatical shift from an adjective to a noun further demeans and dehumanizes undocumented immigrants.

Kofi Annan traveled to Rwanda in May of 1998 attempting to repair the image of the United Nations (U.N.) and to heal the fractured political relationship between the two entities. However, the U.N. secretary general largely failed to fulfill his mission. This article analyzes the reasons why Annan's mea culpa failed. It argues that in Annan's address before the Rwandan parliament, his rhetorical choices constrained his ability to repair the U.N.'s image and U.N.-Rwandan relations. Specifically, this article demonstrates that the U.N. leader's nondiscussion of his personal culpability for U.N. action, his democratization of blame for the genocide, and the appearance of personal arrogance created by his language choices hindered his ability to fulfill his mission. The article concludes with implications for image repair theory, lessons from Annan's failure for rhetors who apologize for historical wrongdoing, and directions for further research into the phenomena of public apology.

Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library’ s potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere’ s viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.

Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the concept of 'vital security systems.' Cast against the historicity of water planning and postcolonial urbanism, water supply, coastal protection and flood control are understood in terms of vigilance, emergency, prediction and control. It is argued that climate adaptation planning  relies on a naturalistic understanding of predictable, linear transformations in base climatic variables, and thus fails to take into consideration the 'pluripotency' of climate futures - that is, the inherent unpredictability of nonlinear transformations that arise in the conjunction of human and nonhuman systems.

At the end of the Sophistici Elenchi, Aristotle claims that Gorgias gave his pupils readymade speeches to learn by heart rather than teaching them a τέχνη. Gorgias’ Helen is often considered to have been a speech used by pupils as a model for the composition of their own speeches. However, there is little extant research into the question as to whether there are speeches still preserved that were composed with the aid of such models. In this paper I will argue that the Helen served as a model for the author of De flatibus. The stylistic similarities between both writings are well known. In addition, De flatibus imitates the composition and argumentation of the Helen. At multiple points, the mechanisms of λόγος as they are described by Gorgias are applied to medical problems. These and other connections between the two texts offer a unique perspective on the ways in which Gorgias’ method of instruction could function and be successful. It is likely that physicians were among Gorgias’ regular students.

According to Mary Shelley’s 1831 Introduction, her great novel is her “hideous progeny.” This proclamation along with numerous birthing metaphors place her Introduction within the obstetric discourse field of the maternal imagination, a theory which claimed that pregnant women’s imaginations had the power to deform their fetuses. More importantly, the maternal imagination, and thus Mary Shelley’s Introduction, is a form of mêtic rhetoric with a distinctly maternal flavor.

This article examines the rhetorical phenomenon of collective apology. Specifically, collective
apologies issued by American President Bill Clinton, Australian Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper were analyzed inductively
to determine the purposes and strategies that make up these speeches. This inductive
approach reveals that the purpose of collective apologies is to repair relationships
damaged by historical wrongdoing. Moreover, it is found that rhetors use the rhetorical
strategies of remembrance, mortification, and corrective action. Ultimately, this research
lays the groundwork for collective apology to be considered a distinct rhetorical genre.

ABSTRACT: Scholars tend to explain or predict China English's rhetorical strategies on the basis of Chinese discourse and cultural preferences. This inference model, I argue, falls short in studying the Chinese variety of English because, first, it essentializes both China English and Chinese, treating their discursive strategies as two easily generalizable, static entities; second, it neglects context, which determines the semiotic meaning potential of any language.

This paper provides insight into how place can be important to the goals of a social movement. Through analysis of a series of historical events, I explore how a place can be constructed by a social movement to act rhetorically and then can be reconstructed through repeated usage to signify a larger meaning. To illustrate these concepts, I examine the
creation, evolution, and transformation of Pittsburgh’s “Freedom Corner” as a site of resistance.

Contemporary processes of globalization beckon consideration of the discursive forces that shape our perceptions of community, group identity, solidarity, and belongingness. The freedoms and limits endemic to life in a globalized world afford a variety of communicative resources for those seekingto promote humane social action. In this article, the author engages the discourse of Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian-based nongovernmental organization, to illuminate its stake in contemporary global politics. Through its rhetorical crafting of a public image of neutrality, its use of media channels to publicize events, and its discursive construction of a humanitarian space for social action, Médecins Sans Frontières conscripts the powerful ethos of the social imaginary in an attempt to forge a global community uniting individuals, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions.

*Winner of the Top Journal Article of the Year Award from the Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association (2017).*  This article examines the challenge of partisanship to the free and open communication entailed by rich notions of democracy. Exploring the vexing riddle of how democratic citizens can balance openness and assertiveness in their dialogic interactions, I turn to the American pragmatist tradition for two important starting points. Drawing from William James and John Dewey, I highlight how the pragmatist tradition provides a nuanced reading of charity, both towards individuals and to situations. Charity is a choice of disposition, and it has vital implications for pragmatist rhetoric's drive to instantiate a deep sense of democratic communication.

This essay grew out of a Masters thesisat California State University-Hayward: "Droppin' Science: Rap Music's Postmodern Critique." ABSTRACT: I focus here on the public discourse of rap music as an "electronically mediated" forum which is being used by participants in order to redefine their ethnicity and relationship to "mainstream" culture. Although rap is an
artform primarily pioneered by black urban youth, the majority of its audience its non-black. This paradox is resulting in a heated debate which, I believe, can shed light on our efforts to come to an understanding of "what diversity means"