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- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke has asserted the significance of paying equal, if not more attention to, propagandist rhetoric, arguing that "there are other ways of burning books on the pyre-and the favorite method of the hasty reviewer is to deprive himself and his readers by inattention." Despite Burke's exhortation, attention to white supremacist discourse has been relatively meager. Historians Clive Webb and Charles Eagles have called for further research on white supremacy arguing that attention to white supremacist discourse is important both to fully understand and appreciate pro-civil rights rhetoric in context and to develop a more complex understanding of white supremacist rhetoric. This thesis provides a close examination of the literature and rhetoric of two white supremacist organizations: the Citizens' Council, an organization that sprang up in response to the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education and Stromfront.org, a global online forum community that hosts space for supporters of white supremacy. Memory scholars Barbie Zelizer, John Bodnar, and Stephen Brown note the usability of memory to shape social, political, and cultural aspects of society and the potential implications of such shaping. Drawing from this scholarship, the analysis of these texts focuses specifically on the rhetorical shaping of memory as a vehicle to promote white supremacy. Through an analysis of the Citizens' Council's use of historical events, national figures and cultural stereotypes, Chapter 1 explicates the organization's attempt to form a memorial narrative that worked to promote political goals, create a sense of solidarity through resistance, and indoctrinate the youth in the ideology of white supremacy. Chapter 2 examines the rhetorical use of memory on Stormfront and explains how the website capitalizes upon the wide reaching global impact of World War II to construct a memorial narrative that can be accessed by a global audience of white supremacists. Ultimately, this thesis offers a focused review of the rhetorical signatures of two white supremacist groups with the aim of combating contemporary instantiations of racist discourse.
ContributorsLadenburg, Kenneth (Author) / Ore, Ersula (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation examines racism as discourse and works to explicate, through the examination of historical and contemporary texts, the ways in which racism is maintained and perpetuated in the United States. The project critiques the use of generalized categories, such as alt-right, as an anti-racist tactic and notes that these rigid categories are problematic because they cannot account for the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of racist discourse. The dissertation argues that racist discourse that is categorized as mainstream and fringe both rely upon a fundamental framework of rhetorical strategies that have long been ingrained into the social and political fabric of the United States and are based on the foundational system of white supremacy. The project discusses two of these strategies—projection and stasis diffusion—in case studies that examine their use in texts throughout American history and in mainstream and fringe media. “Everyday White Supremacy” contributes to important academic and societal conversations concerning the how the academy and the public use category to address racism, anti-racist practices, and rhetorical understandings of racist discourse. The project argues for shift away from the use of categorical naming to identify racist groups and people towards the practice of identifying racism as discourse, particularly through its rhetorical strategies. This paradigm shift would encourage scholars, and the general population, to identify racism via the processes by which it is propagated rather than its existence within a person or group
ContributorsLadenburg, Kenneth James (Author) / Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Ore, Ersula (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Scholars have attended to paradoxes inherent in wider public discourse where subordinated groups most affected by laws and sanctions have the least political, material, and rhetorical capital to speak back to them. Such scholarship often focuses either on the subordinated status of a group or the work of subordinated groups going public as part of a collective mass movement for social change. In doing so, scholarship risks undermining the agency of subordinated rhetors or treating mass-movement rhetoric as somehow both exceptional and yet necessary for enacting cultural citizenship. What is less frequently studied is the agency that local publics demonstrate through their tenacious organizational decision-making in the face of political, material, and rhetorical sanctions.
In response to this gap, this project features the Puente Movement, a mixed-documentation-status grassroots organization in Phoenix, AZ. Specifically, I’ve analyzed this organization’s public efforts from April 23rd, 2010 to September 6th, 2012 to oppose Senate Bill 1070—a state-specific measure to stop undocumented immigration across the Mexico/Arizona border and deport current undocumented residents. I situate the study in the larger context of Latino cultural citizenship. Combining a critical-incident interview technique and a rhetorically informed decision-making framework, I analyze Puente’s active construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to their decision-making that attempted to leverage Puente’s identity and membership to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to SB 1070. Using a five-part framework to assess potential risks and benefits, the study documents the complexity of this decision-making. For instance, the study shows how Puente’s strategy of Barrio Defense Committees negotiated the tension between protecting the identification of local residents and publically protesting the injustices of immigration sanctions. It also highlights how a strategy to use member’s undocumented status as a point of publicity actively engaged tensions between the narratives Puente members wanted to present to the public about undocumented people and the images otherwise circulated. Behind these strategies and others like them is Puente’s persistent effort to re-frame immigration controversy. Findings are relevant to the study of Latino/a social movements, public-spheres scholarship, and action-research with subordinated rhetors.
In response to this gap, this project features the Puente Movement, a mixed-documentation-status grassroots organization in Phoenix, AZ. Specifically, I’ve analyzed this organization’s public efforts from April 23rd, 2010 to September 6th, 2012 to oppose Senate Bill 1070—a state-specific measure to stop undocumented immigration across the Mexico/Arizona border and deport current undocumented residents. I situate the study in the larger context of Latino cultural citizenship. Combining a critical-incident interview technique and a rhetorically informed decision-making framework, I analyze Puente’s active construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to their decision-making that attempted to leverage Puente’s identity and membership to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to SB 1070. Using a five-part framework to assess potential risks and benefits, the study documents the complexity of this decision-making. For instance, the study shows how Puente’s strategy of Barrio Defense Committees negotiated the tension between protecting the identification of local residents and publically protesting the injustices of immigration sanctions. It also highlights how a strategy to use member’s undocumented status as a point of publicity actively engaged tensions between the narratives Puente members wanted to present to the public about undocumented people and the images otherwise circulated. Behind these strategies and others like them is Puente’s persistent effort to re-frame immigration controversy. Findings are relevant to the study of Latino/a social movements, public-spheres scholarship, and action-research with subordinated rhetors.
ContributorsOliver, Veronica (Author) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.
ContributorsBryant, Jason (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Horror, more than a genre, manifests in marginalized communities through real-life violence and oppression perpetuated by state powers. This project focuses on both horror as a genre, and horror as an analytic of how oppression, social death, and white supremacy works itself out on the lives of the marginalized. I analyze numerous multicultural horror texts, including Especially Heinous by Carmen Maria Machado, The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, and “The Finkelstein 5” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, to demonstrate the potential of resistance within the genre. I name this form of horror-as-resistance “oppositional horror.” Oppositional horror operates as subgenre of horror and a theory through which to understand how the tenets of horror—excessive violence, ambient terror, and monstrosity—are used by state powers to perpetuate the oppression of minority populations. Although the horror genre often replicates gendered and racialized stereotypes, it is also capable of resisting systems of oppression. By labeling these systems as horror, the violence is exposed as excessive, terrifying, and dehumanizing. Oppositional horror draws on theories of social death, haunting, and monstrosity as methods to resist state powers and manifestations of violence. Each chapter demonstrates how social death affects different marginalized communities and the multitude of ways in which social death can be resisted. The first chapter argues that gendered violence is dismissed as normal and acceptable, but by constructing victims as monstrous—because monsters are inherently outside of the norm—destabilizes the normality of their deaths. The following chapter centers state powers as intentionally allowing migrants to die or go missing on the U.S./Mexico border. In the texts analyzed in this chapter, body horror and hauntings make the deaths of migrants visceral and present, refusing to be disregarded or ignored. The final chapter contends that Black people are kept socially dead through narratives of criminalization and racism. The texts of this chapter position police brutality and the unjust killing of Black people as a tool of white supremacy enforced through fear. Ultimately oppositional horror, by marking violence against marginalized communities as horrific, offers methods of resistance against social death and white supremacy.
ContributorsGoldsmith, Clarissa Susan (Author) / Bebout, Lee (Thesis advisor) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Non-Natives and Nativists is a relational analysis of contemporary multiethnic literatures in two countries formed by settler colonialism, the process of nation-building by which colonizers attempt to permanently invade Indigenous lands and develop their own beliefs and practices as governing principles. This dissertation focuses on narratives that establish and sustain settlers’ claims to belonging in the US and Australia and counter-narratives that problematize, subvert, and disavow such claims. The primary focus of my critique is on settler-authored works and the ways they engage with, perpetuate, and occasionally challenge normalized conditions of belonging in the US and Australia; however, every chapter discusses works by Indigenous writers or non-Indigenous writers of color that put forward alternative, overlapping, and often competing claims to belonging. Naming settler narrative strategies and juxtaposing them against those of Indigenous and arrivant populations is meant to unsettle the common sense logic of settler belonging. In other words, the specific features of settler colonialism promulgate and govern a range of devices and motifs through which settler storytellers in both nations respond to related desires, anxieties, and perceived crises. Narrative devices such as author-perpetrated identity hoax, settings imbued with uncanny hauntings, and plots driven by fear of invasion recur to the point of becoming recognizable tropes. Their perpetuation supports the notion that the logics underwriting settler colonialism persist beyond periods of initial colonization and historical frontier violence. These logics—elimination and possession—still shape present-day societies in settler nations, and literature is one of the primary vehicles by which they are operationalized.
ContributorsFranks, Travis B (Author) / Bebout, Lee (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Whyte, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
The purpose of this study was to understand how community members within a segregated school district approached racial inequities. I conducted a ¬nineteen-month-long ethnography using a critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach to explore how members in a community activist group called Eliminate Racism interacted and worked with school district officials. My goal was to identify and examine how community members addressed racially inequitable policies and practices in the Midwestern city of Pinecreek (pseudonym) in the context of a school district that had undergone two school desegregation lawsuits. I conducted 32 interviews with 24 individuals, including teachers and school leaders, parents, and community members.
This study answers three research questions: (1) What strategies did the community activist group use to influence local education policy for addressing racism in the schools? (2) How did community participation influence local education policy? (3) What were the motivating factors for individuals’ involvement in issues of local school segregation? To answer these questions, I used concepts from Critical Race Theory and Social Capital Theory. I employ Putnam’s and Putnam and Campbell’s social capital, Warren’s civic participation, Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and religio-civics. My analysis shows that the community group used the social capital and community cultural wealth of its members to create partnerships with district officials. Although Eliminate Racism did not meet its goals, it established itself as a legitimate organization within the community, successfully drawing together residents throughout the city to bring attention to racism in the schools.
The study’s results encourage school and district leaders to constantly bring race to the forefront of their decision-making processes and to question how policy implementation affects minoritized students. This research also suggests that strategies from this community group can be adopted or avoided by other antiracist groups undertaking similar work. Finally, it provides an example of how to employ critical PAR methods into ethnography, as it notes the ways that researcher positionality and status can be leveraged by community groups to support the legitimacy of their mission and work.
This study answers three research questions: (1) What strategies did the community activist group use to influence local education policy for addressing racism in the schools? (2) How did community participation influence local education policy? (3) What were the motivating factors for individuals’ involvement in issues of local school segregation? To answer these questions, I used concepts from Critical Race Theory and Social Capital Theory. I employ Putnam’s and Putnam and Campbell’s social capital, Warren’s civic participation, Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and religio-civics. My analysis shows that the community group used the social capital and community cultural wealth of its members to create partnerships with district officials. Although Eliminate Racism did not meet its goals, it established itself as a legitimate organization within the community, successfully drawing together residents throughout the city to bring attention to racism in the schools.
The study’s results encourage school and district leaders to constantly bring race to the forefront of their decision-making processes and to question how policy implementation affects minoritized students. This research also suggests that strategies from this community group can be adopted or avoided by other antiracist groups undertaking similar work. Finally, it provides an example of how to employ critical PAR methods into ethnography, as it notes the ways that researcher positionality and status can be leveraged by community groups to support the legitimacy of their mission and work.
ContributorsWinn, Kevin (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Berliner, David C. (Committee member) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Committee member) / Sampson, Carrie (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Nohokáá Dine’é Diyinii’s (Empowered Earth Surface People, Diné People) story begins with the origin of the cosmos as detailed in Diné emergence narratives, and continues in Diné ceremonial songs, film, and poetry. Diné people’s emergence narratives describe how life moved through the four worlds and how Changing Woman brought Diné people into existence. In the present, Diné people often tell stories against violent colonial domination that aims to unsettle the hope and safety that undergirds their life and prosperity. Through their stories, Diné people bring their past and present together to make futures where Diné life can flourish. Each dissertation chapter explores the contours of storytelling as imagination, power, and future-making through selected Diné stories. Chapter 1 draws from the story of Gus Bighorse as set forth in his as-told-to autobiography (1990). The chapter describes how this Diné warrior, who survived the 1860s forced removal of Diné people, spoke from the heart to tell of a future beyond the US Cavalry’s violence. Such future-focused storying illustrates how Diné people apply elements of Sa’ah’ Naghai Bike’ Hózhǫ (SNBH) in the present to encourage the people to live. SNBH is a philosophy, worldview, and organizing principle for the underlying power through and by which Diné people imagine, create, remake, and renew our reality to realize hózhǫ, beauty. Chapter 2 examines the critical discourse within and around the 2014 Navajo election language fluency controversy that led to Christopher L. Clark Deschene’s removal from the general election ballot. Chapter 3 analyzes the hooghan and the Treaty of 1868 to show how construction in the United States always has sustained and marked the permanence of settler colonialism as white colonizers usurped Diné people’s lands and destroyed their homes. Chapter 4 employs the concept of feminist rehearsal to map the production of life and death in the border town of Gallup. This chapter interweaves the author’s family’s border town experience, the Nááhwíiłbįįhí Story, and Sydney Freeland’s feature film Drunktown’s Finest (2014). Chapter 5, an examination of Diné narratives of catastrophe and emergence, establishes a Diné-based approach to the threat of removal that climate change imposes.
ContributorsClark, Jerome (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Fonseca-Chávez, Vaness (Committee member) / Yazzie, Melanie K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This qualitative classroom-based study investigates the writing practices, choices and reflections of Latinx high school students during an instructional unit on writing testimonio. The study is grounded in a sociocultural theory of writing and draws from LatCrit and Testimonio to understand how writing about self as testimonio shapes the writing practices of ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, specifically Latinx, urban youth. The study took place in the researcher’s eleventh grade class at an urban charter school in a major urban center in the southwest. Data collection included collection of writing samples, interviews of a subsection of the students within the class, and participant observer memos and field notes. Analysis was conducted through a testimonio and narrative analysis lens and afforded the opportunity for researcher and participant to co-construct the knowledge gained from the data corpus. Findings focus on the ways participants interacted with the unit of study, how participants used navigational capital to navigate the in-between spaces in their lives, including between cultures, school and home, and linguistic situations. Further, these findings reveal the purposes for which participants wrote their testimonios and on the ways the participants found agency as writers, pride in their writing, and ownership of the narratives of their communities.
ContributorsBaldonado-Ruiz, Monica (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Durand, Sybil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The current study used a Solomon four-group, experimental design to investigate the influence racist hate speech has on college students' anxiety, affective state, and attentional functioning. This study also examined if racist hate speech has differential impacts between students of color (i.e. targets of racist hate speech) and White students (i.e., non-targets of racist hate speech). Participants included 591 undergraduate students predominantly from Arizona (n = 553, 93.57%). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups (i.e., pretest experimental, pretest control, posttest only experimental, and posttest only control). Participants assigned to the experimental condition read a vignette containing a classroom incident of racist hate speech, while participants assigned to the control condition read a vignette containing a classroom incident of speech remarking on a university’s football team. Repeated measures, within-between interaction analyses of variance as well as Spearman's bivariate correlations were conducted. Findings revealed that exposure to racist hate speech in a classroom setting can raise state anxiety for students of color and White students. Unexpectedly, exposure to racist hate speech reduced positive affect among White students, and previous experiences witnessing racist hate speech was associated with greater anxiety and attentional difficulty for White students; however, students of color did not experience changes in affective outcomes following exposure to racist hate speech, and previous experiences with racist hate speech were not associated with affective or attentional outcomes for students of color. The present study and future research on this topic can help to inform university policies and campus initiatives to support students impacted by racist discourse and create a more inclusive learning environment for all students.
ContributorsCruz, Samantha Nicole (Author) / Spanierman, Lisa B (Thesis advisor) / Capielo Rosario, Cristalís (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021