Sample Topic Post: Citizen Front Cover

The front cover of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. Cover art by David Hammons (In the Hood, 1993)

Who/what: This image is the front cover of Claudia Rankine's best-selling book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, and includes artwork by David Hommans (Rankine). Rankine is a Jamaican-American poet and English Writing professor. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2014 (ClaudiaRankine.com). The "object" is the book cover and its popularity since its publication.

Where: Everywhere, at least in the US: the itself book was incredibly popular, was reviewed by most major press outlets, and the cover image later became recognizable as a link between Rankine's work and the #blacklivesmatter movement.

When: Published in 2014. David Hommans originally created the image in 1993 (Rankine, back cover).

Why (is it interesting/relevant): Citizen and its cover image raise the question of how art (specifically "lyric" art, including poetry) relates to protest. 

The identities it's interested in articulating through protest are: "American" (as in "American Lyric") and black youth culture, represented here by the image of the hood or the hoodie. The hoodie has been a symbol for that culture for a long time--since at least 1993--but also came to be a symbol of violent racist attacks on members of that culture after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Works Cited:

"Claudia Rankine." Claudia Rankine. Web. 2 September 2015.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014.

Body Rhetoric

Definition: a placement or deployment of the body that uses one or more rhetorical strategies (ethos, pathos, or logos) to persuade or demonstrate a point. In protest, body rhetoric often involves occupying public spaces.

Example: sit-in participants use a passive posture (sitting rather than standing, which places them lower than law enforcement or other authorities) to emphasize the non-violent or passive nature of their protest activity, as well as their determination not to be moved (since a person is less mobile when seated than when standing).

Sit-in protesting anti-homeless policies.
Image credit: Darcy,  Alex. "Resisting the Sit-Lie Ban and Business Owners in Downtown Monterey." Santa Cruz IMC. Web. 26 January 2016.

From the text: 
Haiman deals with the question of whether body rhetoric is an exercise of free speech or a form of physical coercion (23). He explains that The United States Supreme Court, in its latest dealings with the “body rhetoric” issue in Cox V.  Louisiana has attempted, as we noted earlier, to fashion a distinction between “Pure speech” and “conduct” such as patrolling, picketing, or marching, which may be the vehicle for speech but is not, according to Justice Goldbergs’s majority opinion entitled to so wide a range of  constitutional protections of speech itself" (24). Haiman goes on to add that the "opinion may return to haunt the court as having enunciated a distinction impossible to maintain" (24)

Works Cited:
Haiman, Franklyn S. "Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations." Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest. Browne, Stephen Howard, and Charles E. Morris III, eds. State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2013.