The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO.

Abstract

gressive politics” (p. 99). Both women constructed a domesticated West by embodying traditional white femininity and establishing women’s political activity as a fulfillment of gender roles rather than a challenge to said roles. Finally, in Chapter 5, Lewis analyzes coverage of the transcontinental car travel of an envoy of four women who left San Francisco and drove to Washington, D.C. to present President Wilson with a petition for women’s voting rights. Lewis argues that this voyage enacted “a modern mythic journey” that performed the rhetorics of continental expansion and the frontier myth by bringing women’s voting rights to the East (p. 129). This trip inverted Duniway’s mythic frontier by implying that, in enduring the difficulties of crosscountry travel, they had earned the federal amendment for national women’s voting rights. These envoys also enacted the rhetoric of the suffrage maps, bringing suffrage from the civilized West to the unempowered East. Taken together, the case studies of each chapter serve to construct a cohesive narrative of the primacy of the West in the women’s suffrage movement. In addition to enriching our understanding of the rhetoric of the suffrage movement in particular, Lewis has demonstrated the utility of a regional rhetorics approach to the study of social movement rhetoric using the concept of region in protest. Lewis’s prose is accessible and engaging, and while rhetorical scholars are the most likely audience, this text is written in such a way that scholars of related disciplines (such as History and Women’s and Gender Studies) and members of the public who are deeply interested in the history of the women’s suffrage movement, the language of social movements more broadly, and the social power of “region” would find this project worthwhile. For rhetorical scholars interested in the rhetoric of women’s rights, the rhetoric of space, place, and/or mobility, or social movement rhetorics more generally, Uprising is truly indispensable for its exploration of spatiotemporality, gender, and resistance in region-(re)making and its contribution of region in protest.