Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics

rhetoric scholars can recognize how violence is more than direct violence and how it inheres in ostensibly nonviolent actions and institutions. By taking note of how this violence, through its circulation, accretes to identities, institutions, and discourses, we may be able to reroute these violent rhetorical ecologies and disrupt the legacy of violence by rhetorically addressing “which responses were available, to whom, and why,” and how “existing responses strain those boundaries” (149). These questions leveled toward violence, Eatman contends, open up new possibilities for how rhetoric may work with, in order to mitigate, violence in its many multimodal, circulating forms.