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This book considers the 2015 Charleston mass shooting from a rhetorical perspective and offers an appraisal of the discourses that cradled and emerged from it. It argues that Charleston was different from other mass shootings in America and that the differences can be heard and seen in that rhetoric.
List of contents
Introduction: Was Blind but Now I See: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in the Charleston Shootings
Sean Patrick O'Rourke
Melody Lehn
Part I: The Killer's Manifesto: Rhetorics of the Lost Cause and Race Warfare
1 "The South Shall Rise Again": Setting the Lost Cause Myth in Future Tense in Dylann Roof's Manifesto
Margaret Franz
2 Charleston and the Postracial Logics of "Race War"
Daniel A. Grano
Part II: Gun Control: The Debates That Did Not Happen and the Language of Lynching
3 The Racial Politics of Gun Violence: A Brief Rhetorical History
Craig Rood
4 The Charleston Church Shooting and the Public Practice of Forgetting Lynching
Samuel P. Perry
Part III: Civic Eulogies and Exhortations: The Responses of Barack and Michelle Obama
5 The Act of Forgiveness in Barack Obama's Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend
Clementa Pinckney, Charleston, South Carolina, June 26, 2015
David A. Frank
6 Challenging the Myth of Postracialism: Exhortation, Strategic Ambiguity, and Michelle Obama's Respon
About the author
Sean Patrick O'Rourke is professor of rhetoric and American studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.Melody Lehn is assistant professor of rhetoric and women’s and gender studies at Sewanee: The University of the South. Sean Patrick O'Rourke is professor of rhetoric and American studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.Melody Lehn is assistant professor of rhetoric and women’s and gender studies at Sewanee: The University of the South. Sean Patrick O'Rourke is professor of rhetoric and American studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.Sean Patrick O'Rourke is professor of rhetoric and American studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Summary
This book uses the 2015 Charleston shooting as a case study to analyze the connections between race, rhetoric, religion, and the growing trend of mass gun violence in the United States. The authors claim that this analysis fills a gap in rhetorical scholarship that can lead to increased understanding of the causes and motivations of these crimes.
