Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric

This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction
Robert Hariman

Chapter 1. The Communal Dilemma as a Cultural Resource in Hungarian Political Expression
David Boromisza-Habashi

Chapter 2. Chronotopes of the Political: Public Discourse, News Media, and Mass Action in Post-Conflict Macedonia
Andrew Graan

Chapter 3. The In-Between States: Enduring Catastrophes as Sources of Democracy’s Deadlocks in the Balkans: The Case of Kosovo
Naser Miftari

Chapter 4. Occupy Wall Street as Rhetorical Citizenship: The Ongoing Relevance of Pragmatism for Deliberative Democracy
Robert Danisch

Chapter 5. Contemporary Social Movements and the Emergent Nomadic Political Logic
Peter N. Funke and Todd Wolfson

Chapter 6. “Project Heat” and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing
Catherine Fennell

Chapter 7. Reading between the Digital Lines: Narrating the Political Rhetoric of Ethical Consumption
Eleftheria J. Lekakis

Chapter 8. The Uncertainty of Power and the Certainty of Irony: Encountering the State in Kara, Southern Ethiopia
Felix Girke

Chapter 9. Grassroots Discourses in Times of Scarcity: Debating the 2004 Locust Plague in Northwestern Senegal and the World
Christian Meyer

Chapter 10. Too Too Much Much: Presence and Catastrophe in Contemporary Art
Monica Westin

Conclusion: What Next? Modernity, Revolution, and the “Turn” to Catastrophe
Ralph Cintron

Contributors
Index