Performing Political Ideologies

This chapter shows the importance of performance studies to the theory and analysis of political ideas and ideologies. Reviewing ways in which these have been studied in political science it argues that there is a need to understand more about how ideologies are manifested in and through their public performance. In particular, drawing on Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA), it argues that rhetorical performances of ethos—of character in various dimensions—are fundamental to the manifestation of ideologies. Using examples from British and American political rhetoric the chapter demonstrates how political leaders perform fidelity to a political tradition, draw rhetorical authority from it, and promote, perform, and embody a particular sort of ideological ethos. The chapter further discusses how performances of ethos may draw on very general archetypes, the playing of parts in larger ideological social dramas, and the ways in which polities governs and sets limits to the range of performances possible.

“Red, White and Blues”

Chapter 6 reveals how Bernstein used the blues to parse intertwined issues of race, faith, and national identity in the developmental process of Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As the opening rite for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mass questioned the notion of faith in the face of persistent violence and social injustice, from the Vietnam War to the ongoing civil rights struggle. As another politically charged work, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue drew heavily on the blues as a part of its historical pastiche. In the year of the bicentennial, Lerner and Bernstein wanted to call America to account for its ongoing failure to truly address the question of civil rights, but they were depending on a frayed black-Jewish relation for their rhetorical authority.

‘The Impudent Fellow Came in Swareing’

This chapter examines the almost fifty-year-long diary written by Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker woman residing in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that Drinker employed her diary as a tool to define the boundaries of her community, which included her immediate family and surrounding Quaker society. The focus of the chapter is on two moments in which Drinker represents and responds to the intrusion of a male stranger into her home and family, and the threats they present to the female members of her community, in order to explore her gendered understanding of belonging. Through the diaristic devices of naming and relational terminology, and by documenting space, movement, and social interaction, Drinker writes her community into being and grants herself the rhetorical authority to keep it safe.

“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800

Growing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

Decameron 2.4: the Matrices of Voice

Unlike many characters of the, Landolfo Rufolo is voiceless. This essay examines the transfer of narrative and rhetorical authority to the narrator of the story, Lauretta, and her appropriation and correction of mercantile ethics summed up in Boccaccio’s own narrative selection betweenandin his late holograph MS Hamilton 90.