Quiet Defiance: The Rhetoric of Silent Protest

by David W. Seitz (Contribution by), D. Graham Burnett (Contribution by), Satarupa Dasgupta (Contribution by), Nune Grigoryan (Contribution by), Alicia K. Hatcher (Contribution by)

Overview

Quiet Defiance: The Rhetoric of Silent Protest focuses on the rhetorical dimensions and power of silent protest. Bridging the gap between the study of protest and the study of rhetorical silence (strategic silence meant to communicate to and influence an audience), this book is the first of its kind to concentrate solely on the phenomenon and tradition of silent protest. The contributors to this volume hail from different cultures, disciplines, and fields. They examine past and present-day cases of silent protest with different research questions and paradigmatic perspectives in mind and methodological approaches at hand. Collectively, however, their original chapters offer a rich, multifaceted understanding of the potentialities, limits, nature, effects, risks, and rewards of silent acts of protest—individual or otherwise—against oppressive, unjust regimes and systems of power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666938999
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/05/2025
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary Rhetoric
Pages:	410
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

David W. Seitz is associate professor of communication at Penn State Mont Alto.

Table of Contents

Introduction
David W. Seitz

Part I: Silence, Presence, and Absence

Chapter 1: Speaking in Silence: Rhetoric, Rancière, and the Blank Sign Protests of 2022
Michael Vicaro

Chapter 2: Vigils for Peace: Silent Presence as Political Action
D. Graham Burnett

Chapter 3: Embodying Absence: Silence and Death at ACT UP’s 1992 Ashes Action
Jeffrey B. Nagel

Chapter 4: Silence as Political Engagement: Student-Led Silent Protests Advocating for LGBTQ+ Youth
Kevin R. Meyer and Stephen K. Hunt

Chapter 5: The Rhetoric of Silence as Embodiment: Georgia Prisoners’ 2010 “Lockdown for Liberty”
Nick J. Sciullo

Part II: On Colin Kaepernick

Chapter 6: Embodying Resistance: Situating Kaepernick’s Performative Symbolic Resistance as an Emic Perspective
Alicia K. Hatcher

Chapter 7: The Silence and the Fury: Colin Kaepernick, Athletic Protest, and Noisy Affects
Dafna Kaufman and Jaclyn Olson

Chapter 8: “I Just Couldn’t Be a Sellout”: Understanding Rihanna’s Absence during the 2019 Super Bowl Halftime Show through Speech Acts Theory
Julia C. Richmond

Part III: In Defense of Women’s Rights

Chapter 9: Silence and Commercial Sex Work: Performing Silence as Strategy, Resistance, and the Articulation of Alternative Perspectives
Satarupa Dasgupta

Chapter 10: Under Their Eyes: The Visuality of Handmaids as Resistance in Transnational Women’s Rights Protests
Annie Hui

Chapter 11: The Woman, Life, Freedom Movement: Social Media Videos of Women Cutting Hair and
Burning Hijabs and the Rhetoric of Silent Protest
Nune Grigoryan

Chapter 12: Red Card Qatar: Human Rights Protests at World Cup 2022
Megan O’Byrne

Part IV: Silent Protest and the Digital Landscape

Chapter 13: From Protest to Solidarity: How the Digital Era is Changing the Volume of Silence
Jessica L. Neu

Chapter 14: “Don’t Mistake My Silence as Not Caring:” Discourses of Nonvoters on Twitter
Alison N. Novak

Chapter 15: Silent Protests in and for the AttentionSphere: A Rhetorical Methodology for Studying Attention
David Landes

Chapter 16: Silent Protest and Cruel Imitation in Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Movement”
Dominic J. Manthey and Keren Wang

Index

About the Contributors

Editorial Reviews

"Quiet Defiance: A Rhetoric Silent Protest is a thought-provoking collection, offering insight into forms of silent resistance that range from blank signs to prison strikes to nonvoting. Individual chapters offer fresh perspective on these and other cases. As a whole, the collection takes seriously and engages meaningfully with the scholarly traditions around each of its key terms, rhetoric, silence, and protest, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars interested in these areas."

Michelle Gibbons