Tu, 9:30 AM-12:00 PM, MJ 112
Meets with AMST-G 620
Open to Graduates Only!

Instructor: Robert Terrill
E-Mail: rterrill@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 204
Phone: 855-0118

The study of protest discourse in the United States is characterized
by three central dilemmas.  First, we are a nation founded in
protest, and we repeatedly affirm that the right to protest is
important to our political culture; at the same time, protest often
is treated as an aberration.  Second, protest can be an important
symptom of cultural crisis, directing attention and resources to
issues that might not otherwise emerge into public consciousness;
however, this instrumental function of protest discourse too often
deflects attention away from the constitutive potential of the
discourse itself.  And third, because protest discourse often
presents a resistance to established categories, a traditional
theoretical vocabulary can sometimes mask its significant
characteristics.

Mindful of these dilemmas, this course will focus on key exemplars
of protest discourse from throughout American history and up to the
present day.  We will consider “public discourse” broadly, as
referring to speeches, documents, essays, pamphlets, novels, and
documentary films.  The course is not intended to provide an
exhaustive survey of American protest, but rather to focus our
attention on key texts and episodes that appear to have some
particular relevance to contemporary American politics.  We will
engage in a sort of collective and inductive theorizing, working
together to discern the themes, figures, strategies, arguments, and
personae that characterize and contribute to a productive
understanding of protest.  Specifically, we will explore tropes of
mimesis and irony as representative figures, thinking about how
representation and identification, misdirection and disinterest,
might provide topoi, or starting places, both for the rhetorical
invention of protest in America and for its scholarly analysis.

A partial list of the texts, figures, movements, and episodes upon
which we may focus would include:  The Declaration of Independence,
The Whiskey Rebellion, Huckleberry Finn, Third Wave Feminism, The
Jungle, Slave Narratives, Figures in Black,  Political Documentary,
Southern Secession, Ann Coulter, The Souls of Black Folk, Malcolm X,
the Chicago Haymarket Anarchists, the New Left, the Young Lords, and
Image Politics.