In the Shadows of Democracy

The essays in this edited volume question, rather than presuppose, conceptions of democracy as representative and deliberative. In the Shadows of Democracy focuses on forms of rhetorical action that sustain normative claims about the virtues of democracy, including those advanced by rhetorical studies. The discipline of rhetoric emerges across the volume in two ways. First, as an entry into varieties of public discourse in which the public is not precisely the state. Second, as an object of critique. The result is a radical invitation to imagine how rhetorical critique might be used toward emancipatory ends.