Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency

Description

Prisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association's Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency. Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a "thick moral vernacular" rhetoric of human rights. Hauser's work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed. Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centered on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance. Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Table of Contents Series Editor's Preface Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Theoretical Probes on a Moral Vernacular Rhetoric of Human Rights 1. Reclaiming Voice 2. Human Rights and Human Rights Talk 3. Thick Moral Vernacular and Human Rights Part II. Case Studies in a Thick Moral Vernacular of Political Agency 4. Parrhesia at Robben Island: Prison Reform from the Inside 5. Women of the Small Zone and a Rhetoric of Indirection 6. Passive Aggression of Bodily Sufficiency: The H-Blocks Hunger Strike of 1981 7. Display Rhetoric and the Fantasia of Demonstrative Displays: The Dissident Rhetoric of Prisoner 885/63 8. Quo Vadis America: National Conscience in Framing Prisoner Bodies at Abu Ghraib 9. The Moral Vernacular of Political Agency Notes Bibliography Index About the Author