Product Description

This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. The book presents a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age as it illuminates new political possibilities currently enacted by radical environmental groups.
 
Chapters in the volume cover key areas of environmental activism such as:
*The rhetoric of social movements;
*Imaging social movements;
*Environmental justice groups; and
*Participatory democracy.
 
This book is of interest to scholars and students of rhetorical theory, media and communication theory, visual theory, environmental studies, social change movements, and political theory. It will also appeal to others interested in ecology, radical environmental politics, and activism, and is an excellent supplemental text in advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in these areas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185413 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"Blending theoretical perspectives from diverse disciplines...DeLuca crafts a highly useful 'critical rhetorical' approach that allows subtle and complex analysis of relatively underexamined kinds of environmental activism....Image Politics...substantially revises recent traditions in rhetorical studies, which have tended to center on the orator/public speaker rather than the 'image event,' and to operate from an 'organizational studies' model....Further, Deluca extends the critiques of various cultural theorists and post-structuralist rhetoricians....Ultimately, DeLuca demonstrates how a 'critical rhetorician' might use the critical tools of post-structuralism to understand the political leverage representational rhetorics provide--and thus how environmental activists might shift systems of shared meanings, even against the full cultural weight of industrial capitalism." --ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "...DeLuca makes an easy connection to the reader and minimizes any pretense such an erudite discussion could involve. He offers chapters as 'meditations' that need not be read in order, allowing flexible classroom use....The book is full of interesting and useful information--for instance Abbie Hoffman's realization in the 60s of the power of the televised image and the later 'yippie' connection to Earth First!....Having taught both environmental resource courses in a geography program and environmental reporting classes in journalism schools, I believe this text could be used to challenge students in a wide array of courses." --Journalism and Mass Communication Educator "...presents a detailed analysis of the use of video images to advance the objectives of activist organizations ranging from little-known groups like the Allegheny County Non-violent Action Group to the internationally recognizable Earth First! And Greenpeace....Recommended for libraries serving higher education programs in political science, mass communications, and environmental science. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." --Choice -- Review

Review

About the Author
Kevin Michael DeLuca, PhD, has taught at the University of Virginia and the Pennsylvania State University and is currently an assistant professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. His major area of interest is how industrial cultures relate to the natural world and construct visions of "nature." He has published articles on environmental politics, technology, the media, and postmodernism.

Customer Reviews

Great, Creative Take on Work in Rhetoric!
In this book, DeLuca says that he aims to "perform a postmodern critical rhetoric" (and he does!) examining "image events" created by environmental activists such as Earth First!, Green Peace, and even more interestingly, anti-pollution activists (very grass roots) in Kentucky. In a nicely scattered array of chapters, DeLuca poses his argument that image events can do things (make change) while also being appropriated and rendered inert in various ways. Reading this book, one can only wonder how it would have been changed if the anti-WTO protests of N30, 1999 would have been considered -- but that is not a shortcoming: the book is thorough and very well written. Great scholarship!

Great work of profound importance (for enviros & academics)
Through a plethora of filters including cultural studies, rhetoric, political economy, postmodernism, critical studies, media studies, activism, and environmental studies, DeLuca strongly introduces the image event, an ideograph of profound political and social implications. The author explores these image events through the tactics and strategies of radical environmental and environmental justice groups. Expertly, he deconstructs the notion of a public sphere, as grounded in today's televisual mass mediated society. Rebuffing an ideal Habermassian public sphere in which all parties and sides can equally and civilly debate issues of any interest, DeLuca questions whether all individuals are welcome to enter into that debate, a debate which today occurs in the mass media. Looking at four nonviolent environmental and environmental justice groups, DeLuca argues that the success of their protests against hegemonic forces now lies in the image event itself rather than the immediate cessation of the offense in question. Success comes about through a direct action: Forcing people (audiences) out of comfortable ignorance into a questioning of the status quo (pp. 1-3). The violent counterresponses (pp. 8-9) from the corporations and governments being protested, in light of the failed (inability to stop the present offense) direct actions by the environmental groups, underscores the author's contention of the redefinition of success. Through this challenge of the mainstream discourse (industrialism and progress) (p. 6), the direct actions of the groups DeLuca analyzes become symbolically charged, expected to fail in immediate terms. Success instead comes through increased visibility and public support. By challenging the legitimacy of the establishment" (p. 15), the groups are, according to DeLuca, considering "the implications for rhetoric of extralinguistic confrontational activities" (p. 15). To critical rhetorical scholars, DeLuca becomes one of the vanguards who asserts that the visual realm, which has for too long been ignored by the field, is not only as important, but more so than spoken or written rhetoric in the political public sphere. Through this analysis, DeLuca explores how radical environmental groups are reconstituting the identity of the dominant culture (p. 16) rather than forming their own. In conclusion, this work is of great importance to the academy, especially the field of rhetoric. DeLuca's book begins to fill the dearth of work on media and the environment. It begins anew the research of social movements in this postmodern era. Importantly, it gifts the activist groups legitimacy and credence, which does have the potential to greater effect social change, an ideal conditional for every work in the academy.