Dana Cloud’s marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series Cosmos, Cloud seeks to explain the show’s enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, Reality Bites comes not a moment too soon.
Articles by Jason Hannan
Jason Hannan is Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the editor of Truth in the Public Sphere (2016) and Philosophical Profiles in the Theory of Communication (2012). His current book project is entitled, Ethics Under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and The Culture Wars, under contract with Bloomsbury.