Regional Rhetorics

Book excerpt: Regionalism is a term that has been used to describe many different kinds of phenomena, including political, geographical, architectural, and literary. This collection examines "rhetorical regionalism," or the relationships we have to physical regions and the idea of regionality. Regional rhetorics are more than simply the fact of local conditions in certain spaces. They are the ways people produce feelings of belonging and discourses of normalcy within those spaces. The authors in this collection bypass familiar narratives of nationality and localism in order to imagine regions as interfaces that help us to negotiate everyday life. Regions are more than physical spaces, therefore. Regional rhetorics can provide different narratives in order to help us invent new kinds of connections to place and publics. They give us new descriptions of relationships, a power that merges together the tectonic (spatial) and the architectonic (discursive) impulses of rhetoric. The book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.