Rhetorical Pain

Book excerpt: This book provides close-textual analysis of traditional and mediated, popular memorials that tackle some of the most significant sources of pain in United States. In doing so, Tiara K. Good argues that pain is highly rhetorical and functions to form collectives and instigate change. This book also demonstrates how popular media texts, such as Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman and Hulu’s original 2021 series Dopesick, hold enormous potential to be effective memorials by virtue of their accessibility and quality of being unbounded by space and place. Tiara K. Good analyzes how each memorial rhetorically operates to demand witness and craft witnesses into people whom can make change. Scholars of rhetoric, public memory, and communication will find this book of particular interest.