Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric Of Motives

Social justice movements draw on a legacy of rhetoric that shapes how participants see the world as it is and how it should be. Their work builds on their predecessors to contribute to a literacy – a literacy of struggle. A literacy in this context is a production of rhetorical arguments that create a lasting dialogue that illustrates the consensus employing those that have laid the groundwork for their movement. Rhetoric as the basis of language informs this thinking as drawn from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke conceptualizes rhetoric as inherent to identity as humans and that we are rhetorical beings who persuade through language: “For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an …show more content…
Striving for justice in an unjust world places movement participants at odds as they struggle within a system of inequality as they work to conceptualize their struggle and where they come from and still have the ability to be effective for their audience. Although, who is the audience is a contentious question. Any given literacy may not have to worry about their audience in that they just are who they are and those excluded from traditional narratives will continue to be excluded (think people of color in the white feminist movement). However, a literacy of struggle functions in that those of a diverse, non-mainstream community must address at least two distinct audiences, those who share in their struggle and those who in power and obviously do not struggle, in their rhetoric to be effective and in that in of itself is a unique struggle in movement politics to exhort a response that cannot be ignored. Other rhetoric produced from a privileged stance does not address others which creates the need for another type of literacy. A literacy of struggle offers a place in which those who have struggled can have a voice. Gerald Vizenor, an Anishinaabe scholar and writer, in his book Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, writes of survivance stories which encompasses the idea of a literacy of struggle is a “heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate and, in the course of international declaration of human rights, is a narrative estate of native survivance” and that “survivance is an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry” (11). An example of a piece of writing that fits into a long legacy of a literacy of struggle is from Joy Harjo: “This poetry made roots from the