Abstract
In 1992, classics scholar George Kennedy proposed that rhetoric existed pre-speech and was present in all-animal life. As visual rhetoric increases in popularity as an area of study, another question emerges: Is visual rhetoric present in non-human animal life? In the natural sciences, the question of bowerbird artistry has been debated for years. The Vogelkop bowerbird, as depicted in the popular BBC Life series, provides an avenue to explore the possibility of bowerbird agency in crafting texts of visual rhetoric. Weaving observations from the documentary with critical tools and frameworks, while continuously embedding research from the natural sciences, this manuscript offers a posthuman, interdisciplinary approach that illuminates the possibility of nonhuman animal visual rhetoric by exploring the aesthetic choices, cultural preferences, and communicative purposes of the Vogelkops’ bowers. Visual rhetoric offers posthuman studies an area of study that focuses on how creatures—humans and nonhumans—exhibit agency in their embodied lives. A posthuman perspective of visual rhetoric allows for a study of the vast and rich study of the history and diversity of visual rhetoric, and encountering the bowers, even through documentary footage, may afford viewers a moment of epiphany that encourages ecological mindedness.
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Rosenfeld, C. (2021). Bowers of Persuasion: Toward a Posthuman Visual Rhetoric. In: Maiti, K. (eds) Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76159-2_7
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