Abstract

The social responsibility that comes with communication can be decidedly viewed in the area of social protest. One of the most consistent types of American protest throughout history has been the protest poster. Susanne Langer began to define the meeting place of the discursive and presentational in the early twentieth century, but rhetorical scholars still need to take more steps to clearly define the role of visual rhetoric in the dominatingly visual world of the twenty-first century. This article takes a step closer to defining that meeting place by evaluating protest images of the war on terror depicted on posters that focus on consumerism issues and by developing a generic approach to the analysis of visual protest rhetoric.