Bridging Culture and Affect: Rhetorical Practices with(in) a Digitized Archive offers a theoretical framework to understanding culture and affect in both digital and non-digital engagement. Many scholars typically take a semiotic approach to understand and interpret cultural texts and events. They, however, often neglect the importance of affect in cultural production, consumption, and meaning. In affect theory, many theorists argue that affect is an ineffable, non-representational, and acultural phenomenon. Yet these theorists fail to account for the role of cultural meanings that produce affect. As such, I argue that rhetorical thinking and practice can activate what I call cultural affect—a rhetorical event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences emerge through intensities that orient a set of relations and meanings. As a practice, then, cultural affect involves not merely reading and then writing about people, texts, objects, and things, but attending to one’s cultural background and affective experience during research and analyses.To show cultural affect in action, I use a mixed-methods approach—story, interviews, and multi-sensuous rhetorical analyses—to explore a set of labor union political posters in the Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections archive at the University of Michigan. After discussing the digitized versions of the posters, I examine three posters created by the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. My findings show the relationships between embodiment, texts, and language. More specifically, they bring to the surface the labor of writing and the practice of connecting reflections and cultural histories. The findings push us to make tighter connections between embodiment and language, emphasize the value in multimodality and diverse writing styles, initiate ethical practices, and identify the affordances and limitations of digitizing texts.
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