Review of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Frank Farmer.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

Through an analysis of the April 2000 IMF/World Bank protests in Washington DC, I identify an expanded repertoire of the creative arts of the contact zone in an era of global capitalism. I argue that three theories of deliberation are at play in the events: a rhetoric of benevolent capitalism, a rhetoric of a rational public sphere developed through supranational organizations, and an emerging rhetoric of grassroots globalization. I conclude that grassroots democratic globalization may provide a new model of the public sphere—a site of rhetorical deliberation where strangers meet to imagine the world they will create.