Rhetoric, Politics & Culture

Editor's Introduction

Bryan McCann — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

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Church-Settler Rhetoric: Ideas and End(s)

ROMEO GARCIA — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Utilizing a modern/colonial framework, and undertaking Ann Stoler’s petition to treat archival activity as ethnographic—“archives as cultural artifact of fact production, of taxonomies in the making, and of disparate notions of what made up coloniality authority (87)—, I put into conversation settler archives from two states to bring a critique to bear on the complicity between a logic of coloniality (e.g., management, control, and policing of land, resources, and people) and a rhetoric of modernity (e.g., salvation, progress, development). I connect them both within what I believe is a network of Ideas and end(s), which at the same time illuminates a network of settler cities interconnected by Ideas and end(s). I illustrate their role in bolstering the production of states themselves and intensifying the ecological effect we know as coloniality

“Nuestras Reliquías Históricas” and the Rhetorical Work of Objects at Machu Picchu

Christa J. Olson — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

This essay elaborates a trio of object lessons that aim to compilcate, reorient, and upend how rhetoricians encounter the rhetorical work of objects. The object lessons follow the history and politics of a set of archeological objects taken from the site now known as Machu Picchu in the early twentieth century and returned to Peru after much debate in the early twenty-first century. Over one hundred years, their nature, purpose, and proper location became subjects of intense debate and, eventually, the debate itself became fused to the objects: they became either national treasures or scientific objects; either evidence of heritage or specimens for research. Tracking that history and the multitude of worlds that emerge from it, the article demonstrates that rhetoricians need to account for the "things" that colonialism has produced and the ways those things act in public life to overdetermine settler colonial perspectives. It draws attention to the worlds precluded by a debate premissed on Peruvian national identity and U.S. scientific imperialism as twin poles, and it turns, instead, to Andean theories of the pluriverse and broader Indigenous relational theories to illustrate how rhetoric's ontological turn has, often, also been a colonial return. Working against that turn, the article aims to unsettle rhetorical studies' objects, places, and theories.

News Media Complicity in the Reproduction of American Colonialism in Guåhan During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Manuel Lujan Cruz — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Over the span of one month, Guåhan (Guam) has seen a dire upswing in COVID-19 infections from travelers coming from the continental United States (many of them being military personnel). The island, being an “unincorporated territory” of the US, did not have the legal authority to close its borders, and could only mitigate the impacts of the second spike in COVID-19. Often referred to as “the Tip of America’s Spear,” the pandemic has laid bare the implications of Guåhan’s colonial status, and is one of the numerous manifestations of American colonial ideology and policy at the nexus of global militarism and imperialism. In this essay, I examine mainstream news media in Guåhan to draw out the presence of pro-American ideologies which operate through modes of unification, dissimulation, and legitimation to reproduce American colonial hegemony in what can be described as an extant colonial mainstream mediascape. By looking at particular discursive events which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, I elucidate how such media environments perpetuate the dominant order of American militarization and imperialism overseas, calling to mind how the country’s transgressions abroad are inseparable from the systems of oppression in the continent.

Masking and Unmasking Extractive Coloniality at Chi’chil Bildagoteel (Oak Flat)

Nicholas Paliewicz — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

At Chi’chil Bildagoteel (Oak Flat Campground), in southeastern Arizona, two of the world’s largest mining companies—Rio Tinto and Broken Hill Property (BHP)—plan to create the biggest copper mine in North America on land sacred to many American Indians such as the San Carlos Apache. Contributing to rhetorical colonialism, indigeneity, and environmental justice, this paper shows that while Rio Tinto and BHP’s joint venture, Resolution Copper, has constructed a paternalistic corporate persona that is genealogical, culturally sensitive, and conservationist, many Indigenous activists and supporters have attempted to unmask Resolution Copper at public hearings through decolonial rhetorics that essentialize its persona as colonial. This analysis speaks to how corporations construct personae to legitimize colonialist activities and how Indigenous actors “talk back.”

“The Fairytale”: Ear Hustle, Domesticity, and the Entrepreneurial Self

John M. Sloop — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Abstract: Ear Hustle, the popular Pulitzer Prize nominated podcast focusing on life inside San Quentin State Prison, claims to provide "true" stories of life in prison. Cohosted by both inmates and volunteers, the show focuses on multiple aspects of life in, and out, of prison. In this essay, I offer a critical reading of the entire series and argue that, ultimately, Ear Hustle presents African American prisoners as both capable and responsible fully for their own achievement, buttressed by a traditional domestic structure. Rather than the disciplinary society of Foucault or the Deleuzian society of control, the podcast is ideologically overwritten with a society of achievement. While Ear Hustle is only one story that might be told about imprisonment, it is one reflective of, rather than resistant to, contemporary values.

Jagmeet's Kairotic Challenge: Darkface, Turbans, and Hypocrisy Upwards

Randy Allen Harris — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Things did not look good for Jagmeet Singh going into his first federal election, the first racialized leader of a federal party in Canada, a country with a long and ongoing history of racist hypocrisy, and a press that had framed Singh in exoticizing terms, associated him with terrorism, and relentlessly metonymized his "electability" by the turban he wears. But that election featured disturbing revelations of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's pre-political penchant for dressing up in racialized costuming. Photographs and videos of the famously progressive prime minister in brown and blackface shook the election and shook the country. But they also provided an opportunity-charged moment, a kairotic opening, for Singh to establish an ethos of compassion and prudential thoughtfulness, and for the country to face its hypocrisy. This essay charts his contributions, focussing on addressivity and deixis in his official statement and its foreshadowing tweet.

Toppling the Temple of Grandin

S. Marek Muller, Z. Zane McNeill — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

In this article, we conduct an ideological rhetorical criticism of Temple Grandin's rhetorical texts. Using our lived experiences as actually-autistic scholars, our critique fuses rhetorical theory with critical autism studies and critical animal studies. We specifically assess the analogical necropolitics central to Grandin's portrayals of livestock and autistic people. We conclude that Grandin's complicity in the animal-industrial complex renders her status as an animal advocate questionable and her status as an autistic advocate dangerous. The discursive intersections of speciesism and ableism in Grandin's central analogies regarding autistic and livestock bodies renders both parties as subhuman, disposable, and potentially killable. We conclude with alternative ways of thinking about animality, autism, and the pursuit of multispecies justice.

Review of Ableist Rhetoric: How We Know, Value, and See Disability by James L. Cherney

Emily Krebs — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

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