On occupying the silent parenthetical: Thinking-feeling after the Ends/ings (Part 1/2)

ABSTRACT

To speak of “the End” as a cataclysmic future event, as depicted in popular apocalyptic genres, oversimplifies the prolonged, multiplicitous character of the End Times as they unfold unevenly across different scales, speeds, populations, and intensities. As many rhetoricians and other critical scholars have noted, an interrelated series of Ends and Endings mark the contemporary conjuncture, disrupting disciplinary traditions and the prevailing epistemic terrain: the End of Speech, Debate, the University, Time, the Individual, Politics, The Greeks, Whiteness, the Canon, Capitalism, Colonialism, Patriarchy, Prisons, Discipline, Man—in short, and in the spirit of Frantz Fanon, The End of the World. In Part 1 of this two-part essay, I begin to speculate on what it might mean to think otherwise from these unfolding and overlapping Ends and Endings, call attention to the limits of criticism-as-usual, and raise a number of questions for rhetorical scholars committed to studying social change and enabling different possible futures and worlds. I consider the im/possibilities of realizing a transformative rhetorical studies rooted in pluriversality, the undercommonsense, experimental writing, and the “radical rhetorics” (Aswad) of communities born in struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Undercommons
• pluriverse
• epistemic south
• abolition
• decolonization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

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2 Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).

3 Bryan McCann, “Lynching and the University,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 244–49.

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5 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire (Duke University Press, 2018).

6 Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2007).

7 Dreama Moon and Lisa A. Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination among ‘Race Traitors,’” Communication Studies 51, no. 2 (2000): 97–115.

8 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. (Seven Stories Press, 2005); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013); PCARE, “Fighting the Prison-Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 402-20; PCARE, “PCARE @10: Reflecting on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, while Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 288–310.

9 Sara Baugh-Harris and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano. “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 337–42.

10 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” in Incerteva Viza, ed. Jochen Volz et al. (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2016), 63–65, https://issuu.com/bienal/docs/32bsp-catalogoweb-en.

11 Armond R. Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 349–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1551985; Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

12 Josue David. Cisneros, “Free to Move, Free to Stay, Free to Return: Border Rhetorics and a Commitment to Telos,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2021): 94–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2021.1898009.

13 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2021); David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014).

14 Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019).

15 Matthew Houdek and Lisa A. Flores, “Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 25, no. 3 (2022): 25–48.

16 Arturo Escobar, “Sustaining the Pluriverse: The Political Ontology of Territorial Struggles in Latin America,” in The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress, eds. Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 237–56.

17 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington (Penguin Books, 1967).

18 Fanon, The Wretched.

19 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017).

20 Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–85.

21 Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Global South Thought through the Haitian Revolution.” In Knowledges Born in Struggle, eds. Santos and Meneses (New York City: Routledge), 4–20.

22 La paperson, A Third University is Possible (Minnesota University Press, 2017).

23 Andrea J. Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (AK Press, 2023).

24 Angela Y. Davis. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Empire, and Torture (Seven Stories Press, 2005); W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Free Press, 1997).

25 Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2012): 44-66; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press, 2015).

26 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2014).

27 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2017).

28 For more on the “undercommonsense,” see Karma Chávez, “Racialized Violence as Common Sense,” supersession panel presentation at the Rhetoric Society of American 2016 convention. May 29, 2016. Atlanta, GA. Unpublished paper (acquired/cited with permission and gratitude); Matthew Houdek, “Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of Black church burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 279–306; Matthew Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2023): 353–65

29 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990/2009), 3, 5, 14; Brittney C. Cooper, “Love No Limit: Towards a Black Feminist Future (in Theory),” The Black Scholar 45, no. 4 (2015): 7; Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 10.

30 Amber Johnson, “Radical Imagination via play: the future of Critical Cultural Studies research,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 81–87; Lore/tta, LeMaster and Amber Johnson. “Speculative Fiction, Criticality, and Futurity: An Introduction,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2021): 280–2.

31 Jeffrey A. Bennett and Charles E. Morris III, “Rhetorical Criticism’s Multitudes,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–3.

32 Escobar, Designs, 43.

33 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Toward a Telos of Solidarity,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, nos. 1–2 (2021): 207–22.

34 Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54