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ABSTRACT
This short essay introduces the special issue, “Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End,” which features original short essays that offer bold, risky, and provocative perspectives that share the general belief that we can no longer afford safe, incremental, or mechanical solutions and responses to the profound challenges that confront our planetary community/ies today. Rather than a new set of universals, or proscriptive, prescriptive, or diagnostic solutions, the essays included herein open an in/coherent political horizon and gesture to a diverse set of tools, concepts, and approaches that might help re-think what meaningful social change, world-building, and the pluriversal present and future might look like in all of its diversity, unpredictability, and in/coherence. This forum emerged from a roundtable discussion at the 2022 National Communication Association convention and was developed through a collaborative peer review process that involved all contributing authors. This introduction establishes the disciplinary, conceptual, and personal context surrounding this forum before providing a brief overview of the essays.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Sara Baugh and Darrel Wanzer Serrano, “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 15, no. 4 (2018): 337–42.
2 Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and The Possible (Duke University Press, 2020), 14.
3 Escobar, Pluriversal, 15.
4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm, 2014, 71.
5 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 29.
6 Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Meneses, “Epistemologies of the South—Giving Voice to the Diversity of the South,” Introduction. Knowledges Born in Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (Routledge, 2020), pp. xvi–xliii.
7 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Towards a Telos of Solidarity,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 207–22.
8 Not all the original panel participants were able to join in this special issue.
9 Michael Lechuga and John Ackerman, “Prelude,” Review of Communication 22, no. 4 (2022): 257–8.
10 Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, October 13, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide; International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).” December 29, 2023; International Federation for Human Rights, “The Unfolding Genocide Against Palestinians Must Stop Immediately,” December 12, 2023, https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-unfolding-genocide-against-the-palestinians-must-stop-immediately; “Jewish Voice for Peace Calls on All People of Conscience to Stop Imminent Genocide,” Jewish Voice for Peace, November 16, 2023, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/11/statement23-10-11/; “800 western officials say the policies of their governments on Gaza ‘are contributing to grave violations of international law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide’,” Commonspace.eu, February 2, 2024, https://www.commonspace.eu/news/800-western-officials-say-policies-their-governments-gaza-are-contributing-grave-violations. Further, while there is an unfortunate tendency to reframe critiques of settler/colonial and Zionist movements as “antisemetic,” as Rabbi Alissa Wise puts it: “I am Jewish, I’m not a Zionist, and I reject the idea that critiquing the politics of a government, the way you would any other government, is antisemitic. Israel is not a Jew, Israel is a state. The claim that it’s antisemitic is used as a cudgel to silence people and it’s really egregious, the way that they manipulate Jewish trauma.” Alaa Elasaar, “‘Not in our name’: Jewish Peace Activists Across the US Call for Immediate Ceasefire and Justice for Palestinians,” CNN, October 23, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/us/jewish-palestinian-protest-israel-gaza/index.html. It is a shame that I even need to write these words because these issues and what is happening right now in Gaza should be obvious to even the most casual observer, nor should it be the case that empathy for one group’s suffering and loss precludes empathy for another (being human is not a zero-sum game), but, as Stacey reminded me, these are dark and contentious times, and one also needs to mind their steps.
11 Kaitlyn Greenidge, “‘We Can Do Something Different’: Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba on Their New Book No More Police,” Harper’s Bizaar, September 30, 2022, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a41447080/andrea-ritchie-mariame-kaba/.
12 This is a continuation of work in a special issue of “Environmental Communication as Care.” See Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “On Environmental Communication as a Care Discipline,” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024); Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis,” Environmental Communication, 18 (1–2).