Cultivating radical care and otherwise possibilities at the end of the world

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the existence of alternative worlds and radical rhetorics within the seemingly apocalyptic landscapes of borders, patriarchy, and environmental decay. Despite the prevailing chaos, there exists evidence of the palpable vitality at the end of the world. Framed through the lens of “radical subjects,” individuals immersed in embodied struggle against oppressive regimes, I put forth three key claims: (1) the generative power of rupture, stressing emancipatory possibilities in disruptions to the status quo; (2) the intellectual power of those in corporeal resistance, highlighting the transformative potential of embodied agency and resistive organizing; and (3) the genealogical power of struggle, emphasizing the significance of ancestral collaboration across temporalities. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of attention, acceptance, and affirmation of those alive at the end of the world. By examining the interplay of rupture, corporeal resistance, and intergenerational struggle, the essay offers a reimagining of how we might foster radical care and solidarities with those in pursuit of hope, justice, and liberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• witnessing
• embodiment
• solidarity
• resistance

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

1 Roy Arundahati, War Talk (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 75.

2 Ghiath Matar, 100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution.

3 Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon: Subcomadante Insurgente Marcos (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 18.

4 Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2022), 11.

5 Mohan J. Dutta, “Decolonizing Communication for Social Change: A Culture-Centered Approach,” Communication Theory 25, no. 2 (2015): 123–43.

6 Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2024); Constance Gordon, “Learning Mutual Aid: Food Justice Public Pedagogy and Community Fridge Organizing Online,” Journal of Applied Communication Research (2024), doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2024.2327417.

7 Desert (Stac an Armin Press, 2011).

8 Ghassan Hage, Waiting (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), 170.

9 Hage, Waiting, 67.

10 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Toward a Telos of Solidarity,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 207–22; Noor Ghazal Aswad, “The U.S. American Left and Reverse Moral Exceptionalism?,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 109, no. 4 (2023): 354–75.

11 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C.N.L. Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 67.

12 Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 57.

13 “Radical care” is an underexamined praxis of radical politics that provides hope in precarious times. For more on radical care, see Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 2; Constance Gordon, “Criminalization Care: Environmental Justice under Political and Police Repression,” Environmental Communication (2024), doi:10.1080/17524032.2023.2296835; Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis,” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024), doi: 10.1080/17524032.2023.2296831.

14 Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 22.

15 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 130.

16 Achille Membe, Out of the Dark Night (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

17 Membe, Out of the Dark Night, 10.

18 Terms are translated from the original Arabic used by Syrian revolutionaries/radical subjects. See Salameh Kaileh, The Syrian Tragedy: The Revolution and Its Enemies (Milan: Almutawassit Books, 2016).

19 Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 13; Yassin Al Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017).]

20 Matthew Houdek and Ersula Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 85–95.

21 The term “intellectual leadership” can be found in the context of how hegemonic groups maintain their dominant status. See Carrie Crenshaw and David Roskos-Ewoldsen, “Rhetoric, Racist Ideology, and Intellectual Leadership,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 4 (2010): 276.

22 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.

23 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 9–10.

24 Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83.

25 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17–18.

26 Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry a Bilingual Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1967, 62).

27 Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998), 246.

28 Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, eds., Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Antiblackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 13.

29 Lilie Chouliaraki and Omar Al-Ghazzi, “Beyond Verification: Flesh Witnessing and the Significance of Embodiment in Conflict News,” Journalism 23, no. 3 (2022): 649–67.

30 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

31 Lia Brozgal, “In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961),” South Central Review 31, no. 1 (2014): 34–54.

32 Brozgal, “In the Absence of the Archive,” 50.

33 Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” Southern Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 759.

34 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 28.

35 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia University Press), 34.

36 Stacey K. Sowards, “The (Under)Commons across the Américas: Connecting Spaces for Fugitivity and Futurity,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2023): 302.

37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 295.

38 Matthew Houdek and Lisa A. Flores, “Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 25, no. 3 (2022): 27.

39 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

40 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 9.

41 Cornel West, “An Abiding Sense of History,” Humanity.org, May 30, 1993, http://www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/cornel-west-wesleyan-speech-1993?page=west_at_wesleyan.

42 Ghiath Matar, 100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution, https://100facesofthesyrianrevolution.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/ghiath-matar.

43 Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care.”

44 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.