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Abstract
This response will contemplate how the fluid mechanics managing the dialectic between nationalism and cosmopolitanism were imbricated with the affective registers of racialized forms of conceptualizing and categorizing the discipline. I want to suggest that the manner in which claims of belonging to and eviction from national dwelling places can be historically coordinated with this nation's emergent racial imaginaries. I will argue that this history has forged important critical capacities that we should cultivate more actively to meet current and future challenges from within and without the academy. Also, I will embark upon a brief trial of critical cosmopolitanism in terms of how it might shape and guide an assessment of a difficult challenge being mounted by Afro-Pessimism to some essential presumptions of Communication Studies in general and Rhetorical Studies in particular.
The author wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker for offering the opportunity to respond to Kirt H. Wilson's essay. The author also wishes to thank Jeremy Grossman for valuable editorial support.
The author wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker for offering the opportunity to respond to Kirt H. Wilson's essay. The author also wishes to thank Jeremy Grossman for valuable editorial support.
Notes
[1] Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 382.
[2] Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 382.
[3] Kirt H. Wilson, “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Disciplinarity: Reconsidering the Origins of Communication Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 244–57, emphasis added.
[4] Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 382–83.
[5] Wilson, “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions,” 252.
[6] Michael Leff, “Introduction, Forum: Rhetoric and Society in the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (February 2006): 51–52.
[7] Wilson, The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions,” 245.
[8] Leff, “Introduction, Forum,” 51.
[9] Steve Mailloux, “Places in Time: The Inns and Outhouses of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 56, emphasis added.
[10] See, for example, Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[11] Mailloux, “Places in Time,” 57.
[12] James Arnt Aune, “The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (February 2006): 73, 74.
[13] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
[14] Leff, “Introduction, Forum,” 51–52.
[15] Wilson, “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions,” 255, original emphasis.
[16] Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 179–96; Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics & Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
[17] Frank Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 58.
[18] Some style manuals would advise that these terms be lowercase; Afro-Pessimists insist on their capitalization.
[19] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 38.
[20] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 55.
[21] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 45, 58.
[22] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 58; see also, Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[23] See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); see also David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005).
[24] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 65, emphasis added.
[25] On Saturday August 9, 2014, Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson encountered Michael Brown and a friend walking home; the encounter resulted in the lethal shooting of Brown, who was unarmed. Several witnesses have reported seeing Brown running from Wilson, and Wilson firing at Brown; they report that Brown turned toward Wilson with his hands up, but Wilson kept firing, hitting Brown in the head. On Wednesday, August 9, the U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into the shooting. The apparent lack of transparency regarding the shooting and the attempt in the media to demonize Brown sparked several days of intense unrest. The incident has been widely viewed as symptomatic of a structural incapacity in U.S. society to see male Blackness as human.
[26] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 55, 37.
[27] Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political: Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 28–66.
[28] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 55.
[29] Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 47.
[30] Eric King Watts, “‘The Incessant Moan’: Reanimating Zombie Voices,” Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association, 2014. Published Carroll C. Arnold Lecture, delivered November 2013 at the National Communication Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C.