Precarious publics

ABSTRACT

Taking up the responses some relatively recent immigrants to the United States had to responses to the 2020 Campaign, this article argues for a postnational perspective on (U.S. American) presidential public address. I develop this argument in two brief sections. First, I demonstrate that rhetorical tropology alone cannot explain the thematic of democracy’s vulnerability that emerged in many people’s reactions to the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections. I then turn to precarity as a principle of disenclosure to relate some of the populist sentiments that surfaced during the 2020 campaign to global currents of precarity catalyzed, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Tropology
• precarity
• 2020 elections

Notes

1 Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan Presdential Library & Musuem, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-members-british-parliament.

2 PBS Newshour, “December 15, 2020,” directed by Chris Alexander 2021.

3 Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament.”

4 Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Siege (New York: Freedom House, 2021), 9, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-02/FIW2021_World_02252021_FINAL-web-upload.pdf.

5 Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Siege (New York: Freedom House, 2021), 3, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-02/FIW2021_World_02252021_FINAL-web-upload.pdf.

6 Repucci and Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021, 2.

7 James Arnt Aune, “Burke’s Late Blooming: Trope, Defense, and Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 3 (1983): 328–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638309383659.

8 Aune, “Burke's Late Blooming: Trope, Defense, and Rhetoric,” 329.

9 Aune, “Burke's Late Blooming: Trope, Defense, and Rhetoric,” 331.

10 Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, and Christa Teston, Precarious Rhetorics (Ohio State University Press, 2018), 1.

11 See, for example, Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penuin Press, 2018) and, for counterpoints: Adam Rothman, “‘Tribalism’ Doesn’t Explain Our Political Conflicts,” Washington Post, November 14, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/14/tribalism-doesnt-explain-our-political-conflicts/; Christine Mungai, “Pundits Who Decry ‘Tribalism’ Know Nothing About Real Tribes,” Washington Post, January 30, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/pundits-who-decry-tribalism-know-nothing-about-real-tribes/2019/01/29/8d14eb44-232f-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html.

12 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 14.

13 G. Mitchell Reyes and Kundai Chirindo, “Theorizing Race and Gender in the Anthropocene,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 436. doi:10.1080/07491409.2020.1824519.

14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 218. doi:10.1086/596640.

15 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa,” Anthropological Forum 22, no. 2 (2012): 114. doi:10.1080/00664677.2012.694169.

16 Kundai Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 383–93. doi:10.1080/07491409.2018.1551686; Lindsay Harroff, “Ethnicity, Politics, and the Rhetoric of Genocide at Eldoret,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 22, no. 3 (2019): 421–51. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.3.0421; Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2019).