Racialized temporalities and rhetorical violence

ABSTRACT

Reflecting upon the words of Professors De Genova, Lozano, and Yam, this essay suggests that rhetorical scholars attend to the intersections between rhetorical violence and rhetorical temporalities. The varied projects that emerge in this forum together suggest that the racialized temporalities of violence rely upon temporalities of relentless and repetition. Together, relentlessness and repetition make race. They do so, within white supremacy and antiblackness, by demanding a particular racist recognition, a seeing and sensing of race premised in antiblackness.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• race
• violence

Notes

1 Maxine Waters qtd. in Katherine Fung, “Maxine Waters Calls Haiti Migrant Treatment ‘Worse Than What We Witnessed in Slavery,’” Newsweek, September 22, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/maxine-waters-calls-haiti-migrant-treatment-worse-what-we-witnessed-slavery-1631707.

2 Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), 2020: 9.

3 Logan Rae Gomez, “Temporal Containment and the Singularity of Anti-Blackness: Saying Her Name in and across Time,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51, no. 3 (2021): 185.

4 Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strous and Giroux), 2007: 6.

5 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press), 2016: 13–14.

6 Waters qtd. in Fung.

7 Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication, 43, no. 4 (2020): 444.

8 Ibid, 444.