Histories of Radical Interactionality: Rivers, Disease, Borders, and Laundry

ABSTRACT

The Spanish flu’s efficacy of spreading across El Paso was in part due to neoliberal governments and racially prejudiced free-market economies exploiting a natural ecosystem to marginalize a Latinx community. This study identifies the tragic consequences these actions brought about for an entire city of both marginalized and privileged. This work argues for a new paradigm of rhetorical agency that accounts for interactions between rhetorical ecologies happening over time. This work demonstrates this paradigm through government policies, newspaper articles, press releases, and ecological surveys of El Paso, Texas, beginning with the early nineteenth century through the first years of the Spanish flu (1918–20). Through the lens of rhetorical methods concerning agency distribution and radical interactionality, we see how one neighborhood played a vital role in the epidemic’s spread throughout the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• border rhetorics
• neoliberalism
• new materialism
• radical interactionality
• rhetorical ecologies
• Spanish flu

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Jane Bennett describes agency as dispersed within specific places and encourages rhetorical theorists to take seriously the agentive qualities of matter. In doing so, Bennett claims agency “becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts” (Vibrant Matter 23). A virus has agency in that it has the ability to enact change in its environment while depending on relationships to healthy cells to continue spreading. Like all life forms, a virus’s intent is survival and propagation. I use agency to account for a virus’s capacity to enact change in relation to other life forms, namely the cells within the human body, and its intent of survival and propagation.