Wangari Maathai's Emplaced Rhetoric: Greening Global Peacebuilding

Abstract

This article offers new insights into how Wangari Maathai's rhetoric of emplacement may be productively understood as a growing form of postcolonial communication, which is amenable to criticism and theory-building in rhetorical studies. Maathai's emplaced rhetoric (ER) addressed postcolonial oppressions while emphasizing peacebuilding. ER is a form of postcolonial symbolic and discursive message-making found in a variety of communication contexts, often political, intercultural, and international exchanges about the environment. Prevailing literature on environmental communication features rhetorics that relate to colonial caused inequities, but little has been discussed in terms of connecting peacebuilding rhetoric of African women's leadership to environmental sustainability. ER functions as a heuristic move to restore agency, interconnection and wholeness of sentient beings and ecosystems within the postcolonial context; it is the peacebuilder's transcendence over dominant discourses that normalize displacement and fragmentation. This rhetorical analysis of recent texts of Maathai as a major peacebuilder in environmental and social justice activism serves as an antidote to the gap in contemporary criticism of postcolonial and environmental confluences in communication.

Keywords:

• Wangari Maathai
• Emplaced rhetoric
• Peacebuilding
• Postcolonial
• Environmental communication

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Editors, particularly Special Issue Editor Stacey Sowards and reviewers for revisions guidance; BGSU's Institute for the Study of Culture and Society for fellowship support; and Yeon Ju Oh for research assistance.

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Notes on contributors

Ellen W. Gorsevski

Ellen W. Gorsevski is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication in the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University (BGSU)