#RhetoricSoWhite and US centered: Reflections on challenges and opportunities

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I interrogate the normalized characteristics of whiteness embedded in the disciplinary norms and forms of knowledge production in the field of Rhetorical Studies. I attend to the normative ways the exclusion of the knowledge(s) and experiences of non-White, non-Western, non-US people reproduces systemic erasure and Euro-American dominant ways of thinking about rhetoric stepped in coloniality and whiteness. I present what has been thoroughly theorized by Feminist, Queer, Trans*, Chicana, Latina/x, Third World, Indigenous, and Black rhetorical scholars that mere “inclusion” and “tolerance” of difference with regards to race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and nationality cannot fully address the violence of white capitalist heteropatriarchy in academia. I propose that rhetorical scholars should pay careful attention to voice and relationality in our scholarly works in order to address the concealments of coloniality and difference in our theorizing and production of knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• race
• colonialism
• voice
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to my fellow contributors to this forum for their invaluable feedback on the manuscript's development. In addition to my appreciation for their feedback, I also appreciate our shared emotional labor in the process of writing the essays in the forum.

Notes

1 Sara Baugh-Harris and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 337–42.

2 Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2002): 57–96.

3 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 2012), 116.

4 Bernadette Marie Calafell, Latino Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 7.

5 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 349–57.

6 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).

7 Kundai Chirindo, “Rhetorical Places: From Classical Topologies to Prospects for Post-Westphalian Spatialities,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 127–31.

8 Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91.

9 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

10 Raka Shome, “Outing Whiteness,” Critical Studies in Media and Communication 17, no. 3 (2000): 366–71.

11 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 305.

12 Paula Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.

13 Calafell, Latino Communication Studies, 7.

14 Tiara Na’puti, “From Guåhan and Back; Navigating a Both/Neither Analytic for Rhetorical Field Methods,” in Text+Field Innovations in Rhetorical Method, ed. Sara L McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma Chavez and Robert Howard (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2016), 56.

15 Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos – a Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communications Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 48–60; Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism”; Stacey Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An examination of Dolores Huerta's rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20, no. 2 (2010): 223–47.

16 Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 179–96.

17 Ibid.,180.

18 Ibid., 192; Lisa A. Flores “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56.

19 King Watts, Flesh to Speech: The Problem of Racism in Public Address (Boulder, CO.: Public Address Conference, 2018).

20 Ronald L. Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson, Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2014), xv.

21 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

22 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003); Martin Bernal, ed., Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

23 Karma R. Chavez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

24 Jacqui M. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Alexander explains that people of color need to know each other's histories so we do not replicate the same violence we experience.

25 Wanzer-Serano, The New York Young Lords, 12.