All of us phantasmic saviors

ABSTRACT

Drawing from interviews and conversations with US American volunteers at an international aid organization in Tanzania, I argue that the subject constitution of US volunteers is dependent upon foreclosures that remove questions of their colonial and racial presence from conscious awareness. I explain how these foreclosures are covered by a white savior fantasy, and trace how volunteers at this particular organization use two primary tools to avoid facing their foreclosures and traversing their fantasies: denial and irony. In conclusion, I explore the implications of this study for reflexivity in critical rhetorical fieldwork, as well as aid practice.

KEYWORDS:

• neocolonialism
• rhetorical field methods
• subjectivity
• white savior
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Dana Cloud, Joshua Gunn, Graham Slater, and Constance Gordon for their insight and feedback on earlier drafts.

Notes

1 “The Real” is that which cannot be symbolized by a subject, and is impossible to represent. Even though the Real cannot be conceptualized, it still affects subjectivity and rhetorical action. Jacques Lacan, “Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung,’” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 324.

2 Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 387.

3 Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook, Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

4 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 671–702.

5 Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification,” in The Judith Butler Reader, eds. Sara Salih with Judith Butler (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 332.

6 Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 679.

7 Butler, “Changing the Subject,” 333.

8 Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 1 (2004): 19.

9 Ibid., 8.

10 Ibid., 10.

11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6.

12 Jenna N. Hanchey, “Constructing ‘American Exceptionalism’: Peace Corps Volunteer Discourses of Race, Gender, and Empowerment,” in Volunteering and Communication Volume II: Studies in International and Intercultural Contexts, eds. Michael W. Kramer, Laurie K. Lewis, and Loril M. Gossett (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 234.

13 Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.

14 Ibid.

15 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 6.

16 Hanchey, “Constructing ‘American Exceptionalism.’”

17 Cole, “White-Savior Industrial Complex.”

18 Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 15–6.

19 Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 114.

20 Godfried Asante, “Glocalized Whiteness: Sustaining and Reproducing Whiteness Through ‘Skin Toning’ in Post-colonial Ghana,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 2 (2016): 92.

21 Butler, “Changing the Subject,” 333.

22 Ibid.

23 Dana Cloud, “The Irony Bribe and Reality Television: Investment and Detachment in The Bachelor,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 5 (2010): 416.

24 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 4.

25 Ibid., 10.

26 Danielle Endres and Mary Gould, “‘I Am Also in the Position to Use My Whiteness to Help Them Out’: The Communication of Whiteness in Service Learning,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2009): 419.

27 See, for instance: SAIH Norway, “Africa for Norway—New charity single out now!” YouTube. Humanitarians of Tinder, “Humanitarians of Tinder,” http://humanitariansoftinder.com; Barbie Savior, “Barbie Savior,” https://www.instagram.com/barbiesavior.

28 Elsa Gunnarsdottie and Kathryn Mathers, “‘Doing Good’ in an Age of Parody.” Africa is a Country. January 11, 2017. http://africasacountry.com/2017/01/doing-good-in-an-age-of-parody/

29 Ibid.

30 Endres and Gould, “I Am Also in the Position.”

31 Cloud, “The Irony Bribe,” 415.

32 Ibid., 416.

33 Kristen M. Lavelle, Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). This and the next quote are from p. 189, emphasis in original.

34 Cloud, quoting Kenneth Burke, “The Irony Bribe,” 416.

35 Saidiya Hartman, “Come, Go Back, Child,” Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007), 84–100.

36 Cole, “White-Savior Industrial Complex.”

37 Constance Gordon, personal communication.

38 Butler, “Changing the Subject.”

39 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 11, 13.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Organization for Research on Women and Communication and the Jesse H. Jones Fellowship, Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin.