“From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow”: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power

Abstract

This essay performs a rhetorical cartography of “regional accents” to draw a map of how they articulate regions into, and out of, maps of power. First, the essay isolates the accent of neoliberalism in the constitution of regions through the use of regional trade agreements. Second, the essay tracks a socialist accent for regional power in Samir Amin's call for the Global South to execute a political strategy of “delinking.” Third, the essay argues that the rhetorical movement between places in protest, expressed by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, invents a horizontal regional accent. For places of protest, a horizontal regional accent invents and folds regions of protest into one another to fuel the production of new places of protest. As a political subjectivity, the protester emerges in the crease of a regional fold of protest places as these places make and unmake maps of power.

Notes

¹Asmaa Mahfouz delivered her speech in Arabic. Our citation of the speech relies on the English subtitles provided by the video.

²For the philosophical underpinnings of the materialist approach to rhetoric used in this essay, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”; Greene, “Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor”; and Greene “Spatial Materialism.”