Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics

Abstract

This essay challenges the model of nationalism long favored in rhetorical scholarship by repositioning it as just one among numerous possibilities. To illustrate an alternative perspective, I employ a new materialist approach to postcolonial nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, I draw on Wangari Maathai’s later work to juxtapose Westphalian nationalism to micronationalism. I argue that close attention to spatial and material dynamics in the African postcolonial context compels us to reconsider rhetoric’s ties to the nation-state. I highlight some consequences of the materiality of space, nation, and rhetoric for rhetorical studies in thinking about rhetoric and (post)nationalism.

Keywords:

• African rhetoric
• nationalism
• nationalist rhetoric
• postcolonial studies
• Wangari Maathai

Notes

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Josh P. Ewalt and Joan Faber McAlister for their invitation to contribute and their generous and insightful feedback. Thanks are also due to Lindsay Harroff and David Schulz for commenting on drafts of this essay.

Notes

1 In the same year that Fanon published his influential book, the African Union chose, at its founding, to authenticate colonial boundaries that had carved the continent into macronations.

2 This bifurcated time was often consecrated through lavish ceremonies marking the dawn of independence. These ceremonies were often accompanied by changes in the names of the countries—Rhodesia became Zambia and Zimbabwe, Nyasaland became Malawi, and so forth.

3 Here I mean to invoke Nancy Fraser’s and Chantal Mouffe’s senses of these terms.

4 I am using Stormer’s definition of articulation here (“Articulation” 261).