An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This essay is organized around four claims, which when taken together, demonstrate that it is time for the field of Communication Rhetoric in the United States to rethink the way it does rhetoric: (1) US American rhetoric is the way settler colonialism organizes, (2) assemblage theory can frame US rhetoric as an organizing logic of Settler Colonialism, (3) anti-colonial social movement knowledge production is akin to theory, and (4) rhetoric must find a better method to engage with these anti-colonial movements. I end the essay with a challenge to rhetorical scholars to learn, rather than try to teach.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetorical studies
• settler colonialism
• assemblage
• praxis
• activism

Notes

1 Christof Rapp, “Aristotle's Rhetoric,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), ed. Edward. N. Zalta (Palo Alto: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford, 2010), https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=aristotle-rhetoric

2 J. Jeffery Auer, “American Public Address and American Studies: A Bibliography,” American Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1957): 219.

3 Ilon Lauer, “Ritual and Power in Imperial Roman Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 427–8.

4 Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24, no. 4 (2001): 73–98.

5 Auer, “American Public Address,” 218; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric: A Glance at our Recent Past, Present, and Potential Future,” Review of Communication 10, no. 3 (2010): 197–210.

6 Auer, “American Public Address,” 218.

7 Ibid., 222.

8 McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric,” 200–1.

9 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave, 2010): 14.

10 Walter D. Mignolo “DELINKING: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 453.

11 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 99.

12 Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 54.

13 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388.

14 Thomas Nail, “What is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): 21.

15 Ibid., 22.

16 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

17 Nail, “What is an Assemblage?” 24.

18 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 2006): 267.

19 “No Papers, No Fear—Ride for Justice,” Last updated September 4, 2013, http://nopapersnofear.org/blog/index.php

20 Michael Lechuga, “Mapping Migrant Vernacular Discourses: Mestiza Consciousness, Nomad Thought, and Latina/o/x Migrant Movement Politics in the United States,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 13, no. 3 (2020): 9.

21 Assemblage theory, Deleuze and Guattari's explanation of the organization of territorializing power in societies of control, was a concept that developed out of their collaboration in Anit-Oedipus (originally in 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (originally in 1980). Assemblage theory as a study of European logics of power is useful in making sense of settler colonialism, as it is also a European-derived logic of power. Deleuze and Guattari, in personal letters and interviews, describe the inspiration that the May, 1968 student riots in Paris, France had in developing an anticapitalist, anti-(US) imperial theory that explains the material impacts ideologies have on May ’68 is what brought them together and their work “bore the stamp of the intellectual ferment of the period.” Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011): 179.

22 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

23 Ibid., 18.

24 Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” (address delivered to the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Havana, Cuba, January, 1966), https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm.

25 David Cisneros’s essay on hybridity and La Gran Marcha is an example of this work in the field of Communication Studies. In this piece, he coconstructs notion of hybridity from the voices of those engaging in political activism. See David Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 26–49.