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ABSTRACT
Through an “inter(con)textual reading” (Maraj), this essay explores the resonances and generative incongruences between two prominent metaphors that reflect the thought/feeling/praxis of two of the modern era’s most significant revolutions – “the common wind” from the Haitian revolution and the “wind from below” from the Zapatista revolution. My goal is to think within/across/beyond these revolutions via the methods, epistemologies, and imaginaries that flow within these shared metaphors – in the common wind from below – and speculate on how the seeds and meanings carried therein might take root and grow into something beyond what the disciplines and world currently offer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For more on the “undercommonsense,” see Karma R. Chávez, “Racialized Violence as Common Sense,” supersession panel presentation at the Rhetoric Society of American 2016 convention. May 29, 2016. Atlanta, GA. Unpublished paper (acquired/cited with permission and gratitude); Matthew Houdek, “Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of Black church burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 279–306. Matthew Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, No. 3 (2023): 353–65.
2 Matthew Houdek, “Metaphors to live and die by,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 353–65.
3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 235–39.
4 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 49.
5 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Seven Stories Press, 2005); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2021); Dylan Rodríguez, “Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 6 (2019): 1575–612.
6 Part 1 of this project, “On Occupying the Silent Parenthetical: Thinking/Feeling After the Ends/ings,” published in the Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, was written concurrently with this project. Throughout the drafting process, I would often have both essays open on my computer while working between them to the extent that whole or partial paragraphs or sentences would be drafted for one piece and then shifted to the other. Both projects represent something of a shift in my work (as with the RSQ piece noted above), and so I felt that I needed to work/think through the critique and argument issued in part 1 to find my way into the argument here in part 2. Acts of composing are acts of becoming.
7 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Toward a Telos of Solidarity,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1/2 (2021): 207–22; Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (202): 378–85.
8 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40
9 Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the Undercommons,” 365.
10 Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of Revolution (Verso Books, 2020).
11 Subcomadante Insurgente Marcos, “Chiapas: The Southwest in Two Winds,” in Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce de León, (Seven Stories P, 2001).
12 Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, eds., Knowledges Born in Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (Routledge, 2020), xxxii.
13 Louis M. Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (University Press of Colorado, 2020).
14 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2017).
15 Scott, The Common Wind, 18.
16 Scott, The Common Wind, 202–22; Alex Khasnabish, “A tear in the fabric of the present,” Journal in the Study of Radicalism 2, no. 2 (2009): 35.
17 Lechuga, “An anticolonial future,” 383–84.
18 Aswad, “Radical rhetoric,” 210.
19 Amy L. Brandziel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond inclusion: Rethinking rhetoric’s historical narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72; Bryan J. McCann, Ashley Noel Mack and Rico Self, “Communication's quest for whiteness: the racial politics of disciplinary legitimacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 243–52; Kenneth Rufo and R. Jarrod Atchison, “From circus to fasces: The disciplinary politics of citizen and citizenship,” The Review of Communication 11, no. 3 (2011): 193–215; Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 36–87. Many others.
20 Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Duke University Press, 2004), 266.
21 Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Global South thought through the Haitian Revolution,” in Knowledges Born in Struggle, ed. Santos and Meneses, 4.
22 Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 124.
23 Manuel Callahan, “Zapatismo and Global Struggle: ‘A Revolution to Make a Revolution Possible,’” in Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, ed. E. Yuen, D.
Burton-Rose, and G. Katsiaficas (Soft Skull Press, 2004), 11–18; Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, ed. D. A. Levy (Vintage Canada, 2002); Paul Kingsnorth, One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (The Free Press, 2003); Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Nation Books, 2004); Midnight Notes, eds., Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local & Global Struggles of the Fourth World War (Autonomedia, 2001).
24 Khasnabish, “Tear in the fabric,” 28.
25 The Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous General Command of the EZLN.
26 Manuel Callahan, “Zapatismo Beyond Chiapas,” in Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, ed. David Solnit (City Lights Books, 2004): 217–19.
27 Walter Mignolo, “The Zapatistas’s theoretical revolution: Its historical, ethical, and political consequences,” Utopian Thinking 25, no. 3 (2002): 245–75.
28 Mignolo, “The Zapatistas’s.”
29 Khasnabish, “A tear in the fabric,” 33.
30 Scott, The Common Wind, 208.
31 Scott, The Common Wind, 81–2.
32 Andrea J. Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (AK Press, 2023), 49.
33 Ritchie, Practicing, 226.
34 Marcos, “Chiapas,” 34.
35 Marcos, “Chiapas,” 36.
36 Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2012): 64; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15 (2012): 647–57; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press, 2015), 22–23; Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication 46, no. 5 (2018): 535–60.
37 Escobar, Pluriversal Politics, 71–2.
38 Khasnabish, “Tear in the fabric,” 49.
39 Hana Masri, “‘From Palestine to Mexico, All the Walls have got to go’: Rhetorical Bordering as Transnational Settler Colonial Project,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18 (2021): 86.
40 Kimberlee Pérez, “Embodying ‘I Can’t Breathe’: Tensions and Possibilities Between Appropriation and Coalition,” in Precarious Rhetorics, ed. Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona and Christa Teston (Ohio State University, 2018), 82–104; Karrieanne Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx rhetoric and intersectionality in racial rhetorical criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 319–25.
41 Marcos, “Chiapas,” 28.
42 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigm, 2014), 71.
43 Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (University Minnesota Press, 2022), 11
44 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003), 9–10.
45 Escobar, Pluriversal Politics, 70.
46 Escobar, Pluriversal Politics, xxii, xxxii.
47 Book Series: Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Critical-Perspectives-on-Breath-and-Breathing/book-series/RCPB. See Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson eds., Atmospheres of Breathing (SUNY Press, 2018); Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016); Magdalena Górska, Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (Linköping University Press, 2016); Irma Kinga Allen, “Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-Breathing-Bodies,” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (2020): 79–015; Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 443–58; Matthew Houdek and Ersula Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 85–95; Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze, “Police Power and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spatialities of In/Securities in U.S. Cities,” English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016); Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2020).
48 Lisa B.Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here Is Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 202–9.
49 Logan Rae Gomez, Matthew Houdek, Robert Mejia, “A Rhetoric that Breathes, a Rhetoric that Heals: In/Coherence, Storytelling, and Abolitionist Futures,” Women’s Studies in Communication. Forthcoming 2024.
50 King, The Black Shoals.
51 Houdek, “(An) allegory of the undercommons,” 355.
52 Bernd Reider ed., Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2018), 2. See also Ashish Kothari et al. eds., Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika Books, 2019).
53 Romeo García and Damián Baca, Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions (CCCC, 2019), 32
54 Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange, “Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 190.
55 Santos and Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologies, xx; Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021).
56 Andre E. Johnson, “My sanctified imagination: Carter G. Woodson and a speculative (rhetorical) history of African American public address, 1925–1960,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 15–49; Chávez, “Beyond inclusion.”
57 Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 7; Arturo Escobar, “Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South,” in Epistemologies, ed. Santos and Meneses, 41–57.
58 Lechuga, “An anticolonial future.”
59 Amber Johnson, “Radical Imagination via Play: The Future of Critical Cultural Studies Research,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 81–87; LeMaster, Loretta, and Amber Johnson. “Speculative Fiction, Criticality, and Futurity: An Introduction,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2021): 280–82; Maraj, Antiracist.
60 Houdek, “(An) allegory of the undercommons,” 357.