Intersectional mobilities: acts of dissettlement

ABSTRACT

This article narrates a mobility history spanning from 16th-century colonization to present-day policing practices to better understand acts of dissettlement. We identify major technological developments enabling new forms of mobility along with their material-semiotic figures that concomitantly shift race relations. Our approach extends inquiry into how rhetoric is performed through technological, material, and figurative acts of mobility and immobility. By focusing on how dissettlement is dominated by shifting race-based power relationships, we forward rhetoric’s commitment to sustain critical attention on race, not as an afterthought but as central to the work of all criticism. This history of mobility also contributes to theorizing dissettlement as a key concept for rhetorical studies. We identify four mobility tropes as acts of dissettlement, each drawn from extant scholarship on rhetoric and mobility: dis/ease, per/meability, b/ordering, and il/legality.

KEYWORDS:

• automobility
• infrastructure
• racial profiling
• rhetoric

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John M. Ackerman, Michael A. Lechuga, Kathleen McConnell, and our anonymous reviewers for the feedback. This article could only be completed with their formative and compassionate support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We see this use of bodies as one example of what Christina Sharpe describes as “the wake,” the unanticipated effects of slavery in the United States. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

2 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez, “Nightmares of Whiteness: Dreams and Deportability in the Age of Trump.” In Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, ed. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2018), 198–217; Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); J.D. Cisneros, “Reclaiming the Rhetoric of Reies López Tijerina: Border Identity and Agency in ‘The Land Grant Question,’” Communication Quarterly 60, no. 5 (2012): 561–87, doi:10.1080/01463373.2012.724999.

3 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 6, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.

4 Robert J. Topinka, Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); Flores and Gomez, “Nightmares of Whiteness;” Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2014); Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).

5 Genevieve Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

6 L. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 12.

7 For example, the United Nations Environment Programme works for policies that address the unique automobility problems of developed and developing nations. United Nations Environment Programme, “About Transport,” UN Environment Programme, June 21, 2017, http://www.unep.org/explore-topics/transport/about-transport.

8 Robert Asen outlines how neoliberalism transforms the possibilities for democracy. Michel Callon methodologically details how users become webbed to larger social dynamics, often against their will. John Urry describes six categories contributing to automobility. Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 329–49, doi:10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507; Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” The Sociological Review 32, no. S1 (1984): 196–233, doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00113.x; John Urry, “Automobility, Car Culture and Weightless Travel.” (Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, 1999), https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/urry-automobility.pdf.

9 Urry, “Automobility.”

10 Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes a precursor to automobility in his study of British railroads in the 19th century. His study describes how new forms of transportation change the biology of passengers. Early train passengers, for example, were frequently sick while traveling because they were not used to the speed. He also points out that the coordination of train schedules required that temporality needed to be standardized. Schivelbusch’s study helps to understand invisible shifts in human consciousness that occur during popularization of any mass media. Baudrillard pointed out how Americans were compelled by rhetorics of freedom enabled by cars. There are numerous other examples, perhaps the most famous being Walter Ong, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan’s research on writing as a technology. Harold Innis, Bias Of Communication (Toronto: University Of Toronto Press, 2008); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001); Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso Books, 1988).

11 Greg Dickinson, “Space, Place, and the Textures of Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (May 26, 2020): 297–313, doi:10.1080/10570314.2019.1672886; Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257–82, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.585167; Ronald Walter Greene, “Spatial Materialism: Labor, Location, and Transnational Literacy,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 105–10, doi:10.1080/15295031003687834; Jason Kalin and Jordan Frith, “Wearing the City: Memory P(a)Laces, Smartphones, and the Rhetorical Invention of Embodied Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2016): 222–35, doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1171692.

12 John M. Ackerman, “The Space for Rhetoric in Everyday Life.” In Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse, ed. Martin Nystrand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 84–117; Greg Dickinson, “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2002): 5–27; Greg Dickinson, Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015); Jennifer Keohane, “Producing Detroit: Narratives of Space and Place in the 1932 Ford Hunger March and Funeral Protest,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 2 (2021): 171–94; Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Andrew Wood, “A Rhetoric of Ubiquity: Terminal Space as Omnitopia,” Communication Theory 13, no. 3 (2003): 324–44, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2003.tb00295.x.

13 Monica Anderson, “Who Relies on Public Transit in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 7, 2016, Research Topics edition, sec. Climate, Energy & Environment, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-on-public-transit-in-the-u-s/.

14 Alexander Bolton, “Transit Funding, Broadband Holding Up Infrastructure Deal,” The Hill, July 22, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/564347-transit-funding-broadband-holding-up-infrastructure-deal; Ian Duncan, “Transit Funding Is a Final Obstacle to an Infrastructure Deal: What Is the 80–20 Split, and Why Does It Matter?,” Washington Post, July 23, 2002, sec. Transportation, https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2021/07/23/transit-highways-infrastructure-deal/.

15 Amy Lubitow, Kyla Tompkins, and Madeleine Feldman, “Sustainable Cycling for All? Race and Gender–Based Bicycling Inequalities in Portland, Oregon,” City & Community 18, no. 4 (2019): 1181–202, doi:10.1111/cico.12470; Ipek N. Sener, Naveen Eluru, and Chandra R. Bhat, “Who Are Bicyclists? Why and How Much Are They Bicycling?,” Transportation Research Record 2134, no. 1 (2009): 63–72, doi:10.3141/2134-08.

16 Anderson, “Who Relies.”

17 Raymond A Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt” (Washington, D.C.: Poverty and Race Research Action Council, 2002).

18 John G. Stehlin, Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

19 “Unframing Models of Public Distribution” was a turning point that sharpened rhetoric critics’ attention to large-scale problems. Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 5–24, doi:10.1080/02773940509391320.

20 Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (New York: Routledge, 2016), xii.

21 Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25, doi:10.5325/philrhet.43.1.0001; Karma R. Chávez, “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 242–50, doi:10.1080/02773945.2018.1454182; Greg Dickinson and Giorgia Aiello, “Being Through There Matters: Materiality, Bodies, and Movement in Urban Communication Research,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 1294–308, doi:1932–8036/20160005; Christopher M. Duerringer, “Research in the Rhetoric of Economics: A Critical Review,” Review of Communication 18, no. 4 (2018): 284–300, doi:10.1080/15358593.2018.1465198; Joshua S. Hanan, Indradeep Ghosh, and Kaleb W. Brooks, “Banking on the Present: The Ontological Rhetoric of Neo-Classical Economics and Its Relation to the 2008 Financial Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014): 139–62, doi:10.1080/00335630.2014.961529; G. Thomas Goodnight and Sandy Green, “Rhetoric, Risk, and Markets: The Dot-Com Bubble,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 115–40, doi:10.1080/00335631003796669; Topinka, Racing the Street.

22 See Alan Walks, ed., The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility: Driving Cities, Driving Inequality, Driving Politics (London: Routledge, 2014).

23 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 201, doi:10.1353/par.2004.0020.

24 Chaput describes this relationship as analogous to the way the muscular system works with the skeletal system to support human movement. The skeletal system provides necessary support, but the muscular system becomes stronger to support the skeletal system, and the skeletal system is conversely altered by muscular tension. Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism.”

25 Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 114, doi:10.1287/isre.7.1.111.

26 Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization.” In Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Phillip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 185–226.

27 Star and Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology.”

28 John M. Ackerman, “Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities.” In The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, ed. John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 76–97; Jeffrey A. Bacha, “The Physical Mundane as Topos: Walking/Dwelling/Using as Rhetorical Invention,” College Composition and Communication 68, no. 2 (2016): 266–91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44783562.

29 Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 345–67, doi:10.1353/par.2003.0006.

30 Catherine Chaput, “The Body as a Site of Material-Symbolic Struggle: Toward a Marxist New Materialism,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 53, no. 1 (2020): 89–103, doi:10.5325/philrhet.53.1.0089; Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism”; Catherine Chaput and Joshua S. Hanan, “Rhetorical Hegemony: Transactional Ontologies and the Reinvention of Material Infrastructures,” Philosophy &; Rhetoric 52, no. 4 (2019): 339–65, doi:10.5325/philrhet.52.4.0339; Dickinson, “Joe’s Rhetoric”; Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism”; Ronald Walter Greene, “Orator Communist,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39, no. 1 (2006): 85–95, doi:10.1353/par.2006.0008; Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 327–31, doi:10.1080/14791420701472866; Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: Rhetorical Subject and General Intellect.” In Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 43–65; Bradford Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 1–26, doi:10.1080/00335630600687107.

31 Topinka, Racing the Street.

32 Bicycles are particularly important artifacts for understanding automobility infrastructure and intersectionality. Bicycles lend themselves to critiques of disability because of their affordances that are only accessible to some people. While many take riding bicycles for granted, they require bodies that can move freely with the material of a bicycle. Bicycles also lend themselves to analysis because of how they are gendered differently than automobiles. We note that marketing campaigns for bicycles draw on different sets of tropes than those for automobiles. We also note, however, that bicycle ridership in the United States is dominated by men. Melody L Hoffmann, Bike Lanes Are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

33 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization.”

34 Cf. Dickinson, Suburban Dreams; Dickinson, “Space, Place, and the Textures of Rhetorical Criticism”; Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters”; Derek G. Handley, “‘The Line Drawn’: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s–2000s,” Rhetoric Review 38, no. 2 (2019): 173–89, doi:10.1080/07350198.2019.1582239; Derek G. Handley et al., “Unearthing Deep Roots: Tapping Rhetoric’s Generative Power to Improve Community and Urban Development Projects,” Review of Communication 20, no. 2 (2020): 135–43, doi:10.1080/15358593.2020.1737194; Keohane, “Producing Detroit”; Joan Faber McAlister, “Space in Rhetorical Theory,” ed. Jon F Nussbaum, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.123; Roxanne Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001): 41–71, doi:10.1080/02773940109391194; Candice Rai, Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016); Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

35 Darcie A. MacMahon and William H. Marquardt, The Calusa and Their Legacy: South Florida People and Their Environments (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 77–78.

36 Ibid., 79.

37 Ibid.

38 Victor D. Thompson and John E. Worth, “Dwellers by the Sea: Native American Adaptations along the Southern Coasts of Eastern North America,” Journal of Archaeological Research 19, no. 1 (2011): 75, doi:10.1007/s10814-010-9043-9.

39 MacMahon and Marquardt, Calusa and Their Legacy, 5–7.

40 William H. Marquardt and Karen J. Walker, “Southwest Florida During the Mississippi Period.” In Late Prehistoric Florida: Archeology at the Edge of the Mississippian World, ed. Keith Ashley and Nancy Marie White (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 29–61.

41 Jerald T. Milanich and Samuel Proctor, eds., Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2017), 2.

42 We note that dis/ease does not assume the intentions of colonizers. Historical records suggest that the Spanish did not intentionally introduce disease into Florida, but there are many historical examples where this was the case.

43 Milanich and Proctor, Tacachale.

44 Brent R. Weisman, “Nativism, Resistance, and Ethnogenesis of the Florida Seminole Indian Identity,” Historical Archaeology 41, no. 4 (2007): 198–212. doi:10.1007/BF03377302

45 Brown, Tampa before the Civil War (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 1999): 7.

46 Ibid., 25.

47 Ibid., 7.

48 Schafer, “U.S. Territory and State.” In The History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 200–201.

49 Brown, Tampa before the Civil War, 3.

50 Fairbanks, “Ethno-Archaeology of the Florida Seminole.” In Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period, ed. Jerald T. Milanich and Samuel Proctor (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2017), 184–86.

51 Brown, Tampa before the Civil War, 6.

52 Ibid., 31.

53 John Missall and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Struggle: A History of America’s Longest Indian War (Palm Beach, FL: Pineapple Press).

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 We see this use of bodies as one example of what Christina Sharpe describes as “the wake,” the unanticipated effects of slavery in the United States. Sharpe, In the Wake.

57 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).

58 Kameel Stanley, “How Riding Your Bike Can Land You in Trouble With the Cops—If You’re Black,” Tampa Bay Times, April 18, 2015, sec. News, https://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/how-riding-your-bike-can-land-you-in-trouble-with-the-cops---if-youre-black/2225966/.

59 Greg Ridgeway et al., “An Examination of Racial Disparities in Bicycle Stops and Citations Made by the Tampa Police Department: A Technical Assistance Report” (Washington, D.C.: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2016), https://cops.usdoj.gov/Default.asp?Item=2859.

60 For an example of up-to-date data collected for CompStat in NYPD, see NYPD CompStat 2.0. https://compstat.nypdonline.org/

61 “Bicycle / Pedestrian,” Tampa Bay Next, Florida Department of Transportation, updated 2019, http://www.tampabaynext.com/bike-ped/.

62 Bowker et al., “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment.”

63 Anderson, “Who Relies on Public Transit.”

64 Peter Wells and Malcolm J. Beynon, “Corruption, Automobility Cultures, and Road Traffic Deaths: The Perfect Storm in Rapidly Motorizing Countries?” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 43, no. 10 (2011): 2492–2503, https://doi.org/10.1068/a4498.

65 Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions,” The Sociological Review 38, no. S1 (1990): 26–56, doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03347.x.

66 Thomas Spijkerboer, “The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control,” European Journal of Migration and Law 20, no. 4 (2018): 452–69, doi:10.1163/15718166-12340038.

67 Deborah Cowen, “Following the Infrastructures of Empire: Notes on Cities, Settler Colonialism, and Method,” Urban Geography 41, no. 4 (2020): 469–86, doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1677990.