An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric

Lechuga, Michael

doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.1829659

Cited by 23 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is also a pressing need to examine how rhetorical processes have contributed to the violent work of settler colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, as Lechuga (2020) notes, the discipline of rhetoric itself is deeply implicated in settler colonialism. The remaking of land, a fundamentally rhetorical process which is central to settler colonialism's strategies of Indigenous erasure, invites continued work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness

Smith

2021

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this essay, I examine the 2016 takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The principal instigators of this occupation, the Bundy family of Nevada, pointed to federally owned public lands as the primary reason for their takeover, citing the allegedly unconstitutional government ownership of these lands. I contend that the Bundys’ arguments about public lands exemplify rhetorical strategies that further one of the primary ends of settler colonialism; the remaking of land into property to better support white settlers’ claims to that land. I hold that the Bundys remake land by defining the land’s meanings following the logics of settler colonialism in three specific ways: privatization, racialization, and erasure. First, I examine the family’s arguments about the constitutionality of federal land ownership to show how the Bundys define public lands as rightfully private property. Second, I examine the ways that the Bundys racialize land ownership and how, in conjunction with arguments about property rights, the family articulates land as the domain of white settlers. Third, I discuss how the Bundys further colonial logics of Native erasure. That is, the family defines land in ways that portray Native Americans as having never been on the land, and as not currently using the land. I argue that these three processes render meanings of land––as private property, colonized, and terra nullius––that rhetorically further the operation of settler colonialism.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness

Smith

2021

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They suggested this is necessary because communication canons often “displace more contemporary theoretical literatures that describe phenomena that [the canons] were unconcerned with” (p. 327). Stretching the canon only serves to extend the same logics of exclusion that are inherent to its construction, replicating the citizenship narrative of rhetoric that has dire consequences for raced and colonized subjects (Flores, 2016; Lechuga, 2020; McCann et al, 2020; Na’puti, 2019). We thereby offer organizational subjectification as an alternative project of organizational rhetoric, one which offers “a rupture in the order of knowing … as the sign of an impossible and productive space” open to alterity (Cortez & García, 2020, pp.…”

Section: The Limitations Of Identification and Potential Of Subjectif...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whiteness and coloniality interpellate white Western subjects into destructive relations with others (Hanchey, 2018a); it is only by interrogating such processes of subject production that subjectification can be thought of in alternative ways. Similar to Lechuga (2020), who rethought assemblage theory toward decolonial praxis, and Cortez and García (2020), who used deconstruction to move beyond the limits of identity-based decolonial struggle, we here repurpose psychoanalysis for decolonial goals.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Identification, as a framework, is ill-equipped to handle difference or alterity, premised as it is on logics of recognition (Gunn, 2008; Oliver, 2001; Towns, 2018b). As such, identification is based in a logic of inclusion, which rhetoric scholars have argued has devastating effects on those who do not fit the assumed norm (Chávez, 2015; Flores, 2016; Lechuga, 2020; McCann et al, 2020; Na’puti, 2019). In part, these effects are caused by the concern for rhetorical effectiveness—a concern that maintains the organizing logics of white settler colonialism (Lechuga, 2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Organizational Rhetoric as Subjectification

Hanchey

Jensen

2021

Management Communication Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Given arguments that organizational rhetoric is disconnected from contemporary and useful trends in rhetorical theory writ-large, we build a case for rethinking organizational rhetoric’s founding concept of identification through recent innovations in rhetorical theory. Drawing from theories of psychoanalysis, racialization, and coloniality, we argue for an alternative understanding of organizational rhetoric premised on subjectification, where subjectification is the process through which a subject is brought into being on the basis of shifting contexts, relations, and imbrication in forces of power. We highlight three facets of organizational subjectification that can contribute to innovative organizational rhetorical research: differential relations, dependence on Otherness, and uneven mutuality. These facets, we argue, highlight how processes of coloniality and racialization are fundamental to our very being and becoming, providing a means of understanding organizational rhetoric as inherently political.

show abstract

“…Given my many privileges and the disproportionate power I hold as a scholar who can reach and influence multiple audiences, critical and collaborative "radical reflexivity" that seeks to dismantle oppressive relations marks a key site for countering the neoliberal capitalist and colonial currents that power academia (Tuck and Yang, 2013;Temper et al, 2019, p. 3;Lee and Ahtone, 2020;Lechuga, 2021). Settler colonialism and coloniality are foundational to dominant communication studies assumptions and practices, including in environmental and energy communication studies (Enck-Wanzer, 2011;Castro-Sotomayor, 2019;Banerjee and Sowards, 2020;Lechuga, 2020). Most academic institutions uncritically applaud scholarship that makes a department or university advance its "engaged research," without considering how these interactions may fail to care about the political, material consequences of recording and circulating experiences, struggles, and stories to reach wider audiences.…”

Section: En/countering Colonial Toxicity In the Jobos Bay Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Onís

2021

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Rural, coastal communities in the Jobos Bay region of southeastern Puerto Rico confront disproportionate harms as an energy sacrifice zone. This space is constituted by imported fossil fuel dependency, economic and climate injustices, environmental racism, ecocide, US colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. In response, many grassroots actors mobilize against the toxic assault on their communities to push for alternatives beyond the suffocating status quo via apoyo mutuo [mutual support]. This survival work and movement building occur literally in “the outdoors” and in other intertwined multispecies environments, challenging narrow, oppressive colonial, and consumerist constructs that reduce “the outdoors” to recreation and thus erase the numerous ways that people labor in, honor, and defend places and spaces to lead good lives. Thus, critical examinations of communication and race/racism/racialization in and about this colonial US territory must grapple with the brutalities and pain caused by systemic and structural cruelties and translate how, where, and with whom self-determined and potentially liberatory environmental and energy justice advocacy takes shape to refuse a trauma-only narrative. Studying these embodied and emplaced efforts positions energy and power broadly construed, including in the form of collective action. This article centers on the collaborative energies of local grassroots actors and scholars who ideologically and politically align and who value working together toward anti-colonial praxis. To provide one example of how these collaborations can yield public-facing projects that contribute to struggles tied to the survival and well-being of the most impacted communities, this essay focuses on the creation of an environmental justice children’s book. This bilingual text documents and translates the pollution caused by a US-owned, coal-fired power plant and mobilizations to topple this corporate invader. The article concludes by reflecting on some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged during multi-year coalitional relationships that inform and exceed the children’s book. To reject racist and colonial dominant assumptions and discourses about outdoor spaces as only privileged recreational areas or as a “blank slate” devoid of people and culture, this project narrates how grassroots organizers and scholars persist in continued study and struggle for power(ful) transformations in Jobos Bay and beyond.

show abstract

An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Public Land, and the Spaces of Whiteness

Organizational Rhetoric as Subjectification

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About