Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics

by Jennifer Clary-Lemon (Editor), David M. Grant (Editor)

Overview

Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics brings together emerging and established voices at the nexus of new materialist and decolonial rhetorics to advance a new direction for rhetorical scholarship on materiality. In part a response to those seeking answers about the relevance of new material and posthuman thought to cultural rhetorics, this collection initiates bold conversations at the pressure points between nature and culture, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, knowing and being, and across culturally different ontologies. It thus relies on a tapestry of both accepted and marginalized discourses in order to respond to frustrations of erasure and otherness prevalent in the fields of rhetoric, writing, and communication—and offers solutions to move these fields forward. With diverse contributions, including compelling pieces from leading Indigenous scholars, these essays draw from political, cultural, and natural life to present innovative projects that consider material rhetorics, our planet, and human beings as necessarily interwoven and multiple.

Contributors: Joyce Rain Anderson, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, David M. Grant, Robert Lestón, Kelly Medina-López, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Shannon Kelly, Christina V. Cedillo, A.I. Ramírez, Matthew Whitaker, Judy Holiday, Elizabeth Lowry, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Malea Powell

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258446
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	08/18/2022
Series:	New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Planting the Anthropocene: Rhetorics of Natureculture.

David M. Grant is Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa.

Read an Excerpt

We begin with two pieces that encourage us to think critically about the importance of recognition in work engaging decolonial humans, nonhumans, and posthumans. Robert Lestón argues in “The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities: Posthumanism, Buen Vivir, and Zapatismo” that various posthumanisms are inadequate for accounting for “the multitude of knowledges, cosmologies, and ways of living and being that are outside a Eurocentric framing.” Lestón draws instead from the buen vivir movements in their particularity among Ecuadorians and Zapatistas to make a connection between epistemic delinking and recognizing the more-than-human upon which any thought of human recognition depends. Lestón asks us to foreground our conceptual apparatus to ask how its framing as otherwise might engender different relations and, hence, different possibilities.

Similarly, in “Performing Complex Recognitions: (De)Colonial (Mis)Recognitions as Systemic Revision,” Kelly Medina-López and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins examine practices of recognition in academic work, not just as a political matter, but also as a relational and constitutive one in academic mentorship. They advance a notion of “performing complex recognitions as a methodology capable of acknowledging differential bodies (human and nonhuman) and practices that disrupts closed loops (of recognition) by invoking the revisionary potential of decolonial misrecognitions as part of systemic revision.” In both of these starting chapters, the affordances of continually and regularly attending to the otherwise possible orientations in any human gathering is of central concern.

In their contribution “Listening Otherwise: Arboreal Rhetorics and Tree-Human Relations,” Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder and Shannon Kelly take that otherwise possible to a case that is concrete and material, thus emphasizing the complexity added when we attune to the more-than-human in our gatherings. They look to a local forested area and encourage us to listen to and think with trees in order to cultivate ethical relations through an “arboreal rhetorics” centered on the nonhuman. In this, trees and their ecological continuance depend on a listening that acknowledges more than the discourse of ecological science and human timescales. It recognizes the ways we already think with trees and how they hold serious consequences for what may be.

Extending a lens on the local, in “Smoke and Mirrors: Re-Creating Material Relation(ship)s through Mexica Story,” Christina V. Cedillo works from a Mexica framework provided from the creation story of Tezcatlipoca, or Smoking Mirror, to look at environmental racism in the petrochemical industry of Houston, Texas. Cedillo brings together thinkers in feminist science studies with Mexica storytelling to engage with new possibilities for entanglement and relation, possibilities that allow us to engage with a whole that “includes a both and sometimes either, both and sometimes neither, because everything is the Everything.” Her rhetorics recognize the disproportionate damage borne by brown and black bodies along the western Gulf Coast.

A. I. Ramírez similarly recognizes contemporary, state-sanctioned violence in her essay, “Perpetual (In)securities: (Re)Birthing Border Imperialism as Understood through Facultades Serpentinas.” Ramírez looks at border wall murals along Mexico’s border with the US to trace out the broader connections to what she calls the “global border industrial complex” (GBIC). Employing a “serpentine research method, theory, and practice of writing,” Ramírez argues that border wall murals are not just visual representations of resistance, but more fully sensual and “generate the capacity to confront the dominant narrative and material realities” of the GBIC, opening responses to both good and bad. Where recognizing and listening to the biological may offer one strand with which to view our material collective, Cedillo and Ramírez point also to the industrial and technical operations of profit and control that perpetuate contemporary colonial violence. They also diverge in their similar methods. Each moves through Mexica theory in her own way, demonstrating not a unified body of knowledge, but a highly situated yet locally grounded panoply of methods and resources.

Table of Contents

Foreword        To Listen You Must Silence Yourself

Introduction    Working with Incommensurable Things

Chapter 1        The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities: Posthumanism, Buen Vivir, and Zapatismo

Chapter 2        Performing Complex Recognitions: (De)Colonial (Mis)Recognitions as Systemic Revision

Chapter 3        Listening Otherwise: Arboreal Rhetorics and Tree-Human Relations

Chapter 4        Smoke and Mirrors: Re-Creating Material Relation(ship)s through Mexica Story

Chapter 5        Perpetual (In)securities: (Re)Birthing Border Imperialism as Understood Through Facultades Serpentinas

Chapter 6        Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent Through “Seeds of Resistance”: A Case Study on Rhetorics of Survivance and the Protest Assemblage

Chapter 7        Top Down, Bottom Up: Ecological Restoration, Rhetorical Resistance, and Decolonization

Chapter 8        Becoming Relations: Braiding an Indigenous Manifesto

Editorial Reviews

Clary-Lemon and Grant call upon a diverse cohort of contributors to offer not one central argument or answer, but rather a conversation between multiple arguments and answers about how disparate theoretical areas can work together. Their book is made all the richer for this intermingling.” —Danielle Endres, coeditor of Social Movements for Climate Change: Local Action for Global Change

From the Publisher