“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
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
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.
Contents
Foreword To Listen You Must Silence Yourself
Joyce Rain Anderson
Introduction Working with Incommensurable Things
Jennifer Clary-Lemon and David M. Grant
Chapter 1 The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities: Posthumanism, Buen Vivir, and Zapatismo
Robert Lestón
Chapter 2 Performing Complex Recognitions: (De)Colonial (Mis)Recognitions as Systemic Revision
Kelly Medina-López and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins
Chapter 3 Listening Otherwise: Arboreal Rhetorics and Tree-Human Relations
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder and Shannon Kelly
Chapter 4 Smoke and Mirrors: Re-Creating Material Relation(ship)s through Mexica Story
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 5 Perpetual (In)securities: (Re)Birthing Border Imperialism as Understood Through Facultades Serpentinas
A. I. Ramírez
Chapter 6 Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent Through “Seeds of Resistance”: A Case Study on Rhetorics of Survivance and the Protest Assemblage
Matthew Whitaker
Chapter 7 Top Down, Bottom Up: Ecological Restoration, Rhetorical Resistance, and Decolonization
Judy Holiday and Elizabeth Lowry
Chapter 8 Becoming Relations: Braiding an Indigenous Manifesto
Andrea Riley Mukavetz and Malea Powell
List of Contributors
Index
