Rhetorics of Exile

“Through transnational archival work and with theoretical heft, Siegfried tells a compelling story about power dynamics that transcend national borders. In Rhetorics of Exile, exile is as much a banner of resistance as it is an instrument of repression, where traditional geopolitical structures are upended by those marked as ‘outside.’”—Timothy Barney, author of Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power

“Siegfried pushes back on exile as a form of silencing or banishment, approaching it as a communicative phenomenon that enables kinds of speech that imagine new worlds, and her perspective highlights how rhetoric scholarship can reflect and participate in the radical remapping of our own world.” —Megan Eatman, author of Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States

Examines how Cold War–era insurgent figures leveraged experiences of exile and containment as powerful rhetorical tools to advocate for anti-colonial liberation and global solidarity.

Rhetorics of Exile forwards the concept of rhetorical cartographies of liberation to offer an alternative history of the Cold War period. Exile, Kate Siegfried argues, is used as a powerful rhetorical practice that reveals alternative maps of power, resistance, and liberation. Drawing on archival research, she reveals how political insurgents from Paul Robeson to Gerry Adams leveraged experiences of exile and containment to advocate for the eradication of colonialism, imperialism, racialization, and global capitalism and to advance a vision of transnational solidarity that defied the hegemonic political and geographic binaries of the time. Examining movements and political figures across the globe, from Cuba to the American Black Belt, through southern Africa’s colonial borders, to China, Ireland, and elsewhere, Rhetorics of Exile reveals how seemingly disparate political ruptures during the second half of the twentieth century shaped an emergent world system. Siegfried not only broadens our view of Cold War–era social movements but also adapts rhetorical cartography to better account for racialized power dynamics—showing its applicability to understanding activism today.

Kate Siegfried is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research has been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Cultural Critique, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech, among other journals.

Contents

INTRODUCTION Mapping Beyond Empire
PART 1 EXILE ACROSS BORDERS
CHAPTER 1 Regional and Exilic Borderscapes: Contesting Peripheralization in Southern Africa
CHAPTER 2 Radio Free Dixie: Mapping Black Nationhood Through Cartographies of Sonic Rhetoric
PART 2 EXILE AS CONTAINMENT
CHAPTER 3 “Our Right to Travel”: Charting a Black Internationalist Emergent Cartography in Paul Robeson’s 1952 Border Concert
CHAPTER 4 Ventriloquist Empire: Revoicing Gerry Adams During the British Broadcasting Voice Ban of 1988
CONCLUSION A New World (Map) Is Still Possible
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index