On Doing, Unsettling, and Hope:

A Written Interview with Romeo García

Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your own research with writing studies, decolonial studies, and visual studies, so we can gain sense of your expertise and the perspectives and frameworks that tend to guide your scholarship. 

My name is Romeo García, assistant professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. I study the relationship between literacies, rhetorics, and coloniality—both as a logic of management and control and as a system of Ideas, images, ends shared in, imported, expanded and disputed. Specifically, I am interested in how this historical and ongoing relationship unfolds at the local-regional level via settler ideological and epistemic work. I turn to rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies because each allows us to attend to sites of ideological and epistemic work, to focus our lens of investigation, that is, on semiotic activities and the semiotic trail that connect to multitudes of other sites. For this work, I have relied on settler archives, the classroom, and ethnographic interviews. Aware of how coloniality is often painted with a wide brush, the first question I typically raise to ground my observation and investigation is: where is coloniality and how does it work in general and on us? (Scale is implicit in both questions). The “where” and the “how” is a call, really, to treat place as perceptible and audible, and hence, readable and interpretable. Many are not taught such doing, to see rather than just look and to listen rather than just hear, place in such ways. Such doing, though, is at the center of rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies. Yet, because my lens of investigation is on how communities form themselves around the haunting relationship between literacies, rhetorics, and coloniality, I also raise several other questions: Who were/are the everyday actor-agents that would become the affective channels of rhetorical transmission for coloniality and its literacies and rhetorics? What can/does settler histories of states tell us about the ways in which coloniality is networked (shared-in and disputed) and persevering? How did/do settler states contribute to the strengthening of the U.S. as one model of hegemony vying for power on the modern/colonial stage? That rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies seem to harmonize in such line of inquiry would be an understatement. They offer, really, nuanced ways for how to engage with and confront coloniality as a logic and system. And for me, that has meant attending to a specific gap, the role rhetorics, languages, and literacies have played in constructing settler states, constituting haunted/ing communities, and maintaining wounded/ing places and spaces.1 While it is true that local-regional coloniality’s work through each, it is also accurate to say these sites and the haunting literacies and rhetorics they produce are powerful mediums of and for decolonial work.

Those interested in attending to the affect and effects of settler colonial exercises in rhetorical colonialism and imperialism surely would be enriched by rhetorical insights, digital visual methods, and the decolonial imperative to unveil, unsettle, and decolonize. Together, they can help unveil the privileging of the enunciator who advances their theologically and secularly informed “right” to position themselves as the center of space and present of time. These areas of studies can also help intervene in and unsettle the “hegemonic architecture of knowledge (content of conversation) and the principles, assumptions, and rules of knowing (terms of conversation)” (Mignolo and Walsh 212). In “Corrido-ing State Violence,” for example, I look at, read, investigate, and work towards both revealing the relationship between coloniality, literacies, and rhetoric and unsettling the modern/colonial grid as illustrated in the comic book series, the Texas Rangers in Action. Here, I pinpoint the ideological work that permitted settlers of Texas and law enforcement agencies such as the Texas Rangers to narrativize empty landscapes (e.g., doctrine of discovery); devalue and eliminate the co-existence of histories, memories, and trajectories (e.g., terra nullius); invent and then render the other, as part of supposed divine and natural designs, absent or excessively visible (e.g., epistemic and ontological difference); and position themselves as the center of space and present of time (e.g., epistemology of the zero point). This article would become part of a larger project, first, of understanding how settlers shared in, imported, and disputed coloniality in local-regional areas, and second, of attending to how these histories of settler colonialism strengthened the U.S. as one model of hegemony vying for power on the modern/colonial stage. The role of rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies in such an endeavor was clear. First, they help situate modern/colonial forms of thinking and doing as not belonging to the past but as an unavoidable presence in our everyday. And second, they hauntingly position a proposition: while coloniality is our present, how do we participate in everyday human projects of being, seeing, and doing in the world that will contribute to it not being part of our future? Their role, thus, is not simply analytical, but also prospective: how do we do work that will allow us to unlearn so as to learn how to re-exist? This centers, I would argue, coalitional building and collective work.

The questions at the onset help me to investigate, unveil, and unsettle coloniality’s effects on and pursuit to manage and control land, “resources,” histories, and peoples. “A Settler Archive: A Site for a Decolonial Praxis Project” and “Decolonizing the Rhetoric of Church-Settlers” are two other examples of the analytic side of the decolonial agenda, intended to illustrate, first, that coloniality does not unfold evenly; second, that we must attend to the relationship between coloniality, literacies, and rhetorics; and lastly, to situate this relationship as an unavoidable presence in our everyday lives that demands a careful reckoning with in order to usher-in the possibilities of unlearning (e.g., de-linking and epistemic decolonization) and re-existing towards pluriversal principles.2 Implicit in all my settler archival research is the latter of the objectives, the prospective side of the decolonial agenda that situates me squarely on being a witness to the everyday lives of the students I teach, who walk and see the world and interact and exchange meaning with others. Each, of course, are constituted differently per their own sets of stories-so-far.3 This fact demands I raise another set of question that complements the others: Where is one at and who is one teaching? What effects has/have the relationship between coloniality, literacies, and rhetorics had on white and non-white communities? Whether I am in Texas, New York, or Utah, I believe everyone inherits, embodies, and experiences the haunting literacies and rhetorics of coloniality. Some, more than others, are forced to learn how to address oneself to hauntings while mitigating a precarious subject position between being a subject of and becoming a subject in hauntings. Others have enjoyed the privilege of not having to know such a corporeal exercise. In both cases, my role as I see it, is to situate the haunt that lives within all our bones and to become a witness to the change that is possible by treating the classroom and haunted/ing literacies and rhetorics as powerful mediums of and for doing decolonial work. These questions are essential because without the specificity of the where, what, and how (of coloniality, literacies, and rhetorics), it becomes difficult to develop concrete decolonial actions. Such questions, amongst others, are the threads that bind rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies.

My central premise has and continues to be that we cannot come to terms with the decolonial ideas of Americanity, coloniality, and/or modernity/coloniality without coming to terms with its haunted/ing literacies, images, and rhetorics—a point that is as important for digital visual studies as it is for all fields of study. I understand this trivium of persevering ideas occurring within a historical complex as hauntings. Jacques Derrida understood that hauntings “belong to the structure of every hegemony,” which is the sequential act of organizing the oppression of people and the repression of their productions of knowledge (46). Hegemony neither emerged out of the ether nor does it function or operate without everyday actor-agents. It is for this reason that I understand coloniality both as a logic of management and control and a system of Ideas, images, and ends. The latter (e.g., system) situates me on a central argument parallel to my central premise: words, images, and Ideas matter; they make an argument; they take and even make place; and they are always already tied to language and sold and purchased rhetorically through the political economies of literacies and rhetoric. Ideas, Emmanuel Kant claimed, “are architectonic” (“Physical Geography” 446), by which he meant “art of systems” (Critique of Pure Reason 691) that depend “upon an idea of the whole” (Logic 101) interconnected by laws, rules, and ends. That he advanced this claim with the analogy of architecting a house is not coincidental. Ideas, like a house, require a foundation or infrastructure to appear and become consequential (Gordon 123). “Ideas,” Lewis Gordon observed, “dwell across the ages in the concepts and institutions human beings have built” (137). Perhaps, for no other reason do members of the Modern/Colonial working group such as Enrique Dussel, María Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Madina Tlosatonva, and Catherine Walsh remind us that we are all effected by and inhabit the house of modernity/coloniality (e.g., the house of humanitas); that we are all constituted by and entangled in a modern/colonial world. This house needs to be confronted and decolonized, and a careful reckoning is in order, which situates us all on our epistemic right to do work. Rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial studies helps us see and imagine pathways for such doing of work.

The question that remains on the minds of many is how to translate our epistemic right to confront, unveil, unsettle, and decolonize the Ideas, images, ends that come out of the house of modernity/coloniality into practical work? (Many of the scholar-contributors of Doing Digital Visual Studies ultimately illustrate how this work is possible). Quite literally, and especially for digital visual scholars, the most central way the analytic task can unfold is by the rhetorical and decolonial questions we are able to ask: where is coloniality at, who are the knowing subjects, what are they saying/doing (and how are they reflecting about it), and how were institutions architected and left behind meant to promote and reproduce ideals and support and defend posterity (see The Darker Side 188; Veracini 15). And these set of questions of course will vary from context to context, but collectively the “where,” “who,” “what,” and “how” are meant to situate us broadly but squarely on the ideological and epistemic experiments and projects of seeding and promoting of an epistemology of the zero point and what Sonia Kruks calls an epistemology of provenance (17). (Indeed, we witness this kind of doing—the locating, identifying, and naming—in Doing Digital Visual Studies). This situatedness is what nuances, I would argue, our rhetorical and decolonial inquiry of coloniality. At the moment, there is an inattention to the specificities of place and particularities of coloniality’s effects, as well as not enough attention, ironically, to the role literacies, images, and rhetorics have played in constructing settler places and constituting communities. It is everyday actor-agents that assure the rhetorical transmission of a system of Ideas, images, and ends, and strengthen, ultimately, the U.S. as one model of hegemony vying for power on the modern/colonial stage. I say ironic, only insofar that we know an epistemology of the zero point and provenance are possible in and by the doing of rhetorical colonialism and imperialism.

Ironic, because we know that words, images, ideas, and institutions are tied to language, sold rhetorically, and purchased intentionally. This is why we understand and approach Eurocentrism, for example, not simply and solely as a geographical issue, but an ideological and epistemic one; why we approach coloniality, moreover, not as a mere event, but as a logical structure that perseveres precisely because actor-agents share in, import, expand, and dispute it. Ironic, lastly, because as members of disciplines of the humanities, we are all entangled and complicit in managing epistemic disobedience and controlling both who enters our classrooms and what knowledge-making is celebrated and devalued (see The Darker Side 141). (There are no exceptional groups or one person emitting the right signs here). What is writing and rhetorical studies, thus, if not the manifestation of knowing subjects policing the police of ideal representations of knowledge and understanding, “standard” English and “standard” writing? More than 20 years later, Victor Villanueva’s doing in “Maybe a Colony” resonates. Now, he did not invoke the usage of police common amongst Spanish Friars of the 15th and 16th centuries as they wrote about that which constitutes the element of being (e.g., police), but Villanueva did indeed implicate the field of writing and rhetoric and its actor-agents for demanding “linguistic and rhetorical compliance” (183). Now, that being said, I am not advancing decoloniality as a project or method meant to serve the disciplines. Rather, in demanding a careful reckoning that can lead to openings and possibilities otherwise, it is here to facilitate the uncomfortable questions: Why the humanities? Why writing and rhetorical studies? How are we complicit and entangled in the police-policing-police apparatus? The humanities, our field, and our own points of contention, nonetheless, are all powerful mediums of and for doing decolonial work. The doing of decolonial work, once more, always already moves in two simultaneous directions, the analytic and the prospective. What good would a haunting back of epistemic projects be, really, without a careful reckoning with and haunting-back of ourselves?

The analytic task is always already wedded to the prospective task. By beginning with literacies, images, and rhetorics as our scale of observation, not only do we interpose in this idea that the globe is our only scale of analysis, but we are also able to witness the various ways the local, regional, and global interact in complex ways. Starting here, we are able to intervene in an epistemology of the zero point and provenance (e.g., the universal) by centering home, by which I mean the place where one’s “I am”,” always already tethered to “where I do and think,” is constituted; the very place from which one learns how to see and walk the world and interact and exchange meaning with others. Who are we if not the accumulation of literacies, images, and rhetorics of our communities? And it is here, where we can begin to center both home as a powerful medium of and for decolonial work and the decolonizing epistemic principles of delinking (or unlearning) and epistemological decolonization as concrete and practical actions one can undertake as a doing. What is demanded, as a process, is a careful reckoning, one that raises several important questions. So often left unquestioned is the question of where the lessons of ethos, ethics, and responsibility are learned. Another question is how are we all haunted? But yet again left unquestioned is the question of who (is haunted)? Some in the humanities have evidenced, unfortunately, the assumption that one’s social position automatically translates to certain inherit qualities. But Quijano, like Frantz Fanon, understood that “extrication” (or delinking) was a responsibility of all precisely because the modern/colonial world and power differentials are unavoidable in everyone’s everyday lives. The last two question raised herein out further foreground the union between rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial theories: How will we choose in the now to constitute ourselves otherwise once we recognize and acknowledge our entanglements and complicities? Will it have been thinkable to conceive of community not on the basis of identification but in the “non-Name of all” (Acosta 105)? Again, there are no exceptional groups or one person emitting the right signs here, so this is a question to be taken seriously by everyone.

The two questions asked above set in motion what Fanon foresaw as most central to the building of community, which consisted both of doing individual work of healing (“I am my own foundation” 231) and the doing of the work of being answerable to another (“That it be possible…to discover and to love man, wherever he may be” 231). As scholar-educators of rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial work, we are in a position to be a witness to people’s lives. By beginning with literacies, images, and rhetorics, we can become a witness both to how hauntings do not need to be part of our future (e.g., time, posterity) and to what it might me to welcome anyone who may or may not arrive in our everyday lives of chance encounters. But before such work can take place, we must accept the careful reckoning that is due on our part and is in line for all.

In terms of Doing Digital Visual Studies, what do you find most exciting and exigent about this book project and DVS on the whole, especially in relation to your own area of research? 

I appreciate the focus on doing in this collection, As I explained above, I knew that I was interested in the relationship between coloniality, literacies, images, and rhetoric early on in my career. I was invested in how words have evolved into ideas into institutions such as the trivium of domination, management, and control; and how this trivium projects an image. They advance through the political economy of literacies and rhetorics that reminds us of how this trivium is tied to language, sold rhetorically, and purchased intentionally. But I would be remised if I only gave credit to my formal education for the work I do today. Perhaps, for no other reason do I begin most of my work (e.g., research) by situating in some way the lessons I learned from my Grandma and the questions I often heard in being her student: “¿qué ves?” | “¿qué oyes?” It is from such questions that I understand undertake a decolonial perspective as a matter of doing.

Early in my career, and for better or for worse, I found myself venturing into the field of ethnography. Today, I still gravitate to Johannes Fabian and Anna Tsing’s work. Both are anthropologists. The former introduced a revised version of ethnography as an intervention into “traditional” anthropological methods and methodology, while the latter nuanced how we understand scales of analysis. But before I was to encounter them, unapologetically today, I was reading folks such as Jose E. Limon and Harry Wolcott. There is one passage in particular that sticks with me from Wolcott: “My point is that an ethnographer’s way of seeing tells us more about doing of ethnography than does an ethnographer’s way of looking” (70; emphasis mine). Both Fabian and Tsing, I believe, would agree on this point. It is a point echoed by other anthropologists such as James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, George Marcus, and Sarah Pink as well as rhetorical scholars such as Dwight Conquergood, Ralph Cintron, and Aaron Hess. The reason why Wolcott’s passage is so significant to me is not simply because it distinguishes between “looking” and “seeing,” similar to how Grandma distinguished between listening (e.g., ¿entiendes? | ¡entiendes!”) and hearing, but because it stresses the doing. Grandma’s form of doing, like the ethnographer who could never have claimed a neutral status, centers us on the rhetorical elements of doing—kairos, invention, and phronesis—that always already stands at the nexus of another’s stories-so-far and possibilities of new stories. I believe the contributors of Doing Digital Visual Studies understand this.

We take the words of a scholar such Conquergood seriously, thus, because in saying that “ethnographers must go to the field to live and interact” (85),” he is stressing how this work is “intimate” and “co-performative” (188). Or, in other words, inextricably an act of doing. We attend to the words of a scholar such as Hess attentively, moreover, who “returns rhetoric” and its co-components (e.g., kairos, invention, phronesis) to an embodiment of witnessing, becoming, and activism, because it reminds us that our everyday lives of chance encounters mean the opportunity of sets of stories to interact with each other and to get to work. Judy Rohrer writes: “We are the set of stories we tell ourselves, the stories that tell us, the stories others tell about us, and the possibilities of new stories” (189). I want to pause on this idea and introduce a coadjacent idea. By “opportunity” and “getting to work,” I am alluding to the scientific definition of friction; friction occurs when there is a presence of opportunity for two things to get to work. And this is how I chose to describe the perceived “resistance” we confront sometimes with people, whether in the classroom or upon a chance encounter, because it allows for a shift from the negative to the openings and possibilities that arise from people doing their everyday human projects of being, seeing, and doing with one another. Whether we are doing ethnography, rhetorical inquiry, digital visual studies, or decolonial work, there is a participatory sensibility in play that draws our attention to the ways in which we seek to create community. Doing carries the promise of making community otherwise. And this doing, as well as promise, demands another set of questions to be asked: How are we to live in-common with each other, to welcome anyone who may or may not arrive in our everyday lives of chance encounters, and to love others wherever they may be in their lives (see Cortez and García)? Such questions are partially inspired by Fanon as well as Jim Corder, both of whom understood that “we are always standing somewhere in our narratives when we speak to others or ourselves” (17). Corder’s “where” is not so insignificant here. The question that remains so central to doing here is the question of where we will choose to stand in our everyday (16)?

Now, while I have written about historical comics, I am not a digital visual studies scholar. The same way, perhaps, that I am not an archivist or theologists, and yet, still do work on settler archives to study the theologically and secularly structured literacies, images, and rhetorics they house. But in the same vein, Grandma was not an educator by profession, and yet, I remain a perpetual student of her everyday practices of being, seeing, and doing. I remain a perpetual student of the everyday, from past to present. One thing we learn from the scholars named above, as well as others not mentioned such as Allan Pred, is that we are indeed researchers of the everyday. Grandma understood this very well. The everyday, Pink will remind us, is not a given. The “rhetorics of public culture,” as Cintron might put it (x), circulates in and around us. They become, to quote at length from Judy Rohrer, “the set of stories we tell ourselves, the stories that tell us, the stories others tell about us” (189). This is because the “rhetoric of everyday life,” to expand on Martin Nystrand and John Duffy’s concept, are always already tied to everyday socio-economic, cultural, ideological, political meanings. They “invite us to become and to belong” (Duffy 51) as much as they accumulate into our “everyday experiences, impressions, and memories” (Predd 287). If Anthony Giddens was correct in arguing that history is only comprehensible as the “outcome of human projects” (171), the same can be said of humans who engage in everyday human projects of being, seeing, and doing. And it is the latter that calls our attention to openings and possibilities. The doing, at least for me, situates us at the nexus of stories-so-far and the possibilities of new stories. And that is work worth doing! So, while I am surely not a digital visual studies scholar, which most likely I share in common with many others, our everyday consists of the doing of the digital and the visual. And this is why I find Doing Digital Visual Studies such an enjoyable, familiar, and fascinating contribution to the field of rhetoric—because the doing becomes the thread that binds us all in this field of life we call the everyday.

While not overtly transparent, the work that takes and makes knowledge and community otherwise in Doing Digital Visual Studies is akin to the work you might see in decolonial and rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly so in the context of a hope and struggle. Contributors of this collection on digital visual studies hope that it may be possible to take a critical stance at the intersections of culture and knowledge production. We witness this in “Geolocating Obama Hope,” where Harry Archer and Emma Collins advance virtual geosemiotics as a method that can “enhance our understanding of how place contributes to the meaning of communicative artifacts” such as murals and graffiti that contain dialogicity (n.p.). They have hope, in other words, that in their understanding of Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope image, that an unorthodox remix may be capable of proffering a response to power. In “Digging Up Obama Hope,” we witness hope once more take center stage where Blake Hallinan advances medial archeology and infrastructural inversion as an “alternative perspective for digital visual studies,” capable of offering nuanced understandings in attending to the materiality of cultural practice. What this means in the context of the Obama Hope image, is perhaps an unstated hope, a hope rooted in a belief that an image can profoundly exist and transcend its socio-historical context. Jacob Greene’s “Remixing Obama Hope” is perhaps an example of this, where it is understood that this image can be “repurposed as sites of counterpublic resistance” (n.p.). Specifically, Greene advances the idea of counterpublic remixes, with mobile AR as a “platform for analyzing and producing counterpublic remixes of public images” (n.p.). A certain hope, for imagining and pursuing a just and racially inclusive future, come to the fore. Each contributor has hope, I would say, that the work they do can amount to more than just a position of critique. While the pieces themselves do not overtly discuss the ways in which decolonial and rhetorical theory work in tandem with each other, the doing of that work in this collection surely asks similar questions. And as many of the contributors situate us squarely on epistemological projects, it is the analytical work that bridges rhetorical theory and the decolonial agenda insofar that lens of investigation is centered on the ways in which everyday actor-agents remain the affective channels of rhetorical transmission of and for (a system of) Ideas (and ends). This investigation, I have witnessed in Doing Digital Visual Studies, reveals how ideas and images are powerful mediums of and for decolonial thinking and doing.

Where do you think that digital visual studies needs to go in the future and what does it need to do better now? How are your important interventions into rhet/comp/writing studies and your other scholarship relevant and exigent for DVS? 

The future of digital visual studies must remain open—a future-to-come (a Derridian thought). And yet, it is a future with everyday actor-agents who must remain absolutely and relentlessly committed to decolonizing methods and methodologies as we witness with Bagele Chilisa and Linda Smith. These agents of change must be willing and able not to surrender their agenda of witnessing and unsettling. Annie Fukushima reminds us here that an unsettled witnessing is a “commitment to witnessing without being settled with what is constituted as legible” (14). Gesa Kirsch and I call it an unsettling the settled approach. But most importantly, I believe, before we deepen our understanding of the relationship between coloniality and literacies, rhetorics, and/or digital visual studies, we must do the work of working on ourselves. That is to say, the analytical is not the only central pillar to a decolonial imaginary that envisions decolonial knowledges, understandings, and institutions. How will we choose in the now to constitute ourselves otherwise once we recognize and acknowledge our entanglements and complicities withing a system of Ideas and ends tied to language and sold rhetorically? How will one choose in the now to constitute ourselves otherwise in the face of an-other set of choices, options, and responsibilities? This is the prospective task of the decolonial agenda, once more. And these set of questions situate us squarely on the epistemic principles of delinking or unlearning…the need “to break free from the thinking programs imposed on us by education, culture, and social environment, always marked by the Western imperial reason” (Tlostanova and Mignolo 7). This epistemic principle is necessary, Mignolo will tell us, precisely because, “You cannot envision alternatives to modernity if the principles of knowledge you hold, and the structure of reasoning you follow, are molded by the hegemonic rhetoric of modernity and the hidden logic of coloniality working through it” (The Idea of Latin America 114). But disengaging or delinking is not a disillusion of escaping modern epistemology, but rather, a recognition and acknowledgement that we are entangled and complicit in it but that we do not have to operate within such modern categories of thought. Hauntings may indeed be part of our past and present, but it most certainly does not need to be part of our future. This work is the work needing to-come of digital visual studies.

So, I want to return to the rhetorical trope of hope that is the thread that binds Doing Digital Visual Studies once more to conclude. If “one could count on what is coming,” Derrida warned, “hope would be but the calculation of a program” (212). José Cortez and I have reflected upon hope too, in the context of a people who hope in the face of hauntings. In this context, we observe that some make a choice to live another day, we argue, with an-other option, in the face of a forced choice, which is not a choice at all but a demand.4 And this demand situates an awaiting, a hope without guaranteed predicate, a hope for that which may or may not arrive. I can see and hear Grandma deliberate, “Pues, ¿Ahora que?” To linguists, pues would be considered a filler word, meaningless and functional only to the extent it performs a pause or a hesitation for the rhetor. But here pues rests on an epistemological and rhetorical framework constituted in the interplay of a singular affirmation and generational deliberation, contradictions and tensions, a forced choice and a responsibility. Pues is like an inquiry without warranty, a rhetoric without certainty, a hope without guaranteed predicate (see Arellano et al.). I am reminded of Gayatri Spivak here. Responsibility, Spivak understood, needs to be situated in the intermediary stage between “an ungraspable call and a setting-to-work” (“Responsibility” 23). Here, we witness the effects of a project such as deconstruction, and how it urges a necessary pause and hesitation in the staging of a formalizable “proper” thought such as a responsibility or a decolonial option. “[Whatever] is formalizable,” Spivak pleads, must necessarily remain in a “sort of intermediary stage” (22). Like pues, this thought situates us in the unknowable: A responsibility? A rhetorical, digital visual, and decolonial scholar? A decolonial option? Will it have been thinkable to conceive of community not on the basis of identification but in the “non-Name of all” (see Acosta 105)? We do not know! While answers to such questions have yet to arrive, we must hope that they are to-come. The choice, which is not a choice at all but a demand of all, is ours.

Works Cited

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Arellano, Sonia, Cortez, José Manuel, & García, Romeo. (2021). "Shadow work: Witnessing Latinx crossings in rhetoric and composition." Composition Studies, 49(2), 31-52.

Brasher, Jordan, Derek Alderman, and Joshua Inwood. “Applying Critical Race and Memory Studies to University Place Naming Controversies: Toward a Responsible Landscape Policy.” Papers in Applied Geography, vol. 3, no. 3-4, 2017, pp. 292-307.

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García, Romeo. “Corrido-ing State Violence.” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018, pp. 51-69.

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---. “Decolonizing the Rhetoric of Church-Settlers.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 18, no. ½, 2021, pp. 124-144.

García, Romeo, and José Cortez. “The Trace of a Mark that Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 93-108.

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---. Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

---. “Physical Geography.” Natural Science, edited by Eric Watkins. Translated by Lewis Beck, Jeffrey Edwards, Olaf Reinhardt, Martin Schönfeld, and Eric Watkins. Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 434-679.

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  1. 1. See Karen Till (“Wounded Cities”) and Brasher et al. (“Applying Critical Race and Memory Studies to University Place Naming Controversies”) for more insight on wounded/ing places and spaces.↩︎

  2. 2. The goal of a decolonial option is to build and advance a pluriversal world and future, where the doors can be open to the co-existence of worlds, knowledge, and understanding (see Escobar; Mignolo; Quijano).↩︎

  3. 3. In my own research and pedagogy, I am drawn to the idea of stories-so-far and the possibilities of new stories. The former is adapted from Doreen Massey. When she spoke of liberating spaces—as the “product of interrelations” and “coexisting heterogeneity” (9)—the “simultaneity of stories-so-far” always already stood at the nexus of a process of becoming and possibility (9; 12). The latter is adapted from Judy Rohrer, who writes: “We are the set of stories we tell ourselves, the stories that tell us, the stories others tell about us, and the possibilities of new stories” (189). I situate myself and the work I do with students at the intermediary of these two ideas, because they foreground openings and possibilities otherwise.↩︎

  4. 4. Cf. García and Cortez, “The Trace of a Mark that Scatters” (106).↩︎

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