Counter-Insurgency, Liberalism, & the Transmogrification of Radical Meaning

Abstract

Privilege, intersectionality, and “the personal is political” are the sites of liberalism’s contemporary counterinsurgency, which occurs through the transmogrification of radical meaning. In this thesis, I argue that rhetoricians presently lack a method to adequately theorize racial capitalism and the nation-state form as they shift and destabilize radical terminologies through introducing the politics of representation via multiculturalism and technologies of governance. I intervene in rhetoric’s conceptualization of the public and private spheres, the rhetorical situation, and the artifact through the introduction of what I term the racial-sexual mark of enunciation, an analytic that attempts to thoroughly theorize Black and Native positionalities against the Settler/Master monopoly on the proper use of speech.