Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks to shift the discipline’s historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter’s rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge “the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning,” Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad’s distinct approach to matter’s rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book’s foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad’s performative new materialism from “vital” as well as what they refer to as “negative” new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad’s framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be “inclusionary”—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate “the human” itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to “objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it” (xi). On the contrary, Barad’s performative approach suggests that “no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter’s ongoing performances” (x). Here, humans are not “outside” of observation, but all observation “human or otherwise” co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate “the human” in an attempt to observe matter’s vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with “erasing associations between race, gender, and matter” and (re)producing a homogenizing, “Western-colonialist notion of humanness” (xiv). In contrast, Barad’s is a “thoroughly relational,” performative new materialism (1).Barad’s concept of “entanglement” draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad’s work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad’s performative new materialism both “supports and affirms” rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric’s materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, “standard” rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric’s secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a “shifting and dynamic material history” (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault’s notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the “material history” McGee called our attention to is itself “produced by apparatuses”—history is not “outside” of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric’s materiality is a “publicity effect” produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power relations. Gamble and Hanan suggest that Barad’s framework expands this view by demonstrating how “matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.” This extends Greene’s notion of apparatuses and publicity effects to recognize that such effects produced are “not reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies” (7). Gamble and Hanan demonstrate how this insight undergirds the entangled reality of humans and nonhumans and the imperative that scholars grapple with this entanglement seriously if we wish to address the power imbalances that persist from normative, taken-for-granted hierarchies. Barad’s unique approach, they argue, has the capacity to shore up power imbalances across all matter and challenge the Western tradition of human exceptionalism—a necessary stance given “the economic and ecological crises currently unfolding” (11). With Barad, then, rhetoric’s engagement with the politics of materiality is enriched.In their own ways, each contribution in this collection analyzes what the editors coin “figures of entanglement,” such as disciplinary “turns,” capitalism, breast cancer, or rhetoric itself, to challenge binary ways of being and knowing. “Figures of entanglement” offers a way to account for issues that matter for critical rhetorical scholars, such as political transformation and power differentials among humans, while also accounting for matter’s rhetoricity (x). Though there are many insights one may glean from this collection, I note three for this review: entangled genealogies that rethink rhetoric’s diversity and origin story, diffraction as a concept-metaphor driving rhetorical reading strategies, and political theorizations of matter’s rhetoricity.Thomas Rickert and Nathan Stormer offer ways to rethink rhetoric’s origin story and rhetoric’s diversity through methodological approaches that emphasize entanglement and relationality. In “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Rickert defines rhetoric as “an incremental, bottom-up achievement” that “coalesces out of multiple cultural, material, and semiotic strands that are mutually entangled and coevolving” (89). To explain rhetoric’s emergence as dependent upon both sociocultural and material conditions, Rickert takes readers to the Paleolithic caves with an approach he calls a materialist historiographic method. This method allows us to “look for strikingly different explanations of modern humanity’s emergence, and in turn, rhetoric’s development” by considering “rhetoricity in other forms of evidence, especially material traces” (94, 89). As his analysis shows, cave art does not so much “represent something” as perform it; shamans could draw upon spiritual experiences, the caves’ darkness and sounds, along with environmental materials, to perform “a theater of the sacred” (103). In effect, Rickert provides a method for rhetoricians to attune themselves to rhetoric in a way that challenges its emphasis on oral and written disciplinary history and considers its “emergent capacity,” which has always already been ambient (103).In “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Stormer enters the conversation of rhetoric’s development from a different route by invoking polythesis as heuristic. Beginning with the point that “what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B,” Stormer seeks to offer a way of understanding “rhetoric’s verdurous materiality” as diverse—“ontologically one and many” (35, 38, 36). This complicates the “Big rhetoric” debate by showing how rhetoric is polythetic: entangled and emergent, in a processual state of “becoming-together” (40). As such, Stormer shows that what matters is not what is rhetorical so much as “how a specific potential for discursivity, realizable in many forms, inheres in dynamics afforded by a nexus” (48). This suggests that entities are entangled (a nexus) and, through their relationships, an entity may emerge as rhetorical (rhetoricity, or rhetorical capacity). For him, rhetoricity does not have an essence, nor does rhetoric have but one genealogy; genealogies themselves are already “coconstitutive acts” (43). Engaging Barad’s notion of “entangled genealogies” and Foucault’s work to offer “genealogies of rhetorics,” Stormer illuminates the sense in which rhetoric as a figure of entanglement has always been “otherwise” (41, 48). “What genealogies of rhetoric’s capacities produce,” he concludes, “is working knowledge of different strains of rhetoric as they have emerged and, perhaps, conditions for their transformation” (50). A Baradian approach to poststructuralist genealogy thus allows him to answer his central question of how we might talk of rhetoric and its genealogies as diverse (35). That is, rhetoric’s genealogies, plural, show not a linear unfolding but a series of historical appearances, never erased, never superseded.As Gamble and Hanan explain, “diffraction” is a useful term for a methodology that can read such figures of entanglement to consider how difference is produced through intra-actions. As I understand it, diffraction is a concept-metaphor that recognizes the intra-action of an apparatus—what Barad calls a measuring agency—and what it seeks to observe as a boundary-making practice that produces difference effects. Such intra-actions can be made visible by a rhetorical critic through a diffractive reading strategy when a critic puts in conversation two or more concepts to produce new insights. By constellating two concepts, for instance, one can show how both are entangled—inseparable, though made different through intra-actions with various apparatuses. A central function, then, of a diffractive reading strategy for rhetorical critics is to observe how apparatuses, as Gamble and Hanan explain, co-constitute whatever is being observed (xi).In “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew Bost diffracts Marx and Engels’s concept of verkehr (“intercourse”) in The German Ideology through Barad’s “notion of intra-active entanglement” to produce new insights about the relationship between historical and “new” materialisms (72). Reading verkehr diffractively through Barad’s concept of entanglement, Bost argues, “allows a refinement” of Marx/Engels’s discussion of production and intercourse insofar as both become understood as inextricably linked, though “cut apart” as they intra-act with larger apparatuses (78). Specifically, Bost suggests that it is “humanist discourses” that help sustain “power relations under contemporary capitalism” (82) insofar as such discourses inevitably and necessarily create boundaries around the very concept “human.” Therefore, he argues, “Verkehr, in conversation with Barad’s work, reframes class and class struggle as figures of ethical entanglement that work against the insulation of certain bodies from precarity at the expense of others” (83). A diffractive reading thus illuminates verkehr’s contemporary relevance and “common ground” with a posthumanist view of capitalism as entangled relations, “providing rhetorical scholars with additional tools for theorizing capitalist power outside a civic humanist frame,” which is to say, to understand how the boundaries which determine how value is produced and extracted is invariably the product of agential cuts among a confluence of materialities—cuts that are historical and for which we are ethically accountable (71, 76). Ultimately, Bost’s work challenges the dichotomy of new materialism and historical materialism: over and against, say, a comparative approach (“is new materialism better or worse than historical materialism?”) or analogical reasoning (“is it similar or different from historical materialism?”), Bost asks, instead, how a diffractive reading of Marx and Engels through Barad enables Marx and Engels to “productively speak to those aspects of contemporary global capitalism that Barad and other scholars of the nonhuman have critiqued” (73).In Diane Marie Keeling’s chapter, “Of Turning and Tropes,” she engages in a diffractive reading of disciplinary “turns” in the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech, examining how tropes of classical physics and dialectical negation collude with neoliberalism in the modern academy to produce disciplinary “turns” as different. As Keeling makes clear, a concept “cannot persist without a set of material–discursive practices—an apparatus—continually reproducing its existence” (54). She argues that neoliberalism, which “values capitalist techniques of accumulation and growth,” acts as an apparatus of academic publishing through classical physics tropes wherein “time is linear; the field is an empirical path; turns are discrete, sequentially patterned, and enable reflection” (54, 56). For instance, her analysis of one contribution shows how its emphasis on “quantification and accumulation . . . attunes us to neoliberalism” (59): This passage exemplifies many of the entangled tropes of the neoliberal constitution of the turn: a “provenance,” which is a place or source of origin; a subject “Raymie McKerrow” who is the creator of an “initial formulation”; a separate object “critical rhetoric” that set a trajectory for “others who were following”; a citation count “178” quantifying value; and credit for “an entire journal” where more research like his can be published. (58)As a corrective to this linear progression of discrete entities, she posits that “tropes of quantum physics can assist in reconditioning a performative orientation to discourse and history” so that we might consider how “turns move recursively through intra-activity, rather than sequentially through interaction” (55). Keeling thus reconfigures turns as “entangled diffractions, indistinct, unpredictable, and always reconfigurable through changes to their apparatus” (55). Reading disciplinary “turns” diffractively—“cultivating a rhetorical physics”—is what allows Keeling to challenge neoliberal progress narratives that would otherwise push us to push for the “new” without considering “turns’” relationality (63). Together, Keeling and Bost demonstrate how Barad’s concept of diffraction can offer a methodological approach to rhetorical analysis that produces insightful ways of engaging figures of entanglements to challenge neoliberalism in the academy or capitalism itself.Annie Hill’s chapter, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal Solidarity,” offers an astute read of Barad’s agential realism to think through how the materialization of a tumor is never not inextricably linked with multiple apparatuses, particularly the discourses of racialization. This chapter is a go-to for critical scholars interested in how one might do rhetorical criticism in a posthumanist, new materialist vein while also clearing space for a radical politics of solidarity no longer constrained by rigid identity categories. As agential realism challenges the language/matter binary, among many other binaries like human/nonhuman, Hill suggests that “We can better grasp the meaning and matter of disease by tracking how it destabilizes the language/matter divide, rather than erecting this binary before analysis gets off the ground” (18–19). Not only does Hill use breast cancer as a figure of entanglement to illustrate this destabilization, but she also furthers the political implications of what she names transmaterial intra-actionality: “Incorporating the Baradian intra” to build upon feminist theories of intersectionality, writes Hill, “means forcefully underscoring the indissociability and coemergence of identity, power, and oppression while announcing that this analytic includes and exceeds the human” (25). This move underscores how “binary codes of being” are violent, our bodies are not impermeable or “closed,” and “objects” like breast cancer that we have bounded as discrete entities by language do, in fact, emerge from the conditions of rhetoricity (19). We need a new theoretical orientation that allows us to challenge these seemingly sedimented boundaries, and Hill makes a compelling case for how agential realism is one that can offer a very different starting point for transmaterial, transformative politics. Hill’s contribution centers the political implications of what she names “corporeal solidarity” so that we can better account for and “understand how we live and die with disease . . . who and what receives life support, and why” (31).Finally, Laurie E. Gries offers the collection’s afterword, which underscores the productive potential of Baradian new materialism and offers potential lines of inquiry for future scholarship. For her, Figures of Entanglement offers insight into how Barad can help rhetoricians build theory, reimagine disciplinary histories, and invent new approaches to research inquiries. Yet, there is still plenty on the horizon for continual engagement with Barad’s work. First, Gries prompts readers to consider how, “weaved together with new materialisms,” Indigenous philosophies could generate a “powerful analytic” for our field (115). Indeed, as many scholars have already noted, there are striking parallels with Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology of agential realism and Indigenous thought, and entangling both could provide important insight and contribute to decolonial work in rhetorical studies (115). Second, scholars could build upon the research methods advanced in this collection and offer additional ones that might “productively intervene in the phenomena we aim to study” (116). For example, Gries urges scholars to take Barad’s notion of entangled intra-actions to forge more “collective engagement,” whether scholarly, pedagogically, or through local activism (116). How, she asks, can new materialist-informed research “help us work collectively to address some of our pressing cultural and rhetorical issues today?” (11)—issues that demand the kind of intellectual creativity that new materialist rhetorical work presents us with.Figures of Entanglement is ripe with potential for future rhetorical work, providing scholars with a rich array of theoretical insights and methodologies that all, in different ways, show the promise of Barad’s performative new materialism. This is a particularly compelling read for scholars who are interested in the entangled relationship between “new” and “old” materialisms and the capacity for more robust political engagement. Warranted critiques of new materialisms, broadly, ask about the consequence of fully engaging matter’s rhetoricity in a way that might obscure its social and political implications. Yet, this collection demonstrates the political potential of Barad’s framework for scholars who are committed to examining our entanglement with/in the world and how we might, as Gries writes, “productively intervene” (116). Though I have organized this review by the contributions I found most compelling, readers will no doubt find even more avenues to consider. Whatever readers may find, the that the editors about their to Barad’s work through it

E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place. . . . As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy of nature. Following the route Wister presents in his journal, Cram details the social ecologies of sexual modernity as they emerge in Chicago as the racialized White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the train ride to Wyoming, and Theodore Roosevelt’s much touted rehabilitation from enervated neurasthenia through the “West cure.” The violent inheritance, the land lines, traced in this chapter link together the racial-sexual dynamics of heredity, rail’s connectivity, the logic of climatic therapeutics, the relations of electricity to sexuality, and the articulation of energetic friction between urbanity and nature. In these lines, Cram finds a capacitive network that cultivated settler sexuality as energy regulation for the purposes of reinvention.Chapter 2 queers settler sexuality and its relation to the land by considering the life of Grace Raymond Hebard, “a historian, suffrage activist, and progressive” who was crucial to developing pioneer mythology, particularly the White mythos surrounding Sacajawea, and who also shared a home and a life with historian Agnes Wergeland (62). Cram studies how archival practices at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming establish “relationships between memory and imagination” that mediate Hebard’s life and love and, in turn, shape the violent inheritance of sexual modernity. Cram queers the affective possibilities of archival mediation by reading how Hebard’s and Wergeland’s lives are connected through Hebard’s sentimental “love for land and woman” within archived materials and against a “narrow vision of settler feminism” that inscribed “extractive world making into her labor” (65). Cram’s intention is to undercut recuperation (here of the New Western feminist woman) and instead foster what they term regeneration. First, they examine Hebard’s racial biopolitics of pioneering, including her sentimental incorporation of Sacajawea into a settler imagination of racial vitalization through extractive, colonial relations to Western land and climate. Then Cram performs queer detective work to disrupt the landline of pioneer womanhood by inspecting Hebard’s efforts to preserve Wergeland’s papers, Hebard and Wergeland’s side-by-side burial plots, Wergeland’s love poetry, a handwritten endearment on the back of a photograph, and embossed lettering on Hebard’s briefcase that suggests Hebard had Wergeland’s name placed opposite hers after Wergeland’s death. Cram’s sensitivity to working against the materials’ normative mediation of Hebard’s memory is admirable for modeling an attunement to traces of queer life in an archive that proceeds as if their love for each other were unthinkable or irrelevant.Chapter 3 shifts again, taking the reader to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, where Cram stresses “the importance of engaging in situ encounters with settler aesthetics of violence as an entry point to witnessing violent inheritance” (92). The organizing interest for the chapter is controversy over the CMHR’s muted account of Canada’s residential school system, which was “explicitly designed to rupture the kinship ties and languages of Indigenous children stolen from their families” (91). Attending to administrative discourse, they contextualize the systemic educational violence of the residential school system within colonial biopolitics, namely the forcible sexualization of Indigeneity through the figure of childhood. Doing so, Cram situates children as resources within the extractive logic of sexual modernity, noting the abusive, paternal absorption of childlike “Natives” to revitalize the settler nation. Then they elaborate the controversy surrounding the CMHR’s handling of residential schools, centering on the museum’s justification that it was protecting (settler) children from “difficult memories” regarding the schools (92). They read two of the museum’s exhibits, the permanent Childhood Denied exhibit and a temporary one, Witness Blanket, to demonstrate the infrastructural violence of incorporating Indigenous sovereignty through Witness Blanket while also erasing it as a special instance within a persistent aesthetic, narrative architecture of settler inheritance. Cram offers a subtle, delicately written, experiential analysis of the two exhibits to contrast a settler vision of reconciliation in the permanent exhibit with that of the temporary exhibit, designed by Carey Newman (Kwagiulth and Coast Salish), which “reconfigures the metaphysics of witness” (126). This counter-installation offers a remapping of Indigeneity through “regenerative aesthetics . . . that do not presume the integrity of nor Indigenous incorporation into the settler state” (127, emphasis original). Cram closes by noting that as of 2019 the CMHR entered a nonpossessive, collaborative stewardship arrangement for Witness Blanket, thus opening future regenerative possibilities. The entire chapter is richly detailed and, against the brutality of the schools, draws transformative inspiration from the power of alternative aesthetic practices.Chapter 4 reflects again on the contested memory of the land, this time through the Minidoka National Historical Site in northern Wyoming, which memorializes the Japanese internment camp that was sited there. It is perhaps the most complex and unexpected chapter in a complex and often unexpected book. Using detailed participation of a pilgrimage to the site, interviews, and historical methods, Cram resituates the politics of internment without disrupting the memory work of its survivors and descendants; in fact, they provide nuance that leaves one humbled. Specifically, they analyze the state’s 2012 allowance of Big Sky Farms to place an eight-thousand-animal concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) just over a mile from Minidoka. Cram uses the legal logic of affected persons, determined by property and residence status (which thus denied survivors and descendants standing to object), to “narrate the overlapping and conflicted relationships it encompasses” (132). Affected persons trace the land lines of this chapter, allowing one to follow the “inherited consequence [cumulative impacts] of earlier appropriations of land from its earlier uses prior to contact, land grabs, and later appropriations” (133). Cram maps how the War Relocation Authority articulated Japanese detention within “histories and spatialities of Indianness” (134) by situating detention sites in federal lands of dispossessed Indigenous people and within imaginaries of future land development, in particular how Japanese forced labor was used to cultivate seized land to be “later transferred to private homesteaders” (134). The chapter outlines a complicated memoryscape by detailing the experience of the pilgrimage (filtered through voices of pilgrims), the history of locating Minidoka on public (dispossessed) land, the camp’s physical layout, pilgrims’ witnessing practices, the intimate environmental dimensions of the memorial, and the smell and pollution of the CAFO. Cram traces these through the way sexuality weaves through capital’s racialized, extractive biopolitics, where land seizure, cultivation by forced labor, and large private bovine agriculture operations make affected persons a window onto the violent inheritance of Western land’s relation to national, whitened vitality.Chapter 5 shifts from sites to mobilities, specifically to Interstate 80 as “a landmark of national and bicoastal queer mobility, a mid-twentieth century route for small-town queer dreams of moving to the Big Gay Bay or Big Apple” (164). To “speak of queer automobilities means thinking through processes of dwelling and constraints on movement” and also taking “seriously the vast energy infrastructures that make such social space possible” (164, 165). Cram makes a strong case for queer scholarship to attend to petroculture because “petroleum and carbon byproducts literally scatter throughout queer migration stories” (166). The chapter follows the connection between urban and rural spaces along I-80, notably through interviews conducted in Laramie and Boulder, to demonstrate the “regional affect” of queer and trans life inhabiting “settler colonial structures” of “‘living oil’” (169, 166). Because the chapter is based in interviews, the regional affect Cram is trying to show us is encountered through “intimate atmospheres” of “queer regional stories” (169). In Laramie, which is defined by petroculture, Cram listens to the suffocating, slow, ambient violence that “petromasculinity” prosecutes and how it creates isolation, vulnerability, and a deep sense of misattunement for queer and trans people. In Boulder, suffocating misattunement becomes a kind of misfitting amid pervasive emphasis on fitness and outdoor life that is ableist, white, and heteronormative. The overpowering desire to just get out created by such toxic, intimate atmospheres pushes people toward the affordances of automobility—“the promise of white selfhood connected to unfettered movement”—in which such mobility depends on consumptive, violent inheritances (183).Cram closes chapter 5, almost like a coda, by taking us to Queer Nature in Colorado in search of an alternative, regenerative form of atmospheric intimacy. As a kind of sanctuary, Cram situates Queer Nature within the longer history of intentional communities of the “lesbian land” movement of the 1970s and 1980s (187). Queer Nature’s mission “overlaps and departs from these models” with the goal of “tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (188). The philosophy of Queer Nature focuses on ecological awareness and grief, which Cram argues is a form of “transing of the erotic,” drawing from Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “energy for change” (196, 194).To say this book is an accomplishment is understatement. Methodologically it is brilliant, demonstrating the significant potential of painstaking regional, case-based scholarship. Conceptually it is discerning, unbound by rigid expectations to hew to schools of thought and consistently profound as a result. As a “read,” it is engrossing. And, most important, as a perspective, exploring violent land relations as an inheritance of energy extraction, settler coloniality, racialized biopolitics, and queer life and insight, it is inspiring. Cram models a kind of environmentally minded scholarship that defies simple categorization but adds to every conversation they enter.Further, because the book is built around case studies brocaded with detail, Cram also generates further lines of inquiry that can build on their work. For example, while the case studies focus on extractive and violent relations, Cram continuously remarks on the ironies of responding to such violence from within its inheritances. How to transform violence into a differently regenerative ethics in opposition to the consumptive regeneration that marks a Whitened settler world is a critical question—one of the broad questions today. Across a range of critical literatures, scholars have considered how to foment new possibilities amid deep structures of violence, and such possibilities come not from establishing a pristine, alternative space or by seeking refuge from vulnerabilities that are necessary to life, but by understanding how one is integrally bound up in, as Cram describes, the inheritances that layer even the simplest actions, like driving to escape your intolerant, hate-filled hometown. Cram helps readers understand that such desires are a form of queer decoloniality, or “dwelling in a decolonial ancestral imagination that abides in the political imagination of eroticism” in the transed sense of Lorde’s erotic (199). The book does not provide answers but rather, from a different vantage point, returns to an important, long-standing question about the necessity and limits of resistance. What is regeneration if it is tied to the land and tangled in lines connecting violence, energy extraction, and modern sexuality? What does regeneration look like if (against individual, whitened bodily vitalization) it is pursued environmentally and attuned to violent infrastructures of feeling?As is evident, I greatly admire Cram and their book. Violent Inheritance does not forge a scalpel to do specific analytical work. As a model for others, Cram writes into the contexts presented, being more evocative than precisely conceptual, sometimes to the point of being elliptical, but gradually you come to feel what they mean in a very concrete way. In that, the book enacts what Cram has previously called queer orientational scholarship in order to advocate for “queer collaborative stewardship.” Such stewardship “models a different kind of queer politics routed not through liberal imagination but though an ecological imagination” that “resists a scarcity framework of settler modernity in favor of abundance” (204, 206). To make this stewardship imaginable, Cram produces concepts that are not instruments so much as they are doorways for readers to enter a different, regenerative inhabitation of their world, by which I mean their bodies, their thoughts, and their feelings in relation to all that makes up “place.” You must sit with this book to understand it; you cannot extract from it easily. And that, I suspect, is part of what Cram means by queer orientational scholarship—to study and connect in affirmative ways that resist the extractive sexualities of modernity, including the modes of scholarship to which all of us are inured.

A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is “complex” and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To be sure, these are all issues long addressed by Native people (Indigenous movements, in particular, always have a long arc), but it sure feels like these are events that happened within a recent timeframe.The feeling that these are events and not manifestations of continuing struggles that go back hundreds of years is related to the well-documented fact that settler discourses on Native peoples often still represent us as existing in the past. A settler public, almost ritualistically, gets reminded of the existence of Native people and is seemingly perpetually surprised. This condition for Rifkin, while representing a significant problem on its own, also represents a double bind for Indigenous people. The long-standing and common response to these discourses of Native pastness has been to assert Native contemporaneity and/or modernity, but, for Rifkin, such a response participates in the very terms set forth by the discourses by contesting them within a linear, developmental, and rationalistic temporal framework. Rifkin rather seeks to dispel the idea that such a response adequately contests continuing settler domination and to show that it appeals to and bolsters a deeper settler framework.The double bind is a familiar ruse first theorized by Gregory Bateson in communication theory as patterns of confusion, a general condition for him for PTSD and schizophrenia, and popularized by Michel Foucault’s analysis of two opposing forms of power that together enmesh unsuspecting and well-meaning subjects further into power’s snares. In brief, Foucault argues that repressive power, the blunt, straightforward, top-down, and usually explicit kind, elicits an antagonistic response from the subjugated that surreptitiously turns them to directly face the repression or exclusion, speak up and against it, and, in order to be intelligible, and this is the twist, assert themselves within the terms of a growing if dispersed productive power that works through them. Rifkin links the double bind to claims that modernity is a collaborative construction between the West and the rest. In this case, for Rifkin, a generative knowledge production on Native contributions to modernity both depends on and bolsters what he refers to as the “background” of a shared temporal framework, asserting a common container in which events take place, which contests narratives of Native disappearance and vulgar forms of archaism and yet contributes to national and global narratives of historical progress, wedding Native assertions of contemporaneity to state interests.Rifkin’s answer to this dilemma is Beyond Settler Time, a long, theoretically expansive, wide-ranging, and erudite book on what he calls “temporal sovereignty,” which he contrasts to “temporal recognition,” the institutional and assimilative mode through which Indigenous peoples get brought/bring themselves into the present. Temporal sovereignty, on the other hand, engages “the texture of Indigenous temporalities” (Rifkin 2017, 7–8) and Native collective experiences of becoming. Echoing Glen Coulthard’s distinction between a politics of recognition (mediated by the settler state and its epistemic frames) and grounded normativities, “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 207–8), Rifkin’s argument likewise emphasizes a form of self-determination that refuses external legitimation, flowing directly from Indigenous experiences, forms of governance, and social relations, but in temporal terms.Rifkin’s turn to time isn’t an obvious one for Native studies considering the intense and persistent focus the field has on “the land question.” Though, from at least the publication of Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red, in which he asserts that Indigenous epistemologies have a spatial orientation in contrast to Western, Christian orientations to historical, linear, and teleological/eschatological time (which Deloria claims undergirds an inherent colonial imperative uprooting a lived sense of place) to the recent publication of Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes’s analysis of the longue durée of Native resistance up to Standing Rock, scholarship in Native studies has had an abiding interest in theorizing time. This includes the heavily populated list of Native scholars that Rifkin draws on to make his argument, including those whom he critically locates as being Native theorists of modernity (Philip Deloria, Scott Lyons, Jean O’Brien). But Vine Deloria’s lesson, drawing on years of Indigenous struggle, has been influential, with the most recent and visible manifestation being the LandBack movement. In this sense, Mishuana Goeman’s Mark My Words is another important touchstone for Rifkin, linking as it does Indigenous modes of storying to practices of grounded normativity, distinguishing between Indigenous place making and settler-colonial space making, or, as Robert Nichols calls it, the (violent) production of land as property. Goeman writes, “Stories teach us how to care for and respect one another and the land. Responsibility, respect, and places created through tribal stories have endured longer than the Western fences that outline settler territories and individual properties that continue to change hands” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 59–61). To Goeman’s abiding sense of storied Indigenous place, Rifkin offers a storied, collective, and experiential Indigenous sense of duration.The structure of Rifkin’s book is a familiar one, beginning with a brief preface; followed by a long first chapter that details the primary argument and the theoretical and methodological investments of the book, and then three chapters that develop the argument through close readings of texts, heavily weighted by novels (where the rubber hits the road, so to speak); ending, finally, with a coda that critically reflects on the relation between the book’s argument and U.S. Indian policy as it affects Native American sovereignty. Because this is such a theoretically rich text, and because Rifkin takes great pains to develop a powerful if complex argument on Native conceptions of time, in this review I primarily focus on the first chapter. For those interested in Native American literature and other forms of Native writing, Rifkin is a consummate literary scholar, and it is certainly worth reading his continuing engagement with the work of Native authors in the last three chapters, where he offers fresh takes based on his theorizing of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty of largely canonical Native literary texts and authors. Each of these chapters engages a different aspect of temporal recognition as the means through which more radical temporal formations in the form of sovereignty are managed or silenced.In brief, chapter 2, “The Silence of Ely S. Parker,” addresses U.S. historical narratives of developmental progress through the rhetoric of a perfecting union. Beginning with a meditation on the silent, onscreen presence of Haudenosaunee politician, Ely S. Parker, in the Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner film Lincoln, Rifkin addresses the imposed temporal formation of the expanding and perfecting rule of law and its relation to violence by juxtaposing two concurrent wars caused by uprisings, the Civil War, and the lesser-known Dakota War. Attending to the writing of Parker as well as Dakota scholar Charles Eastman, Rifkin analyzes the temporal formations of the treaty and reservation systems as outcroppings of the rule of settler law. Chapter 3, “The Duration of the Land,” focuses on John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown, set in an Osage community during the allotment era. Analyzing the temporality of U.S. Indian policy and its focus on resource development (allotment and the petro-economy here), Rifkin notes how Mathews’s novel represents and disrupts a maturational and heteronormative conception of social reproduction. To do so, he juxtaposes reproductive futurity to the queerness of the main character, Chal, whose Indianness acts as an opening onto a sense of place-based duration. The final chapter, “Ghost Dancing at Century’s End,” addresses the almost excessively researched social, political, and spiritual response to settler invasion, the Ghost Dance. Removing it from the sociological interpretations it has been subjected to and restoring its affective and everyday aspects, Rifkin discusses two novels in which the ceremony features prominently, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. Referencing the version of the ceremony envisioned by the Paiute Doctor, Wovoka (there have been others), the ceremony, as made clear by Rifkin’s readings of the two novels, is both a hopeful vision for a future restored to Indigenous peoples, with the dead returning to live with the living in many interpretations, and a messianic manifestation of Indigenous rage through the prophesied disappearance of all white people. This affective ambivalence is summed up by Rifkin through the emotions of anger and longing, which, he argues, open up cross-time proximities based in prophetic temporality and its everyday manifestations.Rifkin lays out the book’s theoretical and methodological infrastructure in chapter 1, “Indigenous Orientations,” where much of his aforementioned argument and the basis for his notion of Indigenous duration reside. Ambitious and just a bit irreverent, the chapter ranges across a bewildering set of philosophies, concepts, and theories: Native and Latinx philosopher V. F. Cordova’s vitalist philosophy; Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (from which Rifkin draws the term “orientation”); Native theorist, memoirist, and poet Deborah Miranda’s archival meditations on the afterlife of annihilation in the wake of the California missions; theories of Native modernity; decolonial theories of coloniality (which get lumped in with the previous group); postcolonial critiques of the enlightenment; Native studies critiques of recognition politics; queer theories of time; Einsteinian relativity; Henri Bergson’s philosophical concept of duration; Native theorist Dian Million’s felt theory (along with non-Native queer theorists of affect); and Native conceptions of storying. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming; however, Rifkin’s erudition together with a conceptually tight argument hold it all together.After establishing the broad parameters of temporal recognition, described above, Rifkin explores a variety of theoretical conceptions of temporal plurality, what he calls being-in-time, as alternatives to dominant settler time. As a subjective form, being-in-time is a phenomenological orientation drawn from past experiences that frame possible future experience, turning one toward the future through interest and momentum in the form of a trajectory. The phenomenological experience of time organizes much of the chapter, though it takes different faces with Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Bergson’s theory of duration, and Merleau-Ponty’s more canonical philosophy. What this step does is specify the experience of time away from abstract, common time. Threaded through this argument is the question of collective (as opposed to common) and therefore Indigenous experiences (which are not just subjective or intersubjective). To begin to answer the question, Rifkin turns to Native scholars: Cordova’s notion of communal frames of reference and Miranda’s and Dian Million’s respective theories of collective storying. Rifkin ends the chapter by staging a conversation between Indigenous storying as collective and affective frames of reference and queer theorizations of temporality. This last section is the only one in the book where non-Native theories are directly questioned through a Native critical lens and is, for that reason, one of the more robust moments of theorizing in the book. It is also very much in Rifkin’s wheelhouse, hearkening back to his earlier work on intersections of queer and Indigenous studies.The hinge between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty in the chapter, perhaps surprisingly, is physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and his idea of frames of reference. In Einsteinian relativity, Rifkin finds a conception of time that breaks with natural time, the common temporal experience of the present as an “unfolding, universal line of development” (Rifkin 2017, 34–35). Frames of reference, on the other hand, are based on one’s relative position and make the idea of a universal time impossible. Turning to theoretical physics in order to understand temporal sovereignty, though, carries a number of risks, which Rifkin acknowledges by noting the limits of Einstein’s theory for discussing Indigenous experiences. While, according to the theory, there is no possible universal time, what makes a frame of reference intelligible is having a common measure to compare frames, in this case mathematics itself (it also helps to have a common perspective, the absolute speed of light). One can understand differences between frames by comparing them according to this measure, each having internally consistent relations to time that onto each The of is that this for different experiences, a problem that philosopher Henri out to with his theory of duration. To and notion of time, offers a and notion of duration. It is, the and subjective of relativity, a philosophical to Einstein’s physics if the that had with was of the for to the between the two conceptions of time is to Rifkin’s distinction between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. Bergson’s of and experiential duration from time much of the critical of Rifkin’s a that the book. than time as an abstract, measure of universal movement a can of it as as temporality than temporalities” The term is as Bergson’s notion of duration is up with the question of in two against theories that human is of asserting a of human of Bergson’s and and, perhaps as a response to the by of that is an if one takes the that space is This of space and time to assert a of experiential duration, and from abstract, had significant on American such as as well as American and It’s a critical that has had and has as a form of critical common sense, as by this by V. F. is an from the fact that there is and change in the (cited in Rifkin 2017, in this distinction Rifkin’s as It like this settler time, as a of and is a that a temporal experience for temporal such as Indigenous that this are through temporal recognition, through a conception of shared modernity and the however, time is and the of settler time is a a of experiential time. The step that Rifkin takes is to this to show that Indigenous peoples within that are at also with the individual of Western Indigenous forms of temporal sovereignty, as within the settler framework. Attending to these for Rifkin, is a to time and open space for “Indigenous forms of collective and modes of One to do this is to the texture of temporal formations in Rifkin turns to physics and a philosopher of to Native temporal sovereignty, because to made but in to Indigenous and also as a of earlier discourses of social development and a time that between peoples according to a though the make is often as a spatial one, as opposed to to Rifkin’s very rich concept of temporal sovereignty into what has as I the Western Rifkin draws on for an conception of time, do not are more than the while certainly directly with Indigenous formations of and experience, of whom theorized in ways that themselves to Rifkin’s obvious answer is that and are interested primarily in time within a Western framework, to the critically turn makes to an of the West such a still makes and then of out into and and so This is of what Rifkin refers to on as his to Western formations of in order to make open and make visible the texture of Indigenous of an critical within a dominant framework. The other obvious answer is the of by Native that it a notion of that in if not Indigenous people into of a different notion of This version of pastness is largely for the idea of a against which Native people are to the common that is a Indigenous people not just in time or but also in does the question of in relation to time discussing for in as an time (Rifkin 2017, the aspect of into Rifkin how is a concept that temporal recognition through the lens of and its and relative to Indigenous time against the of settler time. But there a between Rifkin’s notion of temporal and relativity that I I it has to do with the complex between the of the and as and by Tony the concept and the of on its and more by as of an that and and through the of subjects the in the different of between and the links this and to the of the term which the question of how and, in Rifkin’s conceptions of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. how do these conceptions on or and for a book review if are to it back in a the and Rifkin’s book that it Rifkin’s on a double bind of its only was a philosopher if there was one, but Rifkin’s on phenomenology a form of human of the Western a number of Native in order to this sense of time as Rifkin gets there by first the problem of settler time and then it within the of Western the and its out time as a in order to the double bind of historical and assertions of Native modernity another one in relation to the of the human as a of an as is, does Rifkin the Native people are of modernity all with Native people are also complex To begin to answer this the colonial and of and its in the of to peoples, as described by and how that undergirds a sense of the This is a question that on the of from to and a that to how in social, and and interest in epistemologies and is at as made clear by the of of Indigenous What if Indigenous epistemologies and are not in the Western What and make possible another of In his engagement with the work of Deborah Rifkin offers a possible on the of the of Rifkin notes that Miranda’s work in the of the of people in the face of such a notion of turning away from a in which Indigenous people up of for an and within a Miranda’s rather the very and of through storying as of our was to the I to that the of was but other Indians California Indians been a the a lot power to or (cited in Rifkin 2017, What is is the of the term with Miranda’s the and of as well as its an or in seemingly form, perhaps through and This isn’t against the such as the but it also have the It’s at this Rifkin’s of Indigenous takes and of Indigenous as the of land or modes of governance, Rifkin finds in Miranda’s conception of a to the of Indigenous and In the of and recognition, acts as a that the itself of an Indigenous through an sense of different and ways of living that into are an affective of experience, what Dian calls felt and in often and The one is the to which, according to like water flowing the of our (cited in Rifkin 2017, in the form of and temporal experiences. For Rifkin, this sense of storying a of a lived that back against the of imposed settler forms of recognition and that from Indigenous governance, to relations to to social and and the of the time of in Rifkin 2017, is at his this sense of into conversation with queer theories of time, his earlier work on imposed forms of settler through Indian the of of Native and and with settler in other of settler as a and the of in of recognition settler and Rifkin this question to on the possible of queer to and the of time to the and through for this of queer temporal conceptions for on of and investments in the of the settler these theories against the terms of addressed by and the for collective to in the face of and Rifkin both takes the from queer temporality and also asserts that Native temporal formations are not to non-Native (which includes non-Native queer It’s a of living with the and in an of Rifkin does with queer theory what he do with Western his notion of on this powerful of storying in and through Rifkin, through us toward another of and making making in other do take up this

ABSTRACTCritiques leveled at epistemic decolonization call for a reorientation in theories of colonialism. The colonial imagination, a rhetorical tool that normalizes a sensible order of dispossession and appropriation, can be a reoriented site of contestation. By imagining an identity whose only means of relating is through opposition, the colonial imagination renders identities that inhabit a state of solitude. Two letters from Hernán Cortés to King Carlos V of Spain show how this colonial imagining aims to normalize dispossession and appropriation of the relations Originary peoples have with lands, waters, airs, and other-than-human relatives. Considering this argument, rhetorical studies needs to readjust its analytical timeframe beyond the times of settler-colonial nation-states and colonization.

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on how the pandemic has intensified long-standing discussions regarding race, Blackness, white privilege and supremacy, settler colonialism, social justice, and more. I draw from forty years of ethnographic fieldwork or being part of the departmental leadership of Latin American and Latino Studies at my university. (Backdrop: growing up Puerto Rican in South Texas with Mexican and Mexican American families, I have dealt with these themes and tropes my entire life. I prefer class analysis over identity and culture, and, like a sophist or anarchist, I do not easily accept the thoughts of anyone.) This essay uses propositional logic to establish a poetics of radical compassion as prior to radical politics, followed by the “scenic” as evidence to “prove” that paradox is our living condition. In contrast, today’s totalization and capitalization of fear and the hypostatization of truth claims—insofar as they obscure the emptiness of truth—are the methods of war.

Amy Allen's The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory is a careful intervention in the ongoing attempts to establish a critical theory of society associated with the Frankfurt School. Its central concern is the way Critical Theory (capitalized here to indicate the specific tradition of the Frankfurt School), particularly in its latter-day incarnations, has been structured by a stadial philosophy of history that presents European modernity as the apex of progress and as a universal standard from which the rest of the world can be judged. Provoked by decolonial and postcolonial critiques of teleological philosophies of history, Allen seeks to decolonize Critical Theory by showing how current normative theorizing remains ensnared in this essentially nineteenth-century Eurocentric framework. Through a series of close readings of the work of, first, Jürgen Habermas and, later, his successors, Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst, Allen examines the ways critical theorists have grappled with the question of “European modernity”—as a historical moment, geographic location, or epistemic framework—and its relevance for Critical Theory's stated emancipatory aims (Horkheimer 2002). Although these thinkers are certainly aware of the problems of Eurocentrism, Allen is particularly adept at detailing how progressive conceptions of Universal History continue to animate normative justifications in this tradition.Allen's account begins not with the origins of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s but with Habermas and his attempt to reconstruct the normative foundations of Critical Theory. Although Habermas has written extensively on globalization, Allen notes his lack of sustained attention to questions of imperialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization. Allen reads the lack as symptomatic of a deeper problem in which a particular account of historical progress continues to play an important role in Habermas's work. This occurs in spite of Habermas's interest in breaking with the Hegelian metaphysics of historical progress in which history marches ineluctably toward reason. Yet Allen shows how a progressive notion of history lurks within Habermas's concepts of social evolution and sociocultural learning. In this context, social evolution refers to the way societies rationally reflect on problems in the process of solving them, a notion articulated in his account of communicative reason. Although Habermas argues that the formal pragmatics of his theory “proceed reconstructively, that is, unhistorically,” the key tension for Allen is that this theory still depends on the “structures of action and structures of mutual understanding that are found in the intuitive knowledge of competent members of modern societies” (Allen 2016, 51, quoting Habermas 1987). Allen's point is that what counts as competency in modern society is not a universal property of humanity, but a specific set of practices and dispositions from a particular historical and geographic social formation connected with European modernity. Habermas, Allen claims, effaces that particularity, presenting European modernism as simply the outcome of a developmental process of learning.Responding to such critiques, Habermas has attempted to distinguish the underlying structures of modern society, which he views as universal, from the various social and cultural responses to modernity, advancing a thesis of “multiple modernities.” On this read, modernity's characteristic elements, including the techno-scientific domination of nature, bureaucratic rule, and capitalist social relations, are presented as a global infrastructure that different societies—or, in his terms, “civilizations” (68)—encounter, respond to, and shape in culturally specific ways. Yet Allen, drawing on the work of Gurminder Bhambra, argues that this approach does little to resolve the problems of Eurocentrism as it continues to present reflexivity, which Habermas connects with Enlightenment reason, as the apex of social evolution.The middle chapters of the book explain Honneth and Forst's differing responses to this basic problematic. Honneth takes a modified Hegelian position in which progress is neither linear nor inevitable but is nonetheless realized by ethical communities as they continually struggle over the conditions limiting freedom. For Honneth, institutions such as the family, the market, and the state gain a sort of legitimacy as individuals opt for certain configurations out of the range of those available. Normative foundations are given in the historical development of institutional forms, as societies pursue the expansion of diverse conceptions of freedom. Allen's critique of Honneth thus comes to center on the way a certain forward-looking notion of progress, what she calls “progress as imperative,” becomes conflated with an assertion that society has itself progressed over time, or what she terms “progress as fact” (12). For Allen, however, “progress as fact” fails to grasp the complexity of unequal societies or the extensive forms of violence coincident with European modernism.Forst, on the other hand, pursues a Kantian response to Habermas, arguing that normativity is grounded not in the historical development of societies but in the formal properties of practical reason. Here too struggles for justice are important, but not because they reveal the normative commitments of an historically specific society. Instead, Forst grounds normativity in a fundamental right to justification, which Allen glosses as requiring “that no one shall be subjected to rules or institutions that cannot be justified to him or her as a free and equal member of society” (127). As to the metaethical question concerning the validity of justifications, Forst treats justifications as valid after they withstand procedures of evaluation characterized by both reciprocity and generality (129). Justifications must be reciprocal—in that similar claims should be treated similarly, and one cannot universalize their own position—and general—in that the interests of all affected parties must also be considered. Yet Allen argues that if we push the metaethical questions back to the normative grounding of the justification procedure itself we return to a conception of the human as a “justifying being” (130), equating humanness with a particular form of practical reason. Here too, Allen finds a problematic Eurocentrism that connects Forst's account to other Kantian and neo-Kantian projects, in which a “Kantian notion of practical reason has been closely bound up with pernicious notions of progress” and has “provided the benchmark with respect to which black, female, queer, colonized and subaltern subjects have been judged” (138).As these brief summaries suggest, Allen's engagement with Habermas, Honneth, and Forst is detailed and extensive. It is clear that hers is a direct intervention in an ongoing debate over the future trajectory of the Frankfurt School (for an earlier skirmish, see Forst 2014). The chapters thus presuppose extensive understanding of the current work of its leading practitioners. For readers coming to the text more interested in a dialogue between Critical Theory and the broader project of anticolonial critical thought, the results might be more mixed. Afterall, Allen owns up to the difficulty in trying to bridge a “gulf” between Critical Theory and postcolonial critique. As she notes in the preface, the project has a quixotic element insofar as she is “criticized vehemently” for “flirting with relativism” by her Frankfurt School colleagues while also looked at askance by her colleagues working in postcolonial traditions for her interest in a “normative foundationalist project at all” (xv).Nonetheless, if the book really does dwell in the gulf between these two traditions, it remains oriented primarily toward the Frankfurt School. This orientation even structures the alternative approach to temporality she maps out in the final chapters, advocating for the forward-looking notion of “progress as imperative” while jettisoning what she sees as the Eurocentric conceptions of “progress as fact.” Where one might have expected a robust engagement with post- or decolonial theory, Allen remains within the Frankfurt School tradition, drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault—even going so far as to reposition Foucault within the family as “Adorno's other ‘other son’” (163).Allen finds Adorno and Foucault useful as thinkers who challenge the notion of history as the progressive development of reason, while also maintaining a notion of philosophy as a critique of the present. In a series of inventive readings, she treats them as taking up the basic Hegelian claim concerning the relationship between knowledge and history but destroying the Hegelian story of reason's dialectical self-realization toward the Absolute (177). Her reading of Adorno focuses on his dialectical approach to history, which views the Enlightenment as, at best, a highly ambivalent achievement and full of self-destructive tendencies. Yet rather than reading Adorno as simply a negative thinker bent on showing the irrationality of Enlightenment, she identifies a more limited understanding of progress in his thought. For Allen, the strength of Adorno's work is the way it continues to offer a notion of reason, but one stripped of the teleology of historical development and thus reflects back on its own role in fomenting the disasters associated with European modernity. For this reason, Allen frequently references Adorno's claim that “progress occurs where it ends” (163).Allen finds a similar use in Foucault, particularly his account of the history of reason from the position of unreason. In her account of History of Madness, Allen wrenches Foucault from readings that position him as celebrating unreason or even madness as a space of freedom that is set apart from modernist rationality. Instead, she carefully parses Foucault's uses of unreason as a category within modernity that problematizes or fractures the seemingly smooth surface of reason's self-development. Unlike madness, which might simply be the Other of reason and fully outside of its logic, unreason is useful as a category that exists within but is not fully intelligible by reason's own self-understanding. As she puts it, “the function of the figure of unreason, then, is to create some distance between ourselves and our system of thought” (184).It is this problematization of “our system of thought” that she urges Critical Theory to take up. Allen presents a powerful case for an approach that is more self-critical and modest, suggesting that decolonizing Critical Theory means quieting it down and allowing it to hear and be challenged by the voice of others. As an immanent critique of the role of stadial history in current normative theorizing, the book succeeds in demonstrating the persistent problems posed by the figure of historical progress. Readers of this journal, for instance, should find her reading of progressive history in Habermas's theory of communicative reason and concepts of sociocultural learning insightful, as it poses important questions about the way formal pragmatics, communication, and language are shaped by Eurocentric assumptions of linear development. But the book also raises issues concerning the meaning, content, or practice of decolonization, not only for the narrower category of normative theorizing in Critical Theory that constitutes Allen's focus but also for the broader category of critical thought more generally.For Allen, notions of progress are really the core of what needs decolonizing in Critical Theory. She notes at the outset that the critique of stadial history is “perhaps the major lesson of postcolonial scholarship over the last thirty-five years” and argues, echoing James Tully, that “the language of progress and development is the language of oppression and domination for two-thirds of the world's people” (3). Clearly Allen is right that progressive narratives have been central to the thought and practice of colonization and conquest. And a diverse range of scholars, from postcolonial theorists to critical social scientists, have demonstrated the continuities of progressive readings of history in postcolonial projects of development and modernization (see, for instance, Wainwright 2008). Those literatures also make clear, however, that Eurocentric conceptions of history as progressive development are always part of a larger apparatus of colonial thought and practice. In other words, it is the different ways that progress is mobilized in the thought and practices of, say, private property, secularism and religion, land and resource use, economic regulation, state violence, or the gendered division of labor that constitute just a few of the many techniques by which societies continue to be structured by colonial and postcolonial relations of domination.If that claim is true, it would set a higher bar for what it might mean to “decolonize,” which could also carry some methodological implications for the practice of critique. Specifically, it might suggest an approach to theory that is attentive to the way theory is conditioned by and moves in the world. What is so interesting is that this is one of the things Allen presents as the great strength of the Critical Theory tradition, that it is “rooted in and constituted by an existing social reality that is structured by power relations that it therefore also aims to critique” (xiii). Yet the diversity and complexity of power relations constituting colonization, imperialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy are largely subsumed under the singular category of “progress” in the text. This is useful for Allen's argument, providing a lever to offer critical readings of the texts at hand, but might also attenuate the multiple ways colonial power continues to work and thus the difficulty of decolonization as a practice. Recognizing as much does nothing to limit the enlightening and rigorous critiques of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst or the useful and insightful readings of Adorno and Foucault, situating them as anti-Hegelian Hegelians. But it might also suggest that there is still much to be done in the work of decolonization.

The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that it persists in literary studies and under the quasi-philosophical heading “critical theory.” Meanwhile, if Brian Leiter offers any indication in his Avital Ronell-scandal quip about theory—what they call “bad philosophy in literature departments”1—then the very question “Why theory now?” would be challenged by professional philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, if not ignored altogether. How and to what extent has Theory consumed territory that was once occupied by philosophy per se? Is “Continental philosophy” now practically synonymous with Theory, and if so, how does that work from the two very different philosophical perspectives? From a global perspective, is professional philosophy small and getting smaller, while “theory”—until recently associated with Europeans and others who indeed consider themselves “philosophers”—large and getting larger? In what ways are theories like postcolonial, queer, and critical race related historically to philosophy? That is to say the question of philosophy/theory raised by the Frankfurt School and recently reiterated by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory speaks to people in rhetoric and to many others across the humanities and social sciences. In this forum I join Martin Jay, Nancy Struever, D'Angelo Bridges, Steven Mailloux, Peter Simonson, and Catherine Chaput as we address this question “Why theory now?” paying special attention to the relevant histories we need to untangle “theory” on the recent scene.One might imagine how a single question posed to seven scholars in a forum invites debate, with the answers pitched against one another. Since we can only buy one answer, it would seem the others can't be right—we are faced with an argumentative scheme of the mutually exclusive. And no doubt there are moments both within and among these essays that don't allow for easy agreement. My essay is set up polemically, so the reader is faced with a choice between a prevailing take on rhetorical theory that invokes classical antiquity, and my own contrary place and date: Ann Arbor, 1900. Bridges recalls for this P&R readership how in 1985 the literary critic Barbara Christian made us choose between Theory then consolidating in the elite practices and institutions where traditional forms of power—including most prominently white, male, and colonial—came at the expense of theory that has long been practiced elsewhere (formatively in Douglass's explicitly rhetorical My Bondage and My Freedom, Bridges will argue). And then there are familiar divides within the essays themselves, and into their presumed readership. At the end of this forum, for example, Catherine Chaput forces a question that has been percolating throughout: Isn't theory as we mean it now originally and essentially critical, running from Marx through Adorno et al., so that any other uptake like the new materialism must explain itself under pressure, or appear suspiciously uncritical and hence a quiet advocate for the powers that be?Ultimately, however, the argumentative scheme of the forum as a whole is not mutually exclusive as it might appear in a more systematic philosophical imaginary, but is rather genealogical. And we each try to be critical, while avoiding master narratives in their reductive forms—whether Marxist, colonial/decolonial, or epic as in the battle between rhetoric and philosophy—so that the essays surprise. The biggest problem with master narratives as a form of scholarship is that they can become predictable and render the scholarly work practically unnecessary: once the master narrative begins you know pretty much where it will end.Instead “Why theory now?” is purposefully polyvalent, and the answers given depend upon the scholarly uptake, which is itself an embedded practice. As the question is picked up distinctly by an intellectual historian Martin Jay, we are returned to the nineteenth-century critique of psychologism that would simultaneously produce philosophy in its most universal aspirations, along with its critique that would come by way of “theory.” Then understood through this formative moment, current conversations around post-critique, and Berkeley-style pragmatic philosophy, appear productively different. Nancy Struever, a very different type of intellectual historian, comes at the question characteristically askew by way of “not theory” and Collingwood/Noë. From the get-go according to Struever, theory has been hampered in its abstraction that is then, inevitably, subsumed into various dumb ideologies. Instead, by way of Collingwood's work on art, we see the possibilities of particular modes of inquiry that are practical all the way down. This is theory in another key, or perhaps not theory at all (just modes of inquiry). Then my piece, inspired in part by Struever's work on history and theory over the decades, hammers at an equivocation whereby we apply the term rhetorical theory indiscriminately to any systematic reflection upon language use or some other type of communication. Instead my goal is to gather inductively what we currently tend to mean when we use the term rhetorical theory, and then locate when exactly it took on its current scope that can include all sorts of things beyond such reflexive activity mentioned above. For the sake of argument, the answer I come up with is Gertrude Buck (Ann Arbor, 1900), and the Strueverite phrase I land on is “reality figured by way of its alternatives,” metaphor most prominently. D'Angelo Bridges, alternatively, foregrounds the “critical” in (critical) theory as a decolonial fact that isn't just a legacy of Hegel and Marx, but fundamentally a legacy of racialized slavery in the United States and its imperative for thought: hence Douglass and the dating 1855. Thus answering “Why theory now?” for Bridges is an account of a decolonial and antiracist imperative that works only when its history becomes legible. And in this reading it turns out that our theory is now and has always been more American than usually recognized, which would help explain much of the critical edge it has now in the book publications of Duke, Minnesota, Fordham, Routledge, now Ohio State, and so on. Then also on the genealogical front we have the piece by Steven Mailloux, which I understand this way: There is no premodern theory, in our more recent, critical sense of the term. Theory emerges out of secular modernity and its others, initiated most famously by Hegel and then worked out in various detail by midcentury German and French thinkers including Fessard, who is especially noteworthy because he makes this confrontation with modernity explicit postwar (hence the dating 1945 if we need one) and in ways indebted to but not politically aligned with Schmitt's political theology. For us beyond the historical argument, this means we would be wise to consider regularly how some version of our contemporary (critical) theory, including rhetorical, negotiates this challenge of secular modernity. Or in a formula: no secular modernity, no theory.Finally and differently we have the piece on rhetorical theory by Peter Simonson, which considers itself most prominently a “sociology of knowledge.” His work is thus historical in the sociological mode, insofar as it persistently asks the questions who is doing rhetorical theory and where exactly, and who is not doing rhetorical theory and why exactly. That said, sociology of knowledge is not indigenous to Simonson's field and those fields that name this journal—philosophy and rhetoric—so Simonson must experiment methodologically. In the end, a reductive sociological formula (e.g., knowledge = power, where power is understood, against Foucault, as unidirectional) cannot prevail. (That might give us, for example, a predictable narrative where rhetorical theory is the product of white privilege and hence can be read only as a tool of oppression.) Instead, the rhetorician that he is, Simonson offers a more circuitous story, which ultimately foregrounds the trope “irony” and the historical turn that has pitched theory, and rhetorical theory in particular, against the powers that be.So instead of systematic on the order of logical argumentation, what lies before you is in itself deeply rhetorical. We work from the places we are as only we can, while narrating for others what that work entails. In this case, we can only hope that you find that work worthwhile.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the importance of decolonization theory/practice outside of Latinx and indigenous literatures to understand how the African diaspora has produced rhetorical and philosophical interventions that have been understudied and ignored. The books reviewed all contribute to understanding the limitations of Western, white humanism through the concepts: Black reason, the undercommons, racial liberalism, the idea of the spill, and ontological terror. These texts function as entrees into a deep excavation of the limits of Kantian freedom and Rawlsian justice that recenters anti-Blackness as an animating force of governmentality (particularly governmental structures and regimes that enforce possibilities of life and death), rhetorical invention, and philosophical engagement.

ABSTRACTDemanding is a fundamental rhetorical strategy for marginalized groups, but recent rhetorical theories of demanding have not explained how speakers can design demands that influence addressees to accede. Although psychoanalytic and decolonial theories have identified constitutive functions, they have not explained how speakers can design demands that pressure addressees to accede, and while speech act theories have explained specific kinds of demands, they have not synthesized insights into a model of demanding generally. We draw on normative pragmatic theory to argue that speakers design demands that generate persuasive force by openly making visible their intent to influence addressees to accede and bringing to bear a reciprocal obligation for themselves and addressees to live up to the norm of “right makes might.”