Abstract

Dominant stories and narratives are violent: They disregard and erase the humanity of so much of the world, with some of us emerging as the dis/figured and inept beings that can, and, apparently, should, be used; our bodies, our spirits, and our lives too easily made into the waste of the world. That making of humans into non-humans happens in all kinds of material ways and through a seemingly never-ending spate of cultural and political practices—colonial histories, immigration policies, labor practices, control of land, extermination—all of which are not just cultural and political, but instead are fundamentally and materially discursive. It is to this force of dominance that Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, intervenes. Advancing a decolonial rhetoric, Wanzer-Serrano takes rhetorical scholars to the complexities of violent narratives and the force of community resistance in his astute assessment of the New York Young Lords and their refusals to submit. His compelling account of the violent narratives surrounding Puerto Ricans makes this point quite clear: “Puerto Ricans were reduced in the popular imaginary and official histories to a caricature, a shell devoid of humanity, an image that was more a reflection of the attitudes of the colonizer than of the people themselves” (33).Given that dehumanized account, Wanzer-Serrano writes a book that asks and answers this compelling question: “Given a history of consciousness regarding Puerto Ricans that was … thoroughly racist and colonialist, how ought we proceed?” (33). Across the book, the answers he offers assess how Puerto Ricans wrote their own histories and futures. At the same time, his larger response, if not your imperative, is dual, and it is this: love and listen. To be fair, Wanzer-Serrano names the book’s primary intervention like this: I argue for a rethinking of democracy rooted in decolonial heterogeneities that keeps open the terrain for political contestation, features commitments to racial and gender justice, is guided more by liberation than by recognition, and empowers people to be engaged political subjects who exhibit epistemic disobedience by delinking from coloniality and rejecting neoliberal hegemonies. (27)Still, as I read through the book, it was love and listening that came together. Consider this frame of the project: “it is a commitment to finding ways to listen to others’ literal and metaphorical voices and to allow such listening to have its full, transformative effects on subjectivity” (127). That argument comes together most powerfully in chapter 4, where Wanzer-Serrano turns to the Young Lord’s “garbage offensive.” The garbage offensive, an instrumental move designed in part to simply clean the streets, became a much more comprehensive move, “a remarkable rhetoric about the decolonial ethos and ethics of [Puerto Ricans’] agency” (134). It’s here, in this analysis, that we can see listening and loving as ethics of both scholarship and activism, for what Wanzer-Serrano makes clear across the book is that the Young Lords intervened, made change, and reconstituted identity, politics, and community through their listening and loving.Wanzer-Serrano’s book raises numerous questions. What are the implications of the turn to decoloniality for scholars (like me) who remain pretty firmly centered in nation-states and race? And for rhetorical scholars more generally? How might we think de-linking outside of decoloniality? Can we? But perhaps the big question that this book raises is this: What would it mean for critical race rhetoricians to write within a love-and-listen framework? I see three critical mandates from this work for critical race rhetoricians. The first is that agency—so critical to Wanzer-Serrano’s project—has to be centered in much critical race rhetorical scholarship. As Wanzer-Serrano reminds us in the conclusion, this work teaches us much about the Young Lords but the bigger contribution lies in “what can be learned from the Young Lords” (167).In his emphasis on the voices, writings, and practices of the Young Lords and with his commitment to decoloniality, Wanzer-Serrano theorizes agency between the abstract and the concrete, always attentive to the histories, the people, and the locales. He advances a theory of rhetorical agency that we would do well to take up. What would it mean to rethink agency along the lines of what Wanzer-Serrano names “body-political modes of theorizing and acting in the world” (13)?If the first key mandate is a vigorous assessment of agency in critical race rhetorical work, a second lies in the discussions of the tensions between identity politics and politics that emerge out of identities. More specifically, Wanzer-Serrano’s project raises questions that we would do well to engage. What does it mean to build anti-essentialist identity politics? What are the other models of anti-essentialist identity politics? If we wanted to continue to theorize anti-essentialist identity politics, where would we begin? How do we make possible moments in which we name our identities, hold them, while also not being reduced to them or constrained by them? Here, Wanzer-Serrano’s turn to Kelly Oliver and response-ability is crucial, in part for the way response-ability, as Wanzer-Serrano argues, “generated the space where gendered subjectivity could become something, where subjectivity could begin to emerge as a set of practices oriented around an ethic of love built on witnessing to one another” (97). There is something in witnessing, something in stopping to see, to hear, to feel, that has potential.A final mandate of The New York Young Lords is the implicit call for more emphasis in our work on relationality. Certainly, relationality does not figure explicitly in the book as centrally as agency; still, it does drive the analysis. Here, I’m thinking relationality as informed by the work of Natalia Molina, in her argument for racial scripts; by that of Alexander Weiheyle, in his turn to racialized assemblages; and by Lisa Lowe, who reminds us that the many raced and colonial violences “are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded” (7). What these folks make so clear is that we cannot think race, colonialism, dispossession, the nonhuman or less-than-human, in isolation. We cannot think just of the body, nor can we forget the body, nor just think here, but also there, not just in the moment, nor just in history.So how do we move forward? We write and think in spaces and voices of vulnerability and connection. This book—a first in our discipline—challenges all of us to attend to modernity and coloniality and our implication in it.