Abstract In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.

AbstractIn 2010, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched a campaign titled “Take Our Jobs!” Explicitly directed at “Americans,” the campaign promised UFW training to applicants for jobs in the nation’s fields. With references to (un)documented immigrants within the nation, the campaign located debates on immigration within the nation, not at the border. I argue that the campaign relied upon irony and visibility politics, generating a logic of absurd reality that allowed audiences to differentiate themselves from (un)documented immigrants in ways that both reinscribe the racial figure of the deportable Mexican and see that figure, at least momentarily, in a humane way.