Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics brings together emerging and established voices at the nexus of new materialist and decolonial rhetorics to advance a new direction for rhetorical scholarship on materiality. In part a response to those seeking answers about the relevance of new material and posthuman thought to cultural rhetorics, this collection initiates bold conversations at the pressure points between nature and culture, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, knowing and being, and across culturally different ontologies. It thus relies on a tapestry of both accepted and marginalized discourses in order to respond to frustrations of erasure and otherness prevalent in the fields of rhetoric, writing, and communication—and offers solutions to move these fields forward. With diverse contributions, including compelling pieces from leading Indigenous scholars, these essays draw from political, cultural, and natural life to present innovative projects that consider material rhetorics, our planet, and human beings as necessarily interwoven and multiple.

Contributors: Joyce Rain Anderson, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, David M. Grant, Robert Lestón, Kelly Medina-López, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Shannon Kelly, Christina V. Cedillo, A.I. Ramírez, Matthew Whitaker, Judy Holiday, Elizabeth Lowry, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Malea Powell

A classic examination of the lived realities of American racism, now with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson.
 
First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced.
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This reissue of the 1965 abridged edition, with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—who acknowledges the book’s profound importance to her own work—proves that Deep South remains as relevant as ever, a crucial work on the concept of caste and how it continues to inform the myriad varieties of American inequality.
 

In Deflective Whiteness, Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating how White supremacy adapts its discursive strategies by cannibalizing the language and rhetoric of Black and Latinx social justice movements. Analyzing a wide-ranging collection of cultural objects—memes, oration, music, advertisements, and news coverage—Noel shows how White deflection sustains and reproduces structures of inequality and injustice.

White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations.

Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men--the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society.

Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined.

This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.

An informative rethinking of how Japanese society discriminates against its Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin populations.
 
In this book, J. Mark Ramseyer, a noted authority on Japan looks at discrimination against groups in Japanese society, focusing on the Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin groups. Ramseyer asks why they experience discrimination in Japan, an unusually homogeneous society. Is it because of some prejudice on the part of the majority that prevents their integration into mainstream Japanese society? Or is it because some of the dynamics within the group create incentives for the group to stay together and to be on the fringes of society?
 
Ramseyer argues that the real explanation is the latter, and each of these three groups has been victimized by its own leadership. Precisely because the groups are dysfunctional, members of the group cannot control members who would appoint themselves group leaders.  The result has been the capture of leadership positions by people who manipulate the group to their own private advantage and to the detriment of the group as a whole.

The impact of conquest and colonialism on identity and the construction of knowledge

Jillian Ford and Nathalia E. Jaramillo edit a collection of writings by women that examine womanist worldviews in philosophy, theory, curriculum, public health, and education. Drawing on thinkers like bell hooks and Cynthia Dillard, the essayists challenge the colonizing hegemonies that raise and sustain patriarchal and male-centered systems of teaching and learning. Part One examines how womanist theorizing and creative activity offer a space to study the impact of conquest and colonization on the Black female body and spirit. In Part Two, the contributors look at ways of using text, philosophy, and research methodologies to challenge colonizing and colonial definitions of womanhood, enlightenment, and well-being. The essays in Part Three undo the colonial pedagogical project and share the insights they have gained by freeing themselves from its chokehold.

Powerful and interdisciplinary, Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies challenges colonialism and its influence on education to advance freer and more just forms of knowledge making.

Contributors: Silvia García Aguilár, Khalilah Ali, Angela Malone Cartwright, Adriana Diego, LeConté Dill, Sameena Eidoo, Genevieve Flores-Haro, Jillian Ford, Leena Her, Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Claudia Lozáno, Liliana Manriquez, Alberta Salazár, León Salazár, and Lorri Santamaría

Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide’s formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California’s prisons. 

While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines. 

Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership. 

Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.