Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Editors’ Introduction Carmen Kynard and Bryan J. McCann In her first non-fiction collection, Michelle Cliff set out to (re)write the history of British colonialism, slavocracy, U.S. white settler colonization, and racial capitalism from her own body’s memories and experiences. She names perhaps one of her most unrelenting and memoir-inspired chapters in this collection: “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” (which is also the namesake of the book, If I Could Write This in Fire).1 In this chapter, Cliff’s prosaic style and rhetorical force works deliberately in homage to Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo and her 1977 tome, Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint.2 Setting Aidoo as both Black Diasporic sister and mentor, Cliff reaches into the everydayness of the racial violence of colonial schooling that sorts, punishes, ranks, and reproduces global hierarchies via: colorism, disability, class status, anti-Blackness, homophobia, misogynoir, and mimicry of British etiquette; memorization of white canons of European nation and femininity from the singing of required morning hymns; the coronation mugs on parlor tables; to the exaltation of Jane Austen. Working to seam it all together, Cliff writes: “I think about how I need to say all this . . . it is up to me to sort out these connections—to employ anger and take the consequences . . . To make it impossible for them to think me harmless.”3 In this second issue of our still very first volume of RPC, we look to Cliff’s notion of “writing in fire” to situate the work that this issue’s authors are doing and the work we do as rhetoric scholars. In this second issue, we are also (re)writing the body politic of our nation-states from our experiences in the way that Cliff demands. We are buttressed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; a white supremacist mass murder of Black patrons in Buffalo, NY; more gun violence against Latinx children in Uvalde, TX and parade attendees in Highland Park, IL; the overturning of Roe V. Wade; and a rollback on voting rights acts and other litigation in relation to equality of opportunity. Schooling maintains its colonial legacy, this time with a renewed public [End Page v] attack on anything deemed a racial justice education and/or an embrace of queer, trans, and nonbinary youth. As Carter G. Woodson argued almost a century ago, schooling’s function is to reproduce the logic of oppression and social violence, and it continues to do that well today.4 We hesitate to suggest that things have gotten worse because that would only serve to validate the false claim of a linear progress narrative or—worse yet—a kind of plantation nostalgia. Instead, the structure has remained the same with merely a varied set of daily expressions. As editors, we also eschew the kind of white liberalist mantra that says rhetoric scholars must respond to the moment in which they live as if that alone coincides with re-imagining that moment. Instead, as editors, we seek to chronicle the long lineage of those of us in rhetoric who know we are writing in fire like the authors and texts this issue collects. In “Decolonizing the Ideas and Ends of Church(-)Settlers,” Romeo Garcia helps us to “produce decolonized archives” since settler words and ideas shape how knowledge is archived towards ongoing colonial goals. Garcia examines the settler ideas of Texas and Utah as a “LatinAmericanist project of modernity/(de) coloniality” that upends our usual obsessions in the Enlightenment enterprise of the 18th century; instead, he historicizes our rhetorical origins in modernity with the Americas of the 15th and 16th centuries. Thus, the linking of Americanity and coloniality unfolds a logic of domination underlying how we study language, rhetoric, and literacy. Americanity acts rhetorically within the projects of both colonialism and coloniality where specific settler locales like Utah and Texas are a profound articulation. Christa J. Olson further challenges us to do the work of “unsettling ‘our’ rhetorical ancestors.” In “‘Nuestras Reliquías Históricas’ and the Rhetorical Work of Objects at Machu Picchu,” she closely follows Machu Picchu ruins in Peru that were “uncovered...