In the aftertimes, breathe: Rhetorical technologies of suffocation and an abolitionist praxis of (breathing in) relation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay advances racial respiratory philosophy and calls for an abolitionist rhetorical studies as a response to Ersula Ore and my call for “cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures” in the Aftertimes. I draw from respiratory philosophy and communication and transdisciplinary scholarship on the constitutive nature of white violence, cruelty, and antiblackness, their relation to breathing/suffocation, and how the university is implicated therein. I then offer a cross-institutional analysis of the state’s dismissive, violent response to Eric Garner’s cry of “I can’t breathe” and the social atmospheres of antiblackness that saturate the university. I read these institutions through a racial respiratory lens to demonstrate how what I call technologies of suffocation work through similar logics and parallel effects in different settings to loot Black breath and sustain white supremacy. Following this analysis, I discuss abolition as a productive force of societal transformation that also demands an embodied, world-breaking/making praxis grounded in an ethical, affective, and collective reorientation around the living and breathing relations at the core of the modern world, a thorough ontic-epistemic dismantling that could create space-times for imagining a new society and new forms of relationality. I conclude by thinking toward abolitionist futures, radical humanism, and disciplinary transformation.