Metaphors to Live and Die By

Abstract

AbstractDecolonial smuggling is a practice that falls at the intersections of fugitivity (Moten) and delinking (Mignolo, Wanzer-Serrano). It is geared toward disrupting rhetorical studies’ zero-point epistemology to open space to marshal alternative epistemologies—of Black being, Indigeneities, and their relational formations—against the canon to enable more radical, decolonial disciplinary futures. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars, this essay details the forms of whiteness and knowledge production that reproduce epistemic violence, performs metaphoric (meta)criticism across various strands of race scholarship, and comments on white scholars’ role in these conversations. This essay seeks to add clarity to what decolonization looks like for rhetoricians with respect to the epistemologies and ontologies embedded within the metaphors that, for many, are matters of life and death.