Special Issue Introduction: Abolition Rhetorics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This introduction draws out and amplifies the major themes engaged in this special issue of “Abolitionist Rhetorics.” Insurgent abolition, we contend, far from marking yet another “turn” in disciplinary history, compels the field to reckon with its conditions of possibility and, in that encounter, with its abolition. It does so inasmuch as it proffers an immanent limit to the rhetorical field’s intellectual imagination; in its invention of a planetary vocabulary and praxes of relationality and scale that cuts against rhetoric’s imperial commonplaces; and by confronting rhetoricians with their disavowed desires for radical realization. In the upshot, the larger stakes of abolitionist rhetorics go beyond epistemic and disciplinary refurbishment. Instead, we argue that abolition—as seen in the rebellions, insurgencies, and resistances that have marked the twenty-first century—are unfoldments of radical survivance and living in the late racial capitalocene.