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

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Planting the Anthropocene: Rhetorics of Natureculture.

David M. Grant is Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa.

Foreword        To Listen You Must Silence Yourself

Introduction    Working with Incommensurable Things

Chapter 1        The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities: Posthumanism, Buen Vivir, and Zapatismo

Chapter 2        Performing Complex Recognitions: (De)Colonial (Mis)Recognitions as Systemic Revision

Chapter 3        Listening Otherwise: Arboreal Rhetorics and Tree-Human Relations

Chapter 4        Smoke and Mirrors: Re-Creating Material Relation(ship)s through Mexica Story

Chapter 5        Perpetual (In)securities: (Re)Birthing Border Imperialism as Understood Through Facultades Serpentinas

Chapter 6        Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent Through “Seeds of Resistance”: A Case Study on Rhetorics of Survivance and the Protest Assemblage

Chapter 7        Top Down, Bottom Up: Ecological Restoration, Rhetorical Resistance, and Decolonization

Chapter 8        Becoming Relations: Braiding an Indigenous Manifesto