Overview

Our political landscape is crowded with competing voices—claims, demands, grievances, and even acts of violence—all made in the name of some idea of “the people.” This powerful concept has been wielded both to assert democratic sovereignty and to justify exclusion and control. Violent Histories, Livable Futures unpacks this complex dynamic through compelling historical case studies, spanning sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s, post–World War II Guatemala, and the United States in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. By tracing how societies have contended over which people matter and which do not, this book offers a deeply relevant exploration of power, representation, and the struggle for justice, all in pursuit of a more livable future.

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9781611865660

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Reviews

“A critical intervention coming amid relentless violence, this book names violence while asking what it means to build communities and systems of both possibility and dignity. Watts and the contributors offer rhetorical scholars complex modes of livability amid violence.”—Lisa A. Flores, author of Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant ""Violent Histories, Livable Futures offers a timely account of the bloody and democratic history and present of ’the people’. A text that does not limit its archive to the domestic histories of violence in the United States, the book highlights how ’the people’ can name both violence and liberation. Erudite and important.""—Paul Elliott Johnson, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh “Violent Histories, Livable Futures contributes to an important rethinking of traditional rhetorical political concepts such as citizenship, democracy, the people, and publics. Rather than abandon these somewhat problematic concepts, this volume recreates them in light of advances in rhetorical research and theorizing about coloniality, race, voice, witnessing, post-truth media, international justice, and authoritarian performance. The new iterations of the traditional concepts that emerge are fresh and dynamic tools that will help guide and inspire contemporary rhetorical political scholarship.”—Freya Thimsen, Associate Professor, Indiana University, author of The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric After Occupy (2022)

Author Information

Eric King Watts has published extensively on Black public voice, its invention, and suppression and is the author of Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement and Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World.

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