Undocumented Times: Rhetorics of a Colonial Moment
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Quinones Valdivia, Fernando Ismael
- Graduate Program:
- Communication Arts and Sciences
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 01, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Michele Kennerly, Major Field Member
Jeremy Engels, Major Field Member
Matthew Restall, Outside Unit & Field Member
Debbie Hawhee, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Kirt Wilson, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Pluriversal
Speech
Writing
Language
Immigration
Chihuahua
Modernity
Decolonial
Postcolonial
Anticolonial
Confinement
Solitude
Labyrinth
Tree
Bird
Aftertimes - Abstract:
- Undocumented Times: Rhetorics of a Colonial Moment is a meditation on our possibilities to augment pluriversal futures. By simplifying the terms of engagement with colonial theory, we can imagine worlds beyond and after colonialism. A colonial moment is a singular rhetorical temporality at the limit of life’s exhaustion. Deluded by political life, speech, writing, and language have become tools of confinement and technologies of exteriorization which give force a voice to grammar. A method of interplaying prose and poetics in the main text and the notes, I begin to sketch a rhetorical art of creation. A nonperformance performance of the various labyrinths it aims to exceed, this dissertation travels in time to give expression to the weight of unspeakable, unwritable, and unimaginable historical, rhetorical, and philosophical violence from the legacies of racial colonialism. From Catholic friars to self-emancipated liberators, States to Originary nations, migrants to their un–, a chronicle of an allegory whereby a tree overtakes a labyrinth ensues. A creation out of necessity, I invite you to reimagine political life altogether.