On January 26, Dr. Lisa A. Flores will deliver the inaugural Rhetoric Unbound lecture. Dr. Flores’s talk, entitled “Seeing through the Spectacle,” will take place at 8.00 p.m. Eastern. The lecture will last 30 minutes and will be followed by both small- and large-group discussion.
Lecture Description
In this talk, I begin with the spectacle as a prevalent contemporary rhetorical form that exists as spectacle through its cultivation of spectating, a form of viewing, looking, or even witnessing premised in dehumanization. Itself an act of violence, the spectacle as a rhetorical form—a genre—does not simply dehumanize, it dehumanizes through antiBlackness. But, like all rhetorical forms, it remains vulnerable. In this talk, I ask how it is that rhetorical scholars might theorize the possibilities of that vulnerability. If the relationship between the spectacle and the act of spectating is not tautological but instead co-constitutive, how do rhetorical scholars theorize seeing through spectacle? As scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe have argued, not only is the hold of antiBlackness not complete, Black aliveness lives in various ways of seeing and knowing that refuse the premises of antiBlackness. I turn to a viral September 2021 spectacular “crisis” at the U.S./Mexico border to consider these questions.
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Rhetoric Unbound 