Their invocation of a legalist approach to remedy centuries of colonial violence in policy debate is invested in a false assumption of subjective citizenship and sovereignty that is rooted in settler colonial consciousness – Rhetorical spaces, like debate, layer ideological structures of settler reproduction which create the conditions for settler colonialism to reproduce itself.

To answer the first claim—that US rhetoric is the communication practice of organizing people and materials to serve the needs of the colonial settlement—I begin by looking at the Aristotelian tradition’s ongoing influence on the field. Aristotle’s rhetoric is a publicfacing procedure for persuasion within a subjected citizenry. Its objective: to find all means that might convince an audience, not because dialectic deliberation will not work, but because “affecting the decisions of juries and assemblies is a matter of persuasiveness, not of knowledge.” 1 Rhetoricians in the US still invested in Aristotle must account for this colonial carryover from Britain’s Aristotelian tradition. It represents particular forms of rhetorical criticism and pedagogical practices—like public speaking, debate, and oral defenses—that rely on a notion of subjective citizenship and sovereignty rooted in a colonial (then settler colonial) consciousness.2 Lauer argues, for example, that classical rhetoric was essential in propulsion of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. As a result of Augustus’s shift from deliberative to epideictic rhetoric, the Roman Empire was able to sustain the spread of Roman ideology onto lands that would have otherwise exceeded its authority.3 Augustus knew that the legitimacy of the Roman Empire was contingent upon the ability to shape public memory so that Roman law would be seen as morally virtuous. Thus, the rhetorical authority of sovereignty was used to justify the expansion of the Roman Empire as a function of the persuasive power of its leaders. Mary E. Stucky and John M. Murphy describe the way rhetorical authority is used, much like the Romans, to also remove native peoples from their stewarded lands for economic exploitation in the US.4 In both cases, rhetorical subjection and claims to sovereignty are communicated onto bodies and lands, exerting a discursive force that commits colonial violence. The practice of issuing rhetorical authority is intrinsically connected to colonial modernity. From Aristotelian thought to the middle of the twentieth century, “rhetorical criticism” focused almost exclusively on studying a speaker’s capacity to persuade publics through oratory.5 This meant that a training in rhetoric required studying “the texts of speeches delivered by the common and uncommon men who attempted to crystallize and mold public thinking about the issues of their day.” 6 The purpose of this training was not to disrupt existing systems of domination but, rather, to replicate them: as important as public address [is] itself in understanding [US] American culture is the character of the training in rhetoric provided by the nation’s colleges and universities. Rhetoric and rhetorical training … reflect to some extent the demands and expectations of the environment; the public image of the orator inevitably influences the collegiate training of future orators.7 Raymie McKerrow suggests that this tradition of training orators was reflected in the field up until the critical turn in the 1970s where scholars then begin to turn to rhetorical criticism of social justice movements and scholars like Maurice Charland and Michael Calvin McGee begin to rethink rhetorical subjectivity. McKerrow also credits Walter Fisher for work on narrative rhetoric, which McKerrow argues gave the field a language to study a “rational world paradigm” through narrative fidelity—though this “world paradigm” was certainly not inclusive of the indigenous narrative epistemologies already circulating for centuries before the arrival of European rhetoric.8 While McKerrow argues that the 1970s moved US rhetoric past its European colonial roots and into a postmodern scholarly practice, much of the field continues to be entangled with processes of settler colonial modes of production: invoking political subjectivities, authorizing sovereignty, and narrating the settler colonial consciousness.9 Notably, the “the rhetoric of modernity” is a structural process driven by the production of colonial subjects (i.e., Christian, white) and capitalist practices of production which originated in Europe and were spread throughout the Americas via genocide, occupation, enslavement, and war.10 Ultimately, the rhetoric of modernity is about the sovereignty constructed through a European ideological paradigm that was deduced from the rhetorical authority invented by monarchs, trade companies, and churches. Furthermore, that sovereignty exerted over colonial subjects relies on a distribution of settler colonial narratives that exist on a trajectory that has not quite finished the settler colonial project; settling for rhetorics of liberal modernity simply “crucially contributes to blocking out indigenous peoples’ struggles for a post-settler colonial future.” 11 Thus, it is not enough to say that rhetoric is “the study” of how settler colonial ideology is communicated. Rather, it is a specific public-facing communication practice that organizes people and materials (especially land) to serve the needs of a settlement through claims of political sovereignty. Furthermore, rhetoric produces and circulates narrative forms that foreclose a postsettler future by reproducing the same sets of relationships between bodies, lands, and power both in our research practices (as I will describe below) and in our pedagogies (like debate, public speaking, etc). Claim #2: assemblage theory frames rhetoric as an organizing logic Embedded within the theory of assemblages is a way to consider how communication moves ideological power onto bodies and throughout territories. Research on White Settler Governance (WSG) emerging from Canadian Cultural Studies reverberates Walter Mignolo and Lorenzo Veracini’s sentiment on the importance of studying the mechanisms of production behind settler colonialism. Scott Lauria Morgensen relies on a framework rooted in Foucault’s biopolitics and settler colonial studies to describe how WSG is founded by apparatuses of power that persist in producing populations and institutions that can reproduce settler logics: the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended … . Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power.12 Settler colonialism, thus, is not simply a condition that afflicts native peoples and lands, but is a method settler states undertake in order to layer ideological structures of settler production like universities, hospitals, and courts onto yet settler-occupied territories. I argue that this is a communicable method. Patrick Wolfe suggests WSG organizes and endures through material mechanisms of ideological replacement, those that eliminate native peoples from lands and then occupy those lands indefinitely: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event … elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence … . Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” 13 What settler colonialism replaces, though, is the order of how sets of relations between lands, peoples, and ideologies are mapped out onto invaded territories. As a structure of settler ideological power—or what I refer to as an assemblage—WSG persist in territorializing native lands and eliminating native peoples through organizing logics of subjectivity and sovereignty circulated through narratives of settler logic. Conventional rhetoric’s “agonistic” emphasis on evaluating the efficacy of a given presidential address, congressional debate, or other communicative practice is inherently conservative, and thus settler colonial, for it positions the WSG status quo as a given; that is, when the organizing logics of settler colonialism are communicated effectively, this is “effective” rhetoric. Therefore, to frame rhetoric as the communicable organizing logics of WSG, a study of assemblages is warranted. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblages are an “ad hoc logic” about the ways social formations rely on a combination of heterogeneous, material and human parts to create change.14 Assemblages are like self-replicating, overdetermined political machines where many seemingly random materials are arranged in a self-reinforcing fashion to produce and sustain a particular outcome. While Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of political desire is ultimately framed in the context of late capitalism, thinking through their conception of assemblage as it is moved by a settler colonial desire—a desire Mignolo asserts is dually capitalistic and genocidally white supremacist—warrants a discussion of how political ideologies of domination are assembled by rhetorical logics. For one, assemblages are not things, and they do not produce things; they are arrangements of things.15 Assemblages, though, do territorialize and code particular annunciations with an organizing logic. In this case, materials and bodies are arranged and mobilized on territories according to the logics of settler desire (resource extraction, labor extraction, and genocide), which has the dual effect of creating the conditions for settler logic to reproduce. For DeLanda, this point is particularly important: what one feels as an effect (or affect) from assemblages is the sense that territories are being reshaped and bodies recoded to be more conducive to the reproduction of the assemblage.16 This facet of assemblages intersects with the biopolitical study of WSG by explaining the ways ideological structures of power arrange racial and economic hierarchies in the service of producing the conditions by which settler colonialism can reproduce. The other facet of assemblage, and the one that pertains most to the study of rhetoric, is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine. An assemblage comprises the abstract machine, the concrete (material) components, and the personae (bodies). The abstract machine is the organizing logic of an assemblage: “the condition of an assemblage is abstract because it is not a thing or object that exists in the world, but rather something that lays out a set of relations wherein concrete elements and agencies appear.” 17 Thus, the abstract machine of an assemblage organizes the materials (including and especially land) and personae of the assemblage in a way that their sets of relationships affect the flows of power toward a particular desire. In the case of WSG, the capacity to call settler colonial subjects into being, the capacity to make sovereignty claims over native lands, and the capacity to normalize this invasive process through religious or grand global political narrative is organized by the abstract machine of settler logic—or what I described earlier as rhetoric. The abstract machine layers power over bodies and lands in a way that reshapes them to reproduce structures of settler power. In other words, settler colonial governance is an assemblage of ideological power in North America that territorializes the lands stewarded by native peoples, codes the bodies of native, Mestizx, and black peoples as Other, and shapes rhetorical/communicable landscapes into spaces conducive to the reproduction of the settlement. Rhetoric is the organizing logic of this white settler assemblage that is continuously communicated (discursively and affectively) to arrange the relationships between settler bodies, native bodies, occupied lands, and technologies of occupation. These tenets of rhetoric are articulated in the organizational logic of settler colonialism. We cannot undo settler colonialism unless we confront the normalization of these logics and begin to rearticulate an anticolonial praxis-driven method for studying rhetoric. This work—if it assumes that conventional rhetoric is, in fact, the organizing logic of the settler colonial assemblage in North America—can undo our complicity as rhetoricians to reproduce settler colonialism.