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Advancing a Decolonial Rhetoric

Dominant stories and narratives are violent: They disregard and erase the humanity of so much of the world, with some of us emerging as the dis/figured and inept beings that can, and, apparently, should, be used; our bodies, our spirits, and our lives too easily made into the waste of the world. That making of humans into non-humans happens in all kinds of material ways and through a seemingly never-ending spate of cultural and political practices—colonial histories, immigration policies, labor practices, control of land, extermination—all of which are not just cultural and political, but instead are fundamentally and materially discursive. It is to this force of dominance that Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, intervenes. Advancing a decolonial rhetoric, Wanzer-Serrano takes rhetorical scholars to the complexities of violent narratives and the force of community resistance in his astute assessment of the New York Young Lords and their refusals to submit. His compelling account of the violent narratives surrounding Puerto Ricans makes this point quite clear: “Puerto Ricans were reduced in the popular imaginary and official histories to a caricature, a shell devoid of humanity, an image that was more a reflection of the attitudes of the colonizer than of the people themselves” (33). Given that dehumanized account, Wanzer-Serrano writes a book that asks and answers this compelling question: “Given a history of consciousness regarding Puerto Ricans that was ... thoroughly racist and colonialist, how ought we proceed?” (33). Across the book, the answers he offers assess how Puerto Ricans wrote their own histories and futures. At the same time, his larger response, if not your imperative, is dual, and it is this: love and listen. To be fair, Wanzer-Serrano names the book’s primary intervention like this: