Violent Histories, Livable Futures

“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)