An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric

ABSTRACT This essay is organized around four claims, which when taken together, demonstrate that it is time for the field of Communication Rhetoric in the United States to rethink the way it does rhetoric: (1) US American rhetoric is the way settler colonialism organizes, (2) assemblage theory can frame US rhetoric as an organizing logic of Settler Colonialism, (3) anti-colonial social movement knowledge production is akin to theory, and (4) rhetoric must find a better method to engage with these anti-colonial movements. I end the essay with a challenge to rhetorical scholars to learn, rather than try to teach.