Rhetorics of Exile: Black Proletarian Cartographies During the Cold War Era
Abstract
Utilizing material frames including racial-capitalism, world systems analysis, and a Black geographic approach to rhetorical cartography, this dissertation offers an analysis of the rhetorics of exiled Black political leaders during the Cold War era. Through my case studies, including Mabel and Robert F. William’s exile in Cuba, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver’s exile in Algeria, and Paul Robeson’s forced containment in the United States, I assess how exiled and contained political leaders utilized place-based rhetorics and place-as-rhetoric to engage in a globally oriented political struggle against racism, imperialism, and colonialism. Robeson performed folk music from different national contexts as a mode through which to articulate the struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism as fundamentally global, while his particular location at Peace Arch Park tapped into the racialized entanglement of imperialism and citizenship. Similarly, Williams utilized a Black internationalist approach to aesthetics rooted in American Southern regionalism as a mode through which to situate the Black Belt as a key geographical space within a globally oriented political struggle against racialized violence. Cleaver’s approach to place was more conceptual, as his Revolutionary People’s Communication Network connected Gramscian war of maneuver and war of position tactics as a communicative mode through which to attend to the relationship between space and race. These utilizations of place-as-rhetoric and place-based rhetorics by exiled Black political leaders highlights the fundamental entanglement between nationhood, land, and citizenship. Taken together, I argue that the rhetorics of exiled Black political leaders chart the emergence of a new global power map, Black proletarian cartographies of struggle, oriented toward fundamentally restructuring the existing racial-capitalist world order. Black political leaders in exile depended on the recognition of foreign states to safely navigate the exilic condition imposed on them by the United States empire. As such, their specific movements throughout socialist, decolonial, and non-aligned nations operated as a recognition of their legitimate status as leaders while simultaneously affirming the national identity and claims to citizenship of Black people throughout the diaspora. As such, the mapping of Black proletarian cartographies of struggle charted the boundaries of the possibility for Black emancipation writ large during the Cold War era.
Citation
Siegfried, Kate L (2021). Rhetorics of Exile: Black Proletarian Cartographies During the Cold War Era. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /193127.