Rhetorics of Exile: Black Proletarian Cartographies During
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RHETORICS OF EXILE: BLACK PROLETARIAN CARTOGRAPHIES DURING THE COLD WAR ERA A Dissertation by KATE L. SIEGFRIED Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Kristan Poirot Committee Members, Ronald Greene Cara Wallis Robert Carley Head of Department, Hart Blanton May 2021 Major Subject: Communication Copyright 2021 Kate L. Siegfried 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 ii 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. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Encountering and feeling supported by so many great colleagues, friends, scholars, teachers, political leaders, and activists over the past years has profoundly impacted the development of my work in indescribable ways. Yet, as one of my closest comrades and mentors taught me, ethical communication demands that we ceaselessly try to bridge the gap, and always attempt to put the ineffable into words. My path through graduate school would not have been possible without Robert Stephens. Every day, you model what it means to relentlessly love the people, how to find the good buried within a bad idea, and how to hold a political line even when under attack. Your dedication to creating a world predicated on emancipation for all people is awe-inspiring, and I hope I’ve captured a glimmer that contagious energy in this project. Thank you, Matthew May. I carry your insights, comradery, and intentionality with me every day. You taught me what “comrade” means through action and relationality, and how to embody this as scholar, teacher, and friend. Your words of insight, political challenges, and (too) clever jokes often played in my head throughout the writing process of this manuscript. Thank you, Kristan Poirot. Throughout our advising relationship and friendship, you’ve modeled what it means to take on a student’s project and help create the foundation they need to really run with it. You consistently created a fun and engaging space to struggle through half-baked ideas, and you’ve modeled what an intellectual community can look and feel like. You’ve shown the importance of intellectual iv vulnerability, and the power it has in creating both community and knowledge. The space, relationships, and resources you facilitated provided me much with the necessary (and more) sustenance to get through graduate school. I so look forward to continuing to learn with you. Thank you to my committee, Cara Wallis, Robert Carley, and Ronald Greene. Your flexibility is unmatched. Thank you for giving me intellectual and political freedom, and for providing countless opportunities for intellectual and professional development along the way. To the Department of Communication at Texas A&M as a whole, thank you for providing a humane and materially stable foundation to be able to finish writing this document in the midst of a global pandemic and an unpredictable recession. Our big, Texas community eased my anxieties immensely. Archivists across three different institutions greatly assisted me with procuring primarily documents for this project. Thank you to the archivists at Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, the archivists at Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University (especially Rebecca Haskins), and the archivists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Your help and patience with this project was truly foundational. I was lucky enough to create deep friendships and thought partners during my master’s program at Syracuse University that have stayed with me, particularly Rachel Presley, Dylan Rollo, Tyler Champine, Ryan Bince and the late Albert Rintrona III. Dylan, you especially have been integral to helping me keep my head on straight over the last seven years. Albert, I miss you dearly, friend. My fellow graduate students in the Department of Communication that I was lucky enough to call friends, colleagues, and v thought-partners, especially Tyler Champine (again!), Chante Anderson, Caitlin Williams, Matt Ray, and Matea Ivanovič, as well as my fellow “bees,” (solidarity forever). My undergraduate professors turned close friends have played a foundational role in my intellectual becoming. Kristen Hoerl and Casey Kelly, our nearly decade long (!!!) friendship has meant so much to me. Your mentorship and advocacy for my work (without ever indicating that I need to give up any political edge) have given me assurance that my work belongs and has value – a sentiment that has enabled me to keep chugging along through graduate school. I truly would never have pursued a PhD without your guidance. Kristen Swenson, your reminders to take care of my whole being – body, mind, and spirit – have helped me feel alive in an institution that often feels lifeless. Our sporadic happy hours have brought so much joy into my life and work. None of my work would look the way it does today if not for those who have mentored me politically. Thank you. Finally, my parents, Carmen and Val, offered me with a profound and stable foundation from which to be able to do this work. My childhood as a military kid certainly sparked my interest in cartography as our family traversed the country and world together. As a child who grew up on U.S. Army bases (especially during the U.S. invasion of Iraq), it was abundantly clear to me from an early age that macro scale geopolitical contexts directly shape people’s lives and experiences – a dynamic that framed my analytic approach to this project. Thank you for encouraging me to intentionally, thoughtfully, and critically make sense of those experiences. vi CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Associate Professor Kristan Poirot and Associate Professor Cara Wallis of the Department of Communication, Associate Professor Robert Carley of the Department of International Studies, and Professor Ronald Greene of the Communication Studies Department at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. All work conducted for the dissertation was completed by the student independently. Funding Sources Graduate study was supported by a graduate fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and a summer dissertation research award from the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. The archival research for CHAPTER 4 was funded by Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan through the Bordin-Gillette Researcher Travel Fellowship. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the University of Michigan. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES ............................................................vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ..............................................................................................