Rhetorical Future(s) and Accounting for Rhetorical Debt

Rhetorical Future(s) and Accounting for Rhetorical Debt

Peitho Volume 21 Issue 2 Spring 2019

Author(s): Kellie Sharp-Hoskins

Abstract: This article posits accounting for rhetorical debt as a feminist attitude and practice that acknowledges how our futures are bound to and bound by our rhetorical accounts. The accounts we offer, I argue, construct rhetorical boundaries for our work, which not only point to our rhetorical futures—what is made possible, recognizable, and important by our accounts—but our rhetorical debts. After tracking out the complicated rhetorical affordances (and constraints) of the economic implications of debt, I review feminist and decolonial scholarly practices of acknowledging rhetorical terministic and genealogical debts. Building on this work, I suggest that scholars must acknowledge both explicit debts as well as the conditions of possibility that allow them to emerge.

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Tags: accounting, credit decolonization, debt, economics, feminist practice, futures, rhetoric