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Socialist Revolution, Southern Rebellion, and Quarantine in Oklahoma
When I first imagined Oklahomas first state flag as a transrhetorical object in a pluriversal space at the transections of place, race, history and the present, leftist radicalism and right-wing rebellion, the world had not yet been irrevocably changed by the twin tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyds violent, unnecessary death at the hands of racist Minneapolis police. Confederate statues, along with a multitude of anti-Black and other settler colonial symbols, had not yet fallen under broad scrutiny by a general public rocked by public health crises, physical isolation policies, supply chain shortages, economic collapse, unemployment surges, negligent national leadership, and the reactionary politicization of quarantine and protocol measures. The anti-Black violence enacted in George Floyds brutal death had not yet recontextualized all discussions about the role of southern white supremacy and systemic anti-Black racism in the present United States. The peaceful, ardent protests demanding immediate justice and enduring change that erupted all over the nation enacted a transrhetorical network, so that resistance to anti-Black violence and calls for immediate reforms such as defunding and demilitarizing the police invoked simultaneously both a united national response to racist violence and local histories of struggle. In similar fashion, while statues of Confederate generals and monuments to the Confederate dead were removed throughout the country, most notably in the south itself, statues commemorating colonialism, particularly those depicting the mythohistorical figure Christoper Columbus, also came down, as demonstrating protestors drew clear connections between coloniality, chattel slavery, genocide of Indigenous peoples, anti-Black racism, the Civil War, and the political present. Transrhetoricity, a concept aimed at articulating the dynamic movements and unfolding meanings occurring across the scope and depth of complex rhetorical networks, such as those enacted in these public responses, characterizes the changing dynamics of the rhetorical process occurring across networked sites.
Transrhetorical analysis and transrhetoricity provide an analytical method and theoretical concept to enable the observation and practice of inter-epistemic communication within pluriversal spaces and among the diverse variations of intersections occurring across them. These intersections are perhaps better understood as trans-sections and envisioned as intersections of multiple lines rather than two-an asterisk of transecting lines rather than an axis. Across these strands, meaning moves between cultural sites connected...