Decolonizing Philosophy and Rhetoric: Dispatches from the Undercommons

This essay examines the importance of decolonization theory/practice outside of Latinx and indigenous literatures to understand how the African diaspora has produced rhetorical and philosophical interventions that have been understudied and ignored. The books reviewed all contribute to understanding the limitations of Western, white humanism through the concepts: Black reason, the undercommons, racial liberalism, the idea of the spill, and ontological terror. These texts function as entrees into a deep excavation of the limits of Kantian freedom and Rawlsian justice that recenters anti-Blackness as an animating force of governmentality (particularly governmental structures and regimes that enforce possibilities of life and death), rhetorical invention, and philosophical engagement.