Slithering toward Social Change: Mobile Reverberations of Anticolonial Dissent across Time and Space

Abstract I explore the ways in which practicing rhetorical analysis transnationally in motu reveals coalitional moments that were previously obfuscated by dominant narratives of rhetorical history. I offer rhetoric transnationally in motu as a method of engaging the mobility of artifacts across time and space, a method that, in turn, enables decentering the nation-state, tracing reverberations of anticolonial dissent, and threading fragments together by reading against and alongside the archival grain. To demonstrate this methodological approach, I analyze the protest technique of “snake-dancing” used by the Zengakuren in Japan and the Yippies in the United States. Although the Zengakuren and the Yippies were active in different time periods and in different geographic locations, by examining their uses of the same protest technique, I am able to suggest that the two groups shared a transnational coalitional moment in which they were fleetingly and intangibly connected through the same echoing reverberations of anticolonial dissent.