Racial capitalism has no contingency: rhetoric, Black Studies, and political economic change

ABSTRACT This essay explores theories of racial capitalism for insights about how to reimagine rhetorical advocacy beyond both Marxist formations and new materialist interventions. With an anticapitalist commitment informed by Marxism and the politics of affectivity that resonates with new materialism, Black Studies scholarship forwards key aspects of these two traditions without following into political rigidity or flattening political asymmetries. It does so by reconfiguring contingency as the grounds of rhetorical praxis. From its frameworks, timeliness is ever present as the past and future bleed into the present, and consequently rhetorical emplacement has an equally ambiguous relationship to traditional heuristics. This uncertain acontingency opens new possibilities for rhetorical studies.