The serpent has become a symbol systematically corrupted by colonial chronobiopolitics, but it reemerges in Chicana femme art as a symbol of decolonial time. This article examines how select artworks of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Diane Gamboa, and Anel Flores mobilize serpentine aesthetics as embodied rhetorical practices that dismantle linear temporality. Through a sensory-centered critical rhetoric informed by decolonial feminist-of-color theories, I theorize their artwork as enacting a Chicana femme logic, which I define as an aesthetic and epistemic system that intertwines queer sensuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and cyclical, generative time. This analysis offers serpentine temporality as a critical framework for resisting the sensorial violence of colonial modernity and imagining futures otherwise foreclosed upon by accelerationist, apocalyptic rhetorics.
This article examines Donald Trump's commodified nouveau riche ethos as a status/fantasy bribe for his proletarian audience to identify their class interests with the bourgeois' profit motive. Specifically, this article illustrates how Trump uses his nouveau riche ethos in his 1987 autobiography/self-help book Trump: The Art of the Deal, in the midst of the de-regulations of the financial industry in the 1970s and 1980s, to rhetorically bribe the reader with the enjoyment of wealth as a spectacle. Thus, this article provides a Lacanian-Marxist definition of ethos as an ideological fetish where the suasive use of a "unified character" to earn the audience's trust obscures the internal contradictions of political economy. To expand on this Lacanian-Marxian definition of ethos as ideology, this article illustrates two conceptual points. First, this article grounds Trump's nouveau riche ethos within the economic-historical context of financial de-regulation policies in response to the economic crises of the 1970s. Second, this article analyzes how the rhetorical realist economic style of Trump's financial advice foregoes practical financial wisdom in favor of impractical performative financial tactics that prioritize the flaunting of wealth and the domination of others to produce an immaterial profit of enjoyment.
This article responds to Eric King Watts' 2024 book Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World. The author contends that one similarity between our contemporary political culture and the racialization apparent in zombie fantasies revolves around a desire to eradicate empathy as a rhetorical and human activity. That is, empathy is superfluous in fantasies that presume the apocalypse ushers in a "postracial" future where only the living and the dead remain, or it is dangerous for fantasies that glorify violence against humans or posthuman zombies as necessary for survival. By exploring how empathy and race are treated in The Girl with All the Gifts, the author contends that the elimination of empathy in zombie narratives serves as a warning to eliminate empathy in our political and social lives. But in zombie narratives where empathy persists despite attempts to destroy it, it creates a complex form of allyship that can usher in new identities, social lives, and political futures.
