It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S. by Alexander Laban Hinton (review)

Abstract

The attention to misrecognition in chapter three prefigures a more robust discussion of the variations within and limits to theories of recognition within human rights work in chapter four (for this reader, the most compelling chapter in the book). Readers of Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms will be particularly interested in how her use of recognition has shifted from the work of Kelly Oliver on witnessing and recognition founded on mutuality or “response-ability,” which Hesford rightly insists must be grounded in material contexts, to the concept of “diffractive recognition” she develops in Violent Exceptions.15 In chapter four, “Black Childhoods and US Carceral Systems,” she reads the murder of Trayvon Martin through four different theories of recognition in order to demonstrate the ways in which they circumscribe or expand understandings of Martin’s death and his family’s demands for justice. The final chapter examines portrayals of transgender children in select US and African contexts. Employing the material rhetorical approach and drawing on theories of posthumanism and debility, Hesford reads two films, Growing Up Coy and Getting Out in order examine the terms in which the LGBTQI children featured seek, respectively, social acceptance and political asylum. Describing her reading practice, she writes, “To read LGBTQI children’s human rights diffractively is to interrogate the biopolitical extraction of value from the bodies of LGBTQI children: to pull away from heteronormative and neoliberal calibrations of vulnerability, capacity, futurity; and to lean into relational vulnerabilities, capacities, and nonnormative futures.”16 The description captures well the goals of the book as a whole. Violent Exceptions will likely interest scholars from different fields in different ways. Those working within rhetorical studies specifically, and feminist, decolonial, disability, materialist, and posthuman theory more broadly, will find Hesford helpful in thinking through new approaches to understanding dynamic intersections of materiality, history, ideology, and representation. Those focusing specifically on children’s human rights will appreciate her close attention to the political divide between support for the CRC and its optional protocols as well as to the “diffractive” interpretations of her case studies.