The grammar and rhetoric of African subjectivity: ethics, image, and language

ABSTRACT This article advances existing studies on ethics, image, and language in rhetoric by offering three key interventions. First, ethics, a reasonable rhetorical practice that enables informed decisions, does not respond to colonial ethics that constructs West Africans as nonhumans, hence the need for an onto-logical ethics that affirms West Africans as reasonably human. Second, decoloniality offers an alternative visual rhetorical model to the common visual perception of Africa that blurs Africans and their essences, a gap that often denies Africans their subject positions, and that almost always gets theorized away in visual rhetoric and communication studies. Third, colonial language—however Africans claim to own it for their rhetorical and creative purposes—almost always expands and advances its linguistic imprint and empiric presence on the users of the language in Africa.