Intersectional mobilities: acts of dissettlement

ABSTRACT This article narrates a mobility history spanning from 16th-century colonization to present-day policing practices to better understand acts of dissettlement. We identify major technological developments enabling new forms of mobility along with their material-semiotic figures that concomitantly shift race relations. Our approach extends inquiry into how rhetoric is performed through technological, material, and figurative acts of mobility and immobility. By focusing on how dissettlement is dominated by shifting race-based power relationships, we forward rhetoric’s commitment to sustain critical attention on race, not as an afterthought but as central to the work of all criticism. This history of mobility also contributes to theorizing dissettlement as a key concept for rhetorical studies. We identify four mobility tropes as acts of dissettlement, each drawn from extant scholarship on rhetoric and mobility: dis/ease, per/meability, b/ordering, and il/legality.