Democracy as Fetish

Ralph Cintron

Published by Penn State University Press 2020

Democracy as Fetish

Ralph Cintron

Volume 13 in the series RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271085654

Overview
Contents

About this book

Democracy has long been fetishized. Consequently, how we speak about democracy and what we expect from democratic governance are at odds with practice. With unflinching resolve, this book probes the theory of democracy and how the left and right are fascinated by it.

In this innovative multidisciplinary study, Ralph Cintron provides sustained analysis of our political discourse. He shows not only how the rhetoric of democracy produces strong desires for social order, global wealth, and justice but also how these desires cannot be satisfied. Throughout his discussion, Cintron includes ethnographic research from fieldwork conducted over the course of twenty years in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, where he observes both citizens and the undocumented looking to democracy to fulfill their highest aspirations. Politicians hand out favors to the elite, developers strong-arm aldermen, and the disenfranchised have little redress. The problem, Cintron argues, is that the conditions required to put democracy into practice—territory, a bordered nation-state, citizens, property—are constituted by inequality and violence, because there is no inclusivity that does not also exclude.

Drawing on ethnography, economics, political theory, and rhetorical analysis, Cintron makes his case with tremendous analytic rigor. This challenge to reassess the discourses on democracy and to consider democratic politics as always compromised by oligarchy will be of particular interest to political and rhetorical theorists.

Author / Editor information

Cintron Ralph :

Ralph Cintron is Associate Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday and coeditor of Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action.

Reviews

“Democracy as Fetish is necessary reading for today. Cintron demonstrates democracy’s fetishization in contemporary theorizing and guides readers through a new framework with the radical potential to explain the political maelström we live in. Cintron wildly blends fieldwork, theory, and textual analysis, constructing what reads like lively dialogue between conversationalists who are excited and invested and who care. Democracy as Fetish will stick with you long after you finish the final pages. Its ideas will return to you in random moments, you will mention it in conversation, and you will recommend it many times over to colleagues and acquaintances.”
—Sara McKinnon, coeditor of Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
1 Putting a Text into Motion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Democracy Is . . . ? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
3 The Undocumented Among Us Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
4 Property and Its Entanglements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
5 Closings/Openings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 2
- Images: 2
- Other: 2 illustrations
Keywords: Undocumented; property rights; gentrification; democracy; oligarchy; ethnography; rhetoric; political theory

eBook

Published: December 10, 2019
ISBN: 9780271085654