There Is No Making It Out: Stories-So-Far and the Possibilities of New Stories

Through classroom ethnography, student interviews, analyses of settler archives, and personal reflection, There Is No Making It Out addresses the legacies of settler colonialism and settler rhetorics and their continued impact on how (subaltern) peoples see the world, walk through it, and interact with others. Romeo García argues that concepts of decoloniality prompt crucial counter-rhetorics and writing that are necessary but perhaps ultimately unattainable. In the demand for something else, and at the intersection between a praxical theorizing and theory-building actioning, There Is No Making It Out works to de-link and reclaim an archival approach as a critical method and also reclaim a theory of archival impressions as a theoretical apparatus deeply attuned both to tilling the ground on which power takes root and to a full spectrum of Matter (living, nonliving, nonhuman). García offers no definitive resolutions but, situated between two rhetorical standpoints-stories-so-far and the possibilities of new stories-There Is No Making It Out channels a hope and struggle for wor(l)ding otherwise.

Romeo García is assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. He is coeditor of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, Unsettling Archival Research, and Pluriversal Literacies, and his interdisciplinary research appears in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Across the Disciplines, and Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.