research

Decoloniality is an emergent interdisciplinary project to name and undo empirical, epistemological, and ontological structures of dehumanization and extraction instituted across 500 years of Western empire- building. This research project will result in a single-authored monograph that intervenes in decolonial scholarship by analyzing across settler souvenir postcal cards from San Antonio, Texas (1900-1917) the persuasive mechanics and "information wars" of coloniality/modernity---global monologics and rhetorics locally adapted and imposed to fulfill settlers' and colonizers' specific needs. Through archival research and visual rhetorical analysis of mass-produced tropes, erasures, and misinformation, this pan-historiographical study explores how real-photo souvenir postals not only evidence ongoing coloniality in San Antonio but are its persisting technology: a powerful, dispersed settler archive and racializing project designed to dispossess Indigenous communities, validate White settler assumptions, and realize local structures of domination, management, and control of Coahuilecan, Tejane, and Mexican communities.

This project illuminates the role of real-photo souvenir postcards within violent colonial legacies of placemaking in San Antonio, Texas and the role of San Antonio as a place made for/by U.S. empire at the turn of the 20th century. Because postcards and other mundane settler ephemera have largely been overlooked in their capacity to discursively constitute and promote local realizations of colonial/modern superstructures, my monograph will serve as a meaningful and necessary methodological intervention in settler colonial, decolonial, and rhetorical studies. Decolonial theorists hold empires' processes are practical, epistemological (Grosfugel), and ontological (Maldonado-Torres), borne around the globe via the eradication of worlds of other ways of being and their replacement with Eurocentric monologics of extraction and mass-sacrifice (Escober; Na'Puti; Wynter). While there are important distinctions between settler colonialism and coloniality, I contend in this work that recognizing their entanglements in mundane texts can help illuminate HOW coloniality and modernity have worked—the universalizing, ubiquitous mechanisms through which, across time and space, empire-making forces reproduce themselves.