Dr. Darrel Enck-Wanzer's Website

For me, research comes from an intensely personal place and broadens out from there. When my mother came to the United States from Puerto Rico, she arrived with a faith that, in “America,” anything is possible. She came here, as many Puerto Ricans have, seeking the “American Dream” in the land of milk and honey. After some time, however, my family learned that the milk frequently goes sour and all that’s left of the honey is a sticky residue that Puerto Ricans are too often expected to clean up. I begin with this brief anecdote because it speaks to what motivates my research and teaching: it is not wholly bitterness toward a system of inequity; and it is especially not the continuation of my family’s former blind faith in an American Dream. Rather, I am motivated by a tempered hope that even (perhaps, especially) within a political field marked by structural and attitudinal inequities, a democratic political consciousness and the lived experience of equal opportunity is possible.

With these motivations in mind, my research interests reflect a commitment to the potential for democratic praxis. One of the hallmarks of the United States of America’s liberal democratic political tradition is the centrality given to “protest,” “dissent,” and “resistance.” We are, after all, a nation founded on a moment of revolution that set a discursive frame for future acts of dissent and resistance. Throughout the U.S.’s history as a nation-state, then, the dissenting spirit has occupied a central place in its political imaginary, reemerging on occasion in specific acts of protest against perceived social ills. In one way or another, however, liberal democratic theory has (re)produced a set of constraints and resources on political practice. In light of the discursive limitations of contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice, we are confronted with the question, how do we enact radical democratic resistance within such a frame?

Furthermore, my research addresses questions about the relationships between race, democratic possibilities, and rhetoric in the U.S. I am deeply interested in the way that theories of race and problematics of difference can and do inform our conceptualizations of democracy. Where some scholars ask the question, What is democracy? I prefer the different question, What can democracy become? Framing the question differently, I align myself with democratic theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Furthermore, I seek to engage what I see as a paradoxical relationship between race and democracy – a relationship that gets worked out in the various forms of rhetoric circulating in our public culture(s).

Currently, I am addressing these themes through an extended project on the New York Young Lords. The Young Lords were a revolutionary nationalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist street political organization who advanced a thirteen-point political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the Island and in the U.S.), the broader liberation of all “Third World people,” equality for women, U.S. demilitarization, leftist political education, socialist redistribution, community control, and other programs as they fit into their platform. I treat the Young Lords as a critical and representative example of a late- or post-modern social movement that relies on the tactical deployment of a rhetoric that incorporated verbal, visual, and embodied discourses. What makes the Young Lords particularly interesting is the way in which they advanced their agenda through a political style that operated functionally at the intersections of competing socio-rhetorical traditions and through various discourses including speech, poetry, images, and embodied performance. This research program is focused on the ways in which the Young Lords crafted a radical democratic rhetoric attentive to alleviating oppressions located at the intersections of race, gender, and class.

Research for my current project has been a welcomed challenge because of the lack of scholarly literature on U.S. Puerto Rican political discourse generally and the Young Lords in particular. As such, research on the Young Lords has required numerous trips to New York City to conduct archival research at El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (located at CUNY-Hunter College) and interviews with former Young Lords. In working closely with El Centro and assembling my own archive of materials on the Young Lords and Puerto Rican radicalism, my research is guided by a concern for faithfully producing a rhetorical history of the Lords that resists romanticization. Methodologically, my research has presented different challenges for a rhetorical critic – namely that it has required me to see how various forms of dissent intersect to articulate something qualitatively different than is typically examined in the scholarly literature on the rhetoric of social movement and dissent. Additionally, this research has uncovered links between the Young Lords and radical Blacks rather than Chicanos, which has complicated popular perceptions of pan-Latino similitude.

Such linkages between Latinos and African Americans led me to an exciting project engaging linkages between the Young Lords and Black Panthers, hosted by the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at UNC-Chapel Hill. As a Lead Advisor for this project, I was involved in the planning, preparation, and production of an exhibit that will first be displayed at the Stone Center’s Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum from January to March 2007. It has traveled to other universities, museums, and community centers around the country (including the university of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and DePaul University) and will continue to do so. It is projects like this – with both scholarly and public agendas – that I look forward to continue developing in the years to come.

In addition to my commitment to so-called popular public scholarship, I also am seeking actively more traditional scholarly outlets for my research. In May 2006, an article titled “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive” was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. That article was derived from a chapter of my dissertation. Additionally, I have an anthology on the Young Lords forthcoming through New York University Press, which is titled The Young Lords: A Reader. I have another article in press in Rhetoric and Public Affairs and am hard at work on additional articles (several of which are already under review) and a scholarly book on the Young Lords and radical democracy.

In addition to research on the Young Lords, I have gained considerable interdisciplinary exposure and perspective that I believe fits well with collaborative trends in higher education today. My work as a graduate student at Indiana University prepared me to teach a range of courses on the relationships between discourse, ideology, and public culture, focusing on the intersections between rhetorical praxis, mass mediation, and the performance of socio-political identity. My minor in political science gave me a background in both classical and contemporary political theory that has prepared me to study competing approaches to both “democracy” and “liberalism.” Further research in Latina/o studies and social theory has enriched my understanding of the antagonism inherent to identity/difference and the multifaceted ways in which gendered, raced, and classed identities get continuously reworked in U.S. popular/political culture. Finally, I have a working background in fieldwork and critical ethnography having conducted participant interviews for my Young Lords project and fieldwork for a current side-project on Puerto Rican cultural/national production in East Harlem, which examines the uses of gardens, casitas, murals, and flags in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood of New York.

Once I complete my long-term Young Lords project in the next couple of years, I will transition to a new project on race and discourse in U.S. public culture. This broad project seeks to bring critical perspectives on situated discourses and my background in critical Latina/o studies to bear on the broader question of the relationship between race and democracy. Pushing beyond a bipolar (black/white) concept of race, this project will interrogate contemporary examples (immigration, Puerto Rico’s status, Barack Obama, and more) to (a) re-theorize race in terms of discursive formation and (b) argue for the importance and centrality of race in contemporary democratic politics. In all, I am committed to continue advancing research on the intersections of race, rhetoric, and democracy and the problems of identity, representation, and agency.