Climate Politics on the Border

Kenneth Walker’s Climate Politics on the Border is a stunningly complex book. By probing the intense place-based relationship between extreme weather and those who endure it, he decodes the social and racial hierarchies that shape the human experience of a supercharged climate. In San Antonio, long racked by flash floods and slow violence, Walker has identified the perfect site to test the world to come.’
—Char Miller, author of Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream

‘This stirring book merges cultural studies with a de-colonialist conscience, Indigenous, Texan and Tejano historiography, alongside rigorous rhetorical analysis of contrasting local narratives of nature and heavy weather spanning the deep history of San Antonio, Texas. Through this original amalgam of sources and critical methodologies, Kenneth Walker reveals an epic of underlying stories about a place where myriad peoples imagined distinct versions of how the city was situated in the natural world. Just in the nick of time, it’s a strikingly groundbreaking work that urgently connects scholarship to an emerging Borderlands ecological activism for the 21st century.’
—John Phillip Santos, author of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

 

Climate Politics on the Border doesn’t just acknowledge that environmental justice and decoloniality are inextricably linked; it provides rich theoretical language for analyzing those links and robust practical insight for working from them. Read this book for the rhetorical history it illuminates and for the multispecies, intersectional, ecological future toward which it orients rhetorical studies.’
—Christa J. Olson, author of American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States

‘Dr. Walker is an innovative, masterful writer and Climate Politics on the Border reflects interdisciplinarity at its best. The book is meticulously researched, using one of the best articulations of decoloniality, and drawing from the theorists of the Global South as well as from rhetorical studies. Of significant importance is the fact that he also cites usually marginalized theorists of color throughout the manuscript. The book is analytically rigorous and makes an ambitious case for pluriversality.’
—Sonia Saldivar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature

 

In an age of climate emergency, we need to become more attuned to the pluriversal ways we connect and disconnect across disciplinary, methodological, cultural, ecological, and political boundaries. This book rethinks rhetorical science studies through identifying the reciprocal and inequitable relationships that constitute flooding impacts in San Antonio. Creative and provocative, Walker’s ambitious project goads us all to become more invested in troubling the borders that define and undo us.’
—Phaedra C. Pezzullo, coeditor of Green Communication and China: On Crisis, Care, and Global Futures

‘The topic of how local communities should respond to the growing challenge of extreme weather events has become increasingly salient with the accumulation of aggregated effects of global warming. This is especially so in southern Texas, an area which has recently experienced many such weather events. Walker reports here on his studies of local responses to dangerous weather events within the city of San Antonio. This urban community with its associated desert river system has suffered widespread, damaging, and reoccurring flooding both historically and in recent times. Walker finds that political responses to the city's disasters during the early colonial period were colored by a divisive micropolitics that allowed for unequal treatment of citizens based on race, and that these conditions continue to operate in the present. Meanwhile, the flooding in southern Texas is likely to increase in severity and intensity, and Walker argues that it is vital that local communities develop strategies that foster cooperation, resilience, and recovery. Highly recommended.’
—CHOICE