Figuring Reconciliation: Dancing With the Enemy

• Main Authors: Jane S. Sutton, Nkanyiso Mpofu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2007-02-01
• Series: Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
• Online Access: https://wyaj.uwindsor.ca/index.php/wyaj/article/view/4616

This essay is about figuring “argument as dance” and one way of conceiving how to live or embody argument as such. Concretely, it displays “argument as war” alongside a road in Mississippi after a white man shoots down James Meredith as he asserts his legal right to vote. And it tells “how to” perceive the shooting as dance by turning firstly to the performance of dance figured in the beginnings of rhetoric and then secondly, setting forth demystified methods and strategies of body-speech figuring argument as dance, rather than as war, through performances of Nelson Mandela. More generally, it explores a new meaning or experience of rhetoric by explicitly conjoining two historical times, two geographies, two speakers, enemies and dancers, that are inextricably interconnected. Using a combination of description and analysis, the first is a full display of three photographs picturing argument as war. The whole picture serves as a descriptive compass or guide for making our way analytically through argument as war and into dance language and behavior and their interconnections to argument. The second is a retrospective discussion of the background, dancing/argumentative practices, what is called “blinking on the behalf of the enemy,” of Nelson Mandela. Overall, the strategy of reticulating political times, chronology and political spaces, geography on the one hand, and argument as war and argument as dance on the other hand is to reconcile conflicting measures and to produce a performance practice (of rhetoric) of which there is no canon.