Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric

Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric

Hallsby, Atilla

Paperback

Series: New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality

General ReferenceGeneral Political ScienceGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0814259723
ISBN13: 9780814259726
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Feb 13 2026
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, Atilla Hallsby argues that secrets play a pivotal role in organizing political discourse in the United States. Hallsby takes up contemporary case studies-ranging from the Valerie Plame scandal during the George W. Bush presidency, to the use of Saul Alinsky's name as a partisan codeword for politicizing Obama's Blackness, to Chelsea Manning's public naming and outing-to show how dramatic revelations increasingly fail to produce meaningful change and instead reproduce entrenched racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

The core feature of these interlinked moments of crisis is the secret: a rhetorical patterning of political life organized by specific forms, each one lending a familiar shape to the shadows of American empire. These forms, theorized here as tropes, connect decades of secrets, linking the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror to the Trump-era reemergence of deep state conspiracy theories. As an extension of secrecy and surveillance studies, and with the aim of attaining a more accountable and just form of US governmentality, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie explains how still-unfolding political realities in the United States emerged, transformed, and regenerate.

Also in

General Reference

View All