ABSTRACT
The political turn in this chapter offers a critical lens for understanding how the perceptions of walls during the Trump presidency attempt to erase social struggles, while simultaneously alienating the possibilities for social transformation. I make the case that the rhetorical analysis of neoliberal “shock” politics opens students to exploring the utopian possibilities for political transformation and dissent, possibilities that reveal how the politics of walled divisions and separations have alienated collective action. Building on the study of the “free-market revolution” beginning with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, followed by the ideology of neoliberalism, and the assaulting concentration of wealth upward compounded by the Trump administration, I argue that students can use conscious-raising storytelling, such as counterstory, to dismantle the walls of individualism, greed, and free-market ideologies by uncovering how systemic shocks are narratives that never completely silence the voices of dissent in the democratic process. I end this chapter with a call for students to write speculative works in genres that strategize possibilities for transforming the future by studying rhetorics of shock in the past and present, bringing critical and creative studies of narrative to the fore.
