Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The perceived marginal place of African black women in business and its supply chain is consistently matched by an unfortunate but generally accepted corporate disclosure appreciation for visual rhetoric that inflicts slow violence. As rhetorical figures, African black women are invoked in annual sustainability reports to lead and anchor corporate narratives of responsibility and accountability on environmental, social, and governance-related issues. These narratives are produced, it is said, to provide and generate insights for “key stakeholders” to illustrate the organisation’s “sustainability”. However, rather than earnestly respond or fully account for conduct or impact, this study argues that organisations use the trope of the African black woman who is happy despite her hardship as part of its rhetorical cannon to mute and exploit her as a passive object for argumentative purposes, rather than an active agent who holds a stake in the organisation.Leveraging Barthes (1957), Spivak (1989), Nixon (2011) and Qgola’s (2021) perspectives on the workings of power, ideology, and violence of discourse in sustaining hierarchically racial and gendered social orders, together with Greenwood, Jack and Hayden’s (2018) proposed methodology for rhetorical analysis; the paper examines how corporate disclosure practitioners leverage visual rhetoric to reproduce slow violence. The study conducts this examination by focussing on the sustainibility reports of five leading global tea and coffee brands in the years 2020 and 2021. The central question is: how does the annual invocation of the African black women as a rhetorical figure reproduce slow violence?