Good Neighbors: Covenantal Rhetoric, Moral Aesthetics, and the Resurfacing of Identity Politics

This article calls attention to a turn in popular political discourse to covenants, a form of social pact that promises unity in place of divisive identity politics. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's account of covenantal rhetoric, the author analyzes residential covenants, the restrictions that govern suburban neighborhoods, finding them to impose an authoritarian moral structure that enforces aesthetic practices to compensate for an absence of communal identity. By foregrounding acts and scenes and sidestepping the nature of the agents bound by the covenants as well as the agency they may exercise, covenants gain distance from their historical role as tools of racial and ethnic exclusion and embrace a communitarian and "colorblind'' rhetoric that reinscribes White affluent privilege. Overall, this study of covenants reveals that they mandate an aesthetic unity that disavows the divergent histories and different social statuses of diverse resident identities. However, the moral structure of these texts contain the inherent possibility that agents may disobey them in ways that allow repressed issues of identity to resurface in conflicts between residents. Since covenants provide only a brief detour around the animosity of identity politics, the author concludes that they should be abandoned for a discourse more suited to directly addressing the larger social economies of privilege that disparately position members of a community.