’Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening’: narrative, fictionality and reflexivity in humanitarian rhetoric

Narratives that use experiments with paratexts, generic conventions and frames of understanding to challenge an audience’s ability to distinguish the fictionalised from the non-fictional have moved from postmodernist forms of literature and art into newer forms of so-called post-postmodernism and metamodernism. They have also, and this is the starting point for this article, moved into rhetorical discourse proper, aimed at moving real people about real issues. The article investigates such experiments as they appear in two cases of contemporary NGO campaign rhetoric: SavetheChildren’s ‘Most Shocking Second a Day Video’ (2014) and Unicef’s ‘Unfairy Tales’ (2016). The campaigns do not simply use fiction in their attempts to motivate – they challenge the ability to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by employing strategies of what the article calls metanoic reflexivity, defined as a reading effect, produced when combinations of textual and paratextual markers defamiliarise the act of ascribing a rhetorical master trope (fiction or non-fiction) to a cultural artefact. The article draws on a pragmatic, rhetorical conceptualization of imaginative thinking and on rhetorical theory about metanoia in order to engage critically with aspects of the discourse on posthumanitarianism.