To be published by The Ohio State University Press in February 2026
Pre-orders available at the link below. This book will also be released as an open-access title. If you are interested in a desk copy once it becomes available, please reach out! I am happy to respond to requests given availability/demand. Stay tuned and I hope you check it out!
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216057.html
Book Jacket Description
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.
Reception
“Much work on the secret skirts over its rhetorical form and associated tropes, but Hallsby has written a rigorous, capacious, and highly engaging account that situates the secret historically and culturally. Essential reading for those interested in the politics and aesthetics of secrecy.” —Clare Birchall, author of Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America
“Presented from a psychoanalytic perspective that refuses to collapse into binaries of suspicion and faith, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie is both reassuring for its ability to ‘name’ contemporary rhetorical dynamics and sobering because, as Freud once put it, we are not masters of our own house.” —Joshua Gunn, author of Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering
“Smart, playful, and theoretically sophisticated, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie introduces us to the hard truths of secrecy in American politics. A one-of-a-kind book.” —Joshua Reeves, coauthor of The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital
“Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie generatively brings rhetorical studies into conversation with surveillance studies to offer important expansions and correctives to the study of secrecy. Drawing on a rich historical archive that includes figures like Alan Turing, Saul D. Alinsky, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Chelsea Manning, Hallsby powerfully illustrates how secrets are not just in but of discourse. In so doing, he importantly foregrounds the secret’s material impacts and entanglements with racial, sexual, colonial, and gendered violences.” —Mia Fischer, author of Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State
“This analytically sophisticated book offers a captivating exploration of the often-destructive role of political secrets in society. Whether found in conspiracy theories, national security leaks, or fabrications supporting war, Atilla Hallsby shows how secrets powerfully shape collective knowledge and legitimize forms of violence.” —Torin Monahan, author of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance
Atilla Hallsby 