Mari Lee Mifsud

6 articles
University of Richmond
  1. Thinking in and through Comparative Rhetoric and Decolonial Studies
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2025.2473909
  2. The Resonance of Resonance
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article explores a state of movement in the humanities into nonhuman entanglements. A key term, “resonance,” emerges in this movement. Predominating scholarship orients resonance as a flourishing. In this article, accounts of the destructiveness of mechanical resonance signal a telling lacuna in humanities scholarship, one this article works to remove.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.57.1.0081
  3. What Cannot Be Said? “Equity Achieved”
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot say, “Equity achieved.”

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.55.1.0071
  4. Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric
    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0398
  5. Figuring rhetoric: From antistrophe to apostrophe through catastrophe
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay explores rhetoric tropologically through various strophes: antistrophe, catastrophe, and apostrophe. Our purpose is to delineate problems and possibilities that these tropes pose for rhetoric in an effort to create new rhetorics. We seek to display the antistrophic and catastrophic figurations of rhetoric and then use visual lenses of photography and cinema to disrupt the figurations. Following the disruption, we seek to heighten sensibilities to other figurations, in particular an apostrophic figuration. We cast apostrophe as a figure for change because it marks a deeply felt turn toward difference and otherness. Turned as such, rhetoric becomes erotic.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391239
  6. Wedge and bridge: A note on rhetoric as distinction and as identification
    doi:10.1080/02773949909391145