Tommie L. McPhetridge

1 article
Miami University

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  1. Review of Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters
    Abstract

    At a time in history when we are faced with an authoritarian, misogynist, racist, imperial regime that has actively dismantled higher education in the USA, what does it mean to stand as an academic witness against the consolidation of white supremacy, of imperial regimes, of the normalization of gender, race, caste and class violence, of religious fundamentalisms and climate disasters, economic dispossession and the carceral state within and beyond the walls of the academy?In this special issue devoted to Transnational Feminist Rhetorical Studies, contributors mobilize critical race theory and transnational feminism to bear witness to the deeply violent, neoliberal, eurocentric narratives of the US academy that objectify, erase, and colonize minoritized international communities from the Global South.Using feminist autoethnography and counter-storytelling, these courageous authors develop complex, theoretically provocative analyses of a variety of rhetorical landscapes in the academy mapping the academic journey of a queer South Asian educator (Saurabh Anand); speculative linking and corporeal rhetorics--the body as the site, producer and consumer of labor in transnational feminist rhetorics (Florianne Jimenez); transnational counterstories and autoethnographies of Bangladeshi women (Abantika Dhar and Ridita Mizan); challenging female fragility and objectification of hegemonic narratives of refugees using counter-storytelling by Syrian Muslim women refugees to develop genealogies of agency and resistance (Nabila Hijazi); and finally, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik and Bernadita Yunis Varas' compelling autoethnographic, theoretically and historically grounded analysis of Palestinian feminist survivance rhetorics bearing witness to the profound impact of the occupation, colonization and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.In speaking back to racist, colonial, objectified hegemonic knowledges normalized by the US academy these young scholars illustrate the profound significance of bearing witness to injustice, just as James Baldwin and many others stood witness to racism and white supremacy.

    doi:10.37514/pei-j.2025.27.3.10