Silence, Intimacy, and the Other: Rhetorical Storytelling in Asian and Asian/American Feminist Writings
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Nadarajah, Madhura
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My dissertation, Silence, Intimacy, and the Other: Rhetorical Storytelling in Asian and Asian/American Feminist Writings investigates how Asian and Asian/American women have used storytelling as a form of discursive transgression. I argue that rhetorical studies tend to understand speech acts as something only accessible to those who are formally represented, which implies that those who are informally represented cannot speak. Reading through Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, and Sharika Thiranagama’s In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka, I argue that the discipline’s traditional approach to analyzing speech acts has failed to consider how informally represented communities have always been speaking in silent and intimate ways that are not always legible. Drawing from cultural rhetorics and women of color feminisms, my dissertation traces how Asian and Asian/American feminists have used different forms of storytelling, a speech act in itself, as a means of revising the racial and gendered subjectivities placed on them.
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Keywords
Asian American, Cultural Rhetorics, Postcolonial, Rhetorical Storytelling, Sri Lanka, Tamil Genocide