English Ph.D. Dissertations

Title

Towards A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Caribbean Rhetoric: African Guyanese Women from the Village of Buxton Transforming Oral History

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

English/Rhetoric and Writing

First Advisor

Andrea Riley-Mukavetz (Advisor)

Second Advisor

Sue Carter Wood (Committee Member)

Third Advisor

Lee Nickoson (Committee Member)

Fourth Advisor

Alberto Gonzalez (Committee Member)

Abstract

In my project, "Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Caribbean Rhetoric: African Guyanese Women from the Village of Buxton Transforming Oral History," I build a Cultural Rhetorics approach by listening to the stories of a group of African Guyanese women from the village of Buxton (Buxtonians). I obtained these stories from engaging in a long-term oral history research project where I understand my participants to be invested in telling their stories to teach the current and future generations of Buxtonians. I build this approach by using a collaborative and communal methodology of asking Wah De Story Seh? This methodology provides a framework for understanding the women's strategies in history-making as distinctively Caribbean rhetoric. It is crucial for my project to mark these women's strategies as Caribbean rhetoric because they negotiate their oral histories and identities by consciously and unconsciously connecting to an African ancestral heritage of formerly enslaved Africans in Guyana. In my project, I enact story as methodology to understand how the rhetorical strategies of the Buxtonian women make oral histories and by so doing, I examine the relationship between rhetoric, knowledge, and power.

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