A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic: Validating Self and Violating the Space of Otherness

This essay explores a Black woman rhetorical critic's search to re-cover Black women's rhetorical traditions in America, which centers Black women's epistemology in a rhetoric of survival. A Black woman rhetorical critic locates self and violates the space of otherness through an African-American women's rhetorical tradition that endorses an ethic of care, dialogue for a meaning-making partnership, and a vision of unity in humanity. Hence, a Black feminist approach to rhetorical criticism celebrates the theoretical significance of the “ordinariness of everyday life” to reveal Black women's ways of crafting identities within an oppressive, socially-constructed reality.