Kaitlyn Patia - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Reviews by Kaitlyn Patia

The Comparatist, 2023

Sex. Democracy. Life in common. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant attends t... more Sex. Democracy. Life in common. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant attends to these and other of “life’s good hard things” (170). We want these things, or want to want them, or have some sense that we should want them. But they are difficult. Messy. Things go to pieces in unexpected ways (or in entirely predictable ones). Previous works by Berlant, such as Cruel Optimism (2011), explored how peoples’ relationships with the objects of their desire can work to frustrate the realization of that desire. With this newest book, Berlant proposes that we are drawn to inconvenient objects. They describe this as “an inconvenience drive— a drive to keep taking in and living with objects” that both vex and attract us (6). But, for Berlant, this is not a bad thing, at least not always or entirely. And, well, even if it was a bad thing, inconvenience is inevitable, “evidence that no one was ever sovereign,” so what might we (un)learn from attending to our mixed feelings about inconvenience (3)?

Review of Robert E. Terrill, Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015). Reviewed in The Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 426-431.

The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2017

Robert E. Terrill’s timely and ambitious new book, Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barac... more Robert E. Terrill’s timely and ambitious new book, Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship, asks readers to grapple with issues that are fundamental to the study of rhetoric and to our everyday civic practices; indeed, Terrill makes the case that the work of the scholar of public address and the work of the practitioner of civic public address share some important commonalities. With the introduction of what he terms “inventional criticism,” Terrill’s book prompts rhetoricians to reconsider the relationship between purpose and method in scholarship. “Democratic double-consciousness,” Terrill’s central analytic framework, engages the urgent question of how to participate in the civic life of a nation historically and presently marked by racism, without ignoring or seeking to minimize difference. This, then, is not strictly a book about Obama, as Terrill takes care to delineate; rather, this is much more broadly a book about how to live and speak democratically in a place and time where the word “democracy” can seem meaningless.

The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2016

The University of Alabama Press, 2014, xv + 229 pp., $49.95 (cloth).

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2011

Articles and Book Chapters by Kaitlyn Patia

Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 2023

This article analyzes the role that travel and labor played in the coalitional activism of the Th... more This article analyzes the role that travel and labor played in the coalitional activism of the Third World Women's Alliance, a pathbreaking organization formed by women of color in 1970 and active through 1980. In it, I attend to the alliance's feminist movements, how its members' activism and commitments were lived, performed, and embodied. Specifically, I focus on its members' travel to California to work with the United Farm Workers and to Cuba to work with the Venceremos Brigade. I explore the rhetorical capacity of movement and bodies in motion to transform feminist activism. This capacity-which I term rhetorical fluidity-names the always-ongoing processes of transforming what is possible that accompany that which moves. Understanding rhetorical fluidity and tracing its contours can demonstrate how activists and social movements can harness this latent power as a potential site of energy to sustain long-term struggles against oppression.