Am I heard? Am I listened to? Am I understood? An essay about bringing Indonesia to the discipline

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I explore the concept of radical rhetoric by writing about my own personal experience as an Indonesian woman studying in the United States. In this piece, I examine the liminality of my identities, the contradictory expectations and difficulties of navigating myself in this discipline of rhetorical studies, and my ongoing effort to bridge my academic journey with my true self through three sequential questions: Am I heard? Am I listened to? Am I understood? Gloria Anzaldúa said that being a bridge requires embracing fluidity, uncertainty, and risk. As such, this essay reflects on my journey as a radical intervention to transcend ourselves into bridges—constantly connecting other spaces, other realities, and other alternatives despite difficulties and constant challenges. Being a bridge is to tell ourselves that people have other ways of intervention that we, a part of western academia, may not have the language for. Being a bridge is to never stop interrogating the system but at the same time keep trying to recognize the existing small insurgencies and overlooked acts of agency. Being a bridge is to believe (and make sure) that there is always a place for everyone in this discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• decolonial feminism
• Indonesia
• bridge work
• Gloria Anzaldúa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.

2 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Duke University Press, 2009).

3 Portugal, The Netherlands, France, Britain, Japan.

4 Gene Demby and Shareen Marisol Meraji, “Codeswitch,” Sometimes Explain, Always Complain, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/23/782331005/sometimes-explain-always-complain (accessed February 29, 2024).

5 Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83.

6 Isma Eriyanti, “Alone but Not Lonely,” in Critical Autoethnography and Intercultural Learning: Emerging Voices, ed. Phiona Stanley (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 45.

7 Devika Chawla, “Race, Language, and Transculturalism: I Have English,” in The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication, ed. B.M. Calafell and S. Eguchi, Routledge Handbooks in Communication Studies (London: Taylor & Francis, 2023), 380.

8 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark=Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

9 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1973), 48.

10 Catherine S. Ramírez, Assimilation: An Alternative History, American Crossroads (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2020), 12.

11 Anzaldúa and Keating, This Bridge We Call Home.

12 Intan Paramaditha, “Radicalising ‘Learning from Other Resisters’ in Decolonial Feminism,” Feminist Review 131, no. 1 (2022): 33–49.

13 Paramaditha, “Radicalising ‘Learning from Other Resisters,’” 33.

14 https://www.pemikiranperempuan.org/about-spp.

15 https://qbukatabu.org/.

16 https://www.mosintuwu.com/.

17 Paramaditha, “Radicalising ‘Learning from Other Resisters,’” 46.