Group members: Lea Roberts, Neha Harve

Ghabra’s way of reshaping her students’ assumptions and stereotypes of the oppression Palestinians faced was through a rhetorical strategy of teaching her students about it through photos, videos, lectures, and personal experiences. In this way, she managed to remove the rhetoric from the dominant perspective that these students have heard and studied so far, and was able to tell them the story as the ‘inferior’, or marginalized ‘other’. She was initially hesitant to talking to her students about it in fear of being under attack, and this further emphasized the barrier that can create a physical and emotional displacement. As she went further into her discussions with her students, she found that her strategy was breaking these walls as these students were learning a complete different side of the story they never knew. The same barriers are being broken as marginalized voices come out in the open and form coalitions between cultures that were always seen as far from being interconnected, whereas go through the same struggles. Ghabra and Calafell question this mainstream representation of marginalized communities or populations by revealing to the world their side of the story as opposed to allowing the dominant rhetoric reign.

The Queen’s rhetorical strategy was to convey a message of resistance and unification to her people. Queen Lili’uokalani’s strategy of using meles were a voice of resistance in the sense that these were specifically catered to native Hawaiians, and wouldn’t be understood by others. She wasn’t trying to teach anyone anything, rebel or overthrow the colonizer. Her message to the people was to reassure them as a moral figure they looked up to, that they would get their day of freedom. More than reshaping any norms or debunking any stereotypes, her strategy was about having a conversation with her people and giving them hope to stay strong and stay true to their Hawaiian identity.