Dialogic Rhetoric in Letters Across the Divide : A Dance of (Good) Faith toward Racial Reconciliation

Abstract

The book Letters Across the Divide: Two Friends Explore Racism, Friendship, and Faith embodies a dialogic rhetoric with significant potential to influence its intended audience to accept the need for racial atonement and reconciliation. It exemplifies what Aaron Gresson calls a "dance of agency" in both its interpersonal exchanges and constructed relationship with readers. Bringing white and black voices, individual and collective concerns, and (inter)personal and public discourse into dialogue, Letters demonstrates the transformative power of "voice," which mediates the "authenticity" of Buberian dialogic rhetoric and the cultural performances of Bakhtinian dialogism. The fact that the white coauthor boldly affirms commonplaces of white resistance increases the likelihood that white readers would identify with and be influenced by his profound attitudinal change in dialogue with his black friend. The coherence and credibility of that transformation depend upon the prefigural power of the authors' shared religious narrative—both enabling and constraining Letters' influence on public racial reconciliation.