Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...