Rethinking elocution: The trope of the talking book and other figures of speech

Abstract

This essay reexamines the eighteenth and nineteenth century elocutionary movement from the perspective of those “others” against whom it erected its protocols of taste, civility, gentility. Elocution, “the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture,” is redefined as the performativity of whiteness naturalized. Moving from a history of ideas approach in which the major theorists and exemplary practitioners are overwhelmingly white and privileged, elocution is relocated within a wider socio‐historical context of racial tension and class struggle. Approaching elocution from below, from the angle of working‐class and enslaved people who were excluded from this bourgeois tradition, brings into sharp focus the complex performative cultural politics of this speech tradition.