The purloined speech: Race and illegitimacy in the Obama school speech controversy

Abstract

In this article, we examine the controversy over and partial ban of Barack Obama's 2009 school speech. Drawing on Lacan's analysis of Poe's Purloined Letter, we argue that the speech was purloined in the way the letter was in Poe's story; that is, its course was prolonged. Further, the banning of the speech had less to do with the speech's content than it did with the role of the speech as a pure signifier – a structuring moment around which political subjectivities were staked out. These subjectivities, we argue, draw on the symbolic universe that Spillers refers to as the “American Grammar”, which never directly references race while being fully constituted by racial difference. The American Grammar constructs a historically and spatially contingent subject of a white, male political leader as a universal paternal authority figure whose legitimacy is based on protecting the “innocent” and the “intimate (home)” from external threat. In efforts to ban Obama's school speech and protect the nation's “innocent school children”, two specific elisions were made: 1) Obama was constructed in terms of what we, following Morrison, term an Africanist presence and made external to the nation to which he was then labeled as a threat, and 2) the space of the school was constructed as private and apolitical precluding Obama's access.