Abstract
Eulogy is a key rhetorical tool for the public to come to terms with national tragedies. While eulogies can bring the nation together during times of hardship, they can also undermine political mobilization by placing excessive emphasis on national unity. This paper will analyze this political aspect of national eulogies by providing a close reading of two pivotal political figures in American politics. These figures are the President Barack Obama and the African-American political activist Dr. Martin Luther King. The paper argues that Obama’s eulogy is deeply depoliticizing as he shifts the focus from politics to theological reasoning. King’s eulogies, on the other hand, are more political as he underlines the theme of individual responsibility. Yet King’s discourse also loses its political salience when he taps into the theme of equalizing power of death. This analysis is important to understand the ambiguous nature of eulogies, which makes these speeches oscillate between being a conservative and transformative rhetorical tool in politics.
Highlights
On June 27, 2015, in the aftermath of the mass shootings in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in Charleston, President Obama gave his eulogy to commemorate and mourn for the death of Rev
Uludağ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi Uludağ University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Journal of Social Sciences eulogies take the representative form of making claims on behalf of different actors that constitute the nation, they posit the mourned as a haunting presence that will keep coming back in the future and keep calling us to political action
Obama and King are both partially able to accomplish this aspect of mourning, but they short-circuit it by relying on a liberal telos that sees moments of divisions, anger, and conflict as something to be domesticated as quickly as possible instead of treating them as productive phenomena that teaches the public to question its fundamental values. When they use this rhetorical form to call the nation to action in the name of challenging systemic racial violence and injustice, their eulogies become politically engaging
Summary
On June 27, 2015, in the aftermath of the mass shootings in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in Charleston, President Obama gave his eulogy to commemorate and mourn for the death of Rev. The eulogy was marked by that brief couple of seconds when the President sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and invited others in the church to join him to demonstrate the strength of America’s unity as a nation For those people who dug deeper into Obama’s speech, there was nothing accidental or surprising about his choice to end his speech with this hymn since he had organized the entire eulogy around the idea of grace. Obama should have treated this tragic event as a political resource to mobilize the people against an order that is informed by systemic racism It is along these lines that Obama’s reference in his eulogy to God’s mysterious agency underlines an important paradox in his speech, which will constitute the heart of this paper. The last section of the paper briefly develops an alternative politics of mourning and eulogy by tapping into Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the topic
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