African American Rhetoric Research Articles

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

The African American Rhetoric of the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention and the Limits of Deliberative Rhetoric of Equality

The African American Rhetoric of the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention and the Limits of Deliberative Rhetoric of Equality

The Editor’s Drawers

Dear Readers:We’re very happy to release our special issue “Black Laughs Matter,” which we announced two years ago in active support of AHSA’s statement of solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter. We are fortunate to have Darryl Dickson-Carr as guest editor. His work on Black satire, especially from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary period, is well known to scholars working in the fields of humor and African American rhetoric, literature, and culture. Darryl’s introductory essay will stake out the ground of our special issue, while I am sure that the six fine articles of “Black Laughs Matter” will capture your interest.Our next special issue (9.2, fall 2023) will focus on participation and humor—instances of interaction between performers and audiences, opportunities to establish affinity, or catalysts of activism, to name a few. Our guest editors for the issue are Michael Moser and Nele Sawallisch, two distinguished American studies scholars from Germany. So keep your eye out for what we’re confident will be another in a string of successful special issues. And if you have a topic to propose for a special issue, let us know.This issue also includes the debut of a new feature that we’re calling Spit Takes. The inaugural piece for this feature is Mike Reiss’s “The Algebra of Jokes.” Reiss has had a long and successful career in comedy, especially television comedy, having been a writer and showrunner for The Simpsons. His quick take in “The Algebra of Jokes” is full of witty insights about a particular genre of joke that requires the audience to work through the joke’s unspoken logic, and we expect you’ll find these remarks illuminating and entertaining. Truth be told, it was Reiss’s submission of this piece that prompted us to come up with the feature as a way to include it in our pages. Now our further hope is that others with professional experience in the production of humor will follow Reiss’s lead. Of course, the primary focus of StAH is still humor scholarship, but we’re always on the lookout for ways to engage our readers. And we’re hoping that Spit Takes will be a different way to spur your interest.Finally, our next issue of Studies in American Humor will be stewarded by a new editorial team. My five-year term as editor is up, as is Jim Caron’s tenure as senior associate editor. Working with Jim and associate editor David Gillota; book review editor Sabrina Fuchs Abrams; contributing editors Joanne Gilbert, Gretchen Martin, Bruce Michelson, and Jonathan Rossing; guest editors Jim Caron, Darryl Dickson-Carr, Marianne Kongerslev, and Judith Yaross Lee (twice); all of the authors whose fine articles, book reviews, and On Second Thought comments have appeared in our pages; and our sharp-eyed PSUP copyeditor MJ Devaney has been a very fulfilling experience.The fact that it has gone so well comes as a bit of a surprise to me. After agreeing to come on board, I had my reservations about whether I was up to the task. But the collaborative spirit that has been part of the editorial practice since Judith Lee’s tenure as editor, if not earlier, made for a very smooth transition. And we aim to continue that effective process as a new editorial team comes on board. In the interest of continuity, David Gillota will take the reins as editor. Given his great work as associate editor and as book review editor prior to that, moving him into the editor’s chair was an easy and sound decision. David’s exceptional organizational mastery has kept everything humming over the last five years. And our two new associate editors, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams and Gretchen Martin, also have years of experience in other StAH roles, so we’re expecting a seamless transition from issue 8.2 to issue 9.1. Christopher Gilbert will come on board as book review editor; his name should be familiar to our readers, given the frequency with which his work has appeared in our pages. And Todd Thompson and Heidi Hanrahan, who are no doubt well known to the AHSA community, will come on board as members of our contributing editor teams on “The Year’s Work” features.Last, I would be remiss not to acknowledge you, our readers. All of our work on StAH is done with you in mind. It’s been my pleasure to have had this relationship with you in print.Yr Obdt Svt,—LH

Full Disclosure: Black Rhetoric, Writing Assessment, and Afrocentric Rubrics

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on writing assessment. Specifically, the author explores the embedded raced construction of writing assessment, rubrics, inter alia, commonly used in first year composition courses. The author posits that rubrics used to assess what Asao Inoue termed Habits of White Language cannot effectively assess and may be detrimental to assessing speakers from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically African Americans. The importance of Black Language (BL), rhetoric, and argumentation styles to rhetorical studies and American discourse must not only be recognized but also explored and taught as a style of argumentation. I implement an Afrocentric rubric using the principles of African American Rhetoric as a means for both expanding the rhetorical triangle and providing ethical assessment of BL in writing.

“Gems of Negro Eloquence”: Memorializing the African American Rhetoric of the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention

“Gems of Negro Eloquence”: Memorializing the African American Rhetoric of the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention

Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson

Review: <i>The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices</i>, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson

Reclaiming Malcolm X: Epideictic Discourse and African-American Rhetoric

ABSTRACT This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

My Sanctified Imagination: Carter G. Woodson and a Speculative (Rhetorical) History of African American Public Address, 1925–1960

AbstractIn 1925, Herbert Wichelns published The Literary Criticism of Oratory. By many accounts, the essay would become the founding document of the academic study of rhetoric and public address. However, in that same year, historian Carter G. Woodson published Negro Orators and Their Orations, which focused on the study of the African American oratorical tradition. In this essay, by way of speculative history and using my sanctified imagination, I wonder what an alternative or speculative history would look like if we can conceive Woodson as challenging the dominant (exclusively white) notions of public address and rhetorical praxis. By paying particular attention to Woodson’s introduction in Negro Orators and Their Orations, I submit that not only would we have been introduced to the richness and power of the African American public address tradition earlier but, more importantly, who we start to see as scholars and what we call scholarship would be different as well.I examine this by first, offering an examination of Woodson’s text, paying close attention to the introduction, where Woodson develops his theory of oratory. Second, I examine the African American rhetoric and public address scholarship between 1925 and 1960. Finally, I offer a speculative history of what could have been and what we can still do if we would include some of these voices and their scholarship in the public address canon.

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson

My Beloved Community

My Beloved Community

Haunt or Home? Ethos and African American Literature

The African American rhetorical tradition could be described as a shelter in an alien environment or as a way station on a long journey. A focus on ethos suggests that such a narrow approach to African American literature cannot do justice to these literary texts: how these writers employ images and symbols, craft and deploy examine identities, blend, criticize, and create traditions, explore contemporary issues, and create community. Because of cultural and racist narratives, African Americans could not simply use either the pre-Socratic or Aristotelian approaches to ethos in their fight for social justice. This essay demonstrates how a postclassical approach to ethos that draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and is focused on community-building and self-healing is central to the African American literature and rhetoric.

People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths to Rhythms: Hip-Hop’s Continuation of the Enduring Tradition of African and African American Rhetorical Forms and Tropes

Hip-hop is an African folk art birthed in America. Whether one simply observes the tonal language that puffs the breath of life into the lyric prose of rap music, the poly-rhythms of the ‘boom-bap’ rhythmic phrasings that became a fixture of New York rap music in the late 1980s, the winding syncopation from the pounding ‘808’ drums that are a staple of many Southern rap anthems, the routine manner in which rappers incorporate antiphony in live performances, or the improvisational nature of true free-styling, hip-hop is innately an African folk art within the American context. This article explores the dynamics of hip-hop’s continuation of centuries-old African and African American rhetorical forms and tropes.

The Impact of Pan-Africanist Political Rhetoric on African Public Policy: The Future of African-American Rhetoric

This short paper aims to discuss the effects of African-American rhetoric on the developments of African public policy. There is an historic relationship between the civil rights struggle in the United States and the struggle for independence on the continent that was greatly influenced by the political discourse that emerged in the US during the 1960’s. This examination or discussion will reflect an essay by Dr. Molefi Asante entitled, The Future of African-American Rhetoric and reference the developments in South Africa to mirror pan-Africanist ideology in an ever-converging world through globalization. As an advocate for a pan-Africanism movement, this paper seeks to simply open channels for further discourse.

Beyond the Subject: Anglo-American Slave Narratives in the Netherlands, 1789-2013

In recent years life writing scholars have increasingly linked the autobiographical genre to human rights causes, such as abolitionism. This article aims to historicize and contextualize the presupposed connection between human rights and the human subject of autobiographical discourse by focusing on the cultural mobility of Anglo-American slave narratives. Tracing their presence in the Netherlands since the late eighteenth century, it is demonstrated that slave narratives were considered of no value to Dutch abolitionism and Dutch debates on slavery and its legacy until very recently. Publishers and readers did, however make sense of slave narratives as sensational, gothic literature. Furthermore, the narratives were appropriated by Dutch fundamentalist Protestants advocating the nation’s emancipation from its state of spriritual “slavery”. Only when secularization converged with post-colonial migration patterns new interpretations stressing Black experience, agency, and subjectivity came to the fore in the Netherlands. Inspired by African-American rhetoric, Afro-Dutch migrants appropriated slave narratives in order to break the public silence on the Dutch history of slavery. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in June 2014 and published in April 2015.

Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

“To Furnish Specimens of Negro Eloquence”: William J. Simmons's Men of Mark as a Site of Late-Nineteenth-Century African American Rhetorical Education

This study features Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, William J. Simmons's 1887 collection of short biographies of 178 prominent African American men, as a significant, yet overlooked site of post-Reconstruction-era African American rhetorical education. Making good on his opening promise “to furnish specimens of Negro eloquence, that young men might find … handy for declamations and apt quotations”—including speeches, resolutions, narratives, editorials, epistles, poems, sermons, and petitions that serve as models of powerful rhetoric worthy of emulation—Simmons sets forth a practical, inclusive pedagogy of civic engagement based on exemplars for imitation and general guidance, rather than textbook principles, abstractions, or theories. He also provides additional texts and commentary to help readers understand the value of his subjects' rhetorical practice. Furthermore, Simmons constructs an approach to acquiring rhetorical power emphasizing activist, progressive, primarily secular discourse and constitutive race pride.

“I’m on a Stage”: Rhetorical History, Performance, and the Development of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum

This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

Review Essay: Writing Inside and Outside the Margins

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Digital griots: African American rhetoric in a multimedia age

Digital griots: African American rhetoric in a multimedia age