Peculiar Rhetoric Research Articles

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

Review: <i>Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement</i>, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

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

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...

Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement; Richard Peter Anderson. Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa.

B<scp>jørn</scp> F. S<scp>tillion</scp> S<scp>outhard</scp>. <i>Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement</i>; R<scp>ichard</scp> P<scp>eter</scp> A<scp>nderson</scp>. <i>Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa</i>.

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Caídos por Dios y por España. El culto a la muerte en la fundación de la dictadura franquista.

Este artículo analiza como la legitimación del «nuevo Estado» en España se fundó sobre el mismo evento de la guerra desde el verano de 1936. La propagación de las representaciones de la guerra formó una cultura de guerra, constitutiva de la identidad colectiva en la «España nacional», opuesta a la anti-España. Como sucedió a través de la institucionalización del culto de la muerte, la transferencia de elementos dogmáticos, litúrgicos y rituales del cristianismo a la política fue esencial en la construcción de esa cultura de guerra.

L’immaginario tecnologico. Un’analisi sociologica della cosmologia contemporanea

From the point of view of the phenomenological sociology of knowledge, is really interesting to analyse relationship between collective imagery and the increasing growth of the technical universe: social existence in the Western world–in our time–is in fact embedded in the “myth of information” (Pecchinenda, 2009). This concept derives its cognitive and normative power from its peculiar genesis: the symbolic roots of this process lie in the moral mission of the early modern science, inspired– consciously or unconsciously–by the ethos of Judeo-Christian paradigm. The “myth of information” incorporates these ancient heritage in the flow of contemporary cosmology using the rhetoric of “transparency” (Breton, 1996): this peculiar rhetoric seems to announce daily the final unmasking of the mechanisms that rule the world.

Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism

Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 693 Heather Berg Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism In the late 1970s, Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot) coined the term “sex work” as a means to best describe the labor she and other workers in commercial sex industries performed. Leigh hoped the term would unite workers, provide an alternative to stigmatized language, and “acknowledg [e] the work we do rather than defin[e] us by our status.”1 Thirty years later, the term “sex work” is widely used, particularly in progressive scholarship, worker-directed activism, and worker narratives. In many respects, Leigh’s hopes seem to have been realized: groundbreaking anthologies and activist undertakings inclusive of workers in various sex industries have been organized under the umbrella of “sex work,” and the term remains the standard in value-neutral language. Indeed, its uses might be too value neutral—the work that emerges from much sex-worker activist writing is not the same work of anti-capitalist critique . Instead, it is the work of free exchange between equals, the dignity of a living earned, and a heady blend of both self-sacrifice and fulfilling escape from the drudgery of a nine-to-five job. It is sometimes work that is barely work at all, but instead a performance of the innate self for which the lucky just happen to be paid. 1. Carol Leigh, “Inventing Sex Work,” in Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (New York: Routledge, 1997), 203. winner of the 2013 Feminist Studies Graduate Student award 694 Heather Berg This work rhetoric offers a welcome reprieve from the anti-sex-work rhetoric in which sex workers appear as voiceless victims. It does so, however , while avoiding a sustained critique of systems of capitalist exploitation and by reproducing key facets of the peculiar rhetoric of work under late capital. Discourses of sex work, at least since white slavery’s first appearance in the public imagination, have served as a virtual repository for anxieties about sexuality and capitalism.2 We see this when, for example, anti-sex-work feminist Sheila Jeffreys condemns the contemporary pornography industry for its use of economic force in compelling performers to take hardcore scenes: “If they do not accept, then the money dries up and they are on the street once more.”3 Jeffreys’ suggestion —that tethering wages to the performance of the labor that employers demand is unique to the pornography industry—scapegoats one industry rather than engages in a critique of the problem (universal under capitalism) of what Marx called the “silent compulsion of economic relations.”4 But what emerges in much activist sex-worker writing is a counter to rhetoric like Jeffreys’ that insists that coercion (economic or otherwise) was not a factor in workers’ choices to enter commercial sexual exchange. This does very different—and more conservative—discursive work than a response reminding us that labor is coercion, but that coercion does not foreclose resilience, resistance, and pleasure. Mine is an argument, then, against sex-work exceptionalism. Commercial sex exchange is not exploitative because of anything unique to sex; it is exploitative because it is labor under capitalism.5 That sexual labor is for many a better paid, more fulfilling alternative to other forms of waged work does not unsettle this premise. Our critique of work under capitalism cannot be restricted to its most sensationally harmful forms. Such a frame invites one-dimensional narratives of Others’ 2. See Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (1999): 23–50. 3. Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (London: Routledge, 2009), 78. 4. See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics , and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 57. 5. See Brooke Meredith Beloso, “Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (2012): 47–70; and Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London and...

The International Criminal Court and Africa: Exemplary Justice

This is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the causal link (if any) between international criminal trials and preventing violence through exemplary prosecutions. Specifically how do representative trials of persons accused of having the greatest responsibility for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, supposedly bind recurrent violence? The argument pursued is that by using an accused as an example, a court engages in an indirect and uncertain substitution of personal rights for social harmony and order. These prosecutions combine a peculiar rhetoric, logic and aesthetic, all which substitute the responsibilities for a society in general to a particular individual in order to redeem that society by transferring its communal responsibility onto the individual punished as a form of atonement or expiation. International and domestic trials, as well as truth and reconciliation commissions, are part of a suite of options addressing communal mass violence that can work in tandem. However, because those convicted do not have a monopoly on criminality, nor do those merely reconciled have a monopoly on virtue, exemplification through punishment only targets a few on behalf of the many. Indeed such a redemptively sacrificial economy distinguishes legal justice from mere vengeance.

City Building and the Rhetoric of “Readability”: Architectural Debates in the New Berlin

Berlin represents an unusual case vis–à–vis the international architectural debate about rebuilding cities. The debate generally takes place between neotraditionalists on the one hand and various avant–gardists on the other. But in Berlin, the main representatives of the first camp are not, for once, members of the New Urbanism movement, nor are they neotraditionalists tout court; they are, at least on their own self–understanding, pioneers of a kind of ‘Third Way’ between the two extremes of neotraditionalism and avant–gardism. Nevertheless, a closer look at their rhetoric reveals deeper–lying affinities with the cultural conservatism characteristic of New Urbanism: the image of the city that they favor for Berlin is one of clarity, order, permanence, weightiness, etc.—a surprising image, given the city's troubled past. I examine the Architektenstreit (“Architects’ Debate”) that arose among planners, architects, critics, and others concerning the rebuilding of the central city in Berlin after reunification, and I discuss, in particular, the doctrine of critical reconstruction that has come to dominate this debate. I locate the origins of critical reconstruction's peculiar rhetoric in a longing for stability amidst the perceived flux of modernity. More generally, I argue (contra many commentators on the Architektenstreit) that a debate on the representations and images of the city is not merely a distraction from, but rather an essential element in, the politics of the city.In Berlin today the substitution of culture for politics is particularly manifest. One sometimes has the impression that architectural form is the most important form of political expression ( Lepenies, 2003 , p. 322).1

«Construire le monde de demain» : l'ethnographie provençale à l'exposition universelle de New York (1939)

«Building tomorrow's world» : the ethnography of Provence at the New York World's Fair (1939). This article reports on field work done in 1938 by Georges Henri Rivière and his team from the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, in Paris, at Barbentane-en-Provence, near Avignon. The work was designed to prepare a contribution to the World's Fair, in New York the following year. It high-lights the peculiar rhetoric of ethnologists at this time, divided between tradition and modernity. The description of the exhibition, the involvement of local players, relations with the press and even random events during the trip help us to understand the rationale underpinning an innovative project, both complex and multifunctional. From a historical point of view, it seems sufFiciently distant to serve as testimony to the gradual change from a largely backward-looking interest in folklore to a form of anthropology applied to local development, concerned about the future and active involvement in research.

Emily Dickinson and Schizotypy

Emily Dickinson probably suffered from schizotypal personality disorder. Not to be confused with schizophrenia, schizotypy suggests a pattern of social withdrawal, especially face-to-face interaction, and behaviors considered eccentric to cultural norms, such as unusual dress. Schizotypy also carries implications for her work. Chief among its characteristics is an unusual use of language. Dickinson's peculiar rhetoric is consistent with patterns particular to schizotypy. While such a diagnosis does not explain her genius and only bluntly acts to reinforce modern scholarship, it does act to coalesce many disparate parts of Dickinson's life and work into a conceptual whole.

Homesick: The Domestic Interiors of "Villette"

NONPERSONAL SOCIABILITY With romance and marriage relegated to the Polly Home subplot, Villette' s unattractive and acerbic heroine unhappily resigns herself to a solitary life – a life spent out of wedlock, a homeless life: But, afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life – no true home – nothing to be dearer to me than myself and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than I care to culture for myself only? Nothing at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of labouring and living for others? I suppose, Lucy Snowe, the orb of your life is not to be so rounded; for you the crescent phase must suffice. By threatening Lucy Snowe with spinsterhood, Villette displays here a peculiar rhetoric of renunciation. The moment records Lucy's decision to redirect her desires: instead of wishing for a “true home” of her own, she will wish for a school of her own; instead of wanting to establish herself in the institution of marriage, she will construct a surrogate establishment. Despite the passage's subtext of desire, Lucy's paean to home does not represent marriage as a pleasure, or as a means of emotional gratification or even as a personal or private relationship shared with one other person; on the contrary, Lucy presents the institution of marriage as a noble and ennobling space, a “rounded” place populated by anonymous “others” for whom she would have laboured and lived selflessly.

The Reinvention of New England, 1691-1770

AMONG the recent debates concerning the intellectual L history of the American Revolution, few have stimulated more controversy than the relationship between political ideology and religious thought. Most commentators agree that the peculiar rhetoric of the Revolutionary generation cannot be understood apart from the religious culture of eighteenthcentury America, but they have differed substantially on the timing and the manner in which sacred and secular modes of thinking converged. Alan Heimert, for example, argues that Edwardsean Calvinism provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical, even democratic, social and political ideology, and evangelical religion embodied, and inspired, a thrust toward American nationalism.' Nathan Hatch, on the other hand, locates the politicization of religious rhetoric in New England during the French and Indian War.2 Both Heimert