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Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6.3 (2003) 588-590



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The Insolent Slave. By William E. Wiethoff. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; pp 223. $39.95.

Nearly a century ago in the Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois prophesied that the fundamental obstacle to realizing American social justice would be the "color line." Du Bois's characterization of this problem is personal—embodying his own blackness—and rhetorical—describing a dilemma provoked by the conjunction of speech and race in America. Souls is a poignant exploration of this multifarious problem; but it begins, ironically, with a revelation regarding the capacity for speech to conceal. To Du Bois, the color line does more than mark off racial geography, it muffles the voice, forcing "black folk" to mask real intentions or code switch. Although Souls demonstrates Du Bois's mastery of these games, his writing also reveals that he was deeply disturbed by them because he sensed that they took the place of more genuine dialogue about America's racial psychology. Du Bois dramatized the way that the "problem of the color line" also indexed a problem of communication between black and white folk about racial experience. In America, this problem of speech has a rich and complicated history dating back, in part, to when the African slave acquired English.

In Insolent Slave, William E. Wiethoff frames the acquisition of slave speech as a profound problem for Southern gentry as well as for an antebellum social order built on mastery and control. Wiethoff focuses on how plantation owners and their associates interpreted and responded to a particular kind of speech act—insolence. Insolent Slave provides a fascinating insight into how black speech constituted a fundamental challenge to assumptions regarding racial superiority (and inferiority) and Providence, illustrating the diverse means that planters employed to rationalize, legalize, and justify the regulation and suppression of slave speech. In so doing, Wiethoff locates African American discursive practices like masking or code switching within a master-slave social relation fraught with contradictions and double binds. Wiethoff offers a four-part analysis—the legislative perspective, the business perspective, the social perspective, and the moral perspective. Each section of the book displays a case study drawn from a wealth of primary and secondary documents like diaries, court proceedings, advertisements, newspaper stories, biographies, and correspondences.

The principal strengths of Insolent Slave arise from how Wiethoff details the complicated manner in which the African presence in America fostered severe [End Page 588] philosophical, rhetorical, and material crises for the gentry. Wiethoff provides extensive examples and a discussion regarding the phenomenal challenge to white supremacy offered by slave insolence, and gives the reader sophisticated interpretations of, for instance, legislative practices that were paradoxical, exhibiting an oftentimes tortured logic. Wiethoff does not merely review the law sanctioning insolence and its "remedies"; his hermeneutic practice reveals to the reader how legislative acts against slave speech contain a confession of white fear; rather than express hubris or certainty of mastery, the attempts to legislate insolence speak of white doubt and vulnerability.

Within the social perspective on slavery and the perception of insolence, Wiethoff's work takes on a special sheen as his case study focuses on Francis Anne Kemble, a "reluctant" plantation mistress. According to Wiethoff, Kemble's qualms about her power over a sizeable slave population stem from her recognition of the humanity of her slaves as evidenced in their speech. Indeed, in her journals about her experiences, "Kemble emphasized the suffering of old female slaves by recounting their own words" (122). An utterly remarkable document, Kemble's writings pose serious challenges to rhetorical studies as they illuminate the double bind faced by women of her social class. Deprived of formal means of voicing her concerns and sentiments, Kemble's journal entries showcase the predicament that plantation mistresses faced as they were expected to preside over the manor as exemplars of the cult of womanhood and yet help police slave insubordination: "Kemble could not escape her base perception of slaves as so dirty and stupid as to be little better than animals. And yet slaves...

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