Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship by Robert E. Terrill (review)

Robert Terrill confesses: "I did not set out to write a book about Barack Obama" (xii). But for Kathleen McConnell, who urged Terrill to read the transcript of Obama's March 23, 2008 "Race Speech," Terrill, one of our best rhetorical critics, would have turned elsewhere to develop his research program on inventional criticism and democratic double-consciousness. Terrill owes a deep debt to McConnell, as he followed her advice, read the transcript, and then wrote Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship. The book received the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for outstanding published scholarship in public address. I urge scholars of rhetoric and race to buy this book and to insist that their libraries do so as well.

The touchstones of Terrill's research program are rhetoric and democracy, with a focus on the rhetorical canon of invention. Avoiding that wretched cliché "thinking outside the box," Terrill locates the source of invention in the attempt made by citizens "to invent ways to address one another" (xii). Rhetorical pessimists, yielding to what appears to be a polarized citizenry, believe modern audiences are beyond the pale of persuasion and attitude change. Indeed, on issues of race, James Golden and Richard Reike were tempted to conclude that solutions were outside the realm of rhetoric. Terrill resists the temptations of rhetorical pessimism and discovers in his study of Obama's rhetoric a democratic double-consciousness that slips the bonds of polarization.

Obama's race speech, Terrill argues, is an exemplar of democratic double-consciousness. This exemplar represents rhetorical invention at its best—discourse "that is at once both novel and familiar" (9). Rhetorical invention, properly enacted, should lead to a "dialogic engagement that opens the rhetor to the influence and perspective of the other" (9). Here, Terrill has discovered a key to civility, attitude change, and democratic pluralism—rhetorical practices that enact a double-consciousness. Rhetorical invention, as Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca have written, calls for the proper imagination of the audience. Obama, in his "Race Speech," accurately imagines the different worlds of blacks and the white working class, without conflating them or equating the sources of their suffering.

To his credit, Terrill builds from the scholarship in our field, and his review of the literature is appreciative. Accordingly, the structure of the book enacts his argument as he launches from familiar scholarship to a host of novel insights. He discovers in Obama's rhetoric a duality manifesting itself in philosophical pairs. Again, avoiding what has also become a cliché, the need to "transcend" the either/or distinction, Obama is comfortable, as Terrill observes, allowing differences to remain in place. Terrill goes deep into the novel logic at work in Obama's rhetoric, which features a paratactic style that begins with, but is not restricted to, dualities.

Obama, Terrill argues, developed a perspective on double-consciousness that shares some assumptions with and differs from the one advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois. Obama anchored his race speech, Terrill writes, in a democratic double-consciousness in which he discussed "each side of the color line, without critique; the two points are allowed to exist side by side, without conjunction, each offering a view of the world that is comparable to but not reducible to the other" (65). In adopting "shifting or oscillating of perspectives" (69), Terrill continues, Obama called for African Americans to better understand the reality of the white working class, and he said that the white working class needed to understand the stark realities of the racist world inhabited by African Americans. The speech, Terrill rightly concludes, "provides an extraordinarily rich resource for the invention of democratic double-consciousness" (74).

Unfortunately, Terrill observes, Obama's race speech was an "anomaly" (103). As candidate and then as president, Obama did...