African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (review)

African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives provides a systematic inquiry into the discursive and cultural practices of a wide range of African American rhetorical forms. The collection of essays arranged here argues that the study of such rhetoric(s) provides a point of entry into the notion that African American rhetorical forms are inherently linked to freedom struggles. Taking African American rhetoric(s) as their point of departure to frame this collection, editors Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson shift the center of rhetorical knowledge production to the marginalized and resistive discursive and material spaces of black history and thought. African American rhetoric(s) are understood as the "study of culturally and discursively developed knowledge-forms, communicative practices and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles by people of African ancestry in America" (xiii).

As such, African American Rhetoric(s) offers rhetoricians an invitation. The text, with its radical suturing of the political to the rhetorical, provides an unflinching view of its object as necessarily tied to issues of social justice. That these rhetorical practices and strategies are necessarily linked to freedom struggles is instructive, both directly for those interested in the study of African American rhetorics proper and those interested in the field more broadly. The text certainly contributes to our understandings of "cultural rhetorics" associated with the mobilization of minoritarian counterpublics, but additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it should be read as a displacement of the very notion of normative rhetorics produced in our field. That is, if we engage the text not as marginal, but as central, then we must ask ourselves if there is any rhetorical engagement that arises in the absence of the cultural. And what might it mean to produce such rhetorical forms?

The pieces collected in African American Rhetoric(s) engage a variety of authors, cultural texts, and discursive forms for the purposes of their studies. From Monster Cody to Sojourner Truth, Nubian to Ancient Egyptian rhetorics, African American Vernacular English to Afrocentric rhetorics, these essays paint a picture of the field of African American rhetorical studies that is simultaneously coherent in its interconnections and diverse in its imaginary. Kalí Tal's study, "From Panther to Monster," for instance, reveals both the overlaps and critical disjunctures between the rhetorics of George Jackson and Sanyika Shakur to demonstrate the "erasure of explicit political ideology in much of mainstream contemporary Black popular culture [that] is intimately connected to the way in which mythic narratives and iconography of the Vietnam War have replaced the critical economic and social analysis so prevalent in the 1960's" (37–38). Pieces such as Tal's abound to reveal African American rhetorics as a site of struggle, resistance, and containment vis-à-vis white geopolitics.

A vital contribution the text makes is its implicature of logics of white supremacy and white alliance in the formation of black struggles and domination. Essays such as Shirley Wilson Logan's "Black Speakers, White Representations," Gwendolyn D. Pough's "Rhetoric that Should Have Moved the People," Kimmika L. H. Williams's "Ties that Bind," and Kermit E. Campbell's "We Is Who We Was," to name a few, explicitly point to these intercultural (dis)connections. Logan's emphasis, for instance, on the "exoticism" through which the racialized bodies of Sojourner Truth and Fredrick Douglass are decoded by white women reveal both the strategies of containment at work in the white gaze (reduce the black body to its sheer physicality) and the logics that trouble multiracial alliance (transformative meanings and connections are trumped by benevolent engagement, which is also a supremacist distancing). Such texts not only reveal the contours of African American rhetoric(s), but also demand an accounting of unmarked white rhetorical forms of containment: the politics of reception and identity.

The text invites such a critical reading practice, in which we allow the text to reveal to us not only the complexity and freedom potentialities at work in African American rhetoric(s), but also...