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Robert E. Terrill
Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship
Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship
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Robert E. Terrill argues that, in order to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must learn to draw on the delicate indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship since its inception. In Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Terrill demonstrates how President Barack Obama�s public address models such a discourse.
Terrill contends that Obama�s most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of �double-consciousness,� which was famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of �two-ness� resulting from the African American experience of �always looking at one�s self through the eyes of others.� It is described as an effect of cruel alienation that can also bring a gift of �second-sight� in the form of perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama is asking each to share in the �peculiar sensation� that Du Bois described. The racial history of U.S. citizenship is a resource for inventing contemporary ways of speaking about race.
Joining with other work that suggests that double-consciousness may be a vital democratic attitude, Terrill extends those insights to consider it as a mode of address. Through close analyses of selected speeches from Obama�s 2008 campaign and first presidential term, this book argues that Obama does not present double-consciousness merely as a point of view but rather as an idiom with which we might speak to one another. Of course, as Du Bois�s work reminds us, double-consciousness results from imposition and encumbrance, so that Obama�s oratory presents a mode of address that emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits, the price as well as the promise.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Terrill, Robert E.
Published: 07/31/2015
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781611175318
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
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Terrill contends that Obama�s most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of �double-consciousness,� which was famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of �two-ness� resulting from the African American experience of �always looking at one�s self through the eyes of others.� It is described as an effect of cruel alienation that can also bring a gift of �second-sight� in the form of perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama is asking each to share in the �peculiar sensation� that Du Bois described. The racial history of U.S. citizenship is a resource for inventing contemporary ways of speaking about race.
Joining with other work that suggests that double-consciousness may be a vital democratic attitude, Terrill extends those insights to consider it as a mode of address. Through close analyses of selected speeches from Obama�s 2008 campaign and first presidential term, this book argues that Obama does not present double-consciousness merely as a point of view but rather as an idiom with which we might speak to one another. Of course, as Du Bois�s work reminds us, double-consciousness results from imposition and encumbrance, so that Obama�s oratory presents a mode of address that emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits, the price as well as the promise.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Terrill, Robert E.
Published: 07/31/2015
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781611175318
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
