Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship (Studies in Rhetoric & Communication)

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Synopsis
“This incisive work” examining Obama’s speeches and the theories of W.E.B. DuBois “illuminates the influences of words and ideas” (Choice).The racial history of US citizenship is vital to our understanding of both citizenship and race. Robert E. Terrill argues that, to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must draw on the 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,” 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.” An effect of cruel alienation, this double-consciousness can also offer valuable perspectives on society. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama asks each to share in the “peculiar sensation” that Du Bois described.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 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.
Copyright:
2015

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
224 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781611175325
Related ISBNs:
9781611175318
Publisher:
University Of South Carolina Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
University of South Carolina
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Communication, Politics and Government
Reading Age:
18 and up
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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