Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 Mudiwa Pettus Mudiwa Pettus City University of New York, Medgar Evers College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 237–240. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mudiwa Pettus; Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 237–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...