Up from Memory:

Abstract

AbstractBooker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights.

Journal
Philosophy & Rhetoric
Published
2012-06-01
DOI
10.5325/philrhet.45.2.0189
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly

References (82) · 2 in this index

  1. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.
  2. Akhmatova, Anna. 1967. Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  3. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  4. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Penguin.
  5. Aristotle. 2006. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. 2nd ed. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford…
Show all 82 →
  1. Augé, Marc. 2004. Oblivion. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  2. Beale, Walter H. 1978. “Rhetorical Performative Discourse: A New Theory of Epideictic.” Philosophy and Rhetor…
  3. Blassingame, John W, ed. 1977. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiogr…
  4. Booth, W. James. 2006. Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Universi…
  5. Bowers, Claude G. 1929. The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  6. Browne, Stephen H. 1994. “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It I…
  7. Browne, Stephen H. 1999. Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. East Lansing: Mich…
  8. Burgess, Theodore C. 1987. Epideictic Literature. New York: Garland.
  9. Calhoun, John C. 1837. “Slavery a Positive Good.” Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.o…
  10. Celan, Paul. 2001. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. New York: Norton.
  11. Chase, Richard. 1961. “The Classical Conception of Epideictic.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 47 (3): 293–300.
  12. Condit, Celeste M. 1985. “The Function of Epideictic: The Boston Massacre Orations as Exemplar.” Communicatio…
  13. Connerton, Paul. 2008. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71.
  14. Connerton, Paul. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Consigny, Scott. 1992. “Gorgias's Use of the Epideictic.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (3): 281–97.
  16. Coulter, E. Merton. 1947. The South During Reconstruction, 1865–1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University…
  17. Creelman, James. 1972–75. “An Article in the New York World.” In The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 4, ed.…
  18. DeNeef, A. Leigh. 1973. “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric.” Journal of Medieval Studies 3 (2): 203–31.
  19. Douglass, Frederick. 1999. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speech…
  20. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press.
  21. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2005. “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” In The Souls of Black Folk, 44–61. New York…
  22. Duffy, Bernard K. 1983. “The Platonic Functions of Epideictic Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (2): 79–93.
  23. Dunning, William A. 1907. Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877. New York: Harper and Brothers.
  24. Foner, Eric. 1990. A Short History of Reconstruction 1863–77. New York: Harper and Row.
  25. Foner, Eric. 2002. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77. New York: Harper and Row.
  26. Forty, Adrian, and Susanne Kuchler, eds. 1999. The Art of Forgetting. Oxford, UK: Berg.
  27. Finkelman, Paul. 2003. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's.
  28. Franklin, John Hope. 1994. Reconstruction After the Civil War. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  29. Franklin, Robert Michael. Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Though…
  30. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. 1987. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin.
  31. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Ne…
  32. Harlan, Louis R. 1983. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press.
  33. Harlan, Louis R. 1998. Booker T. Washington in Perspective. Ed. Raymond W. Smock. Jackson, Miss.: University …
  34. Harris, Thomas E. 1993. Analysis of the Clash over the Issues Between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bo…
  35. Harris, Thomas E., and Patrick C. Kennicott. 1972. “Booker T. Washington: A Study in Conciliatory Rhetoric.” …
  36. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  37. Heath, Robert L. 1978. “A Time for Silence: Booker T. Washington in Atlanta.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 …
  38. Huyssen, Andreas. 2005. “Resistance to Memory: The Uses and Abuses of Public Forgetting.” In Globalizing Crit…
  39. King, Andrew A. 1974. “Booker T. Washington and the Myth of Heroic Materialism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech …
  40. Kraditor, Aileen S. 1969. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and T…
  41. LaCapra, Dominick. 1988. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  42. LaCapra, Dominick. 1994. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  43. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  44. Leff, Michael. 1999. “The Habitation of Rhetoric.” In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Loui…
  45. Levi, Primo. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage.
  46. Levi, Primo. 1996. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  47. Logue, Cal M. 1977. “The Rhetorical Appeals of Whites to Blacks During Reconstruction.” Communication Monogra…
  48. Loraux, Nicole. 1986. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Alan Sherida…
  49. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  50. Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press…
  51. Ober, Josiah, and Barry Strauss. 1990. “Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy.” …
  52. O'Malley, John W. 1979. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Or…
  53. Ovarec, Christine. 1976. “‘Observation’ in Aristotle's Theory of Epideictic.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (3): …
  54. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1971. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John…
  55. Poulakos, John. 1986. “Gorgias' and Isocrates' Use of the Encomium.” Southern Speech Communication Journal 51…
  56. Poulakos, Takis. 1987. “Isocrates's Use of Narrative in the Evagoras: Epideictic, Rhetoric and Moral Action.”…
  57. Poulakos, Takis. 1990. “Historiographies of the Tradition of Rhetoric: A Brief History of Classical Funeral O…
  58. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: Univers…
  59. Rosenfield, Lawrence W. 1980. “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic.” In Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Eugen…
  60. Rosenfield, Lawrence W. 1989. “Central Park and the Celebration of Virtue.” In American Rhetoric: Context and…
  61. Rothberg, Michael. 2000. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University …
  62. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale Universi…
  63. Sullivan, Dale L. 1993. “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (2): 113–33.
  64. Verney, Kevern. The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881…
  65. Vivian, Bradford. 2006. “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2…
  66. Vivian, Bradford. 2009. “On the Language of Forgetting.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (1): 89–104.
  67. Vivian, Bradford. 2010. Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again. University Park: Pen…
  68. College English
  69. Wallace, Karl R. 1943. “Booker T. Washington.” In A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 1,…
  70. Washington, Booker T. 1907. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday.
  71. Washington, Booker T. 1969. “The Atlanta Address.” In Booker T. Washington, ed. Emma Lou Thornbrough, 33–36. …
  72. Weinrich, Harald. 2004. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Trans. Steven Rendall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell…
  73. Wiesel, Elie. 2006. Night. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang.
  74. Wilson, Kirt H. 2002. Reconstruction's Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Pla…
  75. Woodward, C. Vann. 1971. The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
  76. Woodward, C. Vann. 2002. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press.
  77. Young, James E. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. …