Roughly over the last twenty years or more, critical race theorists and whiteness theorists have magnetized considerable attention in the academy. Many scholars, including numerous critical race th...

Book Review| March 01 2013 On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation. By Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly. New York: Palgrave, 2011; pp. 224. $22.00 cloth; $14.00 paperKing's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech. By Eric Sundquist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009; pp. viii + 295. $14.00 paper"Making a Way out of No Way": Martin Luther King's Proverbial Rhetoric. By Wolfgang Mieder. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; pp. xiv + 551. $169.95 clothMartin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights. By Gary Selby. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008; pp. xii + 217. $34.95 paperThe Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. By Jonathan Rieder. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2008; pp. xi + 394. $18.95 paper Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller is Professor of English at Arizona State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (1): 167–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Keith D. Miller; On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2013; 16 (1): 167–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction: The Hunt for Traces of Remnants [T]here are remnants around me, or traces of remnants—misunderstood and misremembered moments and events, ghostly presences, hazy icons. I'm such a tra...

Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly cited the Bible, no one has seriously examined his rhetoric as biblical hermeneutic. Here I argue that in “I Have a Dream,” King explodes closed memories of the Exodus by reconceptualizing a hermeneutic of (Second) Isaiah as he interprets African-Americans' experience of oppression and exile in Babylon/America and their hope for a new Exodus. Drawing on African-American political rhetoric, King spotlights biblical writers' dialogue with each other and extends the arc of biblical narrative into the present. He also anticipates certain forms of liberation theology of the 1970s and beyond.

Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.

From the early 1990s to the present, Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, coauthors Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, and other academics have focused on race by uncovering, interrogating, and theorizing as a largely unacknowledged but vastly important rhetorical and epistemological system. Nakayama and Krizek consider relatively unchartered territory that remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without domain (291). Whiteness, they claim, wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated (291). Further, they argue, whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space (293). Many whites, they argue, refuse to acknowledge their ethnicity, claiming simply to be human, thereby erasing from its history and social

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Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

Jim W. Corder. Uses of Rhetoric. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. 230 pages.

(1989). Voice merging and self‐making: The epistemology of “I have a dream”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 23-31.

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Donald Stewart, The Versatile Writer. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1986. 381 pages. Sentence Combining: A Rhetorical Perspective. Ed. Donald A. Daiker, Andrew Kerek, and Max Morenberg. Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, xxi + 386 pages. Beverly L. Clark, Talking about Writing: A Guide for Tutor and Teacher Conferences. The University of Michigan Press, 1985. 225 pages.

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