Panel: Reconstructing African-American History
Copanelists: William Andrews and Ann Rayson
William Andrews, in To Tell A Free Story, writes that “autobiographies of black people tell a free story . . . free storytelling [is] signaled in the ways black narratives address their readers and reconstruct personal history . . . ” (xi). Reconstructing personal history has long been the stance of Black Americans, and that stance is embedded in physical and visual rhetorical practice. Scholars in the field of sociology and anthropology suggest that Black autobiographers viewed themselves in opposition to the historically and socially constructed “self” that the dominant culture has imposed upon them, which is inextricably linked to oppositional conceptions of self held by Blacks today (Bjorklund; Ogbu). A social construction of the “self” segues to a person’s acquisition of knowledge; Michel Foucault says that “knowledge is not pure and abstract but is implicated in networks of power relations . . . [that these] truths determine how we imagine and manage the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the transgressive, the lawful and delinquent.” What gave Jarena Lee and Julia Foote the audacity to write their stories? What gave them the audacity to preach? What rhetorical strategies did they employ? I will argue that as nineteenth century Black women preacher autobiographers, Lee and Foote channeled self-knowledge toward a spiritual enlightenment that allowed them to “move away from the particular ‘I’ to the objectified or universalized ‘I’, which was the theme of the American Renaissance period” (Buell). In order to tell their stories, Lee and Foote engaged in mimicry (as Homi Bhabha defines it) by adopting the cultural mores of the dominant culture and performing them even better than its members. The resulting texts are discursive performances that allow each narrator to represent the “I” and “to tell their free story.”
Kendra L. Fulllwood (BA, Shaw U; MA, U of Akron) is a PhD student in English at the University of Kansas focusing on the African American preacher as a rhetorician. I am also especially concerned with helping twenty-first century students acquire multiple rhetorical strategies, which will allow them to navigate among various competing discourses; studying the African American preacher will be the model from which I can create my analysis because she/he has had to navigate discourses and social situations historically. Hopefully, this will be accomplished through the study of nineteenth century American literature, Composition and Rhetoric, and the sermon as a genre.
BIOGRAPHY HERE