Rhetoric and Language Communities

Gates and Holmes discussed their subjects from very different angles that contribute to what we might come to understand as African American rhetoric. Gates explains in his opening that he’s setting out to “define a carefully structured system of rhetoric” (1551). His descriptions reminded me of Richards in that they were primarily concerned with how different language communities make meaning (and the role of rhetoric in that process).  A lot of what Gates wrote about resonated with my experiences, primarily as one of ten white kids in a predominately black high school, where I noticed various teachers encouraged Signifyin(g) in the classroom as a sort of pedagogical practice.  My English teacher in particular, who I had for my junior and senior years, often drew our attention to white and black English, devoting much of her class time to explaining how my classmates would have to learn to speak the former, which she jokingly called “The Queen’s English,” when they went off to college.  Meanwhile, she addressed us primarily through Signification, emphasizing the legitimacy of the latter.  All of this is to say that these colliding language communities that Gates describes make up a large part of how I came to understand the world and how language operated.  It was not, however, until I read Gates that I considered this understanding of how language operates in direct relationship to rhetoric.

Gates’s text reveals how language is rhetorical, and by that, specific decisions are made in order to distinguish one community from another.  He presents African American rhetoric as a rich example of this—of how speaking is an act of agency (to use our newfound classroom term).  In this way, he exposes us to a different level of rhetoric than the texts that we’ve read so far—a more profound level of agency in the creation of a culture, or, in other words, the evolution of a community’s language practices through rhetorical agency. Also, he shows us how rhetoric is born out of response (or in retaliation) of a society’s power structure.  On the other hand, as my showing the relationships between what’s been established already in our readings—with Burke’s identification, Richards’s making meaning, and Weaver’s consideration of rhetoric as “an art of emphasis” or the decisions made in order to impress an audience (1357). 

Holmes, meanwhile, shifts focus from the language practices (Signification) specific to the African American community, and concentrates more on the line of rhetors whose writings and speeches come from what he calls “the jeremiad” tradition in his abstract—speech derived from Biblical prophets (like Jeremiah) in their “forth-telling” to point out societal “woes” in order to instigate social change (816).  Holmes shows how Shuttlesworth incorporated the “precept hermeneutic,” derived from the church, into his speech (812).  I found it interesting that a “precept hermeneutic” was not distinctly African American—I’m pretty sure Astell uses the same tactics in different points of her Proposals in order to further her cause for women’s education.  In this way, Holmes’s text does less to distinguish a rhetoric but rather to show places where African American rhetorical practices intercept with other traditions, such as Communism and Christianity.

In answering the question to this week’s blog prompt, I agree with Katie and Bruce that introducing new language communities and rhetorical traditions complicates our understanding of rhetoric rather than changes it; I say that mostly because Gates, who offers us the biggest change, is more or less emphasizing, maybe to a larger extent, the principles of rhetoric already put in place by those we’ve read—particularly Burke and Richards (as I’ve already stated).  Even so, Gates’s text does more (for me, anyway) to highlight the relationship between language, social structure, and rhetoric than anything we’ve read so far. He’s left me with a lot of questions concerning how language communities develop, particularly—Do all languages develop with this strong of a connection to agency and response to power structure?    I’m also wondering if I will be able to spot how this rhetorical language development happens among communities with more overlap, i.e. the grad students in the English department versus Freshmen in our composition classes?