African-American Rhetorical Education in the Age of Booker T. Washington
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Pettus, Mudiwa Mpho
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 22, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Raymond Keith Gilyard, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Cheryl Jean Glenn, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Shirley Moody, Committee Member
Esther Susana Prins, Committee Member
Esther Susana Prins, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Booker T. Washington
African-American rhetorical education
African-American rhetorical theory
post-Reconstruction
interracial communication
W.E.B. Du Bois
Pauline Hopkins
Sutton Griggs
democratic deliberation
rhetoric
rhetorical education
compromise
nineteenth-century rhetoric - Abstract:
- African-American Rhetorical Education in the Age of Booker T. Washington traces the development of a collective African-American rhetorical consciousness through the oratorical career of Booker T. Washington. I examine a diverse collection of texts, including speeches, novels, editorials, obituaries, and unpublished poetry, to pursue two primary goals. First, I establish Booker T. Washington as a conscious theorist of democratic deliberation whose ambivalent rhetorical style uniquely allowed him to manage the precarity of Post-Reconstruction American politics. Second, I uncover how African Americans, across gender, class, educational, and political divides, capitalized on Washington’s visibility as an orator to administer rhetorical education to black learners. By turning to the end of the nineteenth century and the experiences of African Americans following enslavement, emancipation, and Reconstruction, I indicate how African-American rhetors actively rejected, courted, questioned, challenged, and manipulated the terms of compromise that Washington offered in his address at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. I locate Washington within a community of black artist-intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Sutton Griggs, who theorized about black rhetorical enfranchisement at the turn of the century. I conclude that by examining nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century black rhetorical theory and black rhetorical education, we might understand some truths about what it means for marginalized rhetors to take rhetoric, and, thereby, rhetorical education seriously in a world in which language is both a tool of liberation and oppression.