ENG 5933 Fleckenstein Spring 2021

In an eerie foreshadowing of the current political moment, The Independent Monitor, a weekly Alabama newspaper, solicited subscribers for what they touted in 1869 as “the white’s man’s newspaper.” Articulating an overt white supremacist agenda, they descried cruelty to the “negro” while at the same time adamantly opposing equality with these “descendants of Ham” through any and all means.,/p>

Heeding George Santayana’s aphoristic warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat,” this course focuses on the past moment evoked by The Independent Monitor to discern potential ways forward in the current moment. More specifically, the course investigates the rhetorical battle waged by nineteenth-century African American activists to obtain and retain civic and civil rights by advocating for and performing citizenship.

We begin with overview of Black nineteenth-century rhetoric, aligning it with the complicated history of U.S. citizenship. We then explore Black rhetoric in three moments W. E. B. Du Bois identifies as significant in the struggle for Black civil rights: 1800-1850, examining the rhetoric of colonization; 1850-1865, addressing a rhetoric of Black civic virtue; and 1884-1900, analyzing the rhetoric of the “New Negro.” Throughout, we trace specific rhetorical performances of Black citizenship, identifying rhetors’ use of available means of persuasion, their invention of new means of persuasion, and their creative appropriation of such emerging technologies as photography.

Grades will be based on two major projects, six short response papers, and participation appropriate for a graduate seminar.