ABSTRACT
The authors illustrate the essential nature of African-American rhetoric, defined for these purposes as the art of persuasion fused with African-American ways of knowing in attempts to achieve in public realms personhood, dignity, and respect for African Americans. African-American rhetoric functions as an epistemic break, to use the parlance of Michel Foucault, and as an exercise in perspective by incongruity, to borrow from the thinking of Kenneth Burke. No specific political perspective predominates, and much strategic verbal behavior occurs in private, interpersonal contexts and in broad displays of play and entertainment. But the focus of the authors is on how African-American rhetors have consciously employed African-American rhetoric as a critical method, in other words, how they have demonstrated meta-awareness that the tropes and texts emergent from African-American culture and integral to it comprise a usable code. For examples, the authors draw on texts such as Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Coming of John.”
