ABSTRACT
The last three decades have seen a proliferation of governments apologizing for historical wrongs, usually as ceremonial speeches or legislative apologies. They share broad genre features: acknowledgment, mortification, and corrective action with the assumed rhetorical goal of reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. Despite these shared features and ends, ceremonial and legislative apologies differ significantly as epideictic speech and legal text. The author provides an overview of genre as a tool in persuasive discourse; discusses the rhetorical tradition of apologia from the ancient Greek defensive genre to the various contemporary sub-genres aimed at relationship repair; and highlights the purported rhetorical goal of contemporary collective apology. The contrasts between epideictic speech and legal texts are especially explored, including interactivity, evaluation, validation, and emotional weight. The author shows how these characteristics can impact reconciliation by foregrounding distinct parts of apology and through positioning perpetrator and victims in new relationships. Thus, this language analysis illustrates how certain variations in the apologia genre can impact rhetorical ends, encouraging recognition of distinct types of collective apology, illustrated with reference to the U.S. government legislative apology for the illegal annexation of Hawaii, signed into law by President Clinton, and his 1993 ceremonial apology to the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
