ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, “America’s Declaration of Independence as Index Case,” looks at the communications practices surrounding the world’s first declaration. It finds that the document was part of a distributed pattern of communication that ventriloquized collective voice and called for judgment from local and global audiences. Today, the American Declaration sits somewhere on the margins of law, serving as a lodestar for constitutional and political practice. Its roots lie in a reiterative process of petitions and correspondence in the early colonies that laid claim to authority through imitation and the repurposing of political and communicative protocols. Contemporary ideas on speech framed the document’s rhetoric, but reveal a struggle between sincerity and artful persuasion. It appeared in an era when the widespread use of print made the displacement of voice through ventriloquism commonplace, creating a pattern of “printed voice” that obscured a speaker behind a compound or fictive identity. The Declaration also signaled readiness to adhere to Vattelian international norms and positioned the American project within a wider world. Ultimately, the document proves to be more grounded and dispersed and less instantaneous and magical than performative narratives imagine.
