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WORK TITLE: Double-consciousness and the rhetoric of Barack Obama
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http://www.indiana.edu/~rterrill/ * https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2015/7531.html * http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/faculty/profile_rTerrill.shtml
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LOC is still down.
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Male.
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Indiana University, Department of Communication and Culture, Bloomington, IN, associate professor.
AWARDS:Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, 2005, for Malcolm X: Inventing Racial Judgment.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Robert E. Terrill is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research covers African American public address, specifically in the way iconic figures like Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Stokely Carmichael, and Barack Obama have contributed to civic culture through rhetorical invention. Terrill says he engages in an analytical practice that is informed by rhetorical lore.
Malcolm X
In 2004, Terrill published Malcolm X: Inventing Racial Judgment. In the book, Terrill focuses on the iconic leader’s speeches. Known for his Civil Rights era movement, Malcolm X was known as a great orator, public figure, cultural icon, and minister for the Nation of Islam. First, Terrill explores the interpretive strategies revealed in key texts from the history of African American protest, from which to gauge and assess Malcolm’s oratory. Then Terrill analyzes the texts of speeches Malcolm X delivered while he was with the Nation of Islam as well as the speeches and statements he made after he left the Nation. This way, Terrill carefully distinguishes Malcolm’s strategies of interpretation and judgment that he fostered in his audiences.
Next, Terrill uses three theoretical approaches to contextualize the radical judgment Malcolm presented through his speeches. Terrill aims to show that the changing potential of Malcolm’s rhetoric was borne of his refusal to be constrained by boundaries. The book received the 2005 Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, which recognizes significant book manuscripts in the field of rhetorical criticism. In Bookwatch, a reviewer commented that the book “strives to reveal a better understanding of one man’s speechmaking power.”
The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X
Terrill edited The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X in 2012. With fourteen specially commissioned essays by prominent scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book provides an introduction to Malcolm X, a chronology of his public life and speeches, the use of symbolism in his speeches, relationship to the black radical tradition, contribution to Afrocentrism, and new perspectives on his life and legacy. Essays also discuss his relationship to literature, religion, politics, gender, ideology, and popular culture.
According to W. Glasker in Choice, “The book is written in a clear, accessible style, yet reveals a treasure trove of information.” Glasker added that essays on Malcolm’s contribution to the black arts movement and his internationalist vision are impressive. Robert Eddy noted in African American Review: “The book ably keeps its promise to provide ‘new perspectives on Malcolm X’s life and legacy’ from a number of disciplines, and is an admirable and substantive addition to scholarship on Malcolm X, for new as well as experienced scholars in this field.”
Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama
In 2015, Terrill wrote Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship, in which he explores how Obama in his speeches and public discourse used the concept of “double-consciousness,” a way of showing the validity of both sides of an argument, popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois. Analyzing numerous speeches by Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and first presidential term, Terrill says this feeling of “two-ness” draws on the indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship and lets the listener see one’s self through the eyes of others. Using this technique, Obama asks us to share that viewpoint to offer perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege.
Terrill explains that Obama’s aim with this double-consciousness was to provide a method with which we could speak to each other, showing that it is essential to effective and just public policy. This emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits. Writing in Choice, K. Anderson remarked: “This incisive work illuminates the influences of words and ideas and the process of democracy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African American Review, 2012, Robert Eddy, review of The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X, p. 476.
Bookwatch, July, 2005, review of Malcolm X: Inventing Racial Judgment.
Choice, March, 2011, W. Glasker, review of The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X, p. 1359; April, 2016, K. Anderson, review of Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship, p. 1243.*
Robert E. Terrill
Professor, English
Director, Writing & Rhetoric Studies
rterrill@indiana.eduBallantine Hall 442Office Hours
Education
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1996
Rhetoric + Writing
About
I am a rhetorical critic. From my perspective, this means that I engage in an analytical practice that is informed by rhetorical lore and that takes as its goal a contribution to civic culture through the invention of just and capacious discourse. My work is animated by an effort to enable and encourage active participation in public life through the close study of exemplars. I participate in a long tradition of rhetorical criticism understood as a project of making public discourse available as civic equipment, a tradition articulated, for example, by Isocrates, Quintilian, and Kenneth Burke. Of course, my work also continues to be influenced by my mentors, including Janice Hocker Rushing and Michael C. Leff.
I have been particularly interested in African American public address, in part because circumstances often demand that marginalized rhetors be especially inventive as they address the limitations and exclusions that bar access to full citizenship. I have written about some of the ways that Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Stokely Carmichael, and Barack Obama have contributed to civic culture through their practices of rhetorical invention.
A natural outgrowth of these intellectual commitments has been my interest in pedagogy, and in particular the role that training in rhetoric should play in the liberal arts and in civic education. In this work, I argue for the continuing relevance of ancient rhetorical theory for analyzing, critiquing, and intervening in contemporary civic culture.
In addition, beginning in graduate school and extending to the present, I have had an abiding interest in the rhetorical analysis of film. In its cultural reach and multisensory appeal, film affords rich potential as an inventional resource, and its narrative form makes it an especially appropriate site for analytical work at the intersection of rhetoric and myth. In my current projects I find myself energized by returning to these interests in my teaching and research.
Malcolm X
The Bookwatch. (July 2005):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
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Malcolm X
Robert E. Terrill
Michigan State University Press
Suite 25, Manly Miles Building
1405 South Harrison Road, East Lansing, MI 48823-5202
0870137301 $49.95 msupress.msu.edu
Written by an Assistant Professor of Communication at Indiana University, Bloomington, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment is a scholarly, intense, and philosophical analysis of Malcom X's oratory. Scrutinizing both the speeches that Malcolm X made while as a minister for the Nation of Islam and those made after he left the Nation, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment especially focuses upon the strategies of interpretation and judgment that Malcom X fostered in his audiences. Recontextualizing the radical judgment found in Malcolm X's rhetoric according to three disparate theoretical approaches, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment strives to reveal a better understanding of one man's speechmaking power that was so great its iconoclasm transcends the limits of individual contemporarty definitions.
Robert E. Terrill, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X
Robert Eddy
African American Review. 45.3 (Fall 2012): p476.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 African American Review
http://aar.slu.edu/
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Robert E. Terrill, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X . New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. 194 pp. $26.00.
With the recent publication of Manning Marable's important and controversial biography of Malcolm X, the politics of representation in work about Malcolm X is a crucial part of the national nonconversation about cross-racial communication and the retreat from racial equity. The opening page of this book describes itself as presenting "new perspectives on Malcolm X's life and legacy in a series of specially commissioned essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplines." The book's intention is to be "a source of information on his life, career and influence and as an innovative substantive scholarly contribution in its own right, the book also includes an introduction, a chronology of the life of Malcolm X, and a guide to further reading." Contributor and editor Robert Terrill, in his Introduction to the volume's fourteen individually authored chapters, after summarizing each, ends by insisting on several crucial points: in spite of many transformations, Malcolm "never abandoned his commitment to Islam, a religion that has been denigrated repeatedly since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon"; Malcolm "never endorsed simple assimilation"; he "never described the political system in the United States as anything other than thoroughly and institutionally corrupt"; finally, "as long as there remains a racial hierarchy, the model of personal and political development that Malcolm X presents will remain relevant" (9).
In Claude Clegg's dynamic first chapter of the book, "Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad," he explains the deep fictive kinship of the two men and the crucial ways in which each required the other's influence to do his work. What finally broke the relationship was not simply the jealousy toward Malcolm of the Nation of Islam's inner circle in Chicago, however deep, or the surveillance and misinformation campaign of the FBI, however effective, and Elijah's "creeping conservatism" (20), as Malcolm's militant transnational commitments strengthened. What finally and fully broke the relationship was Malcolm's embracing of Sunni Islam, since Elijah Muhammad feared that his groomed successor--seventh son Wallace--was moving in the same direction, a path that would discredit the Nation of Islam as a "Muslim" group, and make Elijah's claim to being the "Messenger of Allah" false, in the eyes of the thereby expanding international and orthodox Islam.
In chapter eight, "Malcolm X and youth culture," Richard Brent Turner explores the "progressive political and religious legacy that Malcolm X created in the last year of his life" (101). Turner pursues this analysis by exploring the antiracist rapping of the "transnational Pan-African 'hip hop umma ,' a version of the Muslim umma --the global community of Islam that Malcolm experienced during his hajj" (103). Often, the raps focus on the international and multiracial elements of Malcolm's experience of the hajj. The pan-African hip hop umma is transnational in its focus and commitment, and so, not surprisingly, it demonstrates the "ascendancy of Sunni Islam in black youth culture" (102), rather than the race-based theology of the Nation of Islam, or its splinter group, the Five Percenters.
In "Womanizing Malcolm X," Sheila Radford-Hill does a fascinating job of helping us see the "impact of women's agency on his life and work" (64) and "gender as a unit of analysis in the politics of black radicalism" (65). The Nation of Islam's ideal of women as "nurturers practicing virtue, modesty, and humility" (67) became increasingly complicated in Malcolm's consciousness in the last years of his life, especially through his visits to Africa where he met women "whose leadership skills gave them professional opportunities and influence in African affairs of state" (67). Radford-Hill insists that Malcolm "remade his masculine subjectivity in ways that allowed him to see women as agents of social change" (68). One powerful piece of evidence for this claim of Malcolm's moving toward gender equality, is that two months before his murder, he introduced Fannie Lou Hamer as "one of the world's greatest freedom fighters" (68). Radford-Hill sees Malcolm's overcoming of the merely protective male orientation toward women of the Nation of Islam as conditioned by Malcolm's Pan-Africanist experiences and commitments, and Malcolm's embracing of orthodox Islam in the last two years of his life. Radford-Hill puts it this way: because of Malcolm's "desire to practice the Sunni Islamic faith, he was compelled to restructure his thinking about the role of both men and women in the struggle for human dignity" (69). Malcolm was able to make this transition toward seeing women as full equals "because his faith gave him the moral clarity he needed to discern the transnational nature of black cultural and political movements" (69).
Kevin Gaines's "Malcolm X in Global Perspective," affirms, like Sheila Radford-Hill's essay, the "importance of his Islamic faith to his rejection of the Nation of Islam's antiwhite doctrine" (158). Malcolm's orthodox Islamic antiracism also strengthened his anti-imperialism by the same rhetoric of equality. Gaines shows how through Malcolm's crucial May 1964 trip to Ghana, and "through the novelty of his travels, and with his cultural immersion into orthodox Islam and the hajj, Malcolm was strongly compelled to rethink his political convictions" (165). Malcolm's antiracism and anti-imperialism became unified as the heart of his ideological critique of both the U.S. political-economic system, and that of the West generally. In the final part of the chapter in which Gaines analyzes Malcolm's influence on the generations in the U.S. since his murder, he reminds us that Malcolm is a main reason for the "spread of Islam among African-Americans" (168).
The final chapter of the book, "The Legacy of Malcolm X," by William W. Sales, Jr., supports Radford-Hill's position that Malcolm was moving toward operational commitment to gender equality. Clear evidence of this promise is that Malcolm asked women to assume "leadership roles in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" (174). Sales also corroborates the suggestions of Turner and Radford-Hill that Malcolm's embracing of orthodox Islam was as much a political as a religious commitment (172). Citing the chapter "Fighting in the Way of God" from Louis A. DeCaro, Jr.'s On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X , Sales makes the point that in the last months of his life especially, Malcolm was committed to Sunni Islam as a "religion that would help him fight back against oppression" (172), unlike the Nation of Islam, which attempted quite successfully to be completely apolitical. Malcolm saw international Islam as the key political and religious focus of the "international anti-imperialist, antiracist struggle for national liberation and human rights" (172). Malcolm considered this transnational focus as necessary to challenge, and here Sales quotes Omi and Winant, the "'racial dictatorship' in America" (181).
What, then, is the project of The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X ? The first paragraph of this review quotes key elements of Terrill's introduction and front inside-cover overviews. The book ably keeps its promise to provide "new perspectives on Malcolm X's life and legacy" from a number of disciplines, and is an admirable and substantive addition to scholarship on Malcolm X, for new as well as experienced scholars in this field. Yes, the chronology and guide to further reading are especially aimed at scholars new to the study of Malcolm X, but they also function for more experienced scholars as a way to think about what pieces of scholarship belong in such a selective listing, to notice what is omitted, and to invite reflection about how he or she would construct such a key and short document. The project of this book or what it does well, in an anthology that has no weak chapters, is to provide critical analyses of appropriate elements of Malcolm's life and work: his autobiography, his relationships with key figures, his representation in rap and in Hollywood, his gender dynamics, his rhetorical ways, his Afrocentricity, transnationalism, and black radical politics. Each of these is done well in a brief space and in complex fashion. But what does the book occlude, minimize or omit? Although there are references, as this review in part documents, to the importance of Malcolm's embracing of orthodox Islam not only as a crucial religious commitment but also as a political-economic implementation of an antiracism and anti-imperialism project, there is no separate chapter on Malcolm X as orthodox Muslim. Why? In an important book on Malcolm in post-9/11 Islamophobic America, this is an especially indefensible omission, and is arguably an erasure of what Malcolm X died trying to implement in the United States--a choice he made over staying safe by remaining outside its borders. If only there could be a second edition of an otherwise excellent book.
Reviewed by Robert Eddy, Washington State University
Eddy, Robert
Terrill, Robert E.: Double-consciousness and the rhetoric of Barack Obama: the price and promise of citizenship
K. Anderson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1243.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Terrill, Robert E. Double-consciousness and the rhetoric of Barack Obama: the price and promise of citizenship. South Carolina, 2015. 205p bibl index ISBN 9781611175318 cloth, $39.95; ISBN 9781611175325 ebook, $39.95
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MARC
Terrill (communication and culture, Indiana Univ., Bloomington) investigates the nuances of rhetoric and public policy in his new book on President Obama and the often-used but frequently misunderstood metaphor on double consciousness first articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois. Terrill analyzes a number of speeches by the president and notes that he often frames problems in a manner in which he holds both sides of an argument up as valuable and worthy of respect, thus modeling and enhancing the idea of rhetorical debate as essential to effective and just public policy. Terrill argues that this is more than the idea of "second sight," as is often ascribed to minorities struggling against an oppressive majority, and is an example for all citizens in understanding and participating in the democratic process. This incisive work illuminates the influences of words and ideas and the process of democracy. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--K. Anderson, Eastern Illinois University
The Cambridge companion to Malcolm X
W. Glasker
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.7 (Mar. 2011): p1359.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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48-4051 8P223 2010-281458 MARC
The Cambridge companion to Malcolm X, ed. by Robert E. Terrill. Cambridge, 2010. 194p bibl index ISBN 9780521515900, $95.00; ISBN 9780521731577 pbk, $24.99
Malcolm X is one of the two most influential African Americans of the second half of the 20th century. These 14 compelling essays across a range of disciplines and perspectives analyze Malcolm X in relationship to literature, religion, politics, and gender, and from rhetoric and ideology to film and popular culture. The book is written in a clear, accessible style, yet reveals a treasure trove of information that will be new to many readers. The essays analyzing Malcolm's speeches, his use of symbols (devils and dogs, house and field, ballots and bullets), and his relationship to the black radical tradition are especially strong. James Tyner's essay on Malcolm's relationship to the literature of utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares is quite provocative, as is editor Terrill's essay on judgment and criticism in Malcolm's rhetoric. The essays on Malcolm's contribution to Afrocentrism (by Molefi Asante), the black arts movement, and his internationalist vision are also impressive. William Sales's concluding essay on "psychological emancipation from the internalized self-concept of racial inferiority" is a fitting coda to this remarkable volume. Indispensable reading. Summing Up: Essential. **** All levels/ libraries.--W. Glasker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden
Glasker, W.