Term paper

Term paper

This independent study will investigate how black leaders such as Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka use African American rhetorical features, including distinct racial appeals, ideology critique, and identifiable black urban charisma. I will examine how the narratives that they transmit contribute to the valuing of cultural retention. My research will ask how and to what end these two figures utilized rhetorical styles and ideological content in order to promote a diasporic consciousness that would position distinct points of reference such as West African cultural and intellectual traditions that remain prevalent in the culture and intellectual traditions of African Americans presently. Overall, this project will provide a clearer understanding about how dynamic and charismatic African American speakers have used rhetorical strategies to enable various cultural retentions among African Americans. Readings will include poetry, speeches, history, literary criticism, gender studies, and rhetorical studies.
FACulTy MenToR
Erica Edwards
Department of English
With Malcolm X’s “A Message to the Grassroots,” Alexander Sterling mobilizes
rhetorical criticism and the scholarship on West African retentions to analyze the
reverberations of West African communalism in one of Malcolm X’s well known
speeches. Emphasizing that African American social movements often resist Western frameworks of knowledge and politics, Sterling’s analysis offers a lucid analysis of Malcolm X’s radicalism that places the speech in vital conversation with scholarship by Cedric Robinson, Vorris Nunley, and other important theorists of black rhetorics and politics. This is an excellent example of undergraduate research.This independent study will investigate how black leaders such as Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka use African American rhetorical features, including distinct racial appeals, ideology critique, and identifiable black urban charisma. I will examine how the narratives that they transmit...

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