Yearbook of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting 6 (2020), pp. 159–181 DOI: 10.2478/yplm-2020-0009 To be sentimental, powerful, and Black: Affective agency in Viola Davis’s award speeches Agata Janicka Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
[email protected] Abstract This article considers how the long-standing American cultural tradition of sentimen- tality and its affective power can be discursively utilized by contemporary Black women in the public contexts. Using the concept of sentimental political storytelling as discussed by Rebecca Wanzo, I analyze three award speeches given by Viola Davis – a popular and acclaimed African American actress whose speeches generate signifi- cant public and media attention. Framing Davis’s speeches within the Black feminist epistemology, I draw on the conventions of sentimental storytelling proposed by Wanzo to argue that Davis is an example of a Black woman skilfully using sentimen- tality to gain affective agency and mobilize sympathy from mainstream public while at the same time narrativizing African Americans’ lived experiences to have their hu- manity and their struggle recognized today. Given the continued prioritization of White female suffering in the American media over stories of Black women’s struggle, the ways in which Black women can discursively utilize sentimentality to gain affective agency and negotiate self-definition in interactional public contexts is of significant sociolinguistic interest. Keywords: African American women; sentimentality; affective agency; discourse; media. 0. Introduction Sentimentality holds a major potential for sociolinguistic studies of language. Inherently emotional, sentimentality has had a long-lasting and conspicuous role in the American literary history, and it has been the object of considerable attention in literary criticism (Howard 1999).