BLACK RHETORIC: THE ART OF THINKING BEING by APRIL LEIGH KINKEAD Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2013 Copyright © by April Leigh Kinkead 2013 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the guidance, advice, and support of others. I would like to thank my advisor, Cedrick May, for his taking on the task of directing my dissertation. His knowledge, advice, and encouragement helped to keep me on track and made my completing this project possible. I am grateful to Penelope Ingram for her willingness to join this project late in its development. Her insights and advice were as encouraging as they were beneficial to my project’s aims. I am indebted to Kevin Gustafson, whose careful reading and revisions gave my writing skills the boost they needed. I am a better writer today thanks to his teachings. I also wish to extend my gratitude to my school colleagues who encouraged me along the way and made this journey an enjoyable experience. I also wish to thank the late Emory Estes, who inspired me to pursue graduate studies. I am equally grateful to Luanne Frank for introducing me to Martin Heidegger’s theories early in my graduate career. This dissertation would not have come into being without that introduction or her guiding my journey through Heidegger’s theories. I must also thank my family and friends who have stood by my side throughout this long journey. This accomplishment is as much theirs as it is mine. My son, James-Edwin, has been a remarkable source of encouragement, support, and patience throughout this long process. My parents, Gene and Sheila, and grandmother, Jo, have been supportive of me every step of the way and made pursuing my doctorate possible. My cousin Phyllis has been a remarkable sounding board for my ideas and theories. My husband, Brinnith, pushed me to meet my objectives, to never give up, and to do my best at all times with honor and dignity. I thank you all. April 19, 2013 iii Abstract BLACK RHETORIC: THE ART OF THINKING BEING April Leigh Kinkead, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2013 Supervising Professor: Cedrick May This dissertation examines the Black Hermeneutic Situation in order to uncover Black Rhetoric’s possibilities for thinking Being. Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics and his theories on thinking and Being provide the theoretical framework through which this dissertation unconceals Black Rhetoric’s historical and philosophical origins in Ancient Egypt (i.e., Kemet). In order to examinine the Black Hermeneutic Situation and its saying through Black Rhetoric, this examination establishes the benefits of Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics to an analysis of Black Rhetoric’s lineage from Kemet to the United States via the Egyptian Diaspora and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Investigating the historical and philosophical origins of Black Rhetoric offers insight into the various modes of Black Rhetoric that evolved in order to confront and resist the dehumanizaing effects of white supremacy (i.e., a socio-political effort as well as a more insidious undercurrent of American culture). These modes of confrontation and resistance seek to protect, maintain, and promote human dignity through rhetorical modes of saying. Historical investigations into as well as rhetorical analyses of Slave Narratives, Black Abolitionist speeches, Black Sermons, and Civil Rights and Black Power Movement speeches reveal the evolutionary process of Black Rhetoric and unconceal the Black Hermeneutic Situation. This dissertation centers its broad historical iv narrative on close examinations of two of President Barack Obama’s speeches (A More Perfect Union and Second Inaugural Address), which provide contemporary evidence for the evolution of Black Rhetoric from Western and Kemetic rhetorical traditions to its present state as a rhetorical mode of thinking Being that resists dehumanization by reclaiming human dignity. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iv List of Illustrations............................................................................................................. vii Chapter 1 Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Black Rhetoric...................1 Chapter 2 Heideggarian Rhetoric and Black Studies .......................................................36 Chapter 3 The Evolution of Black Rhetoric from Ancient Egypt to the “New World” ........65 Chapter 4 Signifying, Revelating, and Testifying in Slave Narratives.............................107 Chapter 5 Black Abolitionist Rhetoric and Black Sermonic Rhetoric..............................162 Chapter 6 Black Rhetoric: Signifying, Poetry, and the Art of Thinking Being .................193 References .....................................................................................................................245 Biographical Information.................................................................................................255 vi List of Illustrations Figure 1-1………………………………………………………………………70 vii Chapter 1 Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Black Rhetoric “Rhetoric is nothing less than the discipline in which the self-elaboration of Dasein is expressly executed. Rhetoric is no less than the elaboration of Dasein in its concreteness, the hermeneutic of Dasein itself” (Heidegger SS 1924). In 1924, Heidegger asserted that Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric provides the first systematic hermeneutic of everyday Dasein, and he later expands this path of inquiry regarding the relationship of hermeneutics and everyday Dasein in Being and Time. There he examines Dasein’s fundamental way of Being as the only being we know of that is concerned with its Being, and Heidegger discloses Dasein as a linguistic, historical, and temporal Being that is primordially ontological and hermeneutical in its understanding of Being. Years after Being and Time, Heidegger focused on an examination of understanding thinking that reveals Dasein’s need to think Being (What is Called Thinking?). Such thinking requires not just access to language but also to memory and to poesy. For Heidegger, only poesy permits recollection, a thinking back that is necessary for Dasein to think Being properly, as temporal. As a scholar who reads Heidegger’s work holistically, as connected thoughts in a process rather than as disparate thoughts in time, I see particular themes emerge from the history and collection of Heidegger’s thoughts that lend themselves to a new way of understanding Black Rhetoric. Although Heidegger never speaks specifically about Black Experience, Black Rhetoric, or Black Hermeneutics, his theories on thinking and Being provide a model for inquiry and reveal the importance of thinking Being. Applying his phenomenological hermeneutics to my own inquiry into Black Rhetoric shall provide insight into the significant contribution Black Rhetoric makes to the history of rhetoric as a rhetoric that has the capacity to think Being. Therefore, examining Heidegger’s theories on thinking 1 as they relate to Being provides a methodological approach to examining Black Rhetoric that shall permit me to argue that Black Rhetoric thinks Being. Heidegger ends What is Called Thinking? with an assertion of what is to be learned from his text: “…the essential nature of thinking is determined by what there is to be thought about: the presence of what is present, the Being of beings” (244). As I read Heidegger, whether it is his examination of Being, discussion of everyday Dasein, exposition on thinking, or his application of phenomenological hermeneutics, I can’t help but see Heidegger’s work as offering revolutionary ways of understanding Black Rhetoric. I am not the only scholar to see the potential contributions of Heidegger’s work to critical examinations of race, as Penelope Ingram’s notable The Signifying Body: Toward an Ethics of Sexual and Racial Difference explores this topic as well. I agree with her argument that Western metaphysics “robs the racialized Other of ontology because s/he is excessively embodied and [thrown] into the position of ground” (31). Understanding her reading of Fanon through a critical lens that seeks ethical encounters “with a wholly different Other” as a necessary point of departure for an ontological understanding of beings and Being permits the interpreter the opportunity to avoid understanding representations of physical bodies as being grounded in alterity. Avoiding interpretations grounded in alterity discloses the possibilities for authentic Being-in-the-world as a potentiality of Dasein, when the Dasein in question must navigate towards a way of understanding and speaking that overcomes Western Rhetoric’s rejection of such ethical encounters (Ingram 30). To do so, I shall rely on Ingram’s claim, which argues that imagining an “ontology that accounts for difference and realizes an ethical relation with the Other” must also take into account Fanon’s understanding of the “problem of racial difference as an ontological question” while at the same time identifying that the “material body has an important role to play in the developing of an