Content area
Full Text
In the parlors, clubs, and churches of turn-of-the-century America, rhetorical instruction was popularized for audiences outside the formal academy in numerous guides to speechmaking, composition, and letter writing. Of the many forms of rhetorical instruction that were generated for new audiences none was more popular than the elocution movement Johnson 141). In this genre alone, a wide variety of texts offered instruction in breathing, gesture, pronunciation, and other elocutionary principles. In addition, collections of stories, poems, and speeches for practice and performance, commonly called "reciter texts," were also popular cultural artifacts of the time; they were found in many homes throughout the nation where individuals sought to enhance their rhetorical expertise. Not all forms of elocutionary training disseminated to audiences outside the formal academy were identical in their approach or ideology. In the African-American community in the half century after emancipation many common elocutionary principles were altered in distinctive ways in order to serve African-American students of elocution. Over the course of her long career, African-American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown (1845-1949), professor of elocution at Wilberforce University from 1893 to 1923, produced pedagogical materials confronting important issues that educators still grapple with today, such as how rhetorical instruction should address the needs of those who have a different linguistic heritage and culture. She raised questions about the relationship between schooling and social responsibility, using and transforming mainstream elocution theory in order to address these issues. The goal of Brown's pedagogy was an "embodied rhetoric," that is to say, a rhetoric located within, and generated for, the African-American community. While other popular elocutionary theorists such as S. S. Curry and J. W Shoemaker espoused the body as a central component of elocutionary study, most aspects of their work were in fact disembodied in so far as they presupposed universal principles and ideals while ignoring the social and ideological implications of their pedagogies.
Brown, on the other hand, conceives of rhetoric as fully embodied in terms of the particularities of linguistic culture, historical moment, and social responsibility. I follow Donna Haraway in using the term "embody," both here and in the essay as a whole. Haraway describes the politics embodied in knowledge-"situated knowledge," she calls it-in which the ideological implications of certain kinds of seemingly "disinterested" knowledge...