Servants, Masters, and the Coercion of Labor: Inventing the Rhetoric of Slavery, the Verbal Sanctuaries Which Sustain It, and How It Was Used to Sanitize American Slavery's History

by David K. O'Rourke

Overview

This book by David K. O'Rourke presents a study of language and linguistic forms and the roles they played in the initial imagining, developing, and maintaining of a society based on coerced labor. It focuses especially on the contexts of coercion and on the differences in the roles of masters and servants from society to society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433125171
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	12/28/2015
Series:	Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics , #91
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

David K. O’Rourke writes extensively in the area of cultural history, especially on the destructive history of utopianism and social idealism. He co-wrote and produced the documentary film Red Terror on the Amber Coast, describing the KGB repression during the Soviet’s fifty-year occupation of the Baltic Republics following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He is the author of Demons by Definition: Social Idealism, Religious Nationalism, and the Demonizing of Dissent (Lang, 1998); How America’s First Settlers Invented Chattel Slavery: Dehumanizing Native Americans and Africans with Language, Laws, Guns, and Religion (Lang, 2005); and Oikos – Domus – Household: The Many Lives of a Common Word (Lang, 2013). He is also a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Contents: Words, Methods, and Contexts – Masters and Servants: Whence the Words? – Retro-writing History – In Praise of Modern Mastery and Its Invention – The Root of Our Slavery Rhetoric: Rhetoric Voices Popular Sentiment. Rhetoric Takes Common Speech and Raises It to a Public Art – The Arrogant Rhetoric of Repression – The Mapping of Colonial Rhetoric – Colonial Rhetoric and the Grand Utopian Vision – The Coffle March.