The Insistent Call: Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929-1937

The Insistent Call: Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929-1937

by Aric Putnam
The Insistent Call: Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929-1937

The Insistent Call: Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929-1937

by Aric Putnam

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Overview

Throughout the nineteenth century, African heritage played an important role in black America, as personal memories and cultural practices continued to shape the everyday experience of people of African descent living under the shadow of slavery. Resisting efforts to de-Africanize their values, customs, and beliefs, black Americans invoked their African roots in public arguments about their identity and place in the "new" world. At the outset of the twentieth century many still saw Africa primarily as the source of a common cultural and spiritual past. But after the 1920s, the meaning of African heritage changed as people of African descent expressed new relationships between themselves, the United States, and the African Diaspora.

In The Insistent Call, Aric Putnam studies the rhetoric of newspapers, literature, and political pamphlets that expressed this shift. He demonstrates that as people of African descent debated the United States' occupation of Haiti, the Liberian labor crisis, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, they formed a new collective identity, one that understood the African Diaspora in primarily political rather than cultural terms. In addition to uncovering a neglected period in the history of black rhetoric, Putnam shows how rhetoric that articulates the interests of a population not defined by the boundaries of a state can still motivate collective action and influence policies.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781558499782
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date: 09/27/2012
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 168
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Aric Putnam is associate professor of communication at the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Rhetoric and Diaspora 1

1 The Politics and Practices of Colonialism 15

2 Black Ethos and the Rhetoric of Pan-Africa 33

3 "Unhappy Haiti": U.S. Imperialism, Racial Violence, and the Politics of Diaspora 53

4 "Modern" Slaves: The Liberian Labor Crisis and the Politics of Race and Class 74

5 Ethiopia Is Now: J. A. Rogers and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia 97

6 Anticolonial Rhetoric and Black Civil Rights History 119

Notes 131

Index 155

What People are Saying About This

Jacqueline Bacon

The Insistent Call is well grounded in current scholarship, and the author defines clearly his place in the debates and his extension of current thought.

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