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Abstract
In this essay, I propose that agency (1) is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; (2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal. Those claims are illustrated and confounded through an analysis of the text, created by a white woman twelve years after the event, of the speech allegedly delivered by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 woman's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.
Notes
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is professor and chair of communication studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. This essay was originally presented in a plenary session at the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies Conference at Northwestern University on September 12, 2003. Correspondence to: Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455‐0427. [email protected]
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1956).
[2] Sharon Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), esp. 155–69. Joel Weinsheimer, “The Philosophy of Rhetoric in Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1650–1800: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 1, ed. Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS Press, 1994). See also Art Walzer, George Campbell: Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
[3] Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 134. See also Oxford English Dictionary, A1.
[4] Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text,” 593–612, Cultural Studies, ed. Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also A. J. Minnis, “The Significance of the Medieval Theory of Authorship,” in Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar Press, 1984) in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. Sean Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 23–30.
[5] See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economies of Linguistic Exchanges,” in Social Science Information 16 (1978): 648, where he points out that “competence” in linguistic performance does not mean grammatical correctness or clarity; rather, it includes “the right to speech,” which is the right to speak “the authorized language which is also the language of authority. Competence implies the power to impose reception.”
[6] Michelle Ballif, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 90.
[7] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), 12, 112, passim. Elsewhere, she emphasizes the need “to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative … For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and time again.” In “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” 35–57, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995), 46–47.
[8] Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).
[9] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: I. Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Rée (London: NLB, 1976), 256–69; here Sartre uses “The Jew (as the internal, serial unity of Jewish multiplicities)” as an example of a serial relationship (267), which is analogous to Young's application of this concept to woman.
[10] They can become a group through some transformative event, such as events that precipitate the filing of a class action suit, for example.
[11] Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Signs 19 (Spring 1994): 713–38; cited material on 737. I thank Zornitsa Keremidchieva for calling this essay to my attention. This is in contrast to the collective standpoint theory posited by Kathi Weeks in Constituting Feminist Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. 133–37.
[12] Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxv.
[13] I am struck by a link to Francis Bacon's Idol of the Theatre in which individuals are led into error by presuming that the ideology or religion to which they subscribe is anagogic. In The Self After Postmodernity, Calvin O. Schrag links narrative, identity, and discourse: “Narratives need to be told by someone to someone. If narrative does not tell a story to someone, then it is not narrative; if discourse is not a rendition by someone, then it is not discourse” (26). Later, using Paul Ricouer's Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147–48, Schrag contrasts Idem-identity, an appeal to objective criteria of identification, and Ipse-identity, “the identity of selfhood, the sense of identity at issue in the occasioning of personal identity, the sense of identity applicable to a person's character, which for Ricoeur finds its direct analogue in ‘character’ as a protagonist in a story” (35). Still later, he adds: “The distinctive characteristics that make up self-identity can profitably be analyzed into the performance of roles” (39). I leave the discussion of publics and counterpublics for another occasion. On this issue, see, in particular, Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 1990). See also “The Forum: Publics and Counterpublics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 410–54.
[14] I thank Chani Marchiselli for her perceptive discussion of this distinction.
[15] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 27, 174.
[16] Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–49. Cited material on 242.
[17] Ice-T, “Straight Up Nigga,” on O. G. Original Gangster, Warner Brothers, 1991. I thank Kirt Wilson for introducing me to this.
[18] (New York: Bantam, 1981), PP.
[19] George A. Kennedy, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 289.
[20] Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), VI.16, p. 29. See the commentary on this passage in Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 263–74, which emphasizes the close relationship between the revelation of character (ethos) and thought (dianoia).
[21] Ballif, 43, 190–91, citing Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1978), 3, 224–26.
[22] Detienne and Vernant, 4. They also write: “Aristotle says that in the art of navigation there can be no general knowledge applicable to every case, no certain knowledge of all the winds that furrow the waters of the sea” (224). The binary Ballif sets up seems to apply only to Plato.
[23] See, for example, Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31,.
[24] Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67.
[25] Michael Leff, “The Idea of Rhetoric as Interpretive Practice: A Humanist's Response to Gaonkar,” 89–100, in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), cited material on 97.
[26] Despite the best efforts of feminists, contemporary US rape laws and their enforcement continue to blame women for sexual assault. See, for example, Stephen J. Schulhofer, Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). On homophobia, see, for example, Jacqueline Zita, Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), esp. “Heterosexual Anti-Biotics,” 35–60. On colonialism, see, among others, Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). On anti-Semitism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George Becker (New York: Schocken, 1948), or Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. Eric de Mauny (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948). The idea that the “other” saps or destroys one's ability to obtain pleasure is a recurrent strand in misogynist rhetoric around the world and currently is an important element in the rhetoric of Shiv Sena, the Hindu Nationalist Party of India, in its attacks on Indian Muslims. Abhik Roy, “Myth, Masculinity, and Hindu Militant Rhetoric: A Case Study of Shiv Sena,” Unpublished paper available from the author at Howard University, Washington, DC.
[27] See, for example, Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” 56–90, Society, Culture, and the Media, ed. M. Gurevitch et al. (London: Methuen, 1982).
[28] The failure to record the words of women is an example of women's recurring loss of historical agency. Accordingly, we have no texts for speeches delivered to state legislatures by Lucy Stone, Clarina Howard Nichols, and many others.
[29] “Sojourner Truth,” The Woman's Journal, 5 August 1876: 252, cited in Fitch and Mandziuk, 19. By contrast, in its report on the Anti-Slavery Convention, Rochester, New York, 15 March 1851, the Liberator of 4 April 1851:1 comments: “She possesses a mind of rare power, and often, in the course of short speeches, will throw out gems of thought.” In Susan Pullon Fitch and Roseann M. Mandziuk, Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story and Song (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 139.
[30] Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time [Battle Creek, MI, 1884]. Olive Gilbert and Frances Titus, Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; with a History of her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life” (1878; rpt. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1990).
[31] “Describing the happenings of 1844, historian Charles Sheffeld commented: ‘Sojourner Truth, the African sibyl, could hold an audience spellbound, and her singing always brought forth applause.’” In Fitch and Mandziuk, 16, citing Berenice Lowe, “Michigan Days of Sojourner Truth,” New York Folklore Quarterly 12 (Summer 1956): 127–35.
[32] See, for example, Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 179–82, 198–200.
[33] National Anti-Slavery Standard, 2 May 1863, p. 2; in Fitch and Mandziuk, 103–4. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1863: 473–80. Stowe quoted Truth in southern dialect similar to that used by Gage, creating a somewhat comic effect based on her apparent illiteracy. A reproduction of William Wetmore Story's sculpture, The Libyan Sibyl (1861), Metropolitan Museum of Art, which may have been Stowe's inspiration, is reproduced in Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37. This analogy, among other things, she argues, dehistoricized Truth.
[34] Narrative, 1878, 133–35; Fitch and Mandziuk, 40; Carla Peterson cites evidence that Truth understood that all writing involved interpretation. See esp. 33.
[35] This is the version that appears in the History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882), 116; in Fitch and Mandziuk, 105–106. I use it because it is the longer and more frequently cited version of the text. Italics added.
[36] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World/ A Harbinger Book, 1957), 13.
[37] In Fitch and Mandziuk, 107.
[38] Cited in Fitch and Mandziuk, 18, 74.
[39] See speeches by these authors in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989). Similarly, the exclusion of freedwomen from what became the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution is foreshadowed in her words here, concerns that Truth addressed explicitly in her speeches at the American Equal Rights Association convention in 1867, also in the source cited above.
[40] See illustration of antislavery token, New Jersey, 1838, in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagin Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 208. Reporting on a Lecture by Sojourner Truth, Anthony Street, New York City, 7 November 1853, the New York Tribune 8 November 1853: 6, wrote that “Pendant from the pulpit cushion was a banner of white satin, on which was inscribed: ‘Ashtabula County. Am I not a Woman and a Sister?’” in Fitch and Mandziuk, 155.
[41] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. I, 1848–1861 (rpt. Salem NH: Ayer, 1985), 116–17.
[42] See Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), for evidence of Kelley's controversial activities.
[43] Peterson, 46; citing a newspaper account in the Narrative (1878), 204.
[44] The report of the 1851 speech in the Liberator of 13 June 1851:4 includes this statement: “The power and wit of this remarkable woman convulsed the audience with laughter.” That comment hints at the close relationship between aesthetic pleasure and cultural racism. Dixon was the author of Birth of a Nation. Thomas Nelson Page was the author of the novel Red Rock (1898) and two volumes for children, Two Little Confederates (1888) and Among the Camp (1891), and a biography of Robert E. Lee (1911), among others.
[45] “Gage wrote her account … while living on the South Carolina Sea Islands … [T]he speech itself seems to assimilate her [Truth] to the South Carolina slave characterized by a heavy black dialect and the use of the term ‘nigger,’ not present in the 1851 version nor, I believe, in any of Truth's other speeches” (Peterson, 53).
[46] See the article from the Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph cited in Fitch and Mandziuk, 37–38, and other supporting evidence “that her speech was in fact very similar to that of the unlettered white people of her time” (38).
[47] Carleton Mabee with Susan Mabee Newhouse, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 64.
[48] Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1926; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15; Peterson, esp. 45–46, 48–50, 54–55, 205–206.
[49] On debunking, see Mabee and Newhouse, esp. 67–82; Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996). For its continuing influence, see, for example, Deborah Gray White, Ar'nt I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), who writes: “Truth's experience serves as a metaphor for the slave woman's general experience … Slave women were the only women in America who were sexually exploited with impunity, stripped and whipped with a lash, and worked like oxen … Only black women had their womanhood so totally denied” (161–62).
[50] Painter, 284–285. She refers to Truth as an “invented great,” which includes figures such as Jesus and Joan of Arc, who are “known purely through the agency of others, who have constructed and maintained their legends” (285).
[51] See, for example, Angela Y. Davis, Woman, Race and Class (New York: Random/Vintage, 1981), esp. 3–29, 60–64. “[H]er construction of her own identity derives specifically, as Jean Fagin Yellin has noted, from her historical experience as a slave whose productive and reproductive labor has been owned and exploited by slaveholders” (81). In Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 81, cited in Peterson, 53.
[52] Author Marietta Holley (1836–1926) wrote a series of 20 domestic novels between 1873 and 1914; her most feminist works are My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet's (1873) and Sweet Cicely (1885). See also Samantha on the Woman Question (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913). Her books were very popular. Samantha at Saratoga (1887) made the national “best seller” list for the decade 1880–1890, which required sales equivalent to one percent of the US population or approximately 500,000-600,000. See Jane Curry, “Samantha ‘Rastles the Woman Question’ or ‘If God had Meant Wimmen Should be Nothin’ but Men's Shadders, He Would Have Made Gosts and Fantoms of ‘Em at Once,” Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1975): 823 n 5. Samantha speaks in a quaint, comical dialect of one who lacks formal education. In the report of an “Address by a Slave Mother, First Congregational Church”, New York City, 6 September 1853, the New York Tribune of 7 September 1853:5 reports: ‘Mrs. Truth … speaks very fluently in tolerably correct and certainly very forcible style, and the latter quality of her address is rather enhanced by her occasional homely and therefore natural expressions.’” In Fitch and Pullon, 145.
[53] Quoted in Esther Terry, “Sojourner Truth: The Person Behind the Libyan Sibyl,” Massachusetts Review 26 (Summer-Autumn, 1985): 442, cited in Peterson, 29.
[54] John Wideman, “Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of Black Voice in American Literature,” American Poetry Review (September/October 1976): 35, 36, cited in Peterson, 31.
[55] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989), 99–102.