Slavery and Oratory: Frederick Douglass within the Historical past of Rhetoric
By Rob Goodman, Toronto Metropolitan College
Frederick Douglass’s antislavery and antiracist oratory is a strong case examine of the appropriation and transformation of the “instruments of the grasp.” Douglass’s formative publicity to the classical rhetorical custom is well-known—however simply as vital are the methods during which he subverted it. He did so by creating a categorically new, hybrid position: the speaking slave. Slavery performed an vital position within the conceptual equipment of the Cicerian rhetoric that Douglass absorbed: it conceived of speech as a keen, non permanent submission to the harms generally related to slavery. A proof of the facility of Douglass’s speech ought to start along with his translation of the speaker-slave identification from the metaphorical to the literal airplane. Drawing on Douglass’s self-education in rhetorical self-discipline and artistry, an account of the symbolic makes use of of slavery in classical rhetoric, and Douglass’s personal oratory, I reconstruct his declare to embody classical rhetoric in a uniquely vivid method.