Canonizing A President
The presence of writing by an American president in an
anthology of literature is not amazing, but the editors of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of African American Literature,
3rd edition, may have to use clever rhetoric to explain why Barack
Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech of March 2008 is included. Obama can write well. Including excerpts from either Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and
Inheritance (2004) or The Audacity of
Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) might have focused
attention on Obama’s autobiographical presentation of self, but the speech
magnifies curiosity about his position in African American cultural and
political nationalism. For readers old
enough to have learned valuable lessons from Richard Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), the
selection raises deep questions about literary history and America’s love
affair with “godterms.” For those in
younger generations who detect how James Boyd White’s analysis of a 1963 speech
by Nelson Mandela in Acts of Hope:
Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (1994) contains
strategies for interpreting Obama’s oratory, the selection is vexing. The
editorial choice is ethical, political, and literary.
It is fair to guess, without access at this moment to the
Norton editors’ metatextual paraphernalia, that the editors were attracted by a
structural relationship between Obama’s use of special national tropes of
secular religion and the historical usage of biblical tropes in African
American jeremiads, polemics, and apologia.
Should the guess prove to be valid, it would be appropriate to ask why
Obama’s use of the racial binary was felicitous in addressing an omni-American
audience, or why the editors thought it was.
Politics, the politics of publishing can from time to time
sponsor ironic laughter. In the case of “A
More Perfect Union,” the Kenyan American senator who would be president is ever
so courtly in excoriating his former African American pastor for loss of faith
in the American Dream. Once the Kenyan
American achieves the Dream, a double-cross occurs as the Dream betrays his
audacity of hope. The reversal of
fortune leaves the meaning of the speech intact as it shifts the grounds for
our interpretation of significance. It
is sheer accident that the publisher of the anthology bears the same name as a
character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man, a character who says: “Self-reliance is a most worthy virtue. I shall look forward with greatest interest
to learning your contribution to my fate.”
No doubt, at the lower frequency the publisher says to the editors “I
look forward to the profit of your fate.”
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. November 29, 2013.
