The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. By George M. Fredrickson. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971. xiii + 343 pp. Notes and index. $10.00.)

Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860@@@Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873

Reconciliation apologies such as Representative Tony Hall's proposed congressional apology for slavery and his own apology at a reconciliation conference in Benin, West Africa raise questions about the means and standards by which representative apologies for historic group offenses may prove satisfactory. This essay explores such questions in light of John Hatch's theory of reconciliation and an analysis of Hall's apology in the context of the Benin conference. In conversation with the work of Erik Doxtader, Mark McPhail, Aaron Gresson, and Nicholas Tavuchis, the essay clarifies ways in which a public reconciliation apology differs from traditional apologia and the unique challenges confronting public discourse for racial reconciliation in the US.

Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery

This article introduces corporate historical responsibility (CHR), a concept that can guide organizations when addressing dark corporate histories. CHR holds that organizations have responsibilities toward victims of past corporate practices and toward present reconciliatory discourse. Volkswagen's discourse about its history of forced labor during WW II serves as an example of CHR. The rhetorical analysis illustrates that CHR hinges on the recognition of the past as a moral issue and on the organization's ability to create historical accountability, take responsibility, make public acknowledgements, and remember its past. It further illustrates that CHR creates sustainable policies that can strengthen corporate citizenship and serve as a means of (re-)legitimation. In order to repair broken relationships, the article concludes, organizational leaders need to overcome primary concerns with liability and invest in a shared and long-term CHR process that creates spaces for ongoing discourse about the past.

Corporate Historical Responsibility (CHR): Addressing a Corporate Past of Forced Labor at Volkswagen

This essay examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S. about how to remember the past. Because the controversy explicitly connects questions about race and cultural memory, it has generated positions that seem irresolvable; yet, ironically, the debate suggests ways in which rhetoric about race in the U.S. might begin to move beyond current impasses.

Reading the Reparations Debate

This essay features a debate in Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, in 1827 and 1828, concerning the proposals of the American Colonization Society. Arguments favoring colonization illuminate the ways in which whiteness informs and constrains the discourse of white self-professed reformers about race, nation, and public rhetoric. As constitutive rhetoric, the anti-colonization arguments of contributors to Freedom's Journal construct African Americans as agents, citizens, and empowered public rhetors. The exchange reveals key, often hidden aspects of the discourses of whites and of people of color about race and reform in the antebellum period and in the contemporary public sphere.

Jacqueline Bacon

Papers

Reading the Reparations Debate

“Acting as Freemen”: Rhetoric, Race, and Reform in the Debate over Colonization in Freedom's Journal, 1827–1828