Communicating Worldviews of Black Popular Culture: Examinations of Rhetorical and Performative Black American Authenticity within the African Diaspora.

Session Submission Type: Panel Discussion

Abstract

The analyses of this panel question and critique the various ways authenticity is rhetorically invoked and performatively embodied. The first paper is an examination of Barak Obama’s discourse and that of media outlets about the senator and presidential nominee calling attention to the ways in which Obama rhetorically invokes claims of authentic Blackness while simultaneously challenges the tenets of this identity position. An analysis of the African American and mainstream press accounts and editorial commentaries of the 2005 Senate apology for lynching points to the use of authenticity as a rhetorical trope invoked by African American press agents to challenge the event – ultimately discrediting the apology as little more than an empty gesture. An ethnographic inquiry of elders in a community on the island Guadeloupe, explores how this carefully constructed French, African, and Caribbean identity is in contest with the “authentic” Black American identity presented by the newly introduced images of Black Entertainment Television. The final analysis examines the ways in which the myth of the Strong Black Women is negotiated by black women attempting to construct and perform an authentic identity

Sub Unit

• African American Communication and Culture Division

Chair

• Erika D Molloseau, Denison University

Respondent

• Eric King Watts, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Session Organizer

• Erika D Molloseau, Denison University