{"id":11107,"date":"2010-12-30T18:56:57","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T18:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11107"},"modified":"2015-11-08T15:14:59","modified_gmt":"2015-11-08T15:14:59","slug":"rhetoric-and-silence-in-barack-obama%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cdreams-from-my-father%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11107","title":{"rendered":"Rhetoric and Silence in Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cDreams from My Father\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rhetoric and Silence in Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cDreams from My Father\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice<\/a>
\n2009<\/a>
\n46 pages
\nISSN: 1097-3087<\/p>\n

Barbara Clare Foley<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of English
\nRutgers University, Newark, New Jersey<\/em><\/p>\n

When Barack Obama\u2019s<\/a> Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance<\/a><\/em> first appeared in 1995, it was greeted with relatively modest sales but favorable reviews: critics welcomed a politician who actually possessed writerly skills. In the wake of Obama\u2019s celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and successful bid for the Illinois<\/a> seat in the U.S. Senate, sales mounted, and a second edition appeared, this one containing the convention speech. In 2006, the audio book version, featuring the author as reader, won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album<\/a>. In 2007, a third edition was published, this time accompanied by an excerpt from Obama\u2019s 2006 policy book, The Audacity of Hope<\/a><\/em>. By July 2008, as the election neared, Obama\u2019s autobiography had been on the best-seller list for 104 weeks. As of this writing in the summer of 2009, the book has sold millions of copies and been translated into eight different languages.<\/p>\n

While Dreams from My Father<\/em> has supplied some fodder for attacks by conservative pundits, it has for the most part inspired positive reviews, many of them bordering on hagiography. Toni Morrison<\/a> praised Obama\u2019s novelistic skill in \u201creflect[ing] on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had.\u201d Joe Klein<\/a>, in Time<\/em>, proclaimed that the book \u201cmay be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.\u201d On the eve of Obama\u2019s inauguration, Michiko Kakutani<\/a>, the New York Times<\/em> critic, described Dreams from My Father<\/em> as \u201cthe most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography [ever] written by a future president.\u201d Indicating the book\u2019s popular appeal, the hundreds of reviews recorded on Amazon.com give the now-President\u2019s autobiography an overall rating of 4\u00bd stars. An informal web-based survey of college course syllabi suggests that, either excerpted or in its totality, Obama\u2019s autobiography is being frequently assigned to college students. Dreams from My Father<\/em> has proven to be an outstanding success in commercial, critical, and popular terms.<\/p>\n

Arguably, however, it is precisely because the President\u2019s literary star has ascended to such heights that his text warrants critical scrutiny.<\/strong> For success in the U.S. book market is in large part a measure not just of literary excellence or authorial prominence but also of a text\u2019s embodiment of normative assumptions about society and self. In particular, a narrative of ascent\u2014of which Dreams from My Father<\/em> is a prime example\u2014characteristically invokes dearly held myths about bootstraps individualism and social mobility, however poorly such notions may mesh with the realities of life in modern capitalist society.<\/strong> In this post-millennial moment, rife with anxieties domestic and international, economic and political, there is a particular yearning for tales about individuals who have passed over barriers and triumphed over hardships, thereby affirming the nation\u2019s transcendence of its ugly racial past and entry into a present that is, if not \u201cpost-racial\u201d\u2014the current popular buzz-word\u2014at least qualitatively more benign. To the extent that the identity quest embarked upon and achieved in Dreams from My Father<\/em> can be taken to illustrate the integrity of not just its central actor, but the nation that has chosen him to be its leader, the text functions as Exhibit A in the case for American progress.<\/p>\n

My principal goal in this essay\u2014which is directed primarily to teachers of Obama\u2019s text\u2014is to examine the various rhetorical maneuvers that the author deploys in order to render maximally persuasive his odyssey to self-knowledge. I shall engage in a study not just of literary devices\u2014which Obama handles with considerable skill\u2014but of the ideology of form. This project will involve textual analysis on both the macro-level\u2014the text\u2019s apparatus of prefaces and postscripts, its tripartite division, the structuring of its individual units\u2014and the micro-level\u2014its narrative voice, methods of characterization, deployment of metaphor. To a significant extent, however, the effect of Dreams from My Father<\/em> is contingent upon what the text does not say\u2014the structured silences that allow it to minimize or, on occasion, exclude material that might impede its ideological work.<\/strong> In order to read the text fully, I shall as needed move outside it\u2014not just to events and situations in Obama\u2019s own life that are elided in his narrative, but also to events in the life of the mysterious father who inhabits the core of the narrative. Although readers may find most provocative the occlusions and obfuscations discussed in the final portion of this essay, they are urged to view these in the context of Obama\u2019s overall rhetorical project, in which the said and the not-said are indissolubly linked…<\/p>\n

…\u201cA broader public debate\u201d: Narrative frames<\/strong><\/p>\n

The teleological<\/a> structure of Dreams from My Father<\/em> can be described in various terms: a narrative of ascent and quest; a record of redemption, reinvention and rebirth; an odyssey from isolation to belonging, alienation to community. Obama\u2019s story is distinctly gendered\u2014unabashedly Oedipal<\/a> in its focus on fathers and sons\u2014and raced\u2014it places front and center the identity dilemma of a young man of mixed descent coming to terms with the dualisms and hierarchies of a society obsessed with racial categorization. As Obama puts it in his 1995 Introduction, the text records \u201ca boy\u2019s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American\u201d (xvi). Dreams from My Father<\/em> thus invokes such classic accounts of black male self-discovery as W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s<\/a> The Souls of Black Folk<\/a><\/em>, Ralph Ellison\u2019s<\/a> Invisible Man<\/a><\/em>, and Malcolm X\u2019s<\/a> Autobiography<\/a><\/em>, as well as various autobiographical and fictional writings of James Baldwin<\/a> and Richard Wright<\/a>\u2014many of which are referenced, implicitly and explicitly in the course of Obama\u2019s narrative. Where these earlier explorations of selfhood characteristically end in defeat or ambivalence, however, Obama\u2019s journey\u2014described throughout the text by means of a trope of voyaging, charting, and traveling the seas\u2014ends in a triumphal homecoming. The text assures its readers that, although not without a few false starts that were soon corrected, its protagonist has moved from a child\u2019s non-racial consciousness through an ambivalent Third Worldism<\/a> to a confident blend of cosmopolitanism<\/a> and American nationalism, bolstered by an ecumenical optimism that Obama loosely terms \u201cfaith.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rhetoric and Silence in Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cDreams from My Father\u201d Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 2009 46 pages ISSN: 1097-3087 Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey When Barack Obama\u2019s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance first appeared in 1995, it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,1196,8,20],"tags":[4923,4922,4908,21808,21807],"class_list":["post-11107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-barbara-c-foley","tag-barbara-clare-foley","tag-barbara-foley","tag-cultural-logic","tag-cultural-logic-an-electronic-journal-of-marxist-theory-and-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43822,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11107\/revisions\/43822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}