Mark Lawrence McPhail

Complicity: The theory of negative difference

The critical consideration of “the other”; has become a key strategy in many feminist, afrocentric, and rhetorical theories of discourse. Scholars in these areas have explicated various indictments of the phallocentric, eurocentric, and essentialist linguistic strategies defined and perpetuated by dominant population groups, and some have begun the difficult task of addressing the complicitous nature of hegemonic discourse. This essay explores the problem of complicity as it is manifest in contemporary critical theories of race, gender, and rhetoric. The analysis suggests that these theoretical approaches maintain the principle of negative difference by their adherence to an underlying epistemological principle of essentialist logic, yet offer the possibility of a theory of rhetoric discourse grounded in an affirmative approach to linguistic and social definition.

From complicity to coherence: Rereading the rhetoric of afrocentricity

Molefi Kete Asantes Afrocentricity offers an analysis of the role of Africa in postmodern history that calls into question many of the basic assumptions of Western thought. Critics of Afrocentric thought contend that it advocates a wholesale rejection of Eurocentric worldviews and illustrates an underlying paradox that emerges in much postmodern thought: the complicitous acceptance of the assumptions of essentialism. This essay explores this paradox by illustrating the common grounds of Afrocentric and Eurocentric thought, the extent to which each way of knowing is implicated in the other, and the possibility of moving beyond the complicity of essentialist epistemology to a coherent integration of opposites.

Passionate intensity: Louis Farrakhan and the fallacies of racial reasoning

Louis Abdul Farrakhan has become an important voice in African and European American debates about racial identity and equality. This essay examines Farrakhans rhetoric through the lens of complicity theory to provide a theoretical amplification of the notion of “symbolic realignment,” a critical examination of the epistemological commitments undergirding Farrakhans rhetoric, and a practical exploration of the problems and possibilities his oratory presents for our understanding of rhetoric and race in America.

Dessentializing Difference: Transformative Visions in Contemporary Black Thought

Contemporary African American communication scholarship has produced a number of theoretical perspectives that enlarge our understanding of the intellectual and cultural dimensions of identity, difference, and diversity. This article offers dialogic coherence as a viable framework for the discussion of contemporary African American rhetorical and political thought and practice. Drawing on the insights of progressive Black thinkers such as Michael Eric Dyson, bell hooks, and Cornel West, the article illustrates how coherence theory reveals a theoretical trajectory of spiritually inspired militancy that enriches the emancipatory potential of contemporary Black thought and rhetorical inquiry.

From black and white to living color: A dialogic exposition into the social (re) construction of race, gender, and crime

Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness.” By Herman Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; pp.xii + 201; cloth

Race and sex in black and white: Essence and ideology in the spike lee discourse

22.95. Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities. By Angharad N. Valdivia (Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995; pp. viii + 332; paper

(E)raced Men: Complicity and Responsibility in the Rhetorics of Barack Obama

19.95. Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. By Gregg Barak (Ed.). New York: Garland Publishing, 1994; pp. xviii + 322; paperback

Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage

18.95.

Quantum Inferential Leaps: The Rhetoric of Physics.

Contemporary popular and academic commentators have criticized mainstream media for its negative depictions of African Americans and women, and have begun to consider the same phenomenon in the works of communicators of color. This article analyzes the critical consideration of race and gender in the films of Spike Lee that feature depictions of women and interracial relationships. It argues that Lees films subscribe to essentialist conceptions of race and gender that reify the same ideological and epistemological assumptions and practices that undermine both the representation of race and gender in mainstream media, and the emancipatory potential of Afro‐centric and oppositional discourses.

Barack Obama's Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation

The dynamic tensions that mark contemporary discussions of race gravitate persistently between historical realities and symbolic fictions. Nowhere is this tension more powerfully and provocatively revealed and concealed than in the rhetoric of Barack Obama. Our essay interrogates this simultaneity by juxtaposing rhetorics of race and responsibility in two of Obamas speeches: his June 15, 2008, Fathers Day speech before the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, and his Remarks to the NAACP Centennial Convention on July 17, 2009.