Barack Obama’s Body: The Presidency, the Body Politic, and the Contest over American National Identity
Beyond the formal powers and duties laid down in the Constitution, the presidency is a cultural institution meant to represent—in a very literal sense—the American people. Presidents act as identificatory figures—symbolizing what their supporters hold sacred about the nation. Presidents’ own bodies come to matter particularly at political moments when a new or counter-interpretation of national identity challenges prevailing assumptions. Supporters often interpret their national identity in the figure of the president. As a black candidate in a historically white-ruled nation, Barack Obama’s narration of his background as representatively American has been a critical task both as candidate and as president. Both Obama’s biography and his visual presence have come to play a part in how political issues, from health care to foreign policy, get framed by both supporters and opponents. But does race stand alone in this dynamic of life story and looks? I analyze the challenges faced and opportunities afforded the Obama presidency by comparing him to earlier presidents who were politically associated with moments of broad change in American politics: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom depended heavily on biography and physical embodiment to authorize their vision of national identity. Presidential embodiment ultimately diminishes democratic politics because of the strong fixation on a singular political institution it produces.
Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage
With the 2008 election of the first African American president of the U.S., race as both subject and object has infiltrated national conversations in myriad ways. As the reality of his ascension unfolded, a counter challenge emerged. How does an enlightened society deal with the inherent contradictions of maintaining a rhetoric of racism, while insisting that the country has moved smoothly, virtually invisibly, into a postracial state? In their 2011 volume, Critical Rhetorics of Race, Michael Lacy and Kent Ono argue that altered cultural conditions and changing technologies have created new contexts for understanding the shifting performances of race and racism in contemporary discourse. As such, these conditions have signaled the emergence of a new “racial formation” invoked by Obama’s election that, in part, offers new permutations and revisions of old legacies of “racial projects from the past” (Lacy and Ono 3). While much scholarly inquiry has explored what goes into the construction of racial pathways of identity, little of that inquiry has considered the deliberate ways in which rhetoric has been used to foment racial hate and dissension. These expressions often reveal themselves not in the grand occasions of celebrated oratory, but in the familiar expressions surrounding us. As Keith Gilyard observed, “ . . . every use of language tells us something, often significant, about the user and human drama” (1). This symposium seeks to push harder past our understandings of what racism is, or how it manifests itself, to explore questions about how rhetoric has been used, with intentionality and skill, to disrupt a sense of “order and rightness,” even when these are in direct opposition to a public discourse that states otherwise (Royster 3). Yet because constructions of race and racism are inextricably tied to structures of power and privilege, it is important that rhetoricians peer deeply, even uncomfortably, into the ways that discursive, semiotic, and symbolic skill are being used to maintain those power structures at all costs. Rhetoric Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, 255–347, 2017 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2017.1355191
Negotiating the cultural and economic outcomes of sport heritage attractions: the case of the National Baseball Hall of Fame
ABSTRACT Contemporary museums must balance their roles as commercial entities and repositories of various, and often dissonant, heritages and histories. Sports museums in particular often have clear commercial and nostalgic aims, particularly through tourist visitation, though the extent to which they represent more challenging narratives remains unclear. This paper examines how one of the most famous sports museums in the world, the National Baseball Hall of Fame (NBHF) in Cooperstown, New York, balances its dual role as tourist attraction and repository of baseball's sometimes checkered past. It was found that different sections of the museum provide greater or lesser degrees of engagement with more controversial issues, although the commercial outputs and appeal of the museum remains clear throughout. Utlimately, the NBHF demonstrates that balancing veneration and critique in collections can be commercially prosperous, and can provide a template for other sport and popular culture museums who may be wary of incorporating more challenging narratives in their exhibits. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship between the Hall of Fame and the village of Cooperstown, particularly in creating and maintaining cultural and economic outputs, requires further exploration.