|
Article Excerpt
Resolved by the House of Representatives that the Congress apologizes to African-Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and the laws of the United States until 1865. ("Apologizing for Slavery")
When United States Representative Tony Hall introduced this simple resolution to the House of Representatives in 1997, his proposal was greeted with vehement opposition from politicians and pundits on both sides of the color line and the political fence, as well as with hate mail from some irate US citizens. Not surprisingly, the resolution never saw the floor of the House. Nonetheless, three years later, Hall again introduced his apology measure, inspired by an event at the end of 1999 that had renewed Hall's belief in the power of apologies to heal historic wounds between alienated peoples. [1] That event was the Leaders' Conference on Reconciliation and Development (LCRD), sponsored and hosted by the nation of Benin, West Africa. Despite receiving almost no attention from the international or US press, the LCRD embodied a historic aspiration: to begin healing the untended wounds of the slave trade before the close of the second millennium. There, joining Senator James Inhofe, David Alton of the British House of Lords, and various European and African leaders who were gathered to apologize for their peoples' roles in the slave trade, Hall explained the impulse behind his initial introduction of the apology resolution in the US and offered an unofficial apology of his own to African Americans attending the conference. Participants reportedly found the apologies and the conference to be, on the whole, a meaningful step of healing in light of the legacy of slavery (Hatch, "Reconciliation as a Tragicomic Corrective"). Armed with this hope, Hall reintroduced his apology resolution in 2000.
Although the controversy surrounding the renewed resolution and the (lack of) response in the House echoed that of 1997, this sequence of events is significant to rhetorical scholarship for several reasons. First, Hall's effort demonstrates a definitively rhetorical approach to the challenges of race relations, since it embodies the assumption that words of apology can work to heal divisions and (re)constitute a more just unity across diverse groups. Second, it represents a recent international move toward using various forms of reconciliation, including apologies, to deal with deep fissures in societies where past human rights violations tarnish history and burden the present. Third, Hall's address in Benin raises questions about how representative apologies aimed at reconciling groups divided by past generations' offenses can be effective and ethical, and how rhetoricians can best assess these qualities in a reconciliation apology.
In virtually all the rhetorical literature to date, public apologies (in the contemporary sense of expressing regret for wrongdoing) are treated as a form of apologia. This move is understandable, given the etymological and historical connection between the two terms. However, theories of apologia have been so deeply rooted in the classical Greek notion of apology--defense against accusation--that their application in these cases tends to deflect attention away from the intentions and ethics we associate with the word "apology" in everyday contemporary life. Indeed, when an apology is offered in the context of reconciliation over slavery or some other historic offense, it hardly seems appropriate to understand and assess it as a rhetoric of defense for the party offering the apology. Even if we embrace William Benoit's expanded view of apologetic discourse as image restoration rhetoric, the focal point is still somewhat myopic: the self-interest of the rhetor or the entity she or he represents. (2) In this essay, I argue that when one focuses on apologies purporting to reconcile parties divided by gross human rights violations, the principal generic lens should not be apologia (at least as typically understood--strategic recovery from an accusation or loss of public esteem), but reconciliation (a dialogic rhetorical process of healing between parties). Using this lens would transform the ways rhetors and critics see the goal of apology, its primary rhetorical counterpart, and its underlying impetus toward redemption.
Beyond the disciplinary question of generic fit, profound questions of historical, political, and ethical fittingness surround collective apologies for past generations' offenses, such as slavery. Is there any validity or value to an apology for slavery? Does it make sense to try to atone for collective, even racial guilt? Can one meaningfully atone for past generations' actions? Even if there is some value in a representative apology generations after the offense, who has the right to speak for an enormous, amorphous, and diverse collective such as white Americans? Furthermore, how can a collective apology be satisfactory when the official, neutral tone that befits a representative statement contradicts the personal regret that an apology normally would express?
A single essay cannot fully do justice to these questions. However, one can begin constructing answers in light of recent scholarly studies of reconciliation and apology as well as Hall's practice of reconciliation via apology. The central theoretical lens used here is a conceptualization of reconciliation as a dialogic praxis of tragicomic rhetoric that both utilizes and surpasses existing rhetorical genres for relational repair--a process akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin terms a secondary genre. I also draw on theories of dialogic rhetoric, especially Mark McPhail's rhetoric of coherence, as well as Erik Doxtader's work on the nature of reconciliation, Aaron Gresson's concepts of racial recovery and atonement, and Nicholas Tavuchis' sociological study of apology. In light of these scholars' work, tentative answers to the questions raised above are offered.
I then examine Hall's apology to African Americans in Benin as an historical exemplar that likewise provides insights into these questions. Unlike his proposed congressional apology for slavery, his Benin apology arose within a larger process of reconciliation involving a number of participants who believed in, or were at least open to, that process. Within this reconciliation "greenhouse," his impulse to initiate a collective apology for slavery found fuller expression. Indeed, his apology address there demonstrates the insufficiency of traditional apologia and image restoration theory to account for such apologies. In contrast with another apology offered in Benin by Senator James Inhofe, Hall's address reveals the ethically transformative potential of reconciliation and exemplifies a deft rhetorical mediation of the conflicting demands placed on representative apologies. Having explored each of these dynamics in Hall's apology, I will conclude by discussing the paradox of reconciliation's liminality and the need to move beyond the traditional assumptions of apologia in rhetorical studies of reconciliation apologies.
Reconciliation: A Dialogic Rhetoric of Redemption
In the space of a decade, the term "reconciliation" has moved beyond seminary and church into public discourse, political practice, and academic analysis. While it has gained serious consideration primarily through its role in South Africa's surprising democratic rebirth, reconciliation has also figured prominently in public discourse in Australia, Northern Ireland, the US, Benin, and other nations. Rhetorical study of reconciliation is still in its infancy but offers some important perspectives to apply to the study of reconciliation apologies. In a groundbreaking analysis of South African reconciliation, Erik Doxtader demonstrated that reconciliation there through the 1990s was understood at every stage as a process of communication, a "rhetoric of rhetorical history-making" ("Making Rhetorical History" 226). In his historical exploration of the concept of reconciliation, Doxtader argues convincingly that reconciliation "is [...] a call for rhetoric and a form of rhetorical activity. In both, individuals locked in conflict employ speech to turn justifications for endless violence into mutual oppositions that set the stage for civil (dis)agreement and common understanding" ("Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/ion" 2). Significantly, Doxtader does not assume that reconciliation equals the end of contention or the achievement of harmony. Rather, it rhetorically unmakes and refashions the identities and laws of a social order in such a way that the grounds of violence are transformed into common ground for debate and dialogue.
In an earlier essay, I explored the ways reconciliation's dialogue rhetorically joins the interests of peace and justice when they have become polarized against each other amid injustice and conflict ("Reconciliation: Building a Bridge"). It does so, I argue, through a tragicomic framing of the exigence and its remedy, since the tragic frame brings evil into stark relief against some principle of the right or just, while the comic reframes offenses as misrecognitions of underlying interconnectedness among social actors in community. [3] I proposed this understanding of reconciliation as an extension of McPhail's theories of rhetorical complicity and coherence. While McPhail's earlier work leaned toward rhetoric's comic correctives for tragic complicity (a la Richard Lanham), [4] his project of "rhetoric as coherence" ultimately aims at a synthesis of dialogic and dialectic in the rhetoric of race relations and has recently emphasized the latter in light of the persistence of white resistance even to a dialogic and coherent discourse of racial reformation. [5] In keeping with the need to hold dialectical and dialogical racial perspectives in tension, I believe that optimal reconciliation discourse would interweave elements of a tragic rhetoric of redemption, which assumes clear and value-laden delineations between social agents and actions, with a comic-dialogic rhetoric premised on implicature. The former has a place in the struggle against injustice but requires the tempering qualities of a dialogic understanding of human being to transform the fight against injustice (which can turn into an unjust cycle of never-ending reprisals) into a striving for restorative justice, interweaving restored community and restored social equality. [6]
At its best, I suggest, reconciliation's tragicomic dialogue toward redemption involves most or all of the following rhetorical acts: confessing truth(s), apologizing for offenses, forgiving offenders, and engaging in a cooperative discourse regarding reparations and symbols of reunion for restorative justice. As the dialogic heart of the process, apology and forgiveness together walk the narrow ridge between justice and peace, attending to the former while reaching toward a grace that enables restoration without retribution. Inventionally interweaving these and other rhetorical acts, public reconciliation is akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a "secondary genre," a transformative combination of primary or simple genres. [7] It differs from Bakhtin's conception, however, in requiring dialogue among real agents. Unlike the novel (one of Bakhtin's examples of secondary genre), reconciliation's drama and dialogue among various actors is not engineered by an omniscient and omnipotent author (though it may be facilitated by a third party), but is co-created and negotiated among its parties through a messy and frequently contentious process. Those social actors who truly grasp reconciliation do not suppose it can be achieved through unilateral symbolic actions such as a statement of apology or the enactment of a reparations bill. Rather, they recognize that reconciliation is, and must be, a dialogic process of coordination and negotiation among differing actors and social locations, a process of respecting and responding to the Other amid the shared project of relational healing. [8] In other words, genuine reconciliation is dialogic in both the Bakhtinian and Buberian sense. [9]
As Doxtader emphasizes, reconciliation has to be understood Other-wise ("Potential of Reconciliation's Beginning"). Otherwise, it is merely a transmutation of the colonial logic that constitutes a social order from the standpoint, and for the benefit, of the dominant social group. This means that the imposition of reconciliation as a sort of ready-made generic formula or cure-all for divided societies is both problematic and dangerous. At the same time, for parties to reconsider and redefine that violent order and to forego the retaliations it provokes from them is to enter into a liminal space and time "in which the grounds of making, acting, and judging appear self-confounding" (380). Given the instability and uncertainty inherent in such attempts at social transformation, I have argued that the parties to reconciliation's hope would typically draw upon genres of reconciling action offered by religious and other cultural traditions ("Hope of Reconciliation"). In need of structure and security amid reconciliation's unsettling liminality, such parties are more likely to discuss, debate, adapt, and use (or abuse, or critique the abuse of) established rhetorical forms of healing discourse than to spontaneously fashion a discourse of reconciliation out of whole cloth--as demonstrated by the recent multiplication of historical apologies and would-be...
|
