Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism.

• Author: McPhail, Mark Lawrence
• Position: Book Review

Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism. By Dexter B. Gordon. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003; pp. xv + 257. $50.00.

In October of 1995, Minister Louis Abdul Farrakhan, leader of the Black Nationalist Nation of Islam, succeeded in the symbolic, spiritual, and physical realignment of one million African American men, inducing them to travel from across America to the nation's capital, to Washington, D. C. Minister Farrakhan, like the geographical space in which he spoke, embodied many of America's most profound and enduring contradictions and tensions: those that stand between the dreams of democracy and the constraints of conservatism, between the possibilities of progress and the preclusions of patriarchy, between the exclusions of color and the inclusions of conscience.

Although Farrakhan's message was heard by Americans of all persuasions, his message resonated most with the million black men who embodied the ongoing struggle for identity and identification that has characterized the experience of peoples of African descent throughout American history. Denied participation in the republic, defined as less than human but for the sake of expediency, black people in general, and black men in particular, have long sought to be included in that many out of which one people would emerge, have used any means of persuasion necessary to induce white Americans to listen, and act, and live out the meaning of this nation's creed. The means of persuasion invoked by Farrakhan, long tied to the constitutive rhetorical efforts of black Americans, revealed how the ideological problems and possibilities of American social and symbolic life remain deeply embedded in the unreconciled strivings of a collective yet divided past.

It is thus fitting that Dexter B. Gordon begins his insightful examination of black nationalist rhetotic of the nineteenth century with the words of its most vocal contemporary proponent: Minister Louis Abdul Farrakhan. As the leader of what is perhaps the most influential black nationalist organization in American history, the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan's voice resonates with a long tradition of rhetorical appeals advanced by black rhetors in their attempts to create identification amidst a culture of material and ideological divisions. Gordon invokes Farrakhan's Million Man March address as a representative anecdote of black nationalist rhetoric, which not only "pushed the debate about 'race' to the forefront of American public discourse," but also "demonstrated the potential power of a black nationalist ideology to unify and mobilize blacks in the face of material and symbolic alienation" (p. 1). Through an examination of this alienation, grounded in an inclusive exploration of contemporary rhetorical theories, Gordon artfully interrogates the ideological origins of black nationalism, its constitutive impulses and epistemological complicities, and the potential it holds for reshaping the recovery of race in American life and language.

In Chapter One, "The Making of a Constitutive Rhetoric of Black Ideology," Gordon defines the black nationalist agenda...