Abstract
Whereas chapter 2 discussed the language and context of slavery from early in the fifteenth century into the twentieth century, this chapter suggests, ever so briefly, some twentieth-century and twenty-first-century instances before examining Barack Obama and slavery, especially in one speech in 2012. There are people alive who can remember the Holocaust and the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and thus the ghastly dogma of white supremacy was being played out violently. The end of apartheid in South Africa is very recent, and Nelson Mandela, so courageous in his battle with it, has been in and out of hospital this year (2013), some of his respiratory problems apparently arising from the tuberculosis he contracted while in jail on Robbin Island. The body of the book began with Zurara’s language in describing slavery and ends with Obama’s representation of slavery.
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Notes
For the speech, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe_ud_5XTBs. For the transcript of the speech, see Lynn Sweet, “Obama at Clinton Global Initiative: Hits at sex slavery. Transcript,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 25, 2012. For a story on the speech, see Mary Bruce, “Obama Outlines Efforts to Prevent ‘Modern Slavery,’“ ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/ politics/2012/09/obama-outlines-efforts-to-prevent-modern-slavery/. As this is an electronic resource, all references to the speech will be to this website, so that one note will suffice as there are no page numbers on the webpage. I am using Obama here as the agent and speech-writer, not knowing who wrote the speech. He approved it and delivered it. I know, however, that while Churchill wrote his own speeches, Margaret Thatcher, who could deliver a speech well, did not. Shakespeare’s texts are unstable, but I use Shakespeare as the textual agent or author, partly as shorthand. The text speaks to audience and reader.
For the range of meanings of “yfel,” including “wicked” and “bad,” see Joseph Bosworth, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1838), 489–90. For an example of “yfel” in the Alfredian Boethius, see James Wilson Bright, Bright’s Anglo- Saxon Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1891), 46.
William Shakespeare,Measure for Measure, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans with J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 596.
For a discussion of “barbarian “and its cognates, “civis,” and “polis,” see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (1982; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 15.
Phillis Wheatley, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Native African and a Slave (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834), 72. For my own extensive discussion of slavery, texts by slaves and related contexts, see, for instance, Jonathan Hart, Contesting Empires: Opposition, Promotion, and Slavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
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© 2013 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Obama and Slavery. In: From Shakespeare to Obama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_11
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