Debts past due: a rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the United States
Golding, Wallace Singleton
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130087
Description
Title
Debts past due: a rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the United States
Author(s)
Golding, Wallace Singleton
Issue Date
2025-07-08
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Murphy, John M
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Murphy, John M
Committee Member(s)
Finnegan, Cara A
Cisneros, Josue D
Mortensen, Peter
Department of Study
Communication
Discipline
Communication
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
reparations
citizenship
rhetorical history
Abstract
This dissertation maps the rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the United States through three watershed periods along its trajectory: Civil War-era land redistribution debates, 1960s and 1970s Black nationalist reparations advocacy, and contemporary (2010) reparations discourse. In each period, advocates reimagined what reparations were and why they were necessary to secure Black freedom within and without the United States. I argue that we should not understand these periods in isolation, but rather as an interconnected string of rhetoric across time, a Black reparations tradition. I analyze various widely circulated and important texts from each period to demonstrate how strategies appear, recur, and take on new meanings across this long history. This project has three specific goals as a result. First, it analyzes the rhetorical strategies and arguments deployed by Black reparations advocates in different periods. Second, it examines how this discourse has evolved over time and responded to new contexts and constraints. Third, it investigates how reparationists’ strategic choices and lines of argument disrupted, refuted, or otherwise contested the prevailing racial logics of each period. By doing so, this project seeks to understand better how rhetors in different contexts looked to the past to invent new visions of reparative justice.
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