Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Stephen Biko's Rhetorical Vision of Black Consciousness

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  • Stephen Biko was a black leader in South Africa who died in police custody on September 12, 1977. Biko's death echoed within the Republic of South Africa and around the world, showing that racial tensions in that country were severe. At his death he was a hero to the black majority and a threat to the white minority. The rhetoric that survives reveals Biko's dominant themes. Biko worked to create an awareness among blacks that it was possible to combat white suppression. Four main themes, I argue, emerge from a study of his rhetoric. They are Black Humanity, Black Unity, Black Courage, and Black Self-Reliance. These themes became part of the ideology behind the Black Consciousness Movement and stood in opposition to four themes of white dominance: dehumanization, separation, fear, and control. In his work on rhetoric and the construction of social reality, Ernest G. Bormann suggests that certain "fantasy themes" within a group's rhetoric "chain-out" and become the "rhetorical vision" that a group holds in common. The fantasy themes, and in turn the rhetorical vision, can motivate the group to action. The purpose of this study, then, is to analyze the fantasy themes within Biko's rhetoric to learn more about the role of rhetoric in social movements and in the constitution and reconstitution of Black Consciousness.
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