Conquergood, Dwight. "Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech."
Conquergood takes “an-other” (335) look at nineteenth-century elocution practice from the perspectives of othered populations—specifically black Americans—against whom “it erected its protocols of taste, civility, and gentility” (326). Elocution practice, Conquergood argues, worked to flatten what Bakhtin would call the “heteroglossia” of language. Manuals sought to regulate the voice and eliminate oral idiosyncrasy, tapping into “the power of popular speech” while curbing “its unruly embodiments…its course and uncouth features” (327). Yet, Conquergood notes, the trope of the talking book in nineteenth-century slave narratives suggests that the relationship between elocutionary practice and racial oppression is complex. For while elocution practices promoted a racist “performance of whiteness,” reading aloud was also the means through which marginalized communities gained access to books and newspapers. Depictions of former slaves reading aloud in narratives like Frederick Douglas’s, Conquergood claims, portray oral delivery as an occasion for “filching the master’s texts in order to raid knowledge, reroute authority, and undermine power” (335).
Conquergood’s approach to elocution “from below” (326) importantly illuminates how the naturalization of upper-class whiteness is embedded into oral reading practices and techniques, both on the platform and in the home. He nods to the family reading habit as he notes that elocution’s regulation of speech was “also embodied as a general social sign of gentility as the bourgeoisie conversed, read aloud, and entertained in their parlors” (327). His analysis also demonstrates how oral delivery is and has always been politicized. Yet he also demonstrates how the practice of elocution cannot be easily characterized as a subversive tool or as a means of oppression. Conquergood’s description of elocution as speech standardization pedagogy, for example, demonstrates the practice’s divergence from the aims of its original, late-eighteenth-century practitioners. They saw the practice as democratic and liberating—an act of resistance against the deceptive sophistry of the aristocratic classes. I will find Conquergood’s essay most helpful, I anticipate, in my dissertation chapter on reading Shakespeare aloud, in which I will discuss how Victorians read Shakespeare aloud to teach raced and classed understandings of “human nature” and emotional expression.