Abstract
The problematization of American slavery through abolitionist discourse was as much an affective process as a cognitive one. Drawing upon nineteenth-century cultural traditions of Sentimentalism, Republicanism, and Evangelical Protestantism, abolitionist protest rhetoric framed slavery respectively as a form of cruelty, a corruption of power, and a national sin. Lamb-Books demonstrates that what made the three main abolitionist problem frames most effective was pathos and not their logos per se. Specifically, much emotional intensity stems from the status implicatures sown into the package and the resultant production of audience moral emotions. For microsociology, the affective umph or kick of status-oriented protest rhetoric is crucial for understanding what makes social movements move via the processes of charisma, identification, problematization, commitment, and persistence.
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- 1.
In his writings, Foucault held that problematizations were not determined by prior, putatively more fundamental, political, or economic processes. Instead, they could be quite original, relatively autonomous shifts in discursive structure. ‘Relatively autonomous’ that is from economy and government, not from power.
- 2.
For example, the Protestant frame defines slavery as a sin—the metaphorical schema of ‘sin’ is well understood and easily generalizable. The frame though rests upon other theological principles and narratives that give it energy, that is, the reasons an abolitionist might give for answering the question, “but why is slavery sinful?” Each of the three problem frames, identified below, emerged within and only made sense within wider cultural traditions. The frames I discuss are metaphorical condensations of meaning structures, maximizing the affective ‘umph’ of an alternate but intelligible way of viewing slavery.
- 3.
Another usage of the term, ‘emotional frame,’ is also present in the sociological literature. Emotional framing for some scholars refers to efforts to craft protest rhetoric to resonate with pre-given emotional cultures (Ruiz-Junco 2013). Helena Flam (2005a, 2005b) is more constitutive about it, and her formulation more in line with my views of big rhetoric and affective creativity.
- 4.
It could be that the word ‘frame’ is too weak then and too cognitive to do the work needed. Alternately we can conceptualize frames as inherently emotional frames so as to better acknowledge their affective kick (as discussed in the Introduction). James Jasper’s conception of the “feeling-thinking processes” of culture is especially useful here (Jasper 2014).
- 5.
The ‘man of feelings’ was replaced by the ‘moral mother’ of sentiments by the 1830s (cf. Burstein 1999). Increasing market competition and the commodification of labor were rendered acceptable only by offering a contrast to it, a refuge where kindred spirits and human warmth still thrived, the family. Home and hearth were seen as the necessary countervailing principle to a market run by self-interests. Abolitionists gained ground by using the cult of true womanhood and images of moral motherhood as bases for condemning the cruelty of slavery (Samuels 1992; Sanchez-Eppler 1992).
- 6.
Those who drafted the Constitution were of course of republican persuasion. The founding federalism of the US Constitution however, in abolitionist eyes, enshrined legal chattel slavery, thus violating republican principles.
- 7.
Another example of Garrison’s millennialist judgment rhetoric: “Yet I know that God reigns, and that the slave system contains within itself the elements of destruction. But how long it is to curse the earth, and desecrate his image, he alone foresees. It is frightful to think of the capacity of a nation like this to commit sin before the measure of its iniquities be filled, and the exterminating judgments of God overtake it” (1854:34).
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Lamb-Books, B. (2016). The Rhetoric of Slavery. In: Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31346-7_4
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