The shaman‐trickster's art of misdirection: The rhetoric of Farrakhan and the million men

Lawbreaking Jokers: Tricksters Using Outlaw Discourse

“…Other television series, such as ''The A-Team,'' ''Leverage,'' and ''Mad Men,'' also impart hero status to the con artist (who Hyde, 1998, p. 11, called America's best candidate for the updated trickster role). Modern communication scholars have recognized the trickster spirit manifested in Louis Farrakhan when he organized and spoke at the Million Man March (Arthos, 2001) and in the 1975 novel, The Woman Warrior, by feminist author Maxine Hong Kingston (as cited in Cai, 2008).…”

"Racially stuffed shirts and other enemies of mankind": Horace Mann Bond's parody of segregationist psychology in the 1950s.

“…The result is that African American rhetoric must often deal with two audiences: the sympathetic and understanding African American audience and the hostile White audience. Arthos (2001) argued that, "Unable to escape their history and identity, African Americans are caught in a double bind. This double bind creates a dual level response, speaking at once to the community that protects and community that threatens" (p. 43).…”

“…In these theatrical presentations, "Parody surfaced as a performative subversion of White authority, undermining and destabilizing racist stereotypes" (Krasner, 1995, p. 318). Such parodies were not confined to the stage; they appear throughout African American discourse in any number of rhetorical situations (Arthos, 2001;Butterfield, 1972;Lindroth, 1996;Sundquist, 1992).…”

Dessentializing Difference: Transformative Visions in Contemporary Black Thought

“…My recent (2001) review of rhetorical scholarship that draws upon the idea of double-consciousness suggests that it offers a critical method for reading symbolic and material structures as racially coded (Browne, 1998), the foundation for a discursive theory of racial identity (Wilson, 1999), and a metaphor for the dualistic character of Black life (Arthos, 2001). Research that focuses on Du Bois's contributions to political thought has suggested that the double-consciousness construct marked a conscious shift toward social activism (Holt, 1990), and that it was less a metaphor than an attempt to describe the empirical conditions of African Americans at the turn of the century (Reed, 1997).…”