David Holmes

Pepperdine University · Humanities

This commentary surveys the skull scene in Django Unchained. Plantation owner Calvin Candie's appeal to the racist science of phrenology is one example of how a number of scholarly discourses have been used to justify discrimination. I maintain that, while Candie's monologue evokes the rhetoric of scientific racism, Django's and Stephen's respectiv...

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have t...

This article focuses on Fred Shuttlesworth, founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the one who convinced Martin Luther King Jr. to participate in the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963. A folksy preacher and an exceptional leader, the article examines his use of the precept hermeneutic in his rhetoric. Li...

This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of...

All of my interests in the field of rhetoric and composition-black preaching, the cultural literacy debate, and civil rights movement rhetoric- converge at the places where the evolution of race ideology and the development of meaningful pedagogy meet. I have also remained intrigued with Hugh Blair, who in 1762 became the first professor at the Uni...

Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature argues that past misconceptions about black identity and voice, codified from the 1870s through the 1920s, inform contemporary assumptions about African American authorship and ethos. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Ch...