Oratory, Embodiment, and US Citizenship in Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio

Abstract

close of nineteenth century African Americans had, in theory, achieved rights of citizenship. The official language of federal government asserted equality of blacks, and African American men secured right to vote. In actuality, however, as has been noted, 1890s formed nadir of US race relations; approximately 200 black men were lynched per year, and turn of century witnessed race riots in New York, New Orleans, and Atlanta. A continuing racist ideology that constructed blacks as degenerate, criminal, and inferior paved way for systematic stripping away of rights and protections ostensibly guaranteed by Fourteenth Amendment and 1875 Civil Rights Act. The passage of Jim Crow laws, refusal of many trade unions to admit black members, revision of state constitutions in South to eliminate virtually all African American voting rights, and social practice in North and South belied federal government's guarantee of full citizenship and effectively denied African Americans any means of achieving social, political, or economic equity. By 1901 William Dunning could declare in Atlantic Monthly that the undoing of Reconstruction is nearing completion (448). 1 The dire social and political conditions for black Americans at this historical moment prompted employment of various strategies for regaining rights of citizenship. African American writer Sutton E. Griggs's 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio uses strategy of developing language to create, recreate, and sustain spaces of democratic political participation in United States. In this text, language itself functions as an important arena for political practice. The novel focuses on use of oratory as a fundamental means of securing and exercising political rights, and showcases characters who employ republican oratorical traditions to participate in political processes and institutions of United States. Such characters engage in dialogue with members of institutional elite, such as university presidents, newspaper editors, and government officials, in attempt to forge potential points of entry into nation. Griggs repeatedly describes protagonists' eloquent declamations and their rhetoric is marked by a faith in linear progress of history and an adulation of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Mastery of oratory thus functions as a linguistic marker of one's fitness for citizenship and one's subscription to republican ideals of Americanness. The characters in text initially

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