Minding “Our Cicero”: Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Rhetoric and the Classical Tradition

Heidi Morse
Literature and Feminist Studies
UC Santa Cruz

Heidi Morse’s dissertation documents a literary history of the Americanization of classical rhetoric as it intersected with African American education and public speaking in the nineteenth century. Black women’s strategic receptions of ancient Roman rhetorical models, she argues, altered the trajectory of American classicism by undermining its monopolization by white elites as a measure for intellectual and cultural superiority. Minding “Our Cicero” recovers an alternative history of the relationship between rhetoric and race in a series of classical reframings. Elementary pedagogical advice in Quintilian’s 95 CE Institutio Oratoria acts as a blueprint for freedpeople’s self-teaching. Anna Julia Cooper adapts rhetorical models from Cicero’s 55 BCE de Oratore in her advocacy for women’s higher education. Sojourner Truth revises her casting in the white press as the “Libyan Sibyl,” and Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s poems reverberate with the voices of black orators imagined as modern-day Romans. Joining the resources of classical scholarship with those of critical race theory and print culture, the investigation of classical receptions in the aftermath of trans-Atlantic slavery offers a philological and cultural analysis of the impact of ancient Roman antecedents on the fabrication of racial categories and their institutionalization in the U.S., particularly in the context of post-Emancipation educational access. Morse’s research advances scholarship in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of “black classicism” by foregrounding African American women whose interventions in print and oratory vis-à-vis the U.S. culture of classicism constitute an archive of liberatory uses of the classics not dependent on elite education or bodily inscriptions of social authority.