Researcher(s)
- Sheyenne Faircloth, English Education, University of Delaware
Faculty Mentor(s)
- Jessica Edwards, English, University of Delaware
Abstract
Rhetorical surveillance is the critical observance, policing, and analysis of Black Language in both written and oratory forms, particularly within a U.S. society shaped by racial hierarchies, white supremacy, and the enduring legacies of Black enslavement. Black writers, speakers, and students often face heightened scrutiny not only for how they look but for how they speak, write, and express themselves—scrutiny that undermines their credibility, intelligence, and worth. These critiques occur across educational, legal, and cultural spaces, reflecting structural and institutional policing of Black expression. Such surveillance has implications not only for literacy and representation, but also for free speech, civil rights, and rhetorical agency.
This study asks: How do Black students, writers, and speakers experience rhetorical surveillance in a racialized society, and how does that pressure shape their rhetorical choices across genres—whether to persuade, perform, preserve, or resist? Drawing on the multi-genre work of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, this project examines how Black rhetorical agency is shaped under surveillance, and how genre functions as both strategy and constraint—from speeches to poetry to legal testimony.
Methodologically, this project blends literary and rhetorical analysis with autoethnographic reflection, using frameworks such as Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice, Gramsci’s Hegemony, Foucault’s Panopticon, Freire’s Critical Consciousness, and Devitt’s theory of genre as social action. Together, these lenses explore the intersections of language, surveillance, and power, framing rhetorical surveillance as a literacy issue, a political issue, and a human rights issue.
This study contributes an original framework for understanding genre-based pressures on Black expression and names Rhetorical Surveillance as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon affecting not only literature, but education, law, and public discourse. In a context of book bans, DEI rollbacks, and suppressed racial discourse, this work argues that protecting Black rhetorical freedom across genres is a legal and constitutional imperative.