Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery

Download or read book Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery written by Benjamin Lamb-Books and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an original application of rhetoric and moral-emotions theory to the sociology of social movements. It promotes a new interdisciplinary vision of what social movements are, why they exist, and how they succeed in attaining momentum over time. Deepening the affective dimension of cultural sociology, this work draws upon the social psychology of human emotion and interpersonal communication. Specifically, the book revolves around the topic of anger as a unique moral emotion that can be made to play crucial motivational and generative functions in protest. The chapters develop a new theory of the emotional power of protest rhetoric, including how abolitionist performances of heterodoxic racial and gender status imaginaries contributed to the escalation of the ‘sectional conflict’ over American slavery.