Rhetoric and reality

Eric Watts studies how public discourse affects social and cultural consciousness.

n the Harlem section of New York City in the 1920s, there concentrated a critical mass of cultural energy so potent that it sent shock waves through white society as well as black. Known as the Harlem Renaissance, its literature in its early stages was especially incisive and influential. In portraying the worth and dignity of African-Americans, writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston gave content to concepts of civil rights and social equality and context to debates on race and democracy that energized the activism of W.E.B. Dubois and beyond.

That the Harlem Renaissance ultimately veered toward the salacious did not diminish its power as a cultural catalyst; indeed, it magnified it. It is that power for social change that captivates Eric Watts and is a primary focus of his award-winning career as a young scholar.

Watts, a recently tenured associate professor of communication at Wake Forest, specializes in rhetorical theory, the study of how public discourse affects social and cultural consciousness. He describes it as “the production of meaning”—how social reality is shaped. Among other influences he studies in this light is hip-hop, the phenomenal contemporary youth movement that has both transformed and been co-opted by mainstream commerce and culture.

His work to date has earned him the respect of colleagues at the University and elsewhere, as evidenced by his selection for the 2002 New Investigator Award by the rhetoric and communication theory division of the National Communication Association. The award is given annually to a junior researcher in recognition of potential excellence in rhetorical and communication theory.

According to Watts, rhetorical theory looks at the discursive strategies speakers and writers use to shape social reality and attain their persuasive objectives with the audience at hand. In the wake of September 11, for example, President Bush employed primarily emotional language in his public comments, in consonance with the country’s mood. By contrast, at the United Nations, American diplomatic language tends to be more intellectual and fact-based, he notes.

Its literary achievements were only part of the power of the Harlem Renaissance to penetrate and transform the mainstream culture of its era. Music was another, and when exposed to the unrestrained and ostentatiously sexual rhythms of jazz and blues, whites began migrating uptown from Greenwich Village hangouts to all-night cabarets and speakeasies in Harlem.

Ultimately, the civil rights criticism of Hughes and Hurston, published in such serious journals as The Messenger, The Nation and black periodicals like The Crisis and The Opportunity, turned toward analysis of what Watts describes as an early strand of “blaxploitation”—Harlem After Hours, or Primitive Harlem, with its trade in Prohibition-era alcohol, drugs, and sex and the portrayal of vice in the films of Josephine Baker. Literature with gay and bisexual themes also emerged.

But while this shift wasn’t anticipated or welcomed by many of the more serious Harlem Renaissance members, Watts notes that it too is a telling illustration of the power of popular culture to shape social reality. Another is the literature of African-American writers of the late 1940s and 1950s like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin—early voices of rage and indignation that culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Watts, a native of Cincinnati who earned his doctorate at Northwestern in 1995 and came to Wake Forest a year later, has been writing about hip-hop since the late 1980s. In its early years a strictly African-American genre with overtones of Black Nationalism, it moved over time into mainstream white youth culture. The most popular male musical artist in the world today, Eminem, is a white hip-hop singer.

The shift seems to suggest that hip-hop’s core appeal all along might have been socioeconomic, which crosses the lines of skin color, instead of racial. In place of rage and aggression are its “Stop the Violence” appeals—an indication, in Watts’ opinion, of the symbiotic relationship of transformation and cooptation between a radical new movement and the larger culture it is within. Another example he cites is the Budweiser “Whaaaas’ Up?” advertising campaign—black speech and behavior adopted by whites. Elvis Presley, Pop Art—examples are numerous of the new and the shocking becoming the standard and the familiar by its mutual interchange with prevailing cultural norms.

In his research, Watts traces the lineage of discourse over time to show that fads rarely, if ever, are totally original. Some of the Harlem Renaissance writers, for example, drew upon the economic conservatism of Booker T. Washington, who two decades earlier had urged blacks to spend money in their own communities. Other writers were influenced by black folk culture, and still others by Emersonian transcendentalism. “A trend may be new in form,” Watts says, “but it is an evolutionary process. Over time the substance is consistent.”
--David Fyten

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