Invention

Chapter 1 uses a historical, and notably unconventional, example of witnessing to demonstrate how bearing witness involves sometimes radical and purposeful rhetorical invention (or reinvention) of historical fact. In his Cotton States Exposition Address (1895), Booker T. Washington, a former slave, romanticized the pre–Civil War South with curious irony. This counterintuitive example indicates that witnesses bear witness in public only if social, political, or moral authorities permit their testimonies. In Washington’s case, the authorities in question presided over the economic and political institutions of the post-Reconstruction South. Witnesses are either broadly empowered or narrowly constrained in their ability to invent a version of the past that presiding officials and the public at large may welcome, according to existing standards of decorum or conventions of praise and blame. Witnessing, this chapter argues, is rhetorically inventive insofar as witnesses testify by appearing to present unmediated recollections of the past; yet such apparently unmediated accounts are effects of rhetorical invention constrained by the dictates of immediate sociopolitical hierarchies.