Double‐Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship. By Robert E. Terrill. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. 203 pp.

Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship. By Robert E. Terrill. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. 203 pp. In the opening pages of Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Robert E. Terrill describes his work as "an extended reflection on the interdependency of rhetoric, duality, democracy, and race" (p. xii). Rather than situating Obama's rhetoric as the active constitution of U.S. identity and citizenship, per se (e.g., how does Obama define U.S. American citizenship? To whom does Obama grant citizenship? How does Obama reinforce or challenge traditional notions of citizenship?), Terrill views Obama's discourse through the lens of inventional criticism and rhetorical competence. As a methodological approach, inventional criticism emphasizes the importance of engaging and criticizing public discourse as a practical rhetorical resource; it calls individuals to explore texts pedagogically and to uncover the exemplary rhetorical practices, from figures to arrangement to delivery, that might better equip citizens to participate in meaningful public conversations. Terrill makes his commitment to rhetorical competence clear early in Chapter 1 when he states that "the more apt citizens become in the interpretive and productive practices associated with the invention of public discourse, the more likely they are to become engaged and critical participants in civic culture" (p. 10). In other words, Terrill's analysis is not so much concerned with how one of Obama's specific speeches might affect audiences to think or act in particular ways as it is with how an individual might engage Obama's rhetorical corpus as a means of informing her or his own attempts to deliberate with other citizens. Given Obama's identity as the first black citizen to hold presidential office, Terrill's work is particularly insightful regarding race. Chapter 2 underscores Terrill's interest in exploring the intersection of race, citizenship, and rhetorical competence by turning to the inventional possibilities associated with W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of double-consciousness. Terrill lays out Du Bois's thinking regarding the always present tensions--a simultaneous being a part of and being apart from--experienced by a person of color who is constituted under the watchful eye of the white gaze. With Du Bois's idea as a starting point, Terrill points to Obama's public discourse as an exemplar of a democratic double-consciousness wherein a speaker's personal discernments and experiences provide an opportunity "to address the alienation experienced by marginalized individuals who would gain full recognition as citizens but also for its potential to help repair the rent fabric of civic life by providing perspectives and attitudes that contribute to the practices of citizenship itself' (p. 28). The rest of the book, then, examines Obama's rhetoric as a "racially marked and representative citizen" and illustrates how his public discourse, rife with dualities, oppositions, and the nuanced examination of diverse perspectives, provides insight, and even instruction, into performative citizenship (p. …