Taking liberty, taking literacy: Signifying in the rhetoric of African‐American abolitionists

Abstract

This essay examines how the trope of signifying informs the rhetoric of Frederick Douglass, William Hamilton, David Walker, and Harriet Jacobs. This analysis demonstrates the importance of a rhetorical framework that arises from within the African‐American tradition itself and enhances our understanding of these rhetors’ persuasive strategies of irony, appropriation, and revision. In addition, the use of signifying by these rhetors illuminate the inherently paradoxical relationship between freedom and literacy in the lives of antebellum African Americans.