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Chapter 17
From Personalization to Parrhesia:
A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical
Recalls in Barack Obama's Political Speech
Giovanna Leone, Francesca Di Murro, and Livia Serlupi Crescenzi
17.1
Beyond Personalization: An Analysis of Barack
Obama's Autobiographical Recalls
Since his surprising victory as a former outsider in the race to become the president
of the USA, many scientific works have been devoted to exploring how much of
the political force of Barack Obama may be explained by taking into account the
features of his unconventional life (Da and McClain
2009
; Zogby
2009
; Hammack
2010
). In this interesting field of study, a specific facet that we will try to understand
more in depth here is the way in which Barack Obama himself uses self-reflections
on his own autobiographical novelty - which made him a somehow “strange”
incumbent senator from Illinois -, as a persuasive tool aimed at enhancing his
political rhetorical skills. We will propose the idea that at these moments of his
political speech, personalization turns into
parrhesia
(Foucault
2001
): a way of
speaking the truth about himself that allows this leader to later propose to his
audience to use the same frankness to cope with controversial points exposed
in subsequent arguments of his political speech, introduced after this first self-
exposure.
Within this general framework, a previous paper (Leone
2013
) already pointed
out that the theory of personalization - a widespread aspect of political leadership
characterizing present-day democracies that can be traced back to Thatcher's and
Reagan's election times (1979, 1980), or even to Trudeau's election time (1968)
(McAllister
2007
) - may not fully explain the specific features of autobiographical
recalls of Barack Obama, often shared with his audience during his political
speeches. In the present work, we pursue this line of thought in more detail by
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