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After describing his life in a parrhesiastic way, Obama invites his audience to
join him in this risky communicative game. He is aware of the danger of proposing
such a realistic description of the cultural isolation characterizing the social past of
Soviet schools. However, he points overtly to his young audience, so as to involve
them more directly in his speech, saying (min. 28.29):
“When you were born, a school like this would have been impossible, and the Internet was
only known to a privileged few.”
Score 3. Moscow (Table
17.4
).
He looks at them seriously with a frowning gaze, without hiding his distress
and smiling only slightly, at the end of the sentence. With his
facial expressions
of frowning and keeping his
body from moving
,heactsasifheisurgingallhis
listeners to consider very seriously and in depth the enormous historical change in
which they are all involved and that destroyed the violent conditions haunting their
societies at the time of their birth to open up opportunities that would have been
considered pipe dreams only a few years before.
17.6
President Obama's Speech to the Parliament of Ghana,
Saturday, 11 July 2009
This speech was made in the Parliament building in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on
11 July 2009. It was Obama's first trip as President of the United States to sub-
Saharan Africa and was made after the G8 summit in Italy. During the speech,
Obama made use of autobiographical themes to assert, among other things, that
it was no longer a time to play the role of the victim and that the future of Africa
depended on the Africans themselves.
Also in this example, Obama uses his autobiographical memories as an integral
part of his self-presentation, just in the social part beginning the speech. But of
course this reminder of his pariah origins as the offspring of a colonial family
acquires a new meaning when pronounced before an African audience as the first
African-American president of the USA.
After thanking his hosts for their warm welcome to him and his family, Obama
introduces himself to his audience declaring that (min. 3.53)
“After all I have the blood of Africa within me (muted applause, and the speaker goes
on), and my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger
African story.
In this first sentence, Obama maintains a very dignified posture: his chin raised,
his head and bust slightly outstretched, he moves his gaze around the entire
audience, where a large number of African leaders, sometimes dressed in traditional
furs, are sitting. He stops the applause that starts following his declaration that he
is partly African, while his gaze remains very serious and he swallows during the
beginning of the uninvited applause (Bull
2006
) as if stressing that he is stating a fact
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