From Personalization to Parrhesia: A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical Recalls in Barack Obama’s Political Speech - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 360

reproachfully at the audience of African leaders, overtly claiming that explaining
the social problems currently plaguing their society by blaming past perpetrators is
a way to escape from their own responsibilities. The audience listens quietly, staring
down and sometimes nodding to the most reproachful parts of these severe but frank
description of the many problems the African leaders must deal with if they really
want to empower themselves after centuries of exploitation. This concept becomes
even clearer in the last sentence that ends this first part of his speech to Ghana's
leaders (min. 6.40):
In my father's life, it was partly tribalism and patronage in an independent Kenya that for a
long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is a daily fact of
life for far too many.

Throughout this difficult parrhesiastic game with his audience, Obama often
signals through facial expressions his involvement in his speech. He betrays his
anger when remembering his grandfather's humiliations and imprisonment, anger
that turns into disdain when he claims that “colonialism was something he (the
grandfather) experienced personally, day after day, year after year.” A similarly
embodied communication is also evident when, expressing his enthusiasm in
recalling that his ancestors' struggles gave “birth to new nations, beginning right
here in Ghana,” he rises up on his foot when pronouncing the words “new nations.”
But the enthusiasm that could easily be predicted considering this was the first
political speech addressed to African leaders by a US president who “after all”
had the blood of Africa within him is scarcely shown during this parrhesiastic
and sometimes even reproachful discourse. The last part of this introduction, which
certainly shocked his audience, ends up in fact by showing mostly negative emotions
in Obama's facial expressions: disdain, quickly turning into sadness, when he states
that “we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled”; doubt if
saying these words overtly, when asserting that “the West is not responsible for
the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which
children are enlisted as combatants”; sadness, coupled with a proud attitude, when
claiming that
“In my father's life, it was partly tribalism and patronage in an independent Kenya that for
a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is a daily fact of
life for far too many . ”

17.7 Concluding Remarks

In this paper, we presented an in-depth analysis of several examples of autobio-
graphical recalls used by Barack Obama during four relevant political speeches
in order to explore the idea that he chose this kind of self-exposure to propose to
his audience a difficult yet empowering “ parrhesiastic game ” (Foucault 2001 ). To
frame this work, we relied on two main theories. The first, advanced by Hannah
Arendt (Arendt 1978 ), proposes that an overt declaration of social disadvantages,