The Rhetoric of Official Apologies: Critical Essays

We are haunted—politically, professionally, and personally—by the rhetorical constraints of contrition and forgiveness. The Rhetoric of Official Apologies, a coedited book by internationally prominent rhetorical scholars Lisa S. Villadsen and Jason A. Edwards, offers a timely intervention. The volume focuses on an “official apology” as a globally-recognized and prevalent rhetorical genre, which they define narrowly as “a statement of regret presented by a representative of a state or a government (e.g., a leading political figure such as a prime minister) to a particular group of citizens or an entire population (or subgroup thereof) of a different country for wrongs committed against them by or in the name of the state or government” (2). They focus beyond crisis communication playbooks of containing damage to one's reputation and into the riskier, more vulnerable realm of a government seeking to recognize and reconcile intergenerational legacies of harm. More than political gestures, though they are that, Villadsen and Edwards underscore the significance of “doing it in public” (3), emphasizing the ceremonial settings and public address of the genre.The book considers what characteristics we might identify when the genre is performed in meaningful ways instead of as empty symbolic acts. The editors insist, as rhetoricians should, that words matter and can help re-constitute meaning about our ugliest, most traumatic, and violent moments in history. Instead of pivoting on guilt, Villadsen and Edwards argue that the genre turns on responsibility, “that is, publicly acknowledging that the acts of the past were wrong, expressing sorrow and remorse over the wrongdoing, and committing to nonrepetition and to new measures for improvement” (6). They conclude that a key to a too-often-overlooked purpose of official apologies is: “a redefinition of or recommitment to the societal norms holding the community together, in other words, the function of rearticulating the meaning of citizenship” (222). Publics, therefore, are critical to assessing whether an official apology matters because moving past immediate harms, these reflections can indicate who maintains or might begin to identify with a sense of belonging in the “us” of what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community” of a nation.The Rhetoric of Official Apologies further narrows the genre to how and why national governments are moved to address past injustices, grappling with the messy work of negotiating morality, harms, and reconciliations. The book includes an introduction and an afterword written by the coeditors, as well as nine chapters without any organizing subthemes. Historical events include slavery, genocide, and colonization. While more than half the book focuses on the United States, chapters also include atrocities in Scotland, Rwanda, Canada, Iraq, Australia, and Indigenous nations. Chapters also include failed or non-apologies, such as Bradley Serber's analysis of U.S. President Clinton's apology for nonintervention in the Rwandan genocide, John Hatch's study of U.S. Congress's apologies for slavery, and Jeremy Cox and Tiara Good's assessment of U.S. President Obama's apology to Native Peoples. In the last chapter, Kundai Chirindo and Jasper Edwards extend rhetorical research on reconciliation to the context of Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islanders, insisting that self-determination is an overlooked feature, to date, that is necessary in addressing the legitimacy of how power over destiny is negotiated between two sovereign nations. This chapter powerfully troubles the idea of “citizenship” as a central term of official apologies by asking how we might imagine reconciliation in the broader framework of human rights or the more daring realm of redistributing power through self-determination.As this book was published during the height of the COVID pandemic, many, like me, may have missed its release. Given its exorbitant price, interested readers might request their libraries order copies. The term “official apology” is immensely useful for rhetoricians studying how state officials navigate blame, self-reflection, and repair. I hope this volume helps make space for studying other genres of apology, including those by corporations, NGOs, and educational institutions (including journals, professional organizations, and departments). Given the focus, for example, the book doesn't engage theorization of transformative justice and abolitionist rhetorics, which focus more on systemic roots and prevention of harm beyond state power. Nevertheless, The Rhetoric of Official Apologies establishes the significance of the genre to public affairs and the work left to develop more robust vocabularies for genres of contrition and forgiveness.

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