Official Apologies:A Rhetoric of (re)framing Civic Commitments

Official apologies – understood as collective expressions of remorse over past wrongs – are a discursive phenomenon on the rise and have already met with scholarly interest in fields such as international law, political science, and philosophy. A common theme is how official apologies may be meaningful if analyzed from a perspective of political discourse in the widest sense: concerned with communal values and as a format for political action. In spite of this ‘rhetorical turn’ in apology studies, little attention has been given to textual analysis at the levels of the actual apology texts and the accompanying political debates. <br/>This panel discusses the prospects of re-conceptualizing official apologies as potential sites of civic invention and redefinition. What would it mean to regard official apologies as serving functions of (re)defining a collective civic identity? What are the implications of regarding this as a rhetorical form that at once (re)frames societal values for a domestic audience and sends a message about that to others? <br/>Drawing on examples from the US and abroad, the panel engages national and cultural differences at a comparative level and probes the uneasy balance between apologies as strategic maneuvers regarding influence and power and as a form of political discourse chiefly concerned with reframing or recuperating particular values and norms pertinent to a community’s self-understanding. <br/><br/><br/>“Collective Apologies and Reconstituting Citizenship”<br/><br/>Jason A. Edwards, Bridgewater State University<br/><br/>Over the past two decades a number of political leaders have apologized for historical injustices in the past, also known as official or collective apologies. Typically, these apologies are from government officials to a harmed “other” within a particular nation. Fundamental questions within these apologies are not only how they work rhetorically, but also how they reconfigure and reconstitute citizenship domestically and internationally. For example, an official apology may allow a group of people to finally feel like they can take their place as full citizens of a particular nation-state or part of the international community. While at the same time, these apologies may circumscribe the grounds upon which their identity is created (e.g. can the victims of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland continue to consider themselves an “other” if the offending party has apologized for past transgressions?). I examine apologies by American President Bill Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, and British Prime Minister David Cameron to map how collective apologies work rhetorically in dealing with questions of citizenship at the domestic and international levels.<br/><br/><br/>“Owning and Disowning the Past: The Rhetoric of Statements of Regret for the Massacres at Mountain Meadows and Bear River”<br/><br/>Keith Grant-Davie, Utah State University<br/> <br/>This paper explores the rhetoric of official apologies by looking at the 150-year evolution of a semi-secular community’s ambivalent responses to two events: the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah, where 120 emigrants from Arkansas were attacked by a band of Mormons and Paiute Indians, and the 1863 Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho, where members of the California Volunteer cavalry were dispatched from Salt Lake City and attacked members of the Shoshone tribe, killing more than 400. I examine the palimpsest of responses to these two massacres, evidenced by conflicting characterizations over the years and by memorials that have been erected, torn down, rebuilt, or supplemented by additional memorials that tell different narratives. I focus on an official statement of regret for Mountain Meadows by the Mormon church and on a resolution of regret for the Bear River Massacre that was opposed and tabled by the Utah state legislature. I discuss the implications of official apology for the community and how Perelman’s concept of dissociation can operate when a community debates how it should both denounce and accept responsibility for regrettable incidents in its past.<br/><br/><br/>"Apologies of the Week, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Copyrighted Feature of this Broadcast"<br/><br/>Rosa Eberly, Penn State University<br/> <br/>This paper uses the ancient Greek concept and practice of apologia to expand current understandings of the apologia/apology pair. This study focuses on apologia as a species of argument at the stasis of fact or conjecture as well as the emergence of the stasis of causality during "the Enlightenment" or "Modernity". The case study involves a close reading of "Apologies of the Week, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Copyrighted Feature of this Broadcast," a regular feature of satirist, actor, musician, and documentarian Harry Shearer, on his weekly radio program "Le Show."<br/><br/>This study is part of a larger project on the stases of conjecture and cause and their roles in democratic communication and decision-making; the project is centrally concerned with modernist rhetorics of science, correlation, and causality. Close analysis of Shearer's "Apologies of the Week" over nearly three decades suggests the powerful role that "setting the record straight" – conjecture without rebuttal when causality remains unstated – can play in informing democratic audiences of the role of empirical facts in individual sense-making and collaborative judgment, particularly about questions of public policy.<br/><br/><br/><br/>“A Sorry Excuse for an Apology? An analysis of the Danish Secretary of Social Affairs’ Reasons for not Apologizing”<br/><br/>Lisa S. Villadsen, University of Copenhagen<br/>While official apologies issued by governments and other state representatives are more and more common in many countries, the same is not true for Denmark. A case in point is a recent case about mistreatment of children in state supervised orphanages from 1945 to 1976. Similar cases in Sweden, Norway, Canada, UK, and Australia have resulted in official apologies for wrongs in the past. In Denmark, the Secretary of Social Affairs did not offer the official apology demanded by the claimants, but did express her regret over their suffering. The Secretary was subsequently summoned for an open hearing in Parliament’s Commission on Social Affairs to answer critical questions about her refusal to apologize. The Secretary’s prepared statement and her subsequent answers during the hearing present a rare opportunity to study the reasoning behind the Government’s stance. I analyze the Secretary’s argumentation and place it in a larger theoretical frame where I draw on work by Cunningham, Smith and Nobles in a discussion of the rhetorical implications of the apparent Danish reluctance to offer official apologies in this and other cases. <br/>

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