From Personalization to Parrhesia: A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical Recalls in Barack Obama’s Political Speech

This paper analyzes autobiographical recalls in Barack Obama’s political speech, framing them by two main theoretical perspectives rather than by the more commonly evoked theory of personalization. The first theoretical framework refers to Arendt’s concept of the self-aware pariah, as opposed to the concept of parvenu. The second theory invoked refers to the work of Michel Foucault on parrhesia, seen as a risky yet empowering communicative game. In accordance with these theoretical premises, four political speeches delivered by Barack Obama, both when he was still a “strange” incumbent and after he had become president of the USA, were selected, given the high political risks these particular speeches were addressing. Extracts sharing autobiographical memories were analyzed with both a multimodal analysis of communication and an analysis of facial expressions of emotions (facial action coding system, or FACS). Results show that these autobiographical memories conveyed parrhesiastic narratives about the social origins of Obama as a pariah. Together with these risky rhetorical moves, emotional expressions (mainly negative) were clearly evident, yet well regulated. Our concluding remarks on this first explorative analysis suggest that Obama could apply a parrhesiastic attitude to himself – making clear to all his socially disadvantaged origins – in order to persuade his audience to accept a similar parrhesiastic game for communicting about difficult aspects of the political situation of his listeners. The limitations of the study and possibilities for future developments of this line of research are discussed at the end of the chapter. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015