2022 Cilt 23 Sayı 42

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11452/27666

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    Politics of national eulogies: Obama and Dr. King’s legacy
    (Bursa Uludağ Üniversitesi, 2021-11-29) Güçler, Arda
    Eulogy is a key rhetorical tool for the public to come to terms with national tragedies. While eulogies can bring the nation together during times of hardship, they can also undermine political mobilization by placing excessive emphasis on national unity. This paper will analyze this political aspect of national eulogies by providing a close reading of two pivotal political figures in American politics. These figures are the President Barack Obama and the African-American political activist Dr. Martin Luther King. The paper argues that Obama’s eulogy is deeply depoliticizing as he shifts the focus from politics to theological reasoning. King’s eulogies, on the other hand, are more political as he underlines the theme of individual responsibility. Yet King’s discourse also loses its political salience when he taps into the theme of equalizing power of death. This analysis is important to understand the ambiguous nature of eulogies, which makes these speeches oscillate between being a conservative and transformative rhetorical tool in politics.