Sep 16th 09
Posted by justin in CCR751
Cannon, Katie Geneva. Katie’s Canon Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum International Group, 1997. Print.
Katie Geneva Cannon
Prelude / Chapter One : Surviving the Blight
There is a lot of information in this section. I’ll start with a couple of key terms. Jungle Stance: the posture of knowing you’re in danger without having to be taught. Cannon claims this stance is natural in young A.A. children because of the pressures of racist society. She also discusses “epistemological privileges of the oppressed” in this section. This is having a deep connection to histories of ancestral oppression that guides your decisions in the social sphere – sometimes this even means away from rationality.
Cannon notes that she will concentrate on a three part elucidation of Black female positions in society. This explanation will use race, sex, and class as it’s sites of inquiry. Later Cannon notes that her meditations will all challenge systems of domination.
In Chapter One, Cannon frames the institution of slavery in terms of “chattel” or property. This allows a view of the slave as properly – not human. In so doing, oppression is absolved of a lot of biblical responsibility. To cope with the realities of chattel, Blacks developed a couple of different coded/insider discourses: 1) folklore, 2) spirituals, and 3) communal prayer.
Chapter Two: Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation
In chapter two, Cannon outlines how three different Christian doctrines allowed chattel slavery to operate in the United States. First, she discusses how the biblical story of Ham predestined all Blacks to a life of servitude because of their status as the outcast, bestial, cannibalistic, heathen. Next, in “remythologizing divine will” Cannon posits that White Christians didn’t prohibit Black enslavement because it wasn’t explicitly prohibited in the bible. .. which presumably made it ok. So, since it wasn’t prohibited in the bible, the subservience of the Black people must have been the “natural order of things” and hence, God’s will. Finally, Cannon notes in “mythologizing the enslavement” that White Christians believed (or at least accepted the belief) that slave ships and slavers were sent to Africa to save the Africans from the “ignorance, superstition, and corruption” of the continent as a whole.
Chapter Three: The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness
In this chapter, Cannon sets out to “track down the central and formative facts in the Black woman’s social world, [thereby] identifying the determinant and determining structures of oppression that have shaped the context in which Black women discriminately and critically interpret Scripture, in order to apprehend the divine Word from the perspective of their own situation” (47). After sketching how Black women were both torn asunder from meaningful relationships with Black men and were also at the sexual whim of white slave masters, plantation owners, etc., Cannon notes that Black women’s position didn’t change much during the Reconstruction period or even until the first large waves of immigration north during the period after WWI (1915-1930). It was only after the economic realities of a dwindling white labor force during WWII that Black women were given even the smallest bit of representation. During the entire experience of Black women after the Emancipation, the church served as a central citadel of hope as it was the only institution that Blacks could use without restraint. As the church framed the Black woman experience from before the Emancipation when slaves weren’t allowed to practice to the present, Black women looked to Jesus and the church as a way to satisfy needs of human dignity and to secure the soul’s liberation. In so doing, Cannon notes that Black women “serve as contemporary prophets, calling other women forth so that they can break away from the oppressive ideologies and belief systems that presume to define their reality” (56).
Chapter Four: Moral Wisdom in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition
In this chapter, Cannon first interrogates mainstream, dominant Protestant ethics to challenge their view that self-reliance, frugality, and industry will, invariably, lead to economic success. Because of their position as an oppressed people living under oligarchic, white patriarchal economic relations, Black experience must develop other mechanisms to achieve a “standard of living that is congruent with the American ideal. In challenging this protestant ethic, Cannon’s goal is “to show how Black women live out a moral wisdom in their real-lived context that does not appeal to the fixed rules or absolute principles of White-oriented, male-structured society” (60). To understand this new ethic, Cannon turns to Black women’s literary tradition to discover what ethical values Black women have developed to participate in this society (61). She comes up with the following conclusions:
a. Black Women’s literary tradition parallels Black history
b. Black Women’s literary tradition uses the oral narrative devices of the Black community
c. Black Women’s literary tradition capsulizes the insularity of the Black community
In discovering these conclusions, Cannon notes that Black women’s literary traditions can be seen as a seriously reliable mirror of the experiences of Black reality.
Chapter Five: Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Cannon Formation
Cannon notes that her work as a womanist theological ethicist concentrates on four areas:
a. The creation of womanist pedagogical styles
b. The emergence of distinctive investigative methodologies
c. Reconsideration of the established theories, doctrines, and debates of Eurocentric, male-normative ethics.
d. The adjudicative function of womanist scholars
Next, she sets out to “identify some of the generative themes in the texts of A.A. women writers that womanist ethicists need to address” (70). The first theme she wants addressed is colorism (71). In the same vein, she id’s the value system of “pigmentocracy” (72). Third, she discusses the notion that accepting Black women as women means “moving beyond a single vision of vaginas” and finally recommends the reading of “Black women’s bodies as texts” (74). As Cannon notes, “Flesh houses memories – the color of flesh, the reproductive character of flesh, and the manifold ways that the flesh of African women is the text on which androcentric patriarchy is written” (75).
Chapter Six: Resources for a Constructive Ethic – The Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston
In this chapter Cannon recommends using Hurston as a model for constructive ethics because “unlike most of the other writers in her time, Hurston emphasized the unique cultural heritage and wholeness of Black life” (78). Hurston achieved this through the employ of folklore, folk sayings, and her own lived experience. In so doing, she offers the reader a really good example of the Black woman as a moral agent. In fact, Hurston “grasped an understanding of the moral quality of life being fulfilled, not as an ideal, but as a balance of complexities in such a way that suffering did not overwhelm and endurance with integrity was possible” (83). This sound a lot like West’s concept of “tragicomic hope.”
Chapter Seven: Unctuousness as Virtue
There are definitely a lot of analogs between Cannon’s treatment of Hurston and West’s notion of tragicomic hope in this chapter. Cannon grounds the importance of Hurston early in the chapter by noting, “Hurston offers a concrete frame of reference for the understanding the Black woman as a moral agent” (91). This moral agency /good is equated with tragicomic hope when Cannon states that moral good “is that which allows Black people to maintain a feistiness about life that nobody can wipe out, no matter how hard they try” (ibid.). In defining “unctuousness” Cannon states that Hurston’s “quality of steadfastness, akin to fortitude, in the face of formidable oppression serves as the most conspicuous feature in the construction of Black women’s ethics” (92). In the pages that follow, Cannon describes how the ridicule and criticism that Hurston received internally (while grappling with the contradictions of having a white financier) and externally (through the brutal criticism of Black male writers, known as the “Godfathers of the Harlem Renaissance”) didn’t deter her from demonstrating unctuousness and moral good in all of her strivings to accurately represent the A.A. condition.
Chapter 8: “The Wounds of Jesus”: Justification of Goodness in the Face of Manifold Evil
This chapter takes up a central theological problem that hampers not only Black Xianity, but also Xianity as a whole. Namely, “Can God create a rock that God can’t pick up?” Or, in other words, would God create evil if he is an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent? Or in Cannon’s words this is the fundamental query that “deals with traditional theological problem concerning transgressions that proceed directly from human sin – structures of domination, subordination, and constraints that reinforce and reproduce hierarchies based on race, sex, class, and sexual orientation” (101). In the Black church, Cannon claims that this problem of moral evil is inflicted by human agency. In this chapter, she intends to do the following:
a. Examine theodicy as it is presented in the ecclesiastical texts embedded as distinctive rhetorical units in Hurston’s work.
b. To critique Hurston’s sermon “The Wounds of Jesus” as a sketch of the problem of evil in Afro-Christian rhetoric.
c. To construct, even in the bare outline, my own composite womanist matrix for the corpus of sermons in the A.A. women’s literary tradition (102).
According to Cannon, Hurston’s treatment of ecclesiastical texts reflects the Black church communities understanding of God’s redeeming love. As such, these texts are seen as ways to assuage the problem of human agency in repressive forms. In her critique of Hurston’s sermon, she articulates that the problem of evil is a) an essential element in the completion of human history, b) relatable to the Black community through metaphorical adornment and c) a representation of the Black Xian tenant of revelation in God in Jesus Christ. In this sense, the image of Jesus as Redeemer exists a priori to any consideration of evil in the world.
In attempting to find the most fruitful site for the expression of seminal evil practices in Black life, one need only turn to Black women novelists due to their position in broader society and their triple oppression. In closing, Cannon notes that, “The point of much A.A. women’s spirituality as expressed in the literature is that it does not begin with questions about the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God and then move to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil. Rather womanist protagonists contend that God’s sustaining presence is known in the resistance to evil” (111). In other words, the problem of evil is not addressed, as it exists; hence, the womanist position is to confront evil with God’s sustaining presence as resistance tactic par excellance.
Chapter 9: Womanist Interpretation and Preaching in the Black Church
In this chapter, Cannon attempts to outline a program for Womanist action in Black churches to more fully realize the contributions of women and to exercise their image as evil from the good book. In performing this task, she relies on the texts of feminist liberationist Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Black homiletician Isaac R. Clark, Sr.
By adopting the methodology of Fiorenza, Cannon hopes to demonstrate how sermonic texts “participate in creating or sustaining oppressive or liberating theoethical values and sociopolitical practices” (114). In critiquing existing Black Sermonic oppression of women, the feminist liberationist interpretation also provides for a space to use womanist methodology at the “constructive stage of sermon preparation and delivery” (115).
In the analysis of preaching in the Black church, Cannon identifies a couple of useful analytical categories:
a. Divine activity – The fact that the Black preacher occupies a space between God and the congregation.
b. Word of God – This is the idea that the “God-Self” is present in the content of the preached word.
c. Proclaiming or announcing – The preacher’s indicative mode for declaring the biblical ideas, beliefs, and systems of though in the vernacular of the hearers.
d. Contemporary Issues – This is how the preacher grounds biblical exegesis in lived experience of the congregation.
e. Ultimate Response to God – This is the preacher’s call to the congregation make a decision “for or against emancipatory praxis” (118).
After finishing her discussion of Black sermons, Cannon launches into an EXTREMLY dense and loaded discussion of “Womanist Queries” where womanist can seek to change the traditional Black church model that oppresses women in multiple ways. This discussion continues into the next chapter. To put it quickly, Cannon notes that her program is one of “unmasking those detailed and numerous androcentric injunctions” in so doing “womanist hermeneutics attempts to expose the impact of ‘phallocentric’ concepts that are present within Black sacred rhetoric” (119).
In womanist hermeneutics, the preacher should aim to:
a. Trace out the logic of liberation that can transform patriarchal oppression
b. Urge congregationists to make interventions, no matter how slight, in the dominant religious discourse of the time
Chapter 10: Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: The Womanist Dilemma in the Development of a Black Liberation Ethic
After framing the tension that exists in Cannon’s own identity as both a Christian social ethicist and a womanist liberation ethicist, she launches into a programmatic discussion of how to change things. I’m going to be brief here as there is SO MUCH.
If acting like a Canonical Boy, the Black woman must:
a. Discount the particularities of her lived experiences and instead focus on the validity of generlizable external analytical data
In so doing, this position ignores the positionality of Black women, and therefore presents them no place to enact their own agency. In challenging this position, Cannon wants to decenter the White male ethicist position to compensate for the more than analytical – the daily lived experience of Black oppression.
To challenge this position, Cannon recommends:
a. New research questions must be developed so that Black women’s moral wisdom can provide answers
b. Practice moral acts that demystify large and obscure ideological relations, social theories, and indeed, the heinous sociopolitical reality or tridimensional oppression
c. Use frameworks of wisdom to compare and contrast Black female moral agency with the agency of those in society who have the freedom to maximize choice and personal autonomy.
d. Focus on particular questions of women in order to reveal the subtle and deep effects of male bias on recording religious history
e. Examine Black women’s contributions in all major fields of theological studies – Bible, history, ethics, mission, worship, theology, preaching and pastoral care.
f. Move from the position of direct object to active subject in the Black Church.
g. Move toward a fundamental reconceptualization of all ethics with the experience of Black women at center stage
h. Recognize and condemn the extent to which sex differences prevail in the institutional church, in our theological writings, and in the Black Church’s practices
Chapter Eleven: Appropriation and Reciprocity in the Doing of Womanist Ethics
I loved this chapter. In this section, Cannon raises some really interesting questions about how to “do” womanist ethics. I’ll list in bullet form:
a. Are they traditions of white feminists and womanists mutually exclusive? (Her answer is a definitive NO – pg. 131).
b. What challenges arise in the process of appropriation?
c. Do I have to choose between my racial identity and my womanhood?
d. How do we remain both beholden to our inherited religious culture materials as well as responsible in favoring the extension of oral texts for posterity? In other words, what are trade-offs in our movement from orality to textuality?
To close Cannon states,
“The origin of the idea dictates the claims of accountability. Whether we begin with paradigms created by mentors of European and Euro-American ancestry or with theoretical constructs emerging from the oral traditions of the African Diaspora or with a dialectical, syncretistic interplay between the two, we must answer the inescapable questions of appropriation and reciprocity. To decline the ethical labor of wrestling with the questions . . .. is to play the game of androcentric heteropatriarchical academese without understanding it” (135).
Chapter Twelve: Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea
In this section, Cannon outlines a womanist pedagogy. To carry out this task, she recommends a three-wheel program.
a. The first wheel is the intellectual predisposition of traditional male thinkers whose very language of objective universality masks our existence, forces us to persist in binary oppositions, and looks at Black women as superfluous
b. The second wheel is the specificity of Afro-Christian culture, systematic accounts of the history and achievements, perspectives and experiences of members of the Black church community.
c. The third wheel is the experiential dimension of women’s texts and interpretations.
She gives a really lovely definition of liberation ethics on the bottom of 138. She concludes the chapter by noting that liberation ethics is something we “do.” Womanist epistemology is the process by which we bring this kind of knowing about A.A. women into relation with justice to arrive at new understandings of our doing, knowing and being (paraphrase 141).
Sep 10th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601, composition
Pough, Gwendolyn D. “’Each One, Pull One’ : Womanist Rhetoric and Black Feminist Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Eds. Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006.
Executive Summary:
In this piece, Pough discusses how Womanist ideology can inform Black Feminist Pedagogy in the writing classroom. Through an analysis of her own experience as a writing teacher using Womanist/Black Feminist texts, Pough examines the tensions toward Womanist and Black Feminist writers that arise in white-dominated post-secondary classrooms . She concludes that by utilizing the parrhesian qualities of Womanist rhetoric to inform Black feminist pedagogy in the composition classroom, instructors are able to “help students move past and ‘transgress’ their own boundaries” toward a social justice of inclusion (81).
Influences:
bell hooks
Alice Walker
Cheryl Johnson and Shirley Wilson Logan
Quotable Quotes:
“I maintain that the writings of black feminist educators and womanist rhetoricians can offer examples of praxis that cen help us make the writing classroom a space in which critical thinking around diverse issues can ultimately lead to change” (70).
Emergent Strategies for an Established Field : The Role of Worker-Writer Collectives in Composition and Rhetoric
Steve Parks and Nick Pollard
Executive Summary:
While teaching a class dedicated to exploring working-class literacies at a elite University in the US, Parks recognized that most of his students couldn’t identify with working-class discourse; furthermore, their inability to identify caused a marginalization of the few working-class students present. In response, Parks helped establish working-class literacy initiatives that utilized service-learning and community literacy practices via writers groups and blogs in order to create a federation of writers dedicated to forging new communities rooted in working-class existence. In making his argument, Parks urges a reconception of contact-zone pedagogy to federation-based community literacy.
Influences:
De Certeau
Mary Louise Pratt
Ira Shor
Paulo Freire
Quotable Quotes:
“Civic writing. . . would be structured to allow these different populations – the FWWCP, Basement Writers, and SU students – to discuss connections between education and economic class, developing the issue within the contexts of access, disablity, equity, and curriculum.”
“These courses attracted a strong contingent of working-class students who found in the manifesto and community partnerships that grounded the class discussion a tradition of work which enabled them to not only speak, but to use their own experience and skills to interrupt the dominant discourses of privilege in many of their classes and draw in their own experiences as bases of legitimate knowledge production.”
Agnew, Lois. (2009). Teaching propriety: Unlocking the mysteries of ‘political correctness’. College Composition and Communication 60.4. 746-764.
Executive Summary:
In this article, Agnew argues that a “new pedagogical construction of rhetorical appropriateness” could stem the complaints of students that they are “stifled by ‘political correctness’” in composition classrooms (761). In forging this new pedagogical construction, Agnew recommends a reclamation of the 18th century concepts of propriety and taste. In rejecting the 19th century conception of propriety/taste as an “isolated realm of aesthetic experience”, Agnew argues that writing teachers should seriously consider the 18th century formulations of these terms as rooted in “a social capacity developed through critical discussion and rhetorical training that considers issues of audience and context” (756). As a sister to the Greek concept of kairos, 18th century scholar Hugh Blair’s definition of propriety and taste create ways to link style to communicative goals and social situations (754). In considering 18th century definitions of taste and propriety in the writing classroom, composition teachers sidestep silencing “entitled to my opinion” approaches while encouraging students to employ taste/propriety in order to develop “ethical subjectivity” while still engendering a respect for the “shared social decisions about appropriate language” (761).
Influences:
Hugh Blair
Sharon Crowley
John Poulakos
Isocrates/Cicero
Quotable Quotes:
“Such an effort [teaching taste and propriety] might help students recognize that appropriate language does not have to be externally imposed, concieved of as a punishment that destroys their rhetorical intentions, but instead can provide them with the flexisbility they need in order to achieve true rhetorical agency” (749).
“He [Blair] shares with both classical and contemporary theorists the assumption that rhetors who cultivate skills he strives to teach will ultimately embody the ethical sense that accompanies propriety, which becomes rhetorically constructed as discourse that is responsive to audience” (755).
“While advocating that individuals yield to the ill-defined ‘common feelings of men’ unquestionably holds the danger of a powerful collective imposing its standards on powerless individuals, the current state of public discourse suggests that we have swung too far in the direction of abandoning individuals to their independent assesments of what constitutes appropriate discourse, since such judgements often rely upon a determination to exert autonomous choice without regard for social consequences” (756).
Writing From Souces, Writing From Sentences – Rebecca Moore Howard
Executive Summary:
In this piece, student writing is analyzed with an eye toward the kinds of source integration students do when composing essays. In the analysis, the researchers viewed student source integration with an eye toward summary, patchwriting, paraphrasing, and direct copying. The researchers found that student often patchwrote, paraphrased and copied; however, they didn’t often use summary. This discovery led the researcher to ask whether the students actually were working with the sources, or merely sentences in the sources. In fact, “Plagiarism is difficult to avoid if one is constructing an argument from isolated sentences pulled from sources” (15).
Influences:
Rebecca Moore Howard
Pecorari
Quotable Quotes:
“Our observations also raise questions about problems students may have with source-based writing, problems that are both prior to and foundational to their correct citation of sources. Citation counts for little if what is being cited is a fragmentary representation of the source. Plagiarism is difficult to avoid if one is constructing an argument from isolated sentences pulled from sources” (15).
Sep 2nd 09
Posted by justin in CCR751
Week One Additional Readings
Keith Gilyard, Introduction: Aspects of African American Rhetoric as a Field from African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Introduction: Resistance, Reform, and Renewal in the African American Experience, from Let Nobody Turn Us Around
Geneva Smitherman, “How I Got Ovuh: African World View and Afro-American Oral Tradition” from Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America
Jaquiline Jones Royster, Forward to African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
In the forward to African American Rhetoric(s) Royster does a couple of different things. First, she establishes that the cultural frameworks that create A.A. rhetoric are ancestrally African. Next, she discusses how A.A. rhetoric has been characterized by a long-running trend of discursivity that is tied to struggles for individual freedom. The reader also embraces the idea that A.A. rhetorics are more than expressive processes – in fact, they are also knowledge making events. The collection is broken up into three sections: historicizing, pedagogy, and research.
As A.A. rhetoric as scholarly work is relatively untapped, Royster notes that the anthology is geared toward reclaiming some of the achievements and legacies of A.A. rhetors. In reclaiming these traditions, Royster recommends that the reader understand three concepts:
1. a view of culture, as influenced by African ancestral traditions, as an appropriate factor in analyzing performance.
2. a critical exploration of the ways in which strategies and practices participate dynamically in knowledge-making enterprises.
3. closer attention to the specific material conditions out of which rhetorical practices come – in this case the struggle for freedom.
The overarching goal of the collection is to disrupt the Eurocentric conception of cultural traditions. In disrupting this notion, the collection looks to, through reclamation, reconceptualize the theory and practices of rhet/comp as a field.
Keith Gilyard, Introduction: Aspects of African American Rhetoric as a Field from African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Gilyard’s introduction to Richardson and Jackson’s work is an extensive cataloguing of the rhetorical scholarship on Black discourse that has taken place since the Civil War (or thereabouts). He begins the article with the admission that:
1. Black folks (and their discourses) have asserted their collective humanity in the face of enduring White supremacy and tried to persuade, cajole, and gain acceptance for ideas relative to Black survival and Black liberation.
Gilyard’s analysis concedes that many of the early studies on Black rhetoric attempted to frame Black discourse in terms of Aristotelian rhetorical frameworks. This, of course, left out many aspects of Black expression. First, in addition to the classifications of judicial, deliberative and epideictic, Black discourse needed to also be categorized in terms of “Christian pulpit oratory.” Religious oratory, as a central tenant of the A.A. rhetorical tradition, was neglected in the early studies of Black discourse. After the acceptance of Black religious oratory as a classificatory schema, much work was done by Pipes and other scholars to classify this form. Characteristically, these scholars used Aristotelian schemas (invention, disposition, style, delivery, etc.) to explain this rhetoric. Again, a mapping of Eurocentric rhetorical tradition on African-derived Black discourses.
Moseberry discussed Black religious oratory in terms of “jubilee rhetoric.” This form “consists of a series of ideas containing a major undertone of tragedy, alternating with a contrasting jubilant response.” This is most effectively put to use in pieces like Douglass’s 1853 “Fifth of July Oration.”
Beyond Black religious oratory, study of A.A. rhetorical discourse began to center around the plight of A.A.’s as oppressed individuals. As such, a schema developed for understanding how to explain A.A. discourse in relation to the events of the Civil Rights era. Boulware notes that this liberatory rhetoric is composed of the following parts: 1)protest grievances, 2) state complaints, 3) demand rights, 4) advocate cooperation, 5)mold racial consciousness, 6) stimulate racial pride. As the civil rights era got underway in earnest, White America began to try and find answers to the rhetorical conventions of Black speakers like King, X, and others. This resulted in an explosion in A.A. rhetoric scholarship. Of particular note is Smith’s work on the “agitational rhetoric” of A.A. speakers. Agitational rhetoric, according to Smith, is comprised of the following parts: 1)vilification (create an antihero that represents domination), 2) objectification (blame an ill-defined group – such as “whitey”), 3) Mythification (use of ’suprarational’ forces – such as God – to support your cause, and 4) legitimation (justify your action’s in light of the vilification of the objectified.
As scholarship in A.A. rhetoric progressed past the Civil Rights Era, special attention began to be paid to the role of “African” ways of knowing, speaking and expression. This is particularly obvious in the work of Smith, Smitherman, Cummings and Daniel, and Jackson. Of particular interest was the West African concept of “Nuomo” or the mystical associations and powers of the word. Nuomo, as understood by Jackson, is comprised of an 8-part process whose parts feed off one another. They are: 1) Rhythm (the rhetor must be in tune with the audience), 2) Soundin’ (signifyin’), 3)Stylin’ (speaker has combined rhythm, excitement, and enthusiasm, 4) Improvisation (spontaneity in light of White organization), 5) Storytelling (arousal of epic memory), 6)Lyrical Code (preservation of the word through a highly codified system of lexicality, 7) Image making (tapping into myths), and 8)Call and response (the core tenant of West African rhetorical practice).
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Introduction: Resistance, Reform, and Renewal in the African American Experience, from Let Nobody Turn Us Around
Marable and Mullings begin by noting that, “Throughout their entire history as a people, African Americans have created themselves. . . . They constructed their cultural identity and notions of humanity in a country that denied them citizenship and basic human dignity for hundreds of years. Like West, Gilyard and others, M&M agree that the history of African American existence in the colonial/new world era has been one of repression. All that being said, the oppressors were not successful in completely silencing A.A. thought or production. As M&M clearly note, social and political theory has developed in A.A. communities as a result of the oppression and repression of their peoples. These theories are the central concern of their book.
M&M make a point of stating that “social and political theory are not merely reactive.” In fact, in addition to being a reaction to social institutions and structures of power, A.A. social and political theory is also a search for meaning and voice. In this search for meaning, a couple of interesting themes/strands develop.
Integrationist – Nationalist – Transformationist
With a few exceptions, most A.A. social and political theory – and it’s related actions – have been taken up by one of these three strands. Integrationists, like MLK Jr., sought to “expand the limited boundaries of American democracy to include people of African descent. . . full unalienable rights to own property, access to public accommodation and schools, and the right to hire themselves out for a fair wage. The only limitations on any individual’s success would be determined by intellect and ambition” (XIX). In other words, after equality, the adoption of the bootstraps narrative.
Nationalists sought to undermine the white supremacist patriarchy by working in collusion with its rules. As such, the nationalists sought to work in Black communities for Black communities. This position assumes the continued existence of White supremacy; furthermore, it also supports the idea of A.A. identity as one of permanent African in exile. M&M claim that these two positions – integrationist and nationalist – have shared the dominant position in response to the socio-political climate of the age. Times of violent action – like the 1920s and 1960s – against A.A.’s has resulted in more nationalist sentiments and vice-versa.
In contradistinction to the integrationist and nationalist position is the transformationist. In essence, this position is one of socialist solidarity. As a way to get around some race issues, groups like the African Blood Brotherhood and the Sleeping Car Porters used their positions as wage earners to fight simultaneously for the demolition of racial discrimination.
While the Integrationist – Nationalist – Transformationist camps were/are the dominant forms of A.A. social and political organization, the triply oppressed position of A.A. women has also been theororized for good reason. As struggles against white patriarchy were framed in predominately masculine terms, black women also began to explore their position as triply oppressed individuals. While many women – Sojourner Truth, Claudia Jones, et. al. – noted their triple oppression early in the race/gender movements toward equality, this debate picked up a lot of steam in the 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, the late coming of this discussion might point exactly to its claims of triple oppression. A.A. women’s rhetoric sought to critique their oppression in terms of race and gender, but also as a rejection of essentialist European descriptions of femininity.
Geneva Smitherman, “How I Got Ovuh: African World View and Afro-American Oral Tradition” from Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America
In this chapter, Smitherman attempts to situate A.A. rhetorical conventions and expressions in the context of an African world view. In making this connection, Smitherman takes the first couple of pages to establish the primacy of orality in “preliterate” (a Western, charged term) African societies. She notes that
Until contemporary times, Black America relied on word-of-mouth for its rituals of cultural preservation . . . . the core strength of this tradition lies in its capacity to accommodate new situations and changing realities. If we are to understand the complexity and scope of black communication patterns, we must have a clear understanding of the oral tradition and the world view that undergirds that tradition.
Smitherman identifies a couple of different defining characteristics of the African worldview. First, she notes that there is a fundamental unity between the spiritual and material aspects of existence. As such, the divide that is often noted in Eurocentric conceptions of experience is somewhat artificial for African-influenced subjects. In making this claim, she relies on the power of the word – or nuomo – or the magical, mystical power of the word. In addition to nuomo, she also notes that the two principles – spiritual and secular – in African communities are the defining strands of existence. For the African, according to Smitherman, the more powerful of these strands is certainly the spiritual.
Connected to this spiritual supremacy is the value of lived experience. Hence, the spiritual and the elderly tend to have social control over those secular and less experienced (read younger).
Working under this spiritual/secular framework, Smitherman goes on to extend her analysis into the lives of A.A.’s. Specifically, she spends a bit of time emphasizing the importance of the oral in communal African life. As orality is the undergirding ontology of African experience, the role of the orator is especially important in A.A. culture. Smitherman adeptly compares the oral adroitness of multiple figures ranging from Sundiata the mythical West African king to Richard Wright and H. Rap Brown. In so doing, she emphasizes the primacy of the spiritual over the secular; however, this binary is a false one. As Smitherman notes, the tension between the secular and the spiritual is really, when conceived spatially, a continuum between the two rhetorical frameworks. While the spiritual has it’s roots in the church, the secular utilizes it’s rhetorical moves and vice versa.
In her analysis, Smitherman explores a couple different forms of African signification. Her analysis includes boastful raps, love raps, black sermons (church raps and their inherent “sacred style”, and street raps “dozens, toasting, etc.”). Her analysis also highlights the meaningful interdependence of the spiritual in all aspects of A.A. life – not just for the floor stomping, church going types. This is a result of Black spirituality as a coping mechanism for the white supremacist orientation of this world.
Finally, Smitherman attempts to create a rhetorical qualities with which to view Black discourse in contemporary times. In her analysis, she includes the following:
1. Exaggerated Language – Sprinkling talk with uncommon words and rarely used expressions.
2. Mimicry – Deliberate imitation of the speech and mannerisms of someone esle for authenticity, ridicule, or rhetorical effect.
3. Proverbial statements – The use of Black proverbs to tap into the “wisdom and power” of nuomo.
4. Punning – The use of puns that are relatable to the pronunciation of Black speech.
5. Spontaneity – The use of unstructured argument/speech in order to more fully embrace the natural nature of the universe (chaos?)
6. Image-making – The use of picture metaphor for representations of reality.
7. Braggadocio – Often misunderstood by Whites, this enhances the ethos of the rapper.
8. Indirection – This rhetorical tactic is linked, in Smitherman’s analysis, with the African discourse strategy of evasion. This absolves logical (in the Aristotelian sense) inconsistencies within the rapper’s speech. See Achebe’s Unoka for example.
9. Tonal Semantics – The variation of sound to create rhetorical/verbal power.
