Voodoo and the Black Vernacular as Weapons of Resistance:

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Babacar M’Baye
Keyword(s):  
Black Vernacular

‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-264
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.

The Brewing Storm

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Shadle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Composers ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Vernacular Music ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
Open Question

A small number of US-based composers began experimenting with the use of African American vernacular music as the basis for instrumental works around 1880, arguing that this music formed a truly American folk repertoire. Their works found public favor in the United States and, more importantly, in several European cities in the months leading up to Dvořák’s arrival as director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák’s own position in the debate about American national style was an open question until May 1893, when he revealed his belief in the authentic American identity of Black vernacular music, thus affirming the approach of earlier American composers.

Steady: Progressive Aspect in Black Vernacular English

1984 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Aspect ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Vernacular English

Envisioning Black Girl Futures

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aria S. Halliday
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Fertile Ground

Black girlhood exists in a world that is constantly trying to negate it. Black vernacular traditions, too, allow girls to be considered “fast” or “womanish” based on their perceived desire or sexuality. However, Black girlhood studies presents a space where Black girls can claim their own experiences and futures. This essay engages how Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda” is fertile ground to help demystify Black girls’ possibilities for finding sexual pleasure and self-determination. Using hip-hop feminism, I argue that “Anaconda” presents a Black feminist sexual politics that encourages agency for Black girls, providing a “pinkprint” for finding pleasure in their bodies.

scholarly journals THE BLACK ATLANTIC TRADITION AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL: SIGNIFYIN(G) AND THE FIGURE OF ESU ELEGBARA IN RALPH W. ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lahoussine Hamdoune
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
West African ◽  
Integrative Model ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
American Model

By exploring the black Atlantic tradition, the present article aims to demonstrate that the narrator’s grandfather in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is not only an emblem of the black vernacular, but a correlative of the West African god and trickster Esu Elegbara. Likewise, the black characters, Tarp, Clifton, and Rinehart, function as interpreters of the grandfather’s ‘double-voiced’ text viewed as metaphoric of the black vernacular and evocative of Ifa, the ‘ambiguous’ West African religious texts. The first part of this article presents the main tenets of the black Atlantic tradition constituting the approach to be deployed. This is an integrative model comprising West African mythology and the African-American model of “Signifyin(g).” The second part examines the ways whereby the protagonist is guided into establishing linkage with the black vernacular. After examining those linguistic and functional aspects demonstrating the correlation between the grandfather and Esu, I will consider Tarp’s and Clifton’s Signifyin(g) strategies meant to enhance the protagonist’s interpretive ability. I will subsequently investigate Rinehart’s masquerading tricks inspiring both the protagonist’s subversion of fix identities and his positive reception of the ambivalence of his grandfather’s ‘Signification.’ Such interpretive enterprise ultimately brings about the protagonist’s emancipation from the alienating discourse of “Progress” and his realization of self-identification and self-expression through the black vernacular. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0620/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

scholarly journals DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture”

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 88-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Elites

The term “cancel culture” has significant implications for defining discourses of digital and social media activism. In this essay, I briefly interrogate the evolution of digital accountability praxis as performed by Black Twitter, a meta-network of culturally linked communities online. I trace the practice of the social media callout from its roots in Black vernacular tradition to its misappropriation in the digital age by social elites, arguing that the application of useful anger by minoritized people and groups has been effectively harnessed in social media spaces as a strategy for networked framing of extant social problems. This strategy is challenged, however, by the dominant culture’s ability to narrativize the process of being “canceled” as a moral panic with the potential to upset the concept of a limited public sphere.

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