Abstract
In as much as this book grapples with the underground in hip-hop culture, African American literature and music, language, particularly linguistic identity as it is represented in literature, tends to suggest the extensive role of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in these discussions. In chapter 3, AAVE informs the verbal masking that often emerges among literary subjects, hip-hop artistic personas, and various individuals in a range of underground contexts. In this chapter I focus briefly on various African American/ethno-linguistic identities in literature, and the theorems herein that largely refer to and reflect the use of Black vernacular speech (or any Black variety of Standard English) in music and cultural production. Many of the ways in which writers present and represent social identity in American literature are not directly related to traditional linguistic analyses, yet many depend directly on language. The question we might ask of any novel (or poem, play, or other literary genre) is what do we know about the identity of the characters/actors in the particular text: who we are reading? This question has many possible answers, but for the student of literature and linguistics the answers can be limited to four modes for analyzing the social identity of a character. Whether or not the representation is authentic to the ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation, characteristics of “real-life” persons or community certainly haunts this discussion. The four modes explained and exemplified in this chapter address some of these concerns, while offering an efficient means of analyzing African American identity in literature and the roles language plays in constituting social (and racial) identity in American literature.
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Notes
For a much more thorough discussion of these phenomena please see Geneva Smitherman’s “The Forms of Things Unknown: Black Modes of Discourse” in Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 101–66.
Elijah Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 3.
Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin (Boston, MA: Houghton and Mifflin, 1977), p. 192.
William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 201.
See Martin Deutsch, Irwin Katz, and Arthur Jensen, eds., Social Class, Race and Psychological Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968);
Carl Bereiter and Siegfried Englemann, Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Pre-school (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966); Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 39 (1969).
For a thorough consideration of Deep Structure, see Noam Chomsky, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
For an extraordinary analysis of the history of the field of linguistics, see Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistic Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). My ideas in this section of the text are thoroughly influenced by these works.
Michael Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. xiv.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1998 [first published 1937]), p. 78.
Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 150.
Yvonne Bynoe, ed., Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip-Hop Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 326.
Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 2004), p. 78.
Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1983 [1955]).
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© 2014 James Braxton Peterson
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Peterson, J.B. (2014). The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: The Deep Structure of Black Identity in American Literature. In: The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305251_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305251_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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