A Discourse‐Centered Approach to Sound and Meaning in Spike Lee's Chi‐Raq

Abstract

Joel Sherzer’s landmark 1987 paper, “A Discourse‐Centered Approach to Language and Culture,” focused linguistic and anthropological attention on playful and artistic uses of language, both as a way of better understanding discourse, and as a way of better understanding how societies distribute and negotiate power. This paper applies Sherzer’s focus to an analysis of Spike Lee’s deployment of poetic language in his 2015 film Chi‐Raq. Few American filmmakers craft dialogue more artfully, or deploy dialogue more saliently than Lee, whose filmic technique and political rhetoric force viewers to focus on speech and its consequences. This paper looks at the distribution of versified and ordinary dialogue speech in Chi‐Raq in order to argue that interpreting the indexical meanings of linguistic variation in Lee’s film generates a nuanced interpretation of the film’s complex but powerful rhetoric. [poetics, film dialogue, signifying, AAVE, visual language]