Talk About Talk: Promises, Risks, and a Proposition Out of Nommo

Abstract

����� ��� In the essay that centers these responses, author George Yancy celebrates and explores three facets of Geneva Smitherman’s (Docta G’s) approach to African American Language (AAL). The first feature is a representation of the Middle Passage as the violent beginning of Africans’ encounter with the Americas, and the onset of “psycho-linguistic rupture” among black people in the United States (Yancy 2004, 290). The second facet introduces the concept of Nommo, its generative power, and its role in constituting an oppositional African American identity and language, and the third aspect explores AAL’s structure and manifestation of “linguistic resistance” to “Euro/Anglo” hegemonic terms of power (Yancy 2004, 288). While the three aspects of Docta G’s theory of AAL are related, and each is important to understanding the linguistic theory of AAL discussed by Yancy, the focus of my response will be on Nommo. From the perspective of a rhetorical philosophical approach to linguistic theory, which forms the framework of my response, I find this facet most provocative. The argument of the present response unfolds in three stages. It begins with a brief definition of rhetorical philosophy followed by reconstruction of Yancy’s and others’ conception of Nommo as creative power. Next, the essay makes an argument about the promises and risks of conceptualizing Nommo and, subsequently, AAL in terms of creativity alone. Both the promises and risks have significance for black people, and for the wider American community as well. I end with the response’s speculative claim about the potential to account for Nommo and AAL from within a theory of public speech premised upon the importance of holding creative power and communicative reason accountable to one another.