The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: The Deep Structure of Black Identity in American Literature

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.