Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Language Use in African American Communities: An Introduction Sonja L. Lanehart, Jennifer Bloomquist, and Ayesha M. Malik PART I. ORIGINS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES The English Origins Hypothesis Gerard Van Herk The Creole Origins Hypothesis John R. Rickford The Emergence of African American English: Monogenetic or Polygenetic? With or Without Decreolization? Under How Much Substrate Influence? Salikoko S. Mufwene On the Origins of African American Vernacular English: Beginnings Donald Winford African American English Over Yonder: The Language of the Liberian Settler Community John Victor Singler Documenting the History of African American Vernacular English: A Survey and Assessment of Sources and Results Edgar W. Schneider Regionality in the Development of African American English Walt Wolfram and Mary E. Kohn PART II. LECTS AND VARIATION The Place of Gullah in the African American Linguistic Continuum Tracey L. Weldon and Simanique Moody Rural African American Vernacular English Patricia Cukor-Avila and Guy Bailey African American English in the Mississippi Delta: A Case Study of Copula Absence and /r/-Lessness in the Speech of Black Women in Coahoma County Rose Wilkerson African American Voices in Atlanta William A. Kretzschmar African American Language in Pittsburgh and the Lower Susqueshanna Valley Jennifer Bloomquist and Shelome Gooden African American Phonology in a Philadelphia Community William Labov and Sabriya Fisher African American Language in New York City Renee A. Blake, Cara Shousterman, and Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz African American Vernacular English In California: Four Plus Decades Of Vibrant Variationist Research John R. Rickford The Black American Sign Language Project: An Overview Joseph Hill, Carolyn McCaskill, Robert Bayley, and Ceil Lucas The Sociolinguistic Construction of African American Language Walt Wolfram PART III. STRUCTURE AND DESCRIPTION Syntax and Semantics Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk The Systematic Marking of Tense, Modality and Aspect in African American Language Charles E. DeBose On the Syntax-Prosody Interface in African American Language James A. Walker Segmental Phonology of African American English Erik R. Thomas and Guy Bailey Prosodic Features of African American English Erik R. Thomas PART IV. CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND DEVELOPMENT Language Acquisition in the African American Child: Prior to Age Four Brandi L. Newkirk-Turner, RaMonda Horton, and Ida J. Stockman The Development of African American English through Childhood and Adolescence Janneke Van Hofwegen Development of Variation Lisa J. Green and Jessica White-Sustaita Narrative Structures of African American Children: Commonalities and Differences Tempii B. Champion and Allyssa McCabe Some Similarities and Differences between African American English and Southern White English in Children Janna B. Oetting Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives for Assessing Young and School-Age AAE Child Speakers Toya A. Wyatt PART V. EDUCATION African American Language and Education: History and Controversy in the Twentieth Century Geneva Smitherman Managing Two Varieties: Code-switching in the Educational Context Monique T. Mills and Julie A. Washington Balancing Pedagogy with Theory: The Infusion of African American Language Research Into Everyday Pre K-12 Teaching Practices Sharroky Hollie, Tamara Butler, and Jamila Gillenwaters History of Research on Multiliteracies and Hip Hop Pedagogy: A Critical Review K.C. Nat Turner and Tyson L. Rose African-American Vernacular English and Reading William Labov and Bettina Baker Dialect Switching and Mathematical Reasoning Tests: Implications for Early Educational Achievement J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Evangelos Evangelou, and Richard L. Smith Beyond Bidialecticalism: Language Planning and Policies for African American Students John Baugh PART VI. LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY African American Church Language Charles E. DeBose The (Re)turn to Remus Orthography: The Voices of African American Language in American Literature James Braxton Peterson African American Language and Black Poetry Howard Rambsy II and Briana Whiteside African American Divas of Comedy: Staking a Claim in Public Space Jacquelyn Rahman The Construction of Ethnicity via Voicing: African American English in Children's Animated Film Jennifer Bloomquist SWB: (Speaking while Black or Speaking while Brown): Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination Based on Speech as a Surrogate for Race in International Perspective John Baugh PART VII. LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY Racializing Language: Unpacking Linguistic Approaches to Attitudes about Race and Speech Kate T. Anderson African American Standard English Arthur K. Spears African American English in the Middle Class Erica Britt and Tracey L. Weldon African American Women's Language: Mother Tongues Untied Marcyliena Morgan Black Masculine Language David E. Kirkland Hip Hop Nation Language: Localization and Globalization H. Samy Alim African American Language and Identity: Contradictions and Conundrums Sonja L. Lanehart

This guide accompanies the following article : Erik R. Thomas, ‘Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English, Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 450–475. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749‐818X.2007.00029.x Author’s Introduction African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, more generally, African American English (AAE) are the most heavily studied group of dialects in North American English. Much of the enquiry has focused on morphosyntactic variation, but a significant amount has dealt with phonological and phonetic variables. Linguistic variables that can set AAE off from local European American varieties (EAE) in a given community span every realm of phonology and phonetics. Consonantal variables such as non‐rhoticity, consonant cluster simplification, and th‐stopping have attracted a great deal of attention. These variables usually involve phonological alternations, but phonotactic constraints also occur. Vowel variables, such as the degree of fronting of the goat vowel, are gaining some attention, mostly to address how closely local AAE varieties approach local EAE forms. Prosody has received some study and voice quality a small amount. Study of these variables is used to address several theoretical and applied issues. Among the most important theoretical issues are the Creolist/Anglicist controversy, over the origins of AA(V)E; the convergence/divergence controversy, over whether AAVE is becoming more or less like EAE vernaculars; and, recently, the uniformity controversy, concerning the degree of uniformity or diversity within AAE across the United States. Applied issues have focused largely on educational policy: whether or not AAE variants hinder learning for African American schoolchildren and to what extent AAE variants can be incorporated into classroom instruction. The Author Recommends Bailey, Guy. 2001. The relationship between African American and White Vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English . ed. by Sonja L. Lanehart, 54–92 (Varieties of English around the World, General Series, 27). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bailey provides a table with 45 phonological and phonetic variables known to be correlated either with AAE (for the majority of them) or with Southern White Vernacular English, giving an approximate date for each one. He focuses on the history of AAE in the South, explaining how agriculture and the expansion of slavery were interconnected in the antebellum South. He also lists some corpora of African Americans’ recordings of historical value. Fridland, Valerie. 2003. Network strength and the realization of the Southern Vowel Shift among African Americans in Memphis, Tennessee. American Speech 78. 3–30. http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/78/1/3?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=Fridland%2C+V&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT This study was the first systematic community investigation into vowel shifting in AAE. Fridland finds that African Americans in Memphis showed nearly all of the vowel shifts comprising the ‘Southern Shift’, although usually not to the most extreme degrees found among whites in Memphis. Younger whites seemed to be pulling back from the extreme forms, while young African Americans did not show an analogous development. She relates the findings to social network patterns. Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction . Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4, Phonology of AAE, pp. 106–33. This chapter provides an overview and some detail about many of the important consonantal variables relevant to African American English. Some of these variables, such as r ‐lessness, are well‐studied, while others, such as /skr/ for /str/, are lesser known. In addition, there is a discussion of Green’s work on the intonation of yes/no questions in AAE. Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis. 1968. A Study of the Non‐Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City . Report on cooperative research project 3288. New York, NY: Columbia University. This investigation is a classic study and one that helped launch the intensive analysis of AAE that has followed in the years since its publication. It examined a range of consonantal variables: r ‐lessness, /l/deletion, substitutions for /θ/ and /ð/, and consonant cluster simplification. It also established methods for analysing each of these variables. Emphasis was placed on the role of social networks in the degree to which variants associated with AAE occurred. Pederson, Lee A., Susan Leas McDaniel, Guy Bailey, Marvin H. Basset, Carol M. Adams, Caisheng Liao, and Michael B. Montgomery. (eds.) 1986–1992. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States , 7 vols. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Volume One, Handbook. Volume Six, Social Matrix. Volume Seven, Social Pattern. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) is an unfortunately neglected treasure trove of information about AAE in the South. Phonological, phonetic, and lexical incidence variables are all included, along with morphosyntactic and lexical ones. Information can be found about phonetic variation for all vowels and most consonants. Volume 1 provides descriptions of each subject who was interviewed. Volumes 6 and 7 provide breakdowns by social groupings, including race, for a very large number of variables. The main stumbling block for most potential users is that the presentation style is somewhat opaque. Users have to refer to the introduction to each volume to understand what the tables and maps represent and to see the total number of subjects included in each cell in the tables. The rather daunting layout was a consequence of the need to compress huge amounts of data into the most concise format. Nevertheless, it is well worth a researcher’s time to learn how to use LAGS. Thomas, Erik R. 2011. Sociophonetics: An Introduction . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Although its analyses of AAE are limited to a few illustrative examples, this book should be crucial for future studies of AAE because it demonstrates how to analyse phonetic variables using current techniques from experimental phonetics. It covers both production and perception, and methods for examining segmental, prosodic, and voice quality variables, as well as ways of relating them to cognition. Numerous variables in AAE are unstudied, but this guidebook opens the door to analysis of them.

African American culture draws upon a rich body of traditions from Africa, Latin America, and the South, and folklore is fundamental to the African American heritage. The first work of its kind, this definitive encyclopedia comprehensively overviews African American folklore. Included are roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 100 expert contributors on such topics as folktales, music, art, foodways, spiritual beliefs, proverbs, and many other subjects. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia concludes with a bibliography of major works. African American folklore has played a dominant role in shaping the spirit and soul of the Americas. African American folk traditions are a vital part of contemporary society and continue to shape art, music, film, literature, and religion. Because folklore is more than just a body of tales and instead encompasses all of traditional culture, it is central to African American daily life. The first work of its kind, this authoritative encyclopedia comprehensively overviews African American folklore. While the encyclopedia gives special attention to music, art, folktales, spiritual beliefs, foodways, proverbs, and other topics central to African American folklore, it also discusses the Caribbean and African roots of traditional African American culture. Features: ; Draws upon the work of more than 100 expert contributors. ; Includes roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries. ; Covers music, art, folktales, spiritual beliefs, foodways, proverbs, customs, traditions, and other topics. ; Entries cite works for further reading. ; Includes an alphabetical list of entries. ; Provides a list of entries grouped in topical categories. ; Lists archives and research centers. ; Offers convenient access through an extensive index. ; Entries are fully cross-referenced. ; Presents a selected, general bibliography of major works on African American folklore. ; Includes entries on the Caribbean and African roots of African American folklore. ; Overviews the presence of African American folklore in contemporary popular culture. ; Contains a generous selection of illustrations of all types of African American folklore. Benefits: ; Helps students understand the heart of African American culture. ; Provides an essential context for African American history, literature, music, and art. ; Promotes respect for cultural diversity. ; Celebrates our nation's African American heritage. ; Relates African American culture to its Caribbean and African influences. ; Serves as a model for student writing. ; Develops research skills by directing students to additional resources. ; Helps students learn about African American history through popular culture. Students researching any aspect of the African American experience will find this encyclopedia to be a valuable resource, as will their teachers. And because African American life is central to American society, anyone interested in American Studies will treasure this reference work.

Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

ABSTRACTThe nature of inequality within African American communities is a well-studied phenomenon that continues to yield new insights into how human beings interact in broad terms. Work relations, housing inequity, occupational unevenness to discourse following the end of the “Race Era,” racism, and inequality have all encouraged numerous discussions about African Americans. The literature addressing African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and racial inequality does not focus on the way in which the use of dialect within AAVE reveals critical issues of power and oppression. In other words, scholars have not used dialect as a means of tracing historical oppression. Using principles of critical discourse analysis as a lens, this article outlines the way in which African American English as a communicative event gives insight into the socioeconomic, historical, cultural, and political context in which people and communities are situated. Using the Northern city of Chicago as a case study, I demonstrate that Blacks in the largest city in the Midwest use a rural Southern style dialect in the speech performance of AAVE because of historical social isolation and a legacy of segregation. The way in which people speak illumines a vast interconnectivity of history, culture, and politics.

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

Introduction to Special issue

This article explores in four sections the logic and impact of the ways in which all archival collections, but African American collections most poignantly, are incomplete; and how a national search engine for African American history confronts and attempts to address the absence of African American stories, voices, documents, and histories. Following the work of scholars such as Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, and others, the first section analyzes how and why archives are always necessarily incomplete, as well as the particular reasons behind the bias and erasure of and within African American history and the archives that have come to collect and represent it. The second section discusses how Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) was conceived as a response to the need for a more complete archival record of African American history and culture. Section three presents Umbra Search as a case study—what it is, how it has grown, the role of partners, and the challenges it faces. The final section considers the roles of academic and community collections, technology, and collaboration in creating access to a deeper and more fulsome representation of American history and culture.

Language is influenced by social differences that appear in society, such as age, gender, religion, power, economic status, and ethnicity. Those social factors produce different kinds of language which is called as variety. Ethnicity as one of the social factors influences the emergence of variety that comes from African American people who lives in United States of America. The variety is called as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE is often used in literary works to represent African American ethnicity as occurred in Shrek movie through the character of Donkey.This research focused on analyzing the grammatical characteristics of Donkey's AAVE utterances and the factors underlying them through descriptive qualitative research. The result of this research showed that Donkey's AAVE utterances have three AAVE's grammatical features which are verb phrase, negation, and nominal and all four factors which consist of social class, gender, age, and linguistic environment underlying those grammatical characteristics. AAVE grammatical characteristics that appeared in Donkey's utterances are Copula/Auxiliary Absence, Invariant be, Subject-Verb-Agreement, Other Verb Phrase Structure, ain't, multiple negation, ain't with but, and second person plural y'all. Those grammatical characteristics are influenced by Donkey's working class status, his male gender, teenage age, and his mood when the utterances were taking place whether he was comfortable or not. AAVE grammatical characteristics indicate that Donkey's character represents African American ethnicity through his utterances and the factors underlying them show that Donkey's variety is influenced by the social factors that appear in society.

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 80, NO. 2 | 27 80 No.2 AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS: HISTORICAL DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION IN CEMETERIES By Sarah Lane Within eyesight of my grandfather’s US Navy plaque was a large field with a few dilapidated headstones. This was the historical “colored section” of Washington Cemetery.TherewerenobrightUSflags.Thisdidnotconvey messages of honor or thankfulness from the community for the service of African American veterans. African American veterans in cemeteries across the nation have lacked deserved recognition. Not only is this disparaging to the African American community and families of veterans, but also, without correction, it passes on division among future generations. In the Civil War, over 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors served in the US Army and Navy.1 They served in 163 units that mainly fell under the moniker United States Colored Troops (USCT). Units of African American soldiers began forming as early as 1862. African American Civil War soldiers were given inferior equipment and low pay, and the highest achievable rank was sergeant major.2 However, African American soldiers and sailors held to their determination to fight the chains of oppression; twenty-one-year-old private Samuel Cabble wrote, “I am a soldier now and i shall use my utmost endeavor to strike at the rebellion and the heart of this system that so long has kept us in chains.”3 Despite their bravery and determination, historically, African American Civil War veterans were not fully recognized, and many of their histories have gone untold. Over 150 years after the Civil War, this discrepancy has begun to be addressed through local and national efforts. I had the privilege of being a part of Paul LaRue’s Research History course at Washington High School in Washington Court House, Ohio. The goal of the course was to bring to light little-known history, with a focus on African American history. Some of the most meaningful work I engaged in was researching and documenting the histories of African American veterans buried in local cemeteries. Prior to my arrival in the course, a 2002–2003 class installed a new row of headstones, called Soldier’s Row, for most of the African American Civil War veterans in Washington Cemetery. This was the unattended area I described earlier; now the headstones for African Americans who served in the Civil War stand upright, with flags and proper honors. There is an Ohio historical marker located there (with text written by students) that includes a quotation by USCT veteran Albert Bird, “We have suffered to save the Country; we ought to be remembered.”4 We engaged in similar work in Beech Grove Cemetery near Cincinnati, Ohio. We did not need to take a trip to Gettysburg; there was untold history in our local community cemeteries. In Beech Grove Cemetery, we were actively conserving the history of African American veterans. I was part of a group who documented as many headstones as possible via photograph, leading to the creation of a digital map of the cemetery. My peers and I hoped to spark even greater change and recognition for these soldiers. Carl Westmoreland, senior historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and a representative from the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, visited our class. Imagine the difference that can be made if more teachers took the initiative to engage students in documenting and recognizing the contributions of African American veterans. Nationally, similar history documentation and recognition work is being done, including efforts by the National Park Service (NPS). Overall, African American heritage and history continues to be recognized, documented, and honored throughout NPS sites and programs. In 1991, an African burial ground (used in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) was discovered in New York City. An African Burial Ground National Monument was erected, and in 1993 it became a National Historical Landmark.5 The National Park Service’s efforts have also focused on the documentation and recognition of African American Civil War veterans. In 1997, the Spirit of Freedom statue, also known as the African American Civil War Memorial, was created. It has a wall of soldiers’names and is located in Washington, DC.6 The NPS provides a Civil...

Reviewed by: African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture Jennifer Sieck Anne L. Bower (ed.), African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 200 pp. Editor Anne L. Bower invites six scholars to bring a dish in the form of a chapter to African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Together they host a multi-course meal for readers hungry to learn about African American history and culture through the lens of food. The diversity of the dinner guests reflects the divergent disciplines to which African American culinary studies lends itself; experts around the table range from archaeologists to sociologists. The result is a recipe for a flavorful feast (and, notably, one attentive to presentation) that provides a solid foundation for exploring African American foodways. Bower, a retired English professor and author of Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, introduces the collection of essays by examining the role of food in the motion picture Soul Food, observing that the Sunday dinner table acts as a barometer for the status of the African American family in the film. Bowers extends the metaphor to show how African American food offers a mirror to history and culture. By studying the history (part one of the book) and representations (part two) of African American food, she contends that scholars gain new insights not only into history and culture, but also into issues of race, gender, [End Page 1193] economics and politics. Though not a cookbook, Bowers includes a recipe for "Chicken and Collard Green Crêpes with Béchamel Sauce" at the conclusion of her introduction, enjoining readers, too, to participate in African American foodways (11). The value of studying food to yield greater meaning than, as the ad slogan puts it, "it's what's for dinner," echoes throughout the book. The author of chapter four, Doris Witt, likens food to music as a site for cultural expression, but critiques the limited recognition food receives related to its role in shaping history. Recapitulated in almost every chapter is the way that food is yet another example of African Americans' use of material culture to retain individual and group identities in the face of oppression. Though the book testifies to a distinctiveness in African American food, it also emphasizes the fusion of cultures blended by African Americans—African, Native American, and European—and the resulting influence that permeates American cuisine today. Finally, women and men play important roles in African American foodways past and present; however, a number of essays pay special attention to women's access to power in relation to food. In chapter one, Robert L. Hall notes that African foodways predate Alfred Crosby's notion of the Columbian Exchange by "hundreds, if not thousands of years" (17). He provides extensive documentation of crop exchanges to inform his inquiry into the relationship between food and the transatlantic slave trade. By asking what Africans ate and brought with them to the Americas, he attempts to determine how "African all Americans are" (18). Hall, a professor of African American studies and history, argues that enslaved Africans integrated their cultures into white southern culture because of their knowledge of growing crops such as rice and their role in preparing food on the plantation. They also maintained what Charles W. Joyner describes as "African culinary grammars" in their own food preparations which were separate from whites (31). Food and identity remained symbolically linked during slavery, a connection that continues today. Hall's concluding contention is reminiscent of Albert Raboteau's groundbreaking work in Slave Religion: foodways provide another instance in which African Americans creatively preserve African culture within the context of the slavery. William C. Whit riffs on similar themes in chapter two from his perspective as a sociologist, touching on how enslaved cooks influenced the evolution of white southern food culture and, more broadly, how "subordinated [End Page 1194] people used their own knowledge systems of the environment they settled to reshape the terms of their domination" (49). In these ways and others, Whit sees "soul food," a term coined in the 1960s to describe African American cuisine, "as constitutive of, and an exemplary performance of...

African American Satisfaction With the SNAP-Ed Program: A Qualitative Exploration

African American Perceptions of Service Provided by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education: A Qualitative Exploration

There is a long tradition of using the lovehate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African American struggle for emancipation. In an interview with Toni Morrison (The Nation, 24 May 2004) Cornel West points out the peculiar function of African American love as a catalyst for change which takes on subversive status rather than being just a gesture. When, throughout history, a people has been systematically taught to hate themselves (Morrison and West 2004), love the opposite of hatred becomes the most effective means of resistance and of claiming ownership of one's history. Toni Morrison's mission as a writer is to write for and from within the African American community. Whilst one of her major concerns is to rewrite African American history, she takes over this tradition of resistance through love and uses it to forge a writing technique through which she dissents from what she calls the whiteness of the American literary canon. Morrison develops a rhetoric of negatives in which mechanisms of dysfunctional love are turned into political strategies for reclaiming African American history. This article will argue that love is a central trope in Morrison's shaping of an alternative African American, non-WASP narrative rhetoric and will analyse the evolution of this rhetoric in her novels Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love.