Reviewed by: Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture Ali Colleen Neff Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture. By Marcyliena Morgan. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 181, 4 black-and-white illustrations, 8 data tables, 4 maps of U.S. slave population expansions, notes on transcriptions, notes, references, index.) In recent years, the academic study of hip-hop culture has grown substantially and includes work from all corners of the social sciences, thus shining unprecedented light on African American linguistics. Marcyliena Morgan's Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (hereafter Language) promises to add significantly to the discourse on hip-hop, while reexamining previous scholarship on African American English (AAE). While this review addresses Morgan's 2002 publication, she has extended her research into a more recent publication, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground from Duke University Press in 2009, which will be reviewed in a future volume of this journal. Grounded primarily in socio-linguistics, Morgan employs a multidisciplinary approach in interpreting the performative speech of a number of AAE speech groups, linking each to the core features that define this rich dialectical style. Morgan's scholarship is a seminal force in the legitimatization and development of the study of hip-hop. As executive director of Harvard's Hiphop Archive, she has sought to facilitate academic and journalistic research on the genre. Morgan's work looks beyond the development of hip-hop as a popular commodity to examine how it operates within local African American communities. By viewing hip-hop's vernacular roots, rather than its pop-cultural front, Language connects with the wealth of ethnographic and folkloristic work on African American speech. In the book, Morgan works her way though generations of African American linguistic culture. She analyzes quantitative and qualitative data through the combined lenses of history, linguistics, folklore, political economy, and cultural studies. The first chapter deals with the synthesis of AAE in the antebellum era, African American styles of managing one's public face, and the phenomenon of what W. E. B. DuBois called "double consciousness." The book goes on to link subsequent generations of AAE speech back to its cultural genesis. It shows how a number of AAE subgroups—double consciousness intact—use tools of signification, indirection, circumlocution, intonation, and laughter to accomplish social goals while retaining a sovereign social space. Chapter 3 deals with the interactions between AAE and General English (GE), with a focus on the contextual complexity that accompanies the use of either style by African Americans. An important feature of Morgan's ethnographic research is her focus on women's speech. She unpacks a schoolgirl gossip chain, discusses the use of memorates by older women, and provides a detailed reading of a warm but complex conversation between adult family members in Chicago. In her fourth chapter, she details women's conversations concerning group traitors, race riots, and maternity practices. From these short excerpts, Morgan extracts both the mind-set of the speaker and coded references to the history, migration, and survival tactics of women of color in America. The result of this emphasis is twofold. Morgan expands the scope of African American linguistic scholarship, which has traditionally emphasized the speech of young urban males, by providing access to oft-overlooked members of the AAE community. Further, she unpacks hip-hop, a form practiced primarily by young men, by connecting it to AAE women's speech, children's games, and elder storytelling. The fifth chapter of Language reframes the hip-hop discourse in terms of these connections. In view of the compelling information offered in the body of the book, the final chapter calls for a redefinition of AAE on the part of education policymakers. Morgan's writing style is straightforward and accessible. She mixes personal anecdotes with qualitative and statistical data and illustrates each aspect of her study with compelling ethnographic information. This ethnography provides the common thread that runs through the whole of Morgan's body of research. Morgan [End Page 368] has done ethnographic work with a variety of groups: hip-hop artists in Los Angeles, her own family in Chicago, and members of...
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Jan 1, 2023
Ivan Matić 
Open Access
