Unknown Tongue Research Articles

Kama La MackerelZOM-FAM

find in Homer, which seem designed both to illuminate and to enact a hidden unity in things, the ones we find in Sebald seem designed to confuse, entangling his characters in meanderings from which they cannot extricate themselves and which have no clear destination.” As an inveterate memoirist, Mendelsohn ’s ultimate quarry lies not in his literary subjects but in his own deepest convictions about these matters—convictions that have informed his own life and works. His book concludes, therefore, with a frank declaration of his own narrative optimism, centering on “a wandering [narrative ] technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique . . . with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things.” Of course, he knows that his optimism is not shared by all his authors—especially not by Sebald but also, in his darker moments, not by Auerbach either. Yet Mendelsohn holds firm to his narrative optimism as this artful book—full of its own digressions, peripheries , and doubts—wends its way to its own moving conclusion. Douglas Clayton Harvard University Kama La Mackerel ZOM-FAM Montreal. Metonymy Press. 2020. 104 pages. AS THE FIRST POETRY collection by a self-identifying queer/trans Mauritian artist , ZOM-FAM is a milestone in Mauritian literature. Titled “Man-Woman” in Kama La Mackerel’s native creole, the poetry collection explores what it means to craft life and love in the slippery spaces between diasporic, linguistic, and gender identities. La Mackerel’s poetry draws from an ancestral lineage imbued with both suffering and resilience. Originally from India, La Mackerel’s ancestors came to the island nation of Mauritius as indentured laborers, as part of the British Empire’s plan to continue supplying labor to colonial sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery. Working explicitly against “the silence / of history,” La Mackerel begins their collection by “invok[ing]” and “honour[ing]” their powerful female and femme ancestors . These powerful figures will deeply modulate the rest of the collection, be it as the determined child vendor of hot ounnde on the streets of Port-Louis or the bindi-wearing, kurta-clad trans ancestor whom the poet weaves out of their imagination when their mother’s remembrances fall short. The space of the island itself becomes one such femme story of “smothered flesh” and “dreamlike / landscapes,” haunted by brutal colonialism and assailed by contemporary nepotism. La Mackerel’s poetry deftly draws out the creolized heritage of the region, as the protection of the Hindu deity Durga Mā is invoked alongside that of Lavierz Nwar (the Black Virgin). While the collection’s poems are primarily in English, they have a strong multilingual undertow that hints at the island’s complex linguistic configuration, which includes colonial languages (English and French) and ancestral tongues (Tamil and Sanskrit) as well as native Mauritian creole. Paradoxically, these languages are vectors of incomprehension: laborer ancestors were doomed to a lifetime of exploitation by signing exploitative contracts they couldn’t understand, while La Mackerel’s father chanted prayers in unknown tongues to save his newborn from mofinn, a Mauritian flavor of “misfortune” (see Arnaud Carpooran, “Mofinn [1],” in Diksioner Morisien: Premie diksioner kreol monoleng, 3rd ed. [University of Mauritius, 2019], 844; for other literary representations of the mofinn in Mauritian literature, see, for example, Ananda Devi’s Pagli [2001]). La Mackerel suggests that real expressions of love and intimacy take other forms. The most powerful encapsulation of this “secret language” comes to us through the poet’s father: unable to express his love in words, he pours it into the twenty-year-long labor of erecting a family house on former servant quarters. The other side of love, however, is violence : La Mackerel recalls “the bitter burn of his [the father’s] right hand against my child face / whenever he caught me in a dress.” The poet deftly explores queer childhood survival strategies on the tropical island, as they eschew masculine gatherings around alcohol under the jackfruit tree for the wafting aroma of spices and feminine confidences in the kitchen. Ultimately, La Mackerel moves beyond these binaries and rejects the body and official documents that “dictate [their] gender,” instead refashioning the “torn skin & paper” into a “fierce femme...

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David W. Blight and Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David W. Blight and Jim Downs Brian Kelly (bio) Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Edited by David W. Blight and Jim Downs. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Cloth $79.95; paper, $24.95.) The problem at the core of this collection—the contested and multiple meanings of freedom after the American Civil War—enters the [End Page 168] historiography of emancipation from two distinct vantage points. First, the differing perspectives of the main protagonists—planters, freedpeople, deliverers—figure prominently in a complicated historical narrative. They brought varying, often irreconcilable understandings of freedom to bear in the protracted confrontation opened up by emancipation. W. E. B. DuBois noted more than eighty years ago in Black Reconstruction in America that these "contending and antagonistic groups spoke different and unknown tongues," shouting past one another while attempting to advance their particular visions. There is a second path by which differing conceptions of freedom enter the literature: interpretive differences among historians aiming to reconstruct the past have shaped understanding no less than the documentary record itself. Malicious assumptions about black inferiority permeated scholarship associated with the Dunning school well into the twentieth century. Subjected to withering assault by DuBois in 1935, it was ultimately dislodged after a revisionist surge driven by the postwar black freedom struggle. This new framework found full expression in the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. Foner acknowledges his debt to DuBois, and like others attempting to bring the archive to bear on the interpretive framework animating Black Reconstruction in America, his work reflects not merely the rejection of Dunning's crude racism but a positive embrace of DuBois's attention to political economy. Much of the impressive scholarship generated in the immediate post–civil rights era attributes substantial responsibility for the gap between freedpeople's expansive vision and Redemption's dismal reality to the outworkings of Republican free labor ideology. Leading scholars focused closely on new challenges facing the "emancipated worker," locating freedom's shortcomings not only in the malevolence of the usual suspects—the Klan, embittered ex-Confederates, former masters—but in the cramped variant of freedom on offer from the slaves' ostensible liberators. This collection, drawing together eleven essays by leading historians of emancipation, aims to move beyond the "freedom paradigm"—a framework that, the editors suggest, meets with growing ambivalence (3). The volume includes thoughtful, impressive stand-alone essays that explore the dynamics shaping events between the antebellum period and the late nineteenth century. Yet read end to end, it is the book's gaps and omissions that are striking. Though the editors deny any intent "to advance an argument or to upset a particular way of thinking" (x), together with the absence of any but a fleeting mention of conflict over land or labor, the [End Page 169] volume's neglect of political economy marks a clear departure from the historiographical legacy outlined above. Beyond Freedom opens with four essays exploring emancipation's prehistory and concludes with a set of extended, sometimes intimate reflections on sources and methodology. In between are three essays grouped under "The Politics of Freedom," just one of which focuses on the poste-mancipation South. James Oakes's illumination of the Republicans' bedrock commitment to antislavery takes the reader into some familiar terrain, but neither of the others is especially concerned with politics, even in its broadest sense. The editors note at the outset that contributions are not intended as case studies grounded in archival research, though Justin Behrend's study of violence in Reconstruction Mississippi and Brenda E. Stevenson's essay on the ritualization of slave marriages come close. While Beyond Freedom's temporal and thematic breadth offers something for everyone, the same qualities render it difficult to identify common threads. Richard Newman begins the first section, "From Slavery to Freedom," with an essay on antiabolitionists' penchant for conjuring the alleged failures of Atlantic emancipation to deflect attacks on southern slavery. Susan O'Donovan challenges the depiction of slaves as inert and apolitical, suggesting instead that the roads and waterways traversing the Cotton South doubled as...

Isaiah Shembe's Prophetic Uhlanga: The Worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in Colonial South Africa by Joel E. Tishken

Isaiah Shembe's Prophetic Uhlanga: The Worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in Colonial South Africa, by Joel E. Tishken. New York, Peter Lang, 2013. x, 232 pp. $82.95 US (cloth). The Amanazaretha, or the Nazareth Baptist Church, one of the largest independent churches in Southern Africa, has held fascination for scholars since the time of Swedish Lutheran bishop Bengt Sundkler, in the 1940s. This fascination stems particularly from of its perceived syncretism with Zulu pre-Christian religion and its promotion of African traditional values within the context of an evangelical background. Scholars, particularly western theologians, have branded the Nazaretha post-Christian and a bridge to traditional religious practices of pre-colonial Africa. This view was seen especially in the earlier works of Sundkler and those of South African Dutch Reformed theologian G.C. Oosthuizen, but has permeated the literature on African independent churches ever since. Two books on the Church published recently, Joel Cabrita's Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (New York, 2014) and the one reviewed here, do not go in this direction and have broken new ground in the literature of this church. The Nazareth Church is arguably the most researched religious movement in Africa, certainly in South Africa, where there are thousands of African Independent Churches. One of the reasons this has been a ready subject for research is the Church's willingness to be examined by outside researchers, especially through its archives and copious sacred writings. The Church began in the early twentieth century, probably in 1910, with the remarkable ministry of its founder, Isaiah Shembe, in the eastern province now known as KwaZulu-Natal. This was also the time when and Pentecostal (Apostolic) churches were beginning to emerge in South Africa--churches that, like Shembe's, emphasized direct divine revelation and the practices of spiritual gifts like prophecy, healing, and speaking in unknown tongues. Shembe was undoubtedly affected by the evangelical revivalism of the time, particularly those practices found in the new movements of Zionism and Pentecostalism, but it is doubtful whether his church could be described as Zionist as Tishken does (7), for churches have very different histories and antecedents. Tishken's book, unlike that of Cabrita, focuses specifically on the life of Isaiah Shembe and his prophetic experiences subverting colonialism and oppression faced by Black South Africans at the time. …

Early Modern Migration from the Mid-Wales County of Radnorshire to Southeastern Pennsylvania, with Special Reference to Three Meredith Families

In 1971 the Honorable Thomas M. Rees of California observed that "very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life to the shaping of American history." In 1979 historian David Galenson maintained that "the issue of the composition of America's early immigrants is an impor-tant one and will continue to receive considerable attention from historians who seek to understand the social and economic history of colonial America." However, Douglas Greenburg's examination of the historiography of the middle colonies revealed that Pennsylvania, which witnessed the immigration of many early modern Welsh Quaker migrants, has not attracted as much attention from researchers as has its neighboring states.

“Speaking in the Unknown Tongue, Holiness Church, Jackson, 1939”

“Speaking in the Unknown Tongue, Holiness Church, Jackson, 1939, ” Photographs, p. 104, with the gracious permission of the Eudora Welty Foundation Dear Welty,Writing by the fireplace, I see you standing with the camerathe eye of the eye of the eyein awe and wonder,a guest in Holiness Churchwatching: the painted horse “The Lord on the Cloud” in the centera white mass moving through mountainslines upon valleys, there goes the Lord ridingoh yes, rise your heart to God in praise, sisterspeaking...

The fire spreads: holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South

Today pentecostalism claims nearly 500 million followers worldwide. An early stronghold was the American South, where believers spoke in unknown tongues, worshipped in free-form churches, and broke down social barriers that had long divided traditional Protestants. Thriving denominations made their headquarters in the region and gathered white and black converts from the Texas plains to the Carolina low country. Pentecostalism was, in fact, a religious import. It came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. Adherents formed new churches in the Jim Crow South and held unconventional beliefs about authority, power, race, and gender. Such views set them at odds with other Christians in the region. By 1900 nearly all southern holiness folk abandoned mainline churches and adopted a pessimistic, apocalyptic theology. Signs of the last days, they thought, were all around them. The faith first took root among anonymous religious zealots. It later claimed southern celebrities and innovators like televangelists Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, T. D. Jakes, and John Hagee; rock-and-roll icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard; and, more recently, conservative political leaders such as John Ashcroft. With the growth of southern pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement moved cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different. Many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end. Yet a growing number did so as active political conservatives.

Aspects of Legislative Drafting: Some South African Realities (or Plain Language Is Not Always Plain Sailing)

It seems to me that a sort of hieratic language has developed by which the priests incant the commandments. I seem to see the ordinary citizen today standing before the law like the laity in a medieval church: at the far end the lights glow, the priestly figures move to and fro, but it is in an unknown tongue that the great mysteries of right and wrong are proclaimed.

Living with Signs and Wonders: Parents and Children in Early Pentecostal Culture

Since in this essay I make the word Pentecostal do a lot of work, I too think it is only fair to pay it extra. I use the term to refer to a religious movement that emerged from the vast and amorphous radical evangelical subculture in the United States in the sunset years of the nineteenth century. Like other radical evangelicals, Pentecostals fervently anticipated the Lord’s imminent return, affirmed the miraculous healing of the body, and believed that the conversion experience should lead to another life-transforming event known as the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Unlike other radical evangelicals, however, Pentecostals also insisted that the baptism experience always manifested itself by speaking in ‘unknown tongues’.

Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology

AMONG THE MANY REASONS CRITICS IN THE 1850s CONDEMNED WHAT WAS called the Spasmodic style, none appears to have perplexed and frustrated readers so much as the poets' seemingly irregular use of rhythm. In response to Sydney Dobell's 1856 volume England in Time of War, critic for the Saturday Review complains that the poet neither sees, feels, nor thinks like ordinary men.... Before we are half through the book, we begin to distrust the evidence of our senses. (1) A writer for the National Review similarly critiques the apparent disorder of Dobell's poetry: His thoughts and fancies flow like the sounds from an instrument of music, struck by the hand of child,--a jumble of sweet and disconnected notes, without order or harmony. (2) But Dobell and his Spasmodic compatriots were not alone in challenging the senses of their readers, and literary critics in the 1850s show increasing indignation and anxiety that any poet should rel[y] on the sympathy of the interpreter to intuit poem's intended rhythmic design. (3) Writing of Robert Browning's Men and Women, reviewer in the Athenaeum protests that recent poets have expected [the reader] here to lean on cadence,--there to lend accent to the rhyme, or motion to the languid phrase; in another place, to condense multitude of syllables, so as to give an effect of concrete strength.... Our poets now speak in an unknown tongue,--wear whatever garniture it pleases their conceit or their idleness to snatch up; and the end too often is, pain to those who love them best, and who most appreciate their high gifts and real nobleness,--and to the vast world, whom they might assist, they bring only mystery and receive nothing but wonder and scorn. (Chorley, p. 1327) Though concerned with more than formal irregularity, the reviewer identifies his contemporaries' rhythmic waywardness as part and parcel of their poems' unpoetic garniture, their difficult language, and, here in the case of Browning, the shocking images and figurative language. Many critics simply did not know how to read rhythmically irregular poetry, and they did not trust, or did not want to trust, to their intuition. (4) The criticism perhaps would not have been as vehement had not Victorian readers associated the Spasmodics' unruly formal styles with Britain's own fragmented and increasingly heterogeneous culture. When writer for Putnam's Monthly Magazine, an American journal, called Alexander Smith a child of the time, the point was clear enough. (5) As other contributors to this special issue demonstrate, the Spasmodic poets were linked by their critics to cultural crises in gender and sexuality (Blair, Hughes), class and national identity (Tucker, Harrison, Boos), and religious practice (Mason, LaPorte). Perhaps most threatening were not the particular cultural values Spasmodic poetry seemed to defy, but the formal methods poets such as Smith and Dobell used to propagate these challenges to British readers. According to Sydney Dobell, the most sophisticated theorist of Spasmodic poetics, the self-conscious work of poetic interpretation matters little next to the unselfconscious effects of rhythm on the physical bodies of readers. As we shall see, Dobell's poetic theory holds that poetry transmits knowledge and feeling primarily through rhythm, rather than through words or other formal structures. Rhythm for Dobell expresses metonymically the physiological conditions of the human body--its pulses either harmonize with or strain against the throbbing of our physical beings--and poets communicate most readily through reader's sympathetic and unmediated experience of these stressed and unstressed rhythmic impulses. (6) Physiologically felt rhythm creates an intimacy between poet and reader such that the reader shares in the physical, and sometimes even mental, experiences of the poet. Hence if Spasmodic poetry threatens Victorian cultural values by unseating conventional notions of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and religion, Spasmodic poetics--and especially Dobell's notion of rhythm--threatens Victorian culture by promulgating these unconventional values, by offering vehicle for the widespread dispersal of the eccentric. …

Gayle T. Tate, Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGayle T. Tate, Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860Rhett JonesRhett Jones Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 89, Number 2Spring 2004African Americans and the Urban Landscape A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/4134100 Views: 6Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Unknown tongues: black women's political activism in the antebellum era, 1830-1860

Unknown tongues: black women's political activism in the antebellum era, 1830-1860

Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860

Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860

“Between the Refrigerator and the Wildfire”: Aimee Semple McPherson, Pentecostalism, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy

Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the way-ward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?

Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860

This volume examines the social and economic factors of northern industrialization, social reform and black nationalism, all of which undergirded black women's political consciousness during the decades before the American Civil War.

Strength in numbers.

Genetic markers — unlike ancient chroniclers — do not lie. But their interpretation can be as perilous as attempts to decipher ancient inscriptions in an unknown tongue.

All his workes Sir : John Taylor's Nonsense

This paper uses the long Nonsense-writing career of Taylor to discuss the political and cultural uses of Nonsense, tracing shifts internal to the genre which testify to Taylor's increasing sense of disillusion and despair as the royalist cause for which he was so robust an apologist frays into apparently final desuetude. Early Nonsense works like the "Utopian" unknown tongue of the squibs directed at Thomas Coryate or Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place (all republished in the 1630 Workes) are very different in aims and means from the later The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence (1653) or the baffled despair of the mock-newssheet Mercurius Nonsensicus (1648). I examine the circumstances of publication of these texts, in addition to their deployment of the forms of Nonsense to articulate the experience of The World Turn'd Upside Down (Taylor's pamphlet of 1647); specific attention is given to the linguistic texture of Taylor's Nonsense. I also consider those ways in which Taylor's own "amphibious" social position, as poet and waterman, unlearned yet a writer, implicates his own work within the very social topsy-turviness which is the cause of his unease, creating further discomforts and silences within the texts themselves.

“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”: Jewish perspectives in Disraeli's fiction

In the book of Daniel there is a famous scene in which the Babylonian king Belshazzar is feasting and drinking from sacred vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had plundered from the Holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem; suddenly a hand unattached to a body appears and writes mysterious words on the wall: "Men?, Men?, Tekel, Upharsin." Neither Belshazzar nor his followers can understand the words which seem to belong to an unknown tongue. So, desperate to know what has been written, Belshazzar summons Daniel, who has a reputation for wisdom. Daniel can read the words, which are in Aramaic. Literally, Daniel explains, the words mean "numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided." But Daniel then offers an ethical interpretation, foretelling the destruction of Belshazzar and his kingdom. Daniel's reading is a prophecy: "God hath numbered thy [Belshazzar's] kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians."

The African-American Student: At Risk

If we all suffer and survive among those marginalized, as some readers of this piece may want to say, then my response to that is that AfricanAmericans do so differently. Caucasian women are in need of positive reinforcement as are those of the underclass and the non-traditional older student. So are Asians and Hispanics and Native Americans. I am not arguing this point. But with African-American students, there are many differences that do not, generally, apply to others. A case in point occurred yesterday afternoon when a well-bred, calm, quiet African-American male from Detroit came to my office, by appointment, to ask me to go over the paper he had just turned in. Much of what he said could be applied to any student. He was not sure he would survive in college. Any number of students may feel that way. However, this young man comes from the oral tradition, as dictated by the black church, slavery, barber shop ritual, and popular culture appeal. While African-Americans are found in all classes of society, the vast majority come from homes where a social letter may never have been written by anyone in the family. Telephone calls are common. There is conversation at the high school reunion or the family reunion, but writing is not a process in which many engage. The written word, for many, is the language of an unknown tongue. Secondly, this young African-American student is one of four children in a single-parent home headed by a mother who does not work. He aspires to be an engineer. His mother supports him in this goal emotionally, but she is not a woman with formal training. While there are a number of productive, well--

Beethoven and the Birth of Romantic Musical Experience in France

The contours of this paper follow the puzzling fortunes of Beethoven in France. First reviled as chaotic and incoherent and then worshiped as divine truth, Beethoven's symphonies transformed themselves in the minds of French audiences from an unknown tongue to the most intimate language of the soul. Most surprising to those who charted Beethoven's reception, this transformation was without apparent evolution. Vaguely familiar but strangely inaccessible in 1815, Beethoven's symphonies were fanatically demanded by Parisian audiences in 1830. The triumph of Beethoven indeed seems sudden, but this was not because he burst upon the French musical scene. Like an unkempt stranger in a Restoration salon, Beethoven held an unwelcome, marginal place on French programs for twenty years before the public rushed to him as a soul mate.

Gender, Race, and Language in Light in August

W~THEN Byron Bunch hears Lena Grove's moaning wail during childbirth, he realizes that she seems be speaking clearly to something in a tongue which he knew was not his tongue nor that of any man.' Women's language in Light in August may be clearly spoken, but it obscures discourse rather than illuminating it. Faulkner's women are not silenced but marginalized in a fictional world controlled by men and their language. Andre Bleikasten notes, With Faulkner, the Father -especially the Dead Father-is always the one who names, places, marks, the one who casts the spell, whether through his voice or his eyes.2 The father circumscribes, imposes limits and definitions. In Light in August, however, Faulkner also testifies to a counterforce embodied in Lena's unknown tongue, which can be viewed as a female challenge to the traditionally male mastery of language. His women characters evade the boundaries and categories by which the men attempt to control them. Faulkner's subtle manipulation of sexual dynamics and gender roles within the novel illustrates the full complexity of his presentation of power and authority. The father may exercise the linguistic power of naming, but the mother's foreign language complicates and undercuts the language and power of the father. Interestingly, Faulkner associates this anti-patriarchal foreign language not only with women but also with blacks, as will be seen in the career of Joe Christmas. Most scholars tend to focus their attention on this theme of patriarchal power, admittedly always a significant force in Faulk-