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Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America PDF

304 Pages·1998·19.87 MB·English
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Signs of Diaspora Diaspora of Signs The Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture series is published in cooperation with the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, by Oxford University Press, New York Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674—1860 Daniel A. Cohen "Littery Man ": Mark Twain and Modern Authorship Richard S. Lowry Signs of Diaspora I Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America Grey Gundaker Signs of Diaspora Diaspora of Signs Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America GREY GUNDAKER New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1998 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaarn Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1998 by Grey Gundaker Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gundaker, Grey. Signs of diaspora/diaspora of signs : literacies, creolization, and vernacular practice in African America / by Grey Gundaker. p. cm.—(Commonwealth Center studies in American culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510769-1 1. Afro-Americans—-Language. 2. English language United States—Foreign elements. 3. African languages-—Influence on English. 4. Afro-Americans—Communication. 5. Afro-Americans—Civilization. 6. Literacy—United States. 7. Black English. I. Title. 11. Series. PE3102.N4G86 -1997 408'. 996073— dc21 96-51560 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper [There was a] policeman in the gate and he opened a book, I saw my name . . . written in the book. He turn over the leaf, I saw it mark "Welcome." He turned a leaf and I saw it mark "Fear." He told me this is my record. I asked the meaning of "Welcome," he said my work is Welcome. I asked the meaning of "Fear," he told me "You must not fear anything." (Norman Paul, quoted by Smith 1963:80) In Bahia, Brazil, in the early years of the nineteenth century, Hausa and Yoruba Muslim slaves precipitated a Preface e series of revolts. Schooled in Arabic literacy through memorization of the Qur'an, the rebels also wore into battle protective amulets containing sacred verses and prayers. The rebels thus paired literate technology with the doctrines of esoteric Islam. At about the same time, famed slave insurrec- tion leader Nat Turner, awaiting exe- cution in a Virginia jail, expressed his mission to lead African Americans to freedom by stressing knowledge of both Roman script literacy and sacred hieroglyphics in which God's instruc- tions to revolt were written in blood on the leaves of trees. Today, in Washing- ton's National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., James Hamp- ton's spiritual masterpiece, the mon- umental Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, surmounted by the force- ful injunction "Fear Not," flashes out a message of transcendence and power through countless layers of shimmer- ing, script-encrusted foil and paper (fig. P.1; all sketches in illustrations are drawn by me. Unless otherwise noted, they are based on my own pho- tographs). On Hampton's Throne, as in Tur- ner's narrative, two scripts interact: VI PREFACE FIGURE P.1. Sketch of James Hampton's Mercy Seat (collection of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). one the conventional Roman alphabet, the other an undeciphered revealed script (fig. P.2). Different scripts and graphic practices in the African dias- pora also interact in less dramatic circumstances. Consider a message scratched on a sea wall in Roseau, Dominica: parallel lines of abstract em- blems and Roman-lettered words together forming a prayer for the basic necessities of life (fig. P.3). Or, on a smaller scale, a hand-painted sign on a chain-link gate in Tennessee: the words "Beware of Dog" ringed by bold Xs and Os in red and black (fig. P4.). Or the red letter V alongside material signs, a white wheel and palmetto in the yard of Victor Melancon in Ham- mond, Louisiana (fig. P.5). The retired autoworker's yard also contains a miniature burial ground commemorating the passage through his life of various roles—welder, barber, sailor, seer—and personal and spiritual guides (fig. 4.34). These cases illustrate some of the ways that different scripts and ap- proaches to reading and writing interact in African America. Several are easy to write off as instances of simple decoration, the kind of aesthetic en- FIGURE p.2. James Hampton used both the Roman alphabet and his own FIGURE p.3. Emblems and an alphabetic prayer in a Spiritual Baptist inscrip- tion, Roseau, Dominica, June 1989. FIGURE p.4. Warning sign, Chattanooga, Tennessee. VIII PREFACE FIGURE p.5. Found object initial V, Hammond, Louisiana hancement that lacks real substance but makes everyday existence more interesting. Several also involve claims of supernatural communication and agency. Although some form of "literacy" is manifest, the behavior of the participants diverges significantly from conventional rationalist and empiricist models of "being literate." One aim of this book is to propose more constructive ways of approaching such phenomena and taking seri- ously the information they yield. The obvious link among these cases is that they combine at least two modes of inscription in a single object, ensemble, or episode. Thus, though each remains distinct in numerous other respects, all mark a confluence between at least two powerful and complex historical currents: the tradi- tions, innovations, and practices of people of African descent in the Amer- icas; and the ideologies of alphabetic literacy that have taken shape among the Arab, European, and European American merchants, slavers, sol- diers, and schoolteachers with whom Africans and their descendants have circulated through a prolonged, often violent and oppressive cul- tural choreography, with profound effects on all parties. To explore the interaction of modes of inscription in the diaspora, then, is to explore the politics of culture. The sources I draw on for this study include published accounts and my own fieldwork in the southeastern United States—and, to a lesser extent, the West Indies — over a six-year period. In a sense, however, although I worked in eleven states and five countries and pulled as much information as I could from several research libraries, I did very little research spe- cifically for this book. My initial intention was to work on two projects that seemed to have very little in common. One was an investigation of yards and gardens that African Americans had dressed for beauty and protection. The other was a more or less straightforward ethnography of literacy within a limited ge- ographic area, preferably one community. As I traveled in search of a field site, documenting yardwork along the ix way, I began to notice overlaps between the two projects. Because of racial stereotypes, the potency of "illiterate" as a pejorative label, and the use until recently of literacy tests as a means of disenfranchising black voters, PREFACE I found that literacy was an uncomfortable topic for me, a white outsider, to raise with African American consultants whom I had known for only a short time. 1 also found, though, that they enjoyed talking about their yards, collections of objects, and artwork. These topics took off from visi- ble accomplishment rather than an unjust past, and they quickly led in other directions — including the recollections of schooling, informal in- struction, and day-to-day reading and writing I had hoped to learn about for my other project. Given the co-constructed nature of conversation, this outcome was predictable, but it surprised me nonetheless. In my trav- els I also noticed that the two projects overlapped in material ways. Writ- ing and print appeared in yards and home exteriors, and sometimes, espe- cially in the deep South and the West Indies, a printed message appeared alongside other marks that I could not interpret. I began keeping track of such cases. Meanwhile, between field trips I also read anything that might help to fill in the historical and cultural backgrounds of African American literacy and land use, including travel accounts, oral histories, autobiographies, ethnographies, folklore collections, and novels. Many of these sources con- tained descriptions that recalled events and objects I had encountered my- self, in which alphabetic literacy or its artifacts intersected black vernacular customs, procedures, and innovations. Gradually, instances that seemed anomalous individually began to make sense together and to clamor for their own accounting. Together they challenge some venerable presupposi- tions about the nature and consequences of literacy; together they also weave a backdrop for vernacular African American literacy. This backdrop is not a seamless fabric, nor does it lend itself to progressive narration. A better analogy might be a loose, strong, boundless net or, perhaps, a genre of performance orchestrated from provisional coherences, memories, ap- propriations, maskings, jokes, and invocations of transcendence. The "method" of this book, then, is simply to notice, recount, group, and attempt to interpret interactions between different modes of inscrip- tion in the diaspora, following where they lead without claiming defini- tiveness or closure. Because this book traces a particular kind of interac- tion across disparate objects and events, it is inherently interdisciplinary and is not preoccupied with texts in the ways that cultural studies and documentary histories usually are. Rather, my orientation is ethnographic even when looking at historical material, and preoccupied with modes of participation and with culture as activity. Integral to this orientation is the assumption that the material contains cues to its own interpretation. Some of these cues index African diasporic associations that have had little say in canonical conceptualizations of "oral" or "literate" activities, or the

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Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective of vernacular activities and creolization. It shows that African-Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also dr
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