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The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

Language in African American Communities is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the language, culture, and sociohistorical contexts of African American communities. It will also benefit those with a general interest in language and culture, language and language users, and language and identity. This book includes discussions of traditional and non-traditional topics regarding linguistic explorations of African American communities that include difficult conversations around race and racism. Language in African American Communities provides:• an introduction to the sociolinguistic and paralinguistic aspects of language use in African American communities; sociocultural and historical contexts and development; notions about grammar and discourse; the significance of naming and the pall of race and racism in discussions and research of language variation and change;• activities and discussion questions which invite readers to consider their own perspectives on language use in African American communities and how it manifests in their own lives and communities; and• links to relevant videos, stories, music, and digital media that represent language use in African American communities.Written in an approachable, conversational style that uses the author's native African American (Women's) Language, this book is aimed at college students and others with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics.

In The Black God Trope and Rhetorical Resistance: A Tradition of Race and Religion, Armondo R. Collins theorizes Black Nationalist rhetorical strategies as an avenue to better understanding African American communication practices. The author demonstrates how Black rhetors use writing about God to create a language that reflects African Americans'shifting subjectivity within the American experience. This book highlights how the Black God trope and Black Nationalist religious rhetoric function as an embodied rhetoric. Collins also addresses how the Black God trope functions as a gendered critique of white western patriarchy, to demonstrate how an ideological position like womanism is voiced by authors using the Black God trope as a means of public address. Scholars of rhetoric, African American literature, and religious studies will find this book of particular interest.

Now in its third edition, this text examines how African Americans personally and culturally define themselves and how that definition informs their communication habits, practices, and norms.This edition includes new chapters that highlight discussions of gender and sexuality, intersectional differences, contemporary social movements, and digital and mediated communication.The book is ideally suited for advanced students and scholars in intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, communication theory, African American/Black studies, gender studies, and family studies.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans'role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.

Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture AssociationWinner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet ResearchersAn explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there's nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

On African-American Rhetoric traces the arc of strategic language use by African Americans from rhetorical forms such as slave narratives and the spirituals to Black digital expression and contemporary activism. The governing idea is to illustrate the basic call-response process of African-American culture and to demonstrate how this dynamic has been and continues to be central to the language used by African Americans to make collective cultural and political statements. Ranging across genres and disciplines, including rhetorical theory, poetry, fiction, folklore, speeches, music, film, pedagogy, and memes, Gilyard and Banks consider language developments that have occurred both inside and outside of organizations and institutions. Along with paying attention to recent events, this book incorporates discussion of important forerunners who have carried the rhetorical baton. These include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Molefi Asante, Alice Walker, and Geneva Smitherman. Written for students and professionals alike, this book is powerful and instructive regarding the long African-American quest for freedom and dignity.

Africana Race and Communication: A Social Study of Film, Communication, and Social Media focuses on the areas of History, Ethos, Motif, and Mythology-Philosophy. This study is an interdisciplinary study, which surveys the collection, interpretation, and analysis of Black communication and culture. Likewise, the intellectual dexterity of Africana Studies as an interdisciplinary body of knowledge postures alternative ways of probing Africana phenomena. This volume provides a categorical lens matrix of Africana Studies to locate race and communication in place, space, and time. Thus, it provides readers with a compilation of literary, historical, philosophical, and communicative essays that attempt to describe and evaluate the Africana experience from a centered perspective.

Examines the barbershop as a rhetorical site in African American culture across genres, including fiction, film, poetry, and theater. In Keepin'It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric, Vorris L. Nunley investigates the role of the hush harbor (a safe place for free expression among African American speakers) as a productive space of rhetorical tradition and knowledge generation. Nunley identifies the barbershop as an important hush harbor for black males in particular and traces the powerful cultural trope and its hidden tradition of African American knowledge through multiple texts. From Dunbar's'We Wear the Mask'to the recent Barbershop movies and the provocative rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Nunley's study touches on a range of time periods and genres.Nunley's introduction connects African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR) to everyday considerations of what may or may not be spoken in public and how African American speakers manage numerous hidden transcripts. In the first three chapters, Nunley charts different iterations of hush harbors and their function in the context of residual and emergent rhetorical traditions. He investigates public sphere theory and its application (and misapplication) to black civil society and hush harbors and connects AAHHR to nommo, the power of the word. In chapters 4 and 5, Nunley examines the ubiquity of the hush harbor trope in African American culture and considers barbershops as pedagogical sites, using literature, poetry, philosophy, and film to make his case. In chapter 6, he analyzes the Barbershop movie in detail, arguing that the movie's commodified, neoliberal version of AAHHR did not represent a hush harbor, although that was ostensibly the aim.Keepin'It Hushed concludes with a presentation of a hush harbor pedagogy in chapter 7 and a distinctive analysis of hush harbor oriented speeches by then-Senator Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rhetoricians and readers interested in African American life and culture will appreciate the cogent analysis in Nunley's volume.

Scholar Adam J. Banks offers a mixtape of African American digital rhetoric in his innovative study Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Presenting the DJ as a quintessential example of the digital griot-high-tech storyteller-this book shows how African American storytelling traditions and their digital manifestations can help scholars and teachers shape composition studies, thoroughly linking oral, print, and digital production in ways that centralize African American discursive practices as part of a multicultural set of ideas and pedagogical commitments. DJs are models of rhetorical excellence; canon makers; time binders who link past, present, and future in the groove and mix; and intellectuals continuously interpreting the history and current realities of their communities in real time. Banks uses the DJ's practices of the mix, remix, and mixtape as tropes for reimagining writing instruction and the study of rhetoric. He combines many of the debates and tensions that mark black rhetorical traditions and points to ways for scholars and students to embrace those tensions rather than minimize them. This commitment to both honoring traditions and embracing futuristic visions makes this text unique, as do the sites of study included in the examination: mixtape culture, black theology as an activist movement, everyday narratives, and discussions of community engagement. Banks makes explicit these connections, rarely found in African American rhetoric scholarship, to illustrate how competing ideologies, vernacular and academic writing, sacred and secular texts, and oral, print, and digital literacies all must be brought together in the study of African American rhetoric and in the teaching of culturally relevant writing. A remarkable addition to the study of African American rhetorical theory and composition studies, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age will compel scholars and students alike to think about what they know of African American rhetoric in fresh and useful ways.

African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives is an introduction to fundamental concepts and a systematic integration of historical and contemporary lines of inquiry in the study of African American rhetorics. Edited by Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II, the volume explores culturally and discursively developed forms of knowledge, communicative practices, and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles by people of African ancestry in America. Outlining African American rhetorics found in literature, historical documents, and popular culture, the collection provides scholars, students, and teachers with innovative approaches for discussing the epistemologies and realities that foster the inclusion of rhetorical discourse in African American studies. In addition to analyzing African American rhetoric, the fourteen contributors project visions for pedagogy in the field and address new areas and renewed avenues of research. The result is an exploration of what parameters can be used to begin a more thorough and useful consideration of African Americans in rhetorical space.

In this book Adam Banks uses the concept of the Digital Divide as a metonym for America's larger racial divide, in an attempt to figure out what meaningful access for African Americans to technologies and the larger American society can or should mean. He argues that African American rhetorical traditions--the traditions of struggle for justice and equitable participation in American society--exhibit complex and nuanced ways of understanding the difficulties inherent in the attempt to navigate through the seemingly impossible contradictions of gaining meaningful access to technological systems with the good they seem to make possible, and at the same time resisting the exploitative impulses that such systems always seem to present.Banks examines moments in these rhetorical traditions of appeals, warnings, demands, and debates to make explicit the connections between technological issues and African Americans'equal and just participation in American society. He shows that the big questions we must ask of our technologies are exactly the same questions leaders and lay people from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to slave quilters to Critical Race Theorists to pseudonymous chatters across cyberspace have been asking all along. According to Banks the central ethical questions for the field of rhetoric and composition are technology access and the ability to address questions of race and racism. He uses this book to imagine what writing instruction, technology theory, literacy instruction, and rhetorical education can look like for all of us in a new century.Just as Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground is a call for a new orientation among those who study and profess African American rhetoric, it is also a call for those in the fields that make up mainstream English Studies to change their perspectives as well. This volume is intended for researchers, professionals, and students in Rhetoric and Composition, Technical Communication, the History of Science and Society, and African American Studies.

What communicative experiences are particular to African Americans? How do many African Americans define themselves culturally? How do they perceive intracultural and intercultural communication? These questions are answered in this second edition of African American Communication: Exploring Identity and Culture. Informing multiple audiences interested in African American culture, from cultural researchers and practitioners to educators, policymakers, and community leaders, this innovative and invaluable resource examines the richness and depth of African American communication norms and patterns, as well as African American identities. Positive and healthy African American identities are centrally positioned throughout the book. Applying the cultural contracts theory and the communication theory of identity, authors Michael L. Hecht, Ronald L. Jackson II, and Sidney A. Ribeau explore relationships among African Americans, as well as between African Americans and European Americans, while highlighting the need for sensitivity to issues of power when discussing race, ethnicity, and culture. This wide-ranging volume provides an extensive review of the relevant literature and offers recommendations designed to encourage understanding of African American communication in a context extending beyond Eurocentric paradigms. Considering African American identity with a communicative, linguistic, and relational focus, this volume: •Defines African American identities by describing related terms, such as self, self-concept, personhood and identity; •Explores Afrocentricity and African American discourse; •Examines the status of African Americans in the United States using census statistics and national studies from other research agencies; •Considers identity negotiation and competence; and •Features a full chapter on African American relationships, including gendered, familial, intimate, adolescent and adult, homosexual, friendship, communal, and workplace relationships. African American Communication: Exploring Identity and Culture begins an important dialogue in the communication discipline, intercultural studies, African American studies and other fields concerned with the centrality of culture and communication as it relates to human behavior. It is intended for advanced students and scholars in intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, communication theory, African American/Black studies, social psychology, sociolinguistics, education, and family studies.

This is an extraordinarily well-balanced collection of essays focused on varied expressions of African American Rhetoric; it also is a critical antidote to a preoccupation with Western Rhetoric as the arbiter of what counts for effective rhetoric. Rather than impose Western terminology on African and African American rhetoric, the essays in this volume seek to illumine rhetoric from within its own cultural expression, thereby creating an understanding grounded in the culture's values. The consequence is a richly detailed and well-researched set of essays. The contribution of African American rhetoric can no longer be rendered invisible through neglect of its tradition. The essays in this volume neither seek to displace Western Rhetoric, nor function as an uncritical paen to Afrocentricity and Africology. This volume is both timely and essential; timely in advancing a better understanding of the richly textured history that is expressed through African American discourse, and essential as a counterpoint to the hegemonic influence of Greek and Roman rhetoric as the origin of rhetorical theory and practice. Written in the spirit of a critical rhetoric, this collection eschews traditional focus on public address and instead offers a rich array of texts, in musical and other forms, that address publics.

This new edition of The Afrocentric Idea boldly confronts the contemporary challenges that have been launched against Molefi Kete Asante's philosophical, social, and cultural theory. By rendering a critique of some post-modern positions as well as the old structured Eurocentric orientations discussed in the first edition, this new edition contains lively engagements with views expressed by Mary Lefkowitz, Paul Gilroy, and Cornel West. Expanding on his core ideas, Asante has cast The Afrocentric Idea in the tradition of provocative critiques of the established social order. This is a fresh and dynamic location of culture within the context of social change.

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 drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings. Distinct from conventional script literacy on the one hand, and oral culture on the other, these'creolized'vernacular practices include writing in charms, use of personal or nondecodable scripts, the strategic renunciation of reading and writing as communicative tools, and writing that is linked to divination, trance, and possession. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the Southeastern United States and the West Indies, Gundaker offers a complex portrait of the intersection of'outsider'conventions with'insider'knowledge and practice.

Afrocentricityùthe placement of African values and ideals at the center of the discussion surrounding African culture, discourse, and behaviorùis an important framework that has emerged over the past decade. In this timely volume, editor Janice D. Hamlet has chosen essays that illuminate various aspects of African American culture, refracted through the lens of Afrocentric thought. In Part I, the basics of Afrocentric ideology and methodology are examined. Part II focuses on Afrocentric approaches to the dynamics of communication. The Afrocentric influence on the black aesthetic is covered in Part III, with an examination of language, literature, oral tradition, movies, and television. Part IV provides a glimpse into the future of Afrocentric visions.