Robin Hamilton wrote:
>It's a narrow example, but I became interested in an aspect of this when I
>came on "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (the original, not the Styron novel)
>transcribed the night before his execution by a white middle-class New York
>reporter, which made Turner sound like a white [etc.] ...
>
>Par for the course, and a stunning example of what in my wilder moments I'm
>inclined to describe as "linguistic genocide".
>
>... what itched my brain was that the only examples of "authentic" (?) black
>19thC American speech -- Mark Twain, Melville in "Benito Cerrino", _Uncle
>Tom's Cabin_ and Joel Chandler Harris -- that I could call to mind were all
>by white middle class [etc] ...
>
>
To flog a favorite horse, look at Frank Stanford's "The Battlefield
Where The Moon Says I Love You." The Grolier Poetry Bookshop in
Cambridge, MA has it classified as Afro-American literature.
Considering Stanford was a white guy from Arkansas, no doubt this is a
response to the poet's language: 320 pages of Arkansas black dialect
speech. Not an appropriation or linguistic genocide but an assimilation
or absorption. One of the few excerptable moments in an otherwise
seamless poem is his black dialect version of the Last Supper.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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