Revisiting Racialized Voice : African American Ethos in Language and Literature

Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature argues that past misconceptions about what constitutes black identity and voice, codified from the 1870s through the 1920s, inform contemporary assumptions about African American authorship. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, David G. Holmes urges a revisiting of narratives from this period to strengthen and advance notions about racialized writing and to shape contemporary composition pedagogies. Holmes considers how the white hegemony demarcated black identity and reveals the ways some African American writers unintentionally reinforced the hegemony’s triad of race, language, and identity. Whereas some of these writers were able to help rethink black voice by recognizing dialect as a necessary linguistic discursive medium, others actually inhibited their own efforts to transcend race essentialism. Still others projected race as a personal and social paradox which complicated racial identity but did not denigrate African American identity. In recalling the transition in the 1960s from voice as metaphor denoting literary authorship to one connoting student authorship, Holmes posits that rereading the 1960s would enable a mediation between literary and rhetorical voice and an empowered look at race as both an abstraction and as rhetorically indispensable. Pointing to the intersection of African American identity, literature, and rhetoric, Revisiting Racialized Voice begins to construct rhetorically workable yet ideologically flexible definitions of black voice. Holmes maintains that political pressure to embrace a “color blindness” endangers scholars’ ability to uncover links between racialized discourses of the past and the present, and he calls instead for a reassessment of the material realities and theoretical assumptions race represents and with which it has been associated. Revisiting Racialized Voice:African American Ethos in Language and Literature argues that past misconceptions about black identity and voice, codified from the 1870s through the 1920s, inform contemporary assumptions about African American authorship and ethos. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, David G. Holmes urges a revisiting of narratives from this period to strengthen and advance notions about racialized writing and to shape contemporary composition pedagogies. Pointing to the intersection of African American identity, literature, and rhetoric, Revisiting Racialized Voice begins to construct rhetorically workable yet ideologically flexible definitions of black voice. Holmes maintains that political pressure to embrace“color blindness” endangers scholars'ability to uncover links between racialized discourses of the past and those of the present, and he calls instead for a reassessment of the material realities and theoretical assumptions race represents and with which it has been associated. Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Introduction......Page 14 1. The Color of Literacy: Race, Self, and the Public Ethos......Page 21 2. From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading......Page 38 3. Chesnutt ’s Reconstruction of Race and Dialect......Page 59 4. Of Color and Culture: Du Bois’s Evolving Perspectives on Race......Page 75 5. “Reading My Words but Not My Mind ”: Hurston ’s Ironic Voice......Page 88 6. The Rhetoric of Black Voice: Implications for Composition Pedagogy......Page 105 Notes......Page 122 Works Cited and Consulted......Page 128 Index......Page 136 The Color Of Literacy: Race, Self, And The Public Ethos -- From Reading Race To Race As A Way Of Reading -- Chesnutt's Reconstruction Of Race And Dialect -- Of Color And Culture: Du Bois's Evolving Race Perspectives -- Reading My Words But Not My Mind: Hurston's Ironic Voice -- The Rhetoric Of Black Voice: Implications For Composition Pedagogy. David G. Holmes. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 115-122) And Index. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, David G. Holmes urges a revisiting of narratives from the 1870s through the 1920 to stengthen and advance notions about racialized writing and to shape contemporary composition pedagogies.