Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture)

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. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Preface 6 Contents 12 1 Introduction: "Conventional" Literacy and "Vernacular" Practice 16 2 Creolization, Double Voicing, Double Vision 28 3 African Scripts, Graphic Practices, and Contexts of Learning and Use 46 4 Diaspora of Signs: A Transatlantic Network 76 5 Narratives of Literacy Acquisition and Use 108 6 Alternative Modes of Participation with Text and Artifacts of Literacy 136 7 Contrasting and Complementary Scripts and Graphic Signs 176 Notes 214 References 250 Index 292 A 292 B 293 C 293 D 295 E 295 F 296 G 296 H 297 I 297 J 298 K 298 L 298 M 299 N 300 O 300 P 300 Q 301 R 301 S 301 T 303 U 303 V 303 W 303 Y 304 "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. Examining the interplay of cultural trajectories and sign systems in the African diaspora, particularly in the U.S., Gundaker 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."--BOOK JACKET. "Replete with nearly a hundred illustrations, Signs of Diaspora: Diaspora of Signs is the first full exploration of the nontraditional modes of expression that have developed among African Americans since the middle passage to the present day. This and its provocative challenge to accepted distinctions between literate and illiterate peoples make Gundaker's book vital reading for students and scholars of African American studies, cultural studies, literacy, and anthropology."--Jacket In the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, and perhaps all complex cultural networks and encounters, events involving literacies arise that incorporate resources with different histories and different relationships to spoken language within a single event, narrative, or object.