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9 Discourse, Cultural Imperialism, Black Culture and Language Research in the United States Garrett Albert Duncan 1. In a 1979 .EW 9ORK 4IMES Op-Ed piece, James Baldwin noted that the public outcry over a court decision that affirmed the importance of black language in the education of black children had little to do with language itself. Rather, he surmised, the chorus of disapproval had more to do with the ROLE of language and the history it revealed about its speakers. For Baldwin, black language is the “creation of the black Diaspora.” It is the precipitate of an alchemical reaction that had transformed diverse linguistic elements into “the political instrument, means, and proof of power” that bears witness to the historical processes that created it (1993, 373–4). Speaking to the truth and the integrity of the language, Baldwin made the following declaration along these lines: A people at the center of the western world, in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a “dialect.” We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie. (1993, 375) Baldwin’s words point to the indelible imprint of oppression that inflects the speech of black people; they also point to the capacity of the language to resist the oppression that seeks to render it mute. Oppression, here, refers not only to structural and institutional relations, such as exploitation, marginality, and powerlessness, which attach in material and particular ways to black language. Rather, his remarks evince a different experience of oppression, one “of existing in a society whose dominant meanings render the particular perspectives and point of view of one’s group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as ‘other’” (Young 1992, 191). This experience, called 144 Garrett Albert Duncan cultural imperialism, “consists in the universalization of one group’s experience and culture and its establishment as the norm” (Young 1992, 191). As Baldwin indicated in the Op-Ed piece, black language reveals the private lives of a people who refuse to be defined by a dominant language that has never been able to recognize it. Black language, in effect, disrupts cultural norms that naturalize its dominant counterpart by rendering them visible and exposing the particularity of their perspective. To be clear, cultural dominance is not merely a matter of ignorance, of not knowing. Rather, cultural dominance derives from a predisposition that reveals such ignorance as being deeply implicated in specific interests; such a predisposition informs the character of national and individual identities. W. E. B. Du Bois alluded to this point when he paused at the dawn of his career to reflect on the meaning of his life’s work. Here, Du Bois observed: I had come to a place where I was convinced that science, the careful social study of the Negro problems, was not sufficient to settle them; that they were not basically, as I had assumed, difficulties due to ignorance but rather difficulties due to the determination of certain people to suppress and mistreat the darker races. I believed that this evil group formed a minority and a small minority of the nation and of all civilized peoples, and that once the majority of well-meaning folk realized their machinations, we would be able to secure justice. A still further step I was not yet prepared to realize must be taken: not simply knowledge, not simply direct repression of evil, will reform the world. In long ... the actions of [women and] men which are due not to a lack of knowledge nor to evil intent, must be changed by influencing folkways, habits, customs, and subconscious deeds. (1997, 221–2) In what follows, I examine Du Bois’ assessment in the context of an appraisal of black culture and language research in the US. In doing so, my objective is to go beyond a critique that simply harps on the evils of white supremacy. Instead, I hope to recast these evils in a different theoretical light to make transparent their machinations in ways that render them vulnerable and that make possible their eradication. I do so by employing Johanne Fabian’s (2002) concept of allochronism as a theoretical device. Allochronism refers to a sociotemporal feature that characterizes ethnographic reporting. Specifically, it describes the practice of anthropologists in which they deny the coevalness...

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