Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature - Hardcover

Holmes PhD, Associate Professor David G

9780809325474: Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809325470 ISBN 13: 9780809325474

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

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.

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About the Author:

David G. Holmes is an associate professor of English and director of the composition program at Pepperdine University.

Review:

[An] ingenious, tightly reasoned study.” Choice

[Holmes’s] project, to problematize voice specifically black voice is a project long awaited and much needed. Revisiting Racialized Voice crisscrosses the field of English studies and provides a clear example of not only how but also why the fields of literature and composition/rhetoric studies should be in conversation with one another. Holmes’s work offers and invigorating push toward a more enlightened practice of reading, teaching, and writing.” Gwendolyn D. Pough, CCC

This book is an invaluable introduction to its subject.” Rhetoric Review

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