Rappin' And Stylin' Out * Communication In Urban Black America

In this anthology, Thomas Kochman includes articles which reflect an awareness of black culture norms. In portraying and analyzing the communicative habits and expressive lifestyle of adult urban blacks, Kochman hopes to disclose the 'inside' sociocultural view: what urban black people themselves see and value in their life situations. He has selected articles that not only describe specific communicative behavior, but reproduce the actual contexts in which such behavior occurs: the street, the clubhouse, the shoeshine stand, the park, the pool hall, the cafe.

This anthology includes: NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION: Nonverbal Communication among Afro-Americans: An Initial Classification (Cooke) * Black culture on black terms: a rejection of the social pathology model (Baratz) * Black folk music (Sithole) * Motion and feeling through music (Keil) * Dynamics of a black audience (Williams)

VOCABULARY AND CULTURE: Names, graffiti, and culture (Hinton & Kohl) * The language of soul (Claude Brown) * The vocabulary of race (Ken Johnson) * 'Inversion' in black communication (Holt) * the kinetic element in black idiom (Kochman) * The African element in American English (Dalby)

EXPRESSIVE USES OF LANGUAGE: Stylin' outta the black pulpit (Holt) * Street talk (H. Rap Brown) * Shoe-shine on 634d (Maryland) * Joking: the training of the man of words in talking broad (Abrahams) * Toward an ethnography of black American speech behavior (Kochman) * Rules for ritual insults (Labov) * Signifying, loud-talking, and marking (Mitchell-Kernan) * Black poetry...where it's at (Rodgers)

EXPRESSIVE ROLE BEHAVIOR: Roles and ideologies (Keiser) * The greaser is a 'bad ass'; the gowster is a 'muthah': an analysis of two urban youth roles (Ellis and Newman) * Aspiration (Brookins) * Foreword from 'Pimp: The Story of My Life' (Iceberg Slim) * The game (Woodie King, Jr.) * Lovers and exploiters (Elliot Liebow) * The hustling ethic (Julius Hudson)