XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

Resumo:154-1

Oral (Tema Livre)

154-1	This paper explores popular forms of linguistic coding (oral performance) used by Africa-descendants in Cuba and the US to demonstrate the use of, or manipulation of language as cultural representations of ethnic/racial identity in literature.
Autores:	Antonio D. Tillis (DARTMOUTH - Dartmouth College, USADARTMOUTH - Dartmouth College, USADARTMOUTH - Dartmouth College, USA)

Resumo

This paper proposes to explore the use of popular forms of linguistic coding (oral performance) by groups of Africa-descended people in the Americas for the purpose of demonstrating the use of, or manipulation of linguistic variance as cultural representations of ethnic/racial identity in literature. Particularly, hybridized-oral language forms in their written manifestation will be examined as semiotic markers of performing identity for Blacks in the United States and in Cuba. In contestation are the official and popular languages and linguistic structures as Blacks in certain geographical spaces in the African Diaspora exert through oral performance an ethnic identity that is tied to in-group communicative forms. With regard to modalities for this critical examination, excerpts from classical works of African-American and Afro-Hispanic literature will be used in order to illustrate the linguistic “play” that has marked, grouped or come to identify Blacks in the African Diaspora. Specifically, the poem “Búcate plata” by Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén and excerpts from Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, first published in 1937, will demonstrate how oral language, through literary manipulation in contested spaces, has created a hybridized space for the celebration of a Black-cultural identity in the Americas. The contested spaces about which I make reference are specifically Florida and Havana. For Hurston, it is the cultural fabric of an early to mid-20th century United States of North America, the South no less, that gives birth to linguistic signifiers that represent geographical space and the people who inhabit that space, Black North Americans in the region of the Florida everglades. For Gullén, Havana, becomes the crucible for the testing of linguistic variances that define people and place. The theoretical paradigms presented in this paper are postulations regarding performance theory, post-coloniality and language, cultural hybridization, and post-colonial identity as presented by scholars, the like of Homi Bhabha, Helen Tiffin, Frantz Fanon, and other cultural and post-colonial theorists.

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