Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America

by Grey Gundaker

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195107692
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/30/1998
Series:	Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	9.57(w) x 6.44(h) x 0.97(d)
Lexile:	1410L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

1	Introduction: "Conventional" Literacy and "Vernacular" Practice	3
2	Creolization, Double Voicing, Double Vision	15
3	African Scripts, Graphic Practices, and Contexts of Learning and Use	33
4	Diaspora of Signs: A Transatlantic Network	63
5	Narratives of Literacy Acquisition and Use	95
6	Alternative Modes of Participation with Text and Artifacts of Literacy	123
7	Contrasting and Complementary Scripts and Graphic Signs	163
	Notes	201
	References	237
	Index	279