Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film

Journal of Sociolinguistics

Volumn 15, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 680-706

  Bucholtz, Mary ^a   Lopez, Qiuana ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS   (United States)

Author keywords

African American English; Language crossing; Masculinity; Mock language; Performance; Race

Indexed keywords

EID: 82255185614     PISSN: 13606441     EISSN: 14679841     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00513.x     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
2. Alim, H. Samy. 2006. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York Routledge.
3. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis, Minnesota University of Minnesota Press.
4. Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal art as performance. In Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, Illinois Waveland Press. 3-58.
5. Bauman, Richard. 1996. Transformations of the word in the production of Mexican festival drama. In Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (eds.) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, Illinois University of Chicago Press. 301-327.
6. Briggs, Charles L. and Richard Bauman. 1992. Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2: 131-172.
7. Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 443-460.
8. Bucholtz, Mary. 2011a. Race and the re-embodied voice in American film. Language and Communication 31: 255-265.
9. Bucholtz, Mary. 2011b. White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
10. Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7: 585-614.
11. Chun, Elaine. 2001. The construction of white, black, and Korean American identities through African American Vernacular English. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 52-64.
12. Chun, Elaine W. 2004. Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of Mock Asian. Pragmatics 14: 263-289.
13. Chun, Elaine. 2009. Speaking like Asian immigrants: Intersections of accommodation and mocking at a U.S. high school. Pragmatics 19: 17-38.
14. Cockrell, Dale. 1997. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
15. Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30: 345-375.
16. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
17. Cutler, Cecelia A. 1999. Yorkville crossing: White teens, hip hop and African American English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 428-442.
18. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453-476.
19. Fine, Marlene G. and Carolyn Anderson. 1980. Dialectical features of black characters in situation comedies on television. Phylon 41: 396-409.
20. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. 1993. Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York Oxford University Press.
21. Fought, Carmen and Lea Harper. 2004. African Americans and language in the media: An overview. Paper presented to the 33rd annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 30 September - 3 October, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
22. Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
23. Harper, Lea. 2006. Style-shifting by African American actors in Hollywood films. Unpublished master's thesis. Santa Barbara, California University of California.
24. Hewitt, Roger. 1986. White Talk Black Talk: Inter-Racial Friendship and Communication amongst Adolescents. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
25. Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, Massachusetts Blackwell.
26. Holmberg, Carl Bryan and Gilbert D. Schneider. 1986. Daniel Decatur Emmett's stump sermons: Genuine Afro-American culture, language, and rhetoric in the Negro minstrel show. Journal of Popular Culture 19: 27-38.
27. Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, Massachusetts South End Press.
28. Johnson, Kenneth R. 1975. Black kinesics: Some non-verbal communication patterns in the Black culture. In Joey Lee Dillard (ed.) Perspectives on Black English. The Hague, The Netherlands Mouton. 296-306.
29. Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of 'Pittsburghese'. Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77-104.
30. Kitwana, Bakari. 2006. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York Basic Civitas Books.
31. Lehmann, Chris. 2003. You gots to be a spirit!: Can't a wigger get a table dance? Reason June 4. Last accessed 13 June 2011 at.
32. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press.
33. Lopez, Qiuana. 2009. Imitation or influence: White actors and Black language in film. Texas Linguistic Forum 53: 110-120.
34. Lopez, Qiuana. 2010. 'I ain't lying': The role of voice quality in constructing (in)authentic identity. Paper presented to the 39th annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 4-6 November, San Antonio, Texas.
35. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York Oxford University Press.
36. Mahar, William J. 1985. Black English in early blackface minstrelsy: A new interpretation of the sources of minstrel show dialect. American Quarterly 37: 260-285.
37. Mahar, William J. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana, Illinois University of Illinois Press.
38. Meek, Barbra A. 2006. And the Injun goes 'How!': Representations of American Indian English in white public space. Language in Society 35: 93-128.
39. North, Michael. 1994. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York Oxford University Press.
40. Nowatzki, Robert. 2007. Blackin' up is us doin' white folks doin' us: Blackface minstrelsy and racial performance in contemporary American fiction and film. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 18: 115-136.
41. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States. New York Routledge.
42. Pfeil, Fred. 1995. White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. London Verso.
43. Podesva, Robert J. 2011. Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types. Paper presented at the 37th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 12-13 February, University of California, Berkeley.
44. Rahman, Jacquelyn. 2007. An ay for an ah: Language of survival in African American narrative comedy. American Speech 82: 65-96.
45. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. New York Longman.
46. Rampton, Ben. 2003. Hegemony, social class and stylisation. Pragmatics 13: 49-84.
47. Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
48. Rickford, John R. 1977. The question of prior creolization in Black English. In Albert Valdman (ed.) Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Bloomington, Indiana Indiana University Press. 190-221.
49. Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London Verso.
50. Rogin, Michael. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley, California University of California Press.
51. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, New Hampshire Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England.
52. Saxton, Alexander. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London Verso.
53. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23: 193-229.
54. Sweetland, Julie. 2002. Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically-marked dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6: 514-536.