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

304 Pages·1998·19.87 MB·English

by  Grey Gundaker

Signs of Diaspora
Diaspora of Signs
The Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture
series is published in cooperation with the
Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture
at the College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, Virginia,
by Oxford University Press,
New York
Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace:
New England Crime Literature
and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674—1860
Daniel A. Cohen
"Littery Man ":
Mark Twain and Modern Authorship
Richard S. Lowry
Signs of Diaspora I Diaspora of Signs:
Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice
in African America
Grey Gundaker
Signs of Diaspora
Diaspora of Signs
Literacies, Creolization,
and Vernacular Practice
in African America
GREY GUNDAKER
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1998
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1998 by Grey Gundaker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gundaker, Grey.
Signs of diaspora/diaspora of signs : literacies, creolization, and
vernacular practice in African America / by Grey Gundaker.
p. cm.—(Commonwealth Center studies in American culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510769-1
1. Afro-Americans—-Language. 2. English language United States—Foreign elements.
3. African languages-—Influence on English. 4. Afro-Americans—Communication.
5. Afro-Americans—Civilization. 6. Literacy—United States. 7. Black English.
I. Title. 11. Series.
PE3102.N4G86 -1997
408'. 996073— dc21 96-51560
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
[There was a] policeman in the
gate and he opened a book, I saw
my name . . . written in the book.
He turn over the leaf, I saw it
mark "Welcome." He turned a
leaf and I saw it mark "Fear." He
told me this is my record. I asked
the meaning of "Welcome," he
said my work is Welcome. I asked
the meaning of "Fear," he told me
"You must not fear anything."
(Norman Paul, quoted by Smith
1963:80)
In Bahia, Brazil, in the early years
of the nineteenth century, Hausa and
Yoruba Muslim slaves precipitated a
Preface e series of revolts. Schooled in Arabic
literacy through memorization of the
Qur'an, the rebels also wore into battle
protective amulets containing sacred
verses and prayers. The rebels thus
paired literate technology with the
doctrines of esoteric Islam. At about
the same time, famed slave insurrec-
tion leader Nat Turner, awaiting exe-
cution in a Virginia jail, expressed his
mission to lead African Americans to
freedom by stressing knowledge of
both Roman script literacy and sacred
hieroglyphics in which God's instruc-
tions to revolt were written in blood on
the leaves of trees. Today, in Washing-
ton's National Museum of American
Art in Washington, D.C., James Hamp-
ton's spiritual masterpiece, the mon-
umental Throne of the Third Heaven
of the Nations Millennium General
Assembly, surmounted by the force-
ful injunction "Fear Not," flashes out a
message of transcendence and power
through countless layers of shimmer-
ing, script-encrusted foil and paper
(fig. P.1; all sketches in illustrations
are drawn by me. Unless otherwise
noted, they are based on my own pho-
tographs).
On Hampton's Throne, as in Tur-
ner's narrative, two scripts interact:
VI
PREFACE
FIGURE P.1. Sketch of James Hampton's Mercy Seat (collection of the
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
one the conventional Roman alphabet, the other an undeciphered revealed
script (fig. P.2). Different scripts and graphic practices in the African dias-
pora also interact in less dramatic circumstances. Consider a message
scratched on a sea wall in Roseau, Dominica: parallel lines of abstract em-
blems and Roman-lettered words together forming a prayer for the basic
necessities of life (fig. P.3). Or, on a smaller scale, a hand-painted sign on a
chain-link gate in Tennessee: the words "Beware of Dog" ringed by bold
Xs and Os in red and black (fig. P4.). Or the red letter V alongside material
signs, a white wheel and palmetto in the yard of Victor Melancon in Ham-
mond, Louisiana (fig. P.5). The retired autoworker's yard also contains a
miniature burial ground commemorating the passage through his life
of various roles—welder, barber, sailor, seer—and personal and spiritual
guides (fig. 4.34).
These cases illustrate some of the ways that different scripts and ap-
proaches to reading and writing interact in African America. Several are
easy to write off as instances of simple decoration, the kind of aesthetic en-
FIGURE p.2. James Hampton used both the Roman alphabet and his own
FIGURE p.3. Emblems and an alphabetic prayer in a Spiritual Baptist inscrip-
tion, Roseau, Dominica, June 1989.
FIGURE p.4. Warning sign, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
VIII
PREFACE
FIGURE p.5. Found object
initial V, Hammond,
Louisiana
hancement that lacks real substance but makes everyday existence more
interesting. Several also involve claims of supernatural communication
and agency. Although some form of "literacy" is manifest, the behavior of
the participants diverges significantly from conventional rationalist and
empiricist models of "being literate." One aim of this book is to propose
more constructive ways of approaching such phenomena and taking seri-
ously the information they yield.
The obvious link among these cases is that they combine at least two
modes of inscription in a single object, ensemble, or episode. Thus, though
each remains distinct in numerous other respects, all mark a confluence
between at least two powerful and complex historical currents: the tradi-
tions, innovations, and practices of people of African descent in the Amer-
icas; and the ideologies of alphabetic literacy that have taken shape among
the Arab, European, and European American merchants, slavers, sol-
diers, and schoolteachers with whom Africans and their descendants
have circulated through a prolonged, often violent and oppressive cul-
tural choreography, with profound effects on all parties. To explore the
interaction of modes of inscription in the diaspora, then, is to explore the
politics of culture.
The sources I draw on for this study include published accounts and my
own fieldwork in the southeastern United States—and, to a lesser extent,
the West Indies — over a six-year period. In a sense, however, although I
worked in eleven states and five countries and pulled as much information
as I could from several research libraries, I did very little research spe-
cifically for this book.
My initial intention was to work on two projects that seemed to have
very little in common. One was an investigation of yards and gardens that
African Americans had dressed for beauty and protection. The other was a
more or less straightforward ethnography of literacy within a limited ge-
ographic area, preferably one community.
As I traveled in search of a field site, documenting yardwork along the ix
way, I began to notice overlaps between the two projects. Because of racial
stereotypes, the potency of "illiterate" as a pejorative label, and the use
until recently of literacy tests as a means of disenfranchising black voters, PREFACE
I found that literacy was an uncomfortable topic for me, a white outsider,
to raise with African American consultants whom I had known for only a
short time. 1 also found, though, that they enjoyed talking about their
yards, collections of objects, and artwork. These topics took off from visi-
ble accomplishment rather than an unjust past, and they quickly led in
other directions — including the recollections of schooling, informal in-
struction, and day-to-day reading and writing I had hoped to learn about
for my other project. Given the co-constructed nature of conversation,
this outcome was predictable, but it surprised me nonetheless. In my trav-
els I also noticed that the two projects overlapped in material ways. Writ-
ing and print appeared in yards and home exteriors, and sometimes, espe-
cially in the deep South and the West Indies, a printed message appeared
alongside other marks that I could not interpret. I began keeping track of
such cases.
Meanwhile, between field trips I also read anything that might help to
fill in the historical and cultural backgrounds of African American literacy
and land use, including travel accounts, oral histories, autobiographies,
ethnographies, folklore collections, and novels. Many of these sources con-
tained descriptions that recalled events and objects I had encountered my-
self, in which alphabetic literacy or its artifacts intersected black vernacular
customs, procedures, and innovations. Gradually, instances that seemed
anomalous individually began to make sense together and to clamor for
their own accounting. Together they challenge some venerable presupposi-
tions about the nature and consequences of literacy; together they also
weave a backdrop for vernacular African American literacy. This backdrop
is not a seamless fabric, nor does it lend itself to progressive narration. A
better analogy might be a loose, strong, boundless net or, perhaps, a genre
of performance orchestrated from provisional coherences, memories, ap-
propriations, maskings, jokes, and invocations of transcendence.
The "method" of this book, then, is simply to notice, recount, group,
and attempt to interpret interactions between different modes of inscrip-
tion in the diaspora, following where they lead without claiming defini-
tiveness or closure. Because this book traces a particular kind of interac-
tion across disparate objects and events, it is inherently interdisciplinary
and is not preoccupied with texts in the ways that cultural studies and
documentary histories usually are. Rather, my orientation is ethnographic
even when looking at historical material, and preoccupied with modes of
participation and with culture as activity. Integral to this orientation is
the assumption that the material contains cues to its own interpretation.
Some of these cues index African diasporic associations that have had little
say in canonical conceptualizations of "oral" or "literate" activities, or the