African American Literacies
Introduction: don't we still have to prove our humanity? 1. Literacy, language, composition, rhetoric and (not) the African American student: sick and tired of being sick and tired 2. the literacies of African American-centered rhetoric and composition: freestylin' or lookin' for a style that's free 3. "To protect and serve": African American female literacies 4. African American-centered rhetoric, composition, and literacy: theory and research 5. Composition in a fifth key: rhetorics and discourses in an African American-centered writing classroom 6. Dukin' it out with "the powers that be": centering African American-centered studies and students in the traditional curriculum
The law, linguistics, and education: Educational reform for African American language minority students
Abstract African Americans are usually excluded from receiving federal or local funding as language minority students because English is their native language. African Americans share a unique linguistic history when compared to other immigrant groups. Slaves were separated by language upon capture in West Africa, thereby resulting in pidginization processes with English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese which flourished during the European African slave trade. Ensuing Creolization in North and South America has created special social and educational problems for descendants of former slaves. This article focuses on that problem in the United States. Evidence from law, educational policy, and linguistics is presented to claim that current linguistic regulations are inconsistent with the educational goals espoused in “systemic reform” (see Smith & O'Day, 1991). Several misconceptions prevail in the larger society regarding African American English (AAE), and many teachers harbor some of these stereotypes, often subconsciously, but often in overtly racist ways. The belief that Black English is bad English or ungrammatical are inconsistent with empirical linguistic evidence to the contrary. These misconceptions have profound social consequences in our schools and halls of justice. Class differences in speech and race have left indelible socially stratified watermarks throughout the United States, and here I explore some sociolinguistic aspects of these problems. A central dimension of this argument focuses on the inadequacy of current language policies for African American students. Speech pathology is commonly used to diagnose African Americans for special education, but vernacular AAE is not pathological. Similarly, many African Americans are placed in bilingual education classes with students for whom English is not native (ENN); this practice is also misguided. In conclusion, I call for comprehensive programs and policies for all students that adequately account for their linguistic diversity.
The Poet, The Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, Epistles 1.19
I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).