ENGLIT 2542

The hyper-economic imperative of organizing cheap labour in higher education hits across all departments and schools in the context of the academy as a new, 'destabilized' but rapidly-growing market....these hiring, market-driven practices serve a larger, ideological function for the disciplines: in the case of English studies, this ideological function intersects directly with freshman English...These political economies, thus, script how English departments are often organized and, as such, as this article attempts to show, also script what Black students will be able to write and, therefore, who they are allowed to be/come as college writers/thinkers.

The authentic voice concept is at one useful and problematic. For students from stigmatized groups such as African Americans, it assumes that such students may find their primary voices in particular discourses. Furthermore, it could imply a conception of an Africanized English worldview. However, it is doubtful that expressionists are referring to voice in this way. Expressionistic proponents are to be commended because they recognize the personal dimension to writing and writing's political nature.

Although African-American worship services appear to be dominated by oral events (sermons, prayers, songs), there is, in fact, an interdependence between oral and written events, and therefore oral and written texts. Thus, my discussion of intertextuality encompasses not only the interconnecting of texts but also interconnecting among media. There are also cultural norms that govern when and how certain texts are used and for what purposes they are used. These intertextual relations and their accompanying cultural norms have major implications for how African-American church communities create, define, and use literate texts.

Minstrelsy, in addition to its humorous depictions of free and enslaved African-Americans, was also a complex and public working out of American class identities and nationalism...Eric Lott argues that with the advent of the minstrel show, the northern masses now had a fixed place, based on race, where they could go to work out their evolving modalities of class through race. In seeing regularly scheduled, politically motivated entertainment based on the humorous dehumanization and abject othering of Black people minstrelsy helped racialize and color class.

The problem lies, at least in part, in seeing America as something in the abstract, as an idea separate from our practices. We often frame unjust practices as aberrations that don't live up to what we want America to be. But it's hard to buy that logic when for more than seventy-five years the country's very Constitution dictated that a slave should be counted as three-fifths of a person. Really, what's an ideal when you can't even get it into the founding document? The American Idea has never been quite the pristine paradigm we make it out to be, and it is our inability to acknowledge this fact that nourishes the value gap.

...what can it mean to be critical when the professional defines himself or herself as one who is critical of negligence, while negligence defines professionalization? Would it not mean that to be critical of the university would make one that professional par excellence, more negligent than any other? To distance oneself professionally through critique, is  this not the most active consent to privatize the individual? The undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future.

...Many would argue that there is no authentic culture to study in rap music or Hiphop discourse for mass consumption, since rap has long become a global industry removed from its primary audience. However, study of folk culture is not constrained to isolated groups untouched by contemporary postindustrial society. Folk are 'the people who know,' who have a special knowledge fro their vantage point of the world, from their routine social experiences....The study of folk groups in the contemporary world involves studying their hybridity, an aspect of which can be examined through studying the impact of technologies on the interaction of discourses between audience, performer, and the making of meaning.

...white America has always had an intense interest in black culture. Consequently, the fact that a significant number of white teenagers have become rap fans is quite consistent with the history of black music in America and should be not be equated with a shift in rap's discursive or stylistic focus away from black pleasure and black fans. However, extensive white participation in black culture has also always involved white appropriation and attempts at ideological recuperation of black cultural resistance...Like generations of white teenagers before them, white teenage rap fans are listening in on black culture, fascinated by its differences, drawn in by mainstream social constructions of black culture as a forbidden narrative, a symbol of rebellion.