Centering Blackness in Sociolinguistics:
On Zora Neale Hurston and the Recombinant Archive of Linguistic Variation
Though linguistics has made recent strides in its structural and epistemological engagement with race, racism, and racialization, the scientific study of language remains bedeviled by what Charity Hudley et al. describe as a “race gap” in linguistics, referring to “significant deficiencies compared to other disciplines when it comes to the critical study of race” (2020: 221). This talk homes in on possibilities for reckoning with these shortcomings with a focus on expanding the scholarly toolkit for analyzing language variation. Specifically, I examine (meta)discourse in and around the work of Zora Neale Hurston, including her contributions to the documentation of African American English (AAE), and the raciolinguistic politics around 20th-century uptake of her work. While Hurston’s nonfiction (e.g., folklore, memoir) and fiction writing is now celebrated for its characteristically deft representation of AAE, neither her substantive achievement in the recording of a minoritized linguistic variety nor the controversy it engendered have been scrutinized thoroughly by sociolinguists. In arguing for an expanded range of sources for language data and weaving more humanistic and intersectional frameworks for linguistic analysis alongside traditional scientific approaches to the study of language, I follow a line of inquiry advocated recently by the Linguistic Society of America that asks, “How might linguistic research itself, in its questions, methods, assumptions, and norms of dissemination, reproduce or work against racism?” (2019: 4)Through analyses of Zora Neale Hurston’s published works, archived correspondence, and contemporaneous commentary about her writing, I explore how the structural (i.e., morphosyntactic, phonological) features of African American English found in her writing contribute to contemporary knowledge of the variety and the social life of language. This examination is complemented with epistemological reframing of harmful and entrenched deficit-based metalinguistic descriptions of language variation and change. By drawing together with linguistics scholarly approaches from African American Studies, anthropology, and gender studies, I chart forward robust interdisciplinary connections in the study of language and race.
References
Charity Hudley, Anne H., Mallinson, Christine, and Mary Bucholtz. 2020. “Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession.” Language, 96(4), pp. 200-235.
Linguistic Society of America. 2019d. LSA statement on race. Online: https://www .linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-statement-race, approved May 4, 2019.