CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Sonja Lanehart (Dept. of English, Univ. of Georgia), November 7, 2003 (Haines 352 - 10AM-12PM).

"Sista Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy"

LePage and Tabouret-Keller's (1985) "acts of identity" (i.e., "People create their linguistic systems so as to resemble those of the groups with which from time to time they wish to identify.... [W]e behave in the way that-unconsciously or consciously-we think appropriate to the group with which at that moment we wish to identify. This may be quite distinct from the group we are talking to.") accurately reflects the narratives produced by my participants (as well as the language I have observed in their everyday lives). Because the narratives are pieced from their oral and written texts, I would dare say "acts of identity" can be applied to both their oral language and their written literacy. Nevertheless, even though we all have "acts of identity", not all of my participants want to own up to theirs.

During the lecture and workshop, we will discuss the lives of five Southern, African American women in one family across three generations: Maya, the matriarch; Maya's fourth oldest child, Grace; Maya's eighth and youngest child, Reia; and Grace's two children, Deidra and Sonja. Their variations in educational level, SES, and generation contribute to some striking differences in how they view and talk about and live their lives with respect to their language and literacy. We will listen to and discuss data that points to attitudes and beliefs about language and literacy and how those beliefs sometimes contradict everyday behavior. That contrast in evidence is one example that will be used to show how multimethods research can answer complex sociolinguistic questions. We will briefly discuss what I mean by multimethods, what multimethods I used to conduct the research that culminated into my book Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (University of Texas Press, 2002), and we will get to know the beliefs, attitudes, behavior, and ways of knowing of Maya, Grace, Reia, Deidra, and Sonja as they grapple with what Alice Walker's Celie in The Color Purple called what only a fool would do but what, unfortunately, many of us do because we struggle with our "acts of identity"-talk in a way that is "peculiar to [o]ur mind[s]".