Signifyin' and Black feminist rhetoric

 There was a part of this book that said that African Americans believe in the power of words. That's why most things are accompanied by words: music, dance, spells, rituals. The magic is contained in the words. 

This idea was brought into sharper focus in chapter 4 of On African American Rhetoric which discusses new words being used by Black feminists. For example, misogynoir is a word referring to racist and sexist actions and abuses against women of color. 

As soon as you hear that word, you realize that we need a word for that. It can't just be sexism, because it is experienced so differently and at different rates by women of color. 

Another one I found fascinating is "wreck", which Gwendolyn Pough discusses as the

"ways the rhetorical practices of Black women participants in hope hop culture bring wreck -- that is, moments when Black women's discourses disrupt dominant masculine discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or influence the U.S. imaginary, even if that influence is fleeting."

I like the resonance between "wreck" and "rhetoric". We must realize that the voices of Black women in hiphop do often create massive epistemic breaks. This is true for me. Even last summer I thought most black women should just be sexualized as objects in hip hop, then Doja Cat sang, a hundred times in the kitchen where I worked, "Can you kiss me more?" 

What? Women can ask to be kissed more? Epistemic break. 

This chapter talks more broadly about the idea of "signifyin(g)", a rhetorical action whose traits I want to write down: 

1. indirect, circumlocution

2. metaphorical-imagistic (but images rooted in the everyday, real world)

3. Humorous, ironic

4. rhythmi fluency and sound

5. teachy but not prachy

6. direct at person or persons usually present in the situational context

7. punning, play on words

8. introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The example story (from a book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) is
of two black men who are talking circles around a white authority figure who is asking them who started a riot. Bucking the stereotype that these common laborers wouldn't know much, they spin a web of sociological and historical truth around him to provide an appropriately complex answer to his question (the answer to who started the riot has to do with Lincoln, who freed the slaves without providing any political power for them, and white America generally, which, in the words of Isabel Wilkerson, acts as an insecure alpha.)

The ability to talk circles around someone -- that is one form of freedom that black people have, although they have often had to pay for using it, when White people have perceived that they are being bamboozled. 

Did you know that Sojourner Truth may very well have never said the phrase "Ain't I a woman?" That phrase was added to a transcript of what she said years later by a scribe. But it has become a cornerstone phrase of Black feminist rhetoric. I liked reading that Alice Walker sees her name as related to Sojourner Truth's, since Sojourner = Walker, and Alice comes from a Greek term for "truth".