Uncovering Linguistic Fugitivity in an African American Family: Image-Listening as One Humanizing Vehicle to Decolonize Scholarship

• In Event: Decolonial Mapmaking: Critical Methodologies Contextualizing Disruption, Refusal, and Relationality

Abstract

In the “afterlives of slavery” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 8), any research conducted within African-American communities requires a re-mapping marked by “building relationships of care and dignity and dialogic consciousness raising…” (Paris & Winn, 2014, p. xvi). In this empirical paper, the Researcher presents findings from her critical ethnographic case study whereby she explored the linguistic identity negotiation taking place cross-generationally in a nine-member, African-American family from January, 2018 to the late fall of 2018 (with follow-ups conducted subsequently). Two questions guided her inquiry: (1) In what ways have African-American family members practiced languages and literacies intergenerationally? (2) How do African-American families negotiate identity in the midst of intergenerational language and literacy practices? Adopting humanizing data collection and analytical methods with the capacity to illuminate her participants’ “utopian dreams and diasporic aspirations” (Campt, 2017, p. 45), the Researcher uncovered The Family’s everyday practices of linguistic refusal wherein their languaging constituted what she terms linguistic fugitivity. Defined as conscious and unconscious speech acts indexing practices of refusal (Campt, 2017) for the purposes of “undermin(ing) the dominant” and sociohistorical language dictates advanced by societal institutions (Campt, 2014, as cited in Sojoyner, p. 516), linguistic fugitivity signals a move beyond mere resistance to an intentional reimagining of how they must language to live within the life-sustaining frequencies of joy and freedom. Employing language silhouettes (as decolonizing data collection method) and image-listening (as decolonizing analytical approach) permitted the Researcher to stay “in the wake” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 11) by recognizing that studying within African-American communities requires methodologies that acknowledge the historical anti-blackness that defines the nature of Black Folk’s reality (Dumas & Ross, 2016; Kendi, 2016).
Language silhouettes are a “multimodal, biographical approach” (Busch, 2012, p. 1) that elicits verbal and visual data for the purpose of exploring linguistic identity and linguistic diversity (Busch, 2012; Martin, 2012). The ontological underpinnings of this method, combined with the Researcher’s re-imagining of its administration (i.e., deferring to the Family’s framing and naming of what constitutes a “language”), reject the white gaze as lens and arbiter. In the verbal mode, her participants share the languages they speak; in the visual mode, they map these languages within a paper-based silhouette and explicate how these languages live and co-exist.
Image-listening (Campt, 2017) forms a new frame through which to engage relationally and critically with the Family’s image-acts (Bakewell, 1998). Listening to the Family’s language silhouettes surfaced the visual, sonic, psychic, and physical dimensions of the Family’s cross-generational linguistic moves (Campt). Among the findings identified via thematic analysis (Ryan & Bernard, 2003) of ethnographic data and image-listening of language silhouettes, the Researcher uncovered (a) the family’s acts of linguistic refusal disguised in the clothing of accommodation and (b) their intergenerational frequencies of “reassemblage in dispossession” (Campt, p. 60), where echoes of languaging past resounded palpably in their youngest generations. By studying The Family’s linguistic fugitivity through decidedly non-Western frames, the Researcher charted a different course into the academy’s understanding of how and why African-American families language cross generations.

Author

• Pamela M. Jones, Bank Street College of Education