Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film¹

Abstract

The ideological and indexical aspects of linguistic representation have been extensively examined in contemporary sociolinguistics both through investigations of language crossing in everyday interaction and through analyses of mediatized linguistic performances. Less well understood are the indexical meanings achieved when language crossing itself becomes the focus of linguistic representation. One prominent instance of this phenomenon is the use of African American English by European American actors in Hollywood films as part of what is argued to be a complex language‐based form of blackface minstrelsy. As mock language, linguistic minstrelsy in such films involves sociolinguistic processes of deauthentication, maximizing of intertextual gaps, and indexical regimentation of the performed language, but unlike earlier forms of minstrelsy these performances are typically problematized within the films as transgressions of the ideology of racial essentialism. In the two films analyzed in detail in the article, linguistic minstrelsy is shown both to reproduce and to undermine the symbolic dominance of hegemonic white masculinity.

Stylizing stylization: The case of Aigia Fuxia

“…They can be seen as ways of performative foregrounding and potentially destabilizing dominant folk linguistic constructs about standard language and dialect in the Cypriot context. In this sense, and through such linguistic choices, Aigia Fuxia addresses common practices of indexing cultural 'authenticity' via the use of the basilectal end of the dialect continuum; Aigia Fuxia performs some quite radical unpacking of the underlying ideological premises of such practices precisely by demonstrating the fact that they are cultural constructs (cf the notion of 'strategic de-authentication' in Coupland 2001;Bucholtz & Lopez 2011). In a sense, then, the Aigia Fuxia 'register' performatively stylizes stylization itself; this may have quite considerable subversive potential as a deconstructive process which foregrounds implicit hegemonic takes on an imagined 'authentic' Cypriot 'other'; it thereby also exposes an imagined hegemonic (modem, urban, cultured, refined) Cypriot Self as an ideological construct.…”

Don’t think, feel: Mediatization of Chinese masculinities through martial arts films

“…As pointed out by several recent works (e.g., Bucholtz, 2011;Bucholtz and Lopez, 2011;Inoue, 2003;Jaffe, 2011), specific voices or speech styles are mapped onto specific racialized bodies through a process of mediatization in movies, TV shows, or novels, and these mediatized and racialized voices or speech styles have largely been taken by most viewers at face value. That is, although it depends on producers' purposes or viewers' positions, what is being presented in media tends to appear to audiences as generally authentic or authoritative.…”

Language and Masculinity

“…In this theoretical approach, what unifies diverse forms of masculinity is power, which is conceptualized as fundamental to how masculinity works. More recent linguistic scholarship complicates the link between masculinity and power, noting in particular the growing ideological destabilization of hegemonic forms of masculinity and the constant identity work required to sustain this construct (Bucholtz and Lopez 2011;Korobov 2009;Milani 2011;Chapter 13 in this volume;Sunderland 2000). Such research points to the insecure status of masculine hegemony at this cultural moment as well as the critical role of language in both delinking and relinking masculinity and power.…”