SLSL Intro "It Had to Do with Language"

[arthur bryant]

Allowed!  It was actually OK to write like this!  Who
knew?  The effect was exciting, liberating, strongly
positive.  It was not a case of either/or, but an
expansion of possibilities." (SL, "Intro," p. 7)

Liberating and positive. But for black authors, many
that influenced Pynchon, it wasn't always actually OK.




In the contention over which parts of Afro Americana
should be emphasized, many, like the poet Langston
Hughes, wanted to stress more earthy mediums
like jazz, the blues, and black dialect. In
opposition, the black bourgeoisie wanted to celebrate
black culture, but in a genteel manner. The
bourgeoisie
won out and "high culture" was promoted--art, music,
and writing of the highest social acceptance (Huggins
10). This did not by any means rule out the
works of Hughes and others like him who revelled in
the use of dialect and other "lowly" black forms They
were lauded, certainly, but they were not always the
darlings of the middle-class, because "black
intellectuals were searching for their own identity,
but they were bound up in a more general
American experience than a 'Harlem Renaissance' would
suggest" (11).
Nonetheless, black culture was promoted, in spite of
the various agendas that were at odds.


http://www.ibrotha.com/thesis/chap1b.htm


The English version of Chomskey's _Language And
Responsibility_ was published in 1979. Same year as
the 
Ann Arbor Black Enlish Case, marking the legitimation
of the language of black people in judicial annals and
confirming the possibilities of linguistic theory and
research in our quest for self-definition and literate
vision. 

Smitherman, "Review Of Noam Chomsky's Language And
Responsibility" [1983]

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