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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Focal point Different linguistic strategies are used in the media to mark the language of black characters. Often, current slang and lexical elements are used, especially if the characters being portrayed are in certain age groups. In addition salient features – syntactic or phonological – accurate or not may also be used.
What is virtually important is that minstrel performances reproduced not only what they supposed were racial characteristics of black Americans (minstrelsy content) but also what they supposed were their principal cultural forms: dance, music, verbal play.
[Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class]Introduction
This chapter continues the discussion of the representation of AAE, but the focus is on audiovisual media from minstrelsy to a film in the twenty-first century. This chapter presents a general overview and description of linguistic features and rhetorical strategies that recur in television shows and films about African Americans. For the most part, the linguistic patterns that I consider here are those that are addressed in the first five chapters. What does it mean for a character to ‘sound black,’ to use the language associated with blackness? What role does language play as viewers evaluate the images of characters in black film? In what way is it used to mark stereotypes, and how are the rhetorical strategies and syntactic, phonological and lexical patterns manipulated to mark different levels of speech, that is, different types of speech in different situations?
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