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The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marcellus Blount
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Abstract

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.

Type
3. Rewriting Performance: Masquerade, Parody, Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 582 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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