Vernacular Forms: expressions of resistance

The role of the 'popular' in popular culture is to fix the authenticity of popular forms, rooting them in the experiences of popular communities from which they draw their strength, allowing us to see them as expressive of a particular subordinate social life that resists its being constantly made over as low and outside...However, as popular culture has historically become the dominant form of global culture, so it is at the same time the scene, par excellence, of commodification, of the industries where culture enters directly into the circuits of a dominant technology -- the circuits of power and capital. -- Stuart Hall, p.469 "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?" in Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies. (eds.) David Morley and Chen Kuan-Hsing. Routledge, 1996.

Webster's Dictionary offers the following definition of vernacular. {L. vernaculus born in one's house, native, fr. verna a slave born in his master's house, a native.] 1. Belonging to or developed in a particular place, region, or country; native; indigenous; esp., spoken or used by the people of a particular place, country. 2. Belonging to, or written in, or using, the native, as opposed to the literary, language...

The vernacular of the African-American community has long been associated with a capacity for earthy expressivity, whether that vernacular takes the form of Spirituals, Gospel, the Blues, Jazz, or Rap. It has not been accidental that the African-American vernacular has often been the chosen language for expressing a spirit of resistance, since it has developed precisely out of the language of the native slave.

In his Narratives, Frederick Douglass talks about his remembrance of slave songs. In our journey through this course we hope to include a parallel journey from the origins of the slaves' "ring shout" to gospel music and its later secularization into rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll.

This section builds around the study of music as an expression of values, traditions, and community; as an expression of how culture can build on the shared experience of oppression. In this way, what are now dots on serialized, linear timelines of history -- slavery, the reconstruction period, the great migrations, the depression, and the civil rights movement -- might be conceptually transformed into the study of myth, ritual and symbol in shared cultural texts. Such a focus might permit us to explore how black religion became both a force for reproducing injustice as well as a fountain of hope; and how it forms a link between expressive culture and specific cultural and political institutions. Reading the chapter on "sorrow songs" in WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks reminds us about the significance of dynamic, vernacular art forms in our society in relation to the deep legacy of racist institutions, and a still deeper hunger for justice.

John Lahr, "Speaking across the divide," New Yorker, Jan 23, 1997, pp.35-42. A report about Ebonics and the attempts of minority girls to express their identities through this vernacular.

The flip side of these vernacular expressions can be found in minstrelsy. See David Roediger, "White skins, black masks: minstrelsy and white working class formation before the civil war," pp. 115-132 in The Wages of Whiteness.

Vernacular forms stretch beyond music to include the realm of storytelling and the folk arts and crafts that persist to this day in spite of the nearly total commodification of material culture. In the following section, Christine Miyasaki, Larry Williams, Heather Marshall, Victoria Panaeva, and Molly Allen explore a variety of vernacular expressions articulated by minority cultural groups in America.