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Book Review: Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture

Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture delivers what the title promises: an in-depth examination of the correlation between the linguistic resources and the power of a speech community. Marcyliena Morgan tackles intellectually challenging and socially meaningful topics that highlight some pivotal points of language-based concern in racial relations in the United States. This review will offer a general overview of the book’s content, and delve into some key strengths and weaknesses. Morgan uses an (auto)ethnographic approach to studying African American English (AAE). The introduction clearly and succinctly reveals the focus around which the content coheres: “While one aim of this book is to describe and analyze contemporary language and communication among African Americans in the US, its main focus is on language as an aspect of culture and the ways in which it mediates identity across cultural and social contexts” (p. 9).Developing an understanding of the social construction of African American identity provides a useful framework with which to examine various discursive data. The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter, studying the African American speech community, reveals some points of academic interest for scholars. First, the discussion of “speech community” implies that she is drawing from the tradition of ethnography of communication. The chapter also provides an effective historical context from which to see and hear the data that are presented in subsequent chapters. This historical overview is accomplished using some vivid data from African American poetry (involving a particularly eloquent analysis of the controversy surrounding Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s work), historic events, and narrative analysis. The chapter draws strongly upon Erving Goffman’s work, and is useful to anyone interested in studying face and/or marginalization. The second chapter focuses on “forms of speech.” This chapter explores different forms of African American speech such as indirectness,pointed indirectness, baited indirectness, direct and directed speech, reading, signifying, and playing the dozens. Morgan effectively describes how the form is performed as well as what is “getting done” through the use of the form. The third chapter, examining “language norms and practices,” opens with a case study of one situation in which AAE language practices caused significant concern in a workplace setting. The rest of the chapter explores very controversial subjects, such as the debates over AAE versus General English use in