Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels

Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels explores how Black women writers engage with their image in dominant Western discourse. Deliberately objectified, their discursive identities have been underwritten and overlooked. Using Sylvia Wynter's argument that the emergence of Black women writers presents a parallax view that reorients humanist discourse, my project argues that Black women novelists reorient Black women's images through heteroglossia. Mikhail Bakhtin reads the novel as an interaction between languages as socio-ideological bodies. Challenging a dominant hegemony, the novel dialogic underscores Black women's resistant writing; however, Bakhtin's fusion of language and body restricts the dynamic between the two, repeating the erasures of dominant discourse. Translanguage constructs Bakhtin's heteroglossic dialogic as a slippage between language and body that demonstrates diversity. Translanguaging proposes named languages as a posteriori group categorizations, while language use approaches language features without regard for these boundaries. In this reorientation of language, Bakhtin's heteroglossia becomes Edouard Glissant's creolization, a specifically racialized expression of movement and change. The translanguaging of Black women's novels plays with dominant discourses to rescript their images as complex and mutable.

Reading four novels, I demonstrate how narrative historicizes, theorizes, diasporizes, and incorporates this strategy. Pauline E. Hopkins displays a daguerreotype that reflects the oppressive history of Black womanhood to project an expressive excess in Contending Forces (1900). Zora Neale Hurston performs her "Characteristics of Negro Expression" as a moving image in the discursive play between main character and community in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). With double exposure in Louisiana (1994), Erna Brodber uses Hurston as the inspiration for her fictional main character to ground her theories in the Black diaspora. Toni Morrison invests in Black women's discursive erasure as the material of reorientation, presenting a photonegative in Sula (1973). Raciolinguistics is explicitly anti-oppressive in its attention to power dynamics. The novelists' synaesthesic presentation of Black women's consciously embodied language use emphasizes the power of language on their material conditions but plays with the individual's power over language. These novels demonstrate the flexibility of the designations Black and woman, names that inform but do not fix expression, to destabilize hegemonies.