The Whitey Voice: Linguistic agency, (anti)racism, and the discursive construction of Whiteness in a Black American barbershop
H. Samy Alim
Friday, May 19/ 1:30 PM /Multicultural Center Theater

This presentation is based on ethnographic research in a suburban US community known as "Sunnyside." Intense gentrification that has reduced Sunnyside's Black population from over 70% in the 1970s to just over 20% at present. Black community members now see themselves as being in direct competition for resources with other ethnic groups and with wealthy, White neighboring suburbs. This talk examines the complex, multilayered relationships between language, discourse and (anti)racism, particularly as they unfold in situations of racial conflict. These relationships are constructed and contested discursively through everyday talk in the community's most (in)famous Black barbershop -- one of the last remaining Black public spaces in Sunnyside.

H. Samy Alim is visiting assistant professor in the Departments of Anthropology and African American Studies at UCLA and assistant professor of linguistics at New York University. The leading scholar of language and hip hop in the world today, Professor Alim is the author or coauthor of four books, including Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (Routledge, forthcoming), You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community (Duke University Press, 2004), and Street Conscious Rap (Black History Museum Publishers, 1999).

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Multicultural Center

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