Handling Family Business: Technical Communication Literacies in Black Family Reunions

ABSTRACT

This article highlights technical and professional communication (TPC) as a literacy practice used to plan and sustain Black family reunions. Specifically, I examine the work of three families who create and engage with technical and business writing genres to complete internal and external reunion organizing work. I argue that the field of TPC needs more focused inquiry into research that centers Black families as TPC practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Black family reunions
• Black families
• literacy
• business writing

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my participants, my family, Beverly J. Moss, Christa Teston, Scott L. DeWitt, and Jonathan Buehl for their advice and guidance in shaping the ideas that led to this article. Thank you to Ashley Newby, Conā Marshall, and my colleagues at York University, Stevie Bell, Rich Shivener, and Beth Caravella, for their feedback and suggestions as I worked to draft this article. Finally, I would like to thank the Black TPC team, reviewers, and editors for their patience and thoughtful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. My capitalization of “Black” throughout this article follows Crenshaw’s (1991) model as Black does “constitute a specific group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun” (p. 1244).

2. Milu (2021) argues for a transnational Black Language Pedagogy to prevent the erasure of practices and experiences of transnational and African immigrants in the U.S. who also identify as Black. This article centers Black families in the U.S. who are descendants of enslaved peoples. To that end, I primarily use the term “Black American” and “Black family reunion” while also engaging with scholars who use the term “Black” or “African American” to reference the same group. I suggest the work of Constance R. Sutton (2004) for learning more about family reunion rituals of transnational Afro-Caribbean families whose experiences may differ from those of Black Americans.

3. All names are pseudonyms.

4. Robert’s Rules of Order was created by Henry Martyn Robert, an engineering officer in the United States Army. The first edition of the manual was published in 1876 and the most recent edition was published in 2011.

5. The host family are members of the family who live in or near the city in which the reunion is located. Thus, the host family can change with the location of the reunion. The host family often (but not always) includes members of the family reunion executive team. In the case of the TCJ family, the host family included the family reunion president and several other executive members.

6. Where many may recognize a tension or binary between the sacred (Moss, 2003) and the secular (Mckoy, 2019) here, I identify an important synergy with Black TPC as a throughline. Mckoy’s digital chapter highlights how Kirk Franklin’s “Melodies from Heaven,” a Black American church choir throwback staple, is performed at Trap Karaoke. Similarly, Erica Campbell (one half of the Gospel Duo Mary Mary) was one of the forerunners of the Trap Gospel genre with her hit record “I Luh God (feat. Big Shizz)” D. Danyelle Thomas (2016) discusses this song and others in the emerging genre, which has roots in the African American church. Thus, the boundaries of the scared and the secular are more intersecting than parallel.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura L. Allen

Laura L. Allen is an Assistant Professor of Writing at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her scholarly interests include digital rhetorics and race, family literacy, and community engaged research in Black communities. She teaches courses on professional writing, rhetoric, social justice, and digital media.