Firing Mama's Gun: The Rhetorical Campaign in Geneva Smitherman's 1971–73 Essays

Abstract

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscure memory of their sophisticated persuasive techniques and political campaigns. Such has been the case with Geneva Smitherman, the noted sociolinguist and scholar activist. This essay analyzes the persuasive choices in a corpus of her earliest essays as a rhetorical campaign to situate her innovative use of antagonism and analysis within a tradition of African-American women scholars and activists who have used essay-writing as a means of sociopolitical action and to model a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of their efforts.

Notes

1Special thanks to RR readers Shirley Logan and Jacqueline Royster for their insightful feedback on this essay, to Geneva Smitherman for her encouragement and inspiration, to various colleagues that have read drafts of this essay, and to my family for their unyielding support.

2See Walker's The Rhetoric of Struggle; Comfort's “The Essay Matters Because the Essayist Matters: Personal Disclosures and the Enactment of Ethos in Essays by Black Feminist Writers”; Logan's With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women; and Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women.

3I use African-American English (AAE) in this essay as a broad term that encompasses Africanized semantic, grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical patterns in speaking and writing referred to in earlier periods as Black Idiom (BI), Black English (BE), Black English Vernacular (BEV), Ebonics, and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

4See Lorenzo Dow Turner's 1949 study on the Gullah culture and dialect, William Labov's 1966 The Logic of Nonstandard English, Lorena Kemp's 1964 College Language essay “Linguistics and Grammatical Rules.”

5Gilyard's research on the College Language Association, the oldest association for African- American literature and language scholars, shows a continued focus on issues of African-American language that predates discussions of the crisis regarding AAE during the 1970s. Sessions at the organization's 1949 conference included “Suggested Procedures for the Handling of Freshman Who Are Weak in English” and “Practical Steps Any College Can Take to Improve Student Performance in English” (Gilyard 633).