Key Term
- Dialogic coherence: “a capacity to integrate diverse conceptions of reality, culture and identity” (111)
In this piece, McPhail discusses two views of African American discourse, Afrocentricity (attributed to Asante) and African worldview (attributed to Sowande). Both Asante and Sowande believe that African American discourse strives toward unity, relationality, synthesis (over analysis), generation (over total and final representation) of language, and the totality of experience. They differ “by the ways in which they conceptualized coherence and its relationship to African culture” (104). Asante, McPhail claims, place African decent over all else (“the implicit claim that the racial self must have priory over the human self” (110).) Sowande, on the other hand, believes that the African view is only part of the picture. “The Afrocentric and Eurocentric are, for Sowande, inseparable and deeply implicated in each other. The belief that they can be separated from each other, even for the sake of analysis, leads to reification of the very social and symbolic wounds that an African worldview might heal” (106). McPhail laments that the Afrocentric view has been valorized while the Sowande’s worldview has remained invisible. He argues that we should open up scholarship, looking at the currently invisible. For one, many people are excluded from the African American scholarship camp (including McPhail) because “African American rhetorical research has largely become defined as studies of Black language and discourse written by African Americans, instead of the more inclusive notion of the study of African American discourse written by rhetorical scholars” (106). This is problematic because it continues the myth that African American can write more authentically about African American discourse and further enables these voices to remain at the margins. Also, “African American rhetorical scholarship, as a field of inquiry that was itself a response to a lack of visibility in ‘mainstream’ publications, can scarcely afford to ignore any perspective on the contributions of people of African descent that enriches our understanding of language and communication in America” (100).
Key Term
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