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Michael L. Hecht, Ronald L. Jackson, II, and Sidney A. Ribeau. AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNICATION: EXPLORING IDENTITY AND CULTURE (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003; pp. 321, $74.95 hardcover, ISBN: 0805839941; $34.50 paper, ISBN: 080583995X.
"Is 'blackness' a separate and independent element that must be resurrected from its hiddenness under an erasure, or is it the emergent product of an intercultural chiaroscuro fusion?" asks Stanford Lyman (1994, p. 361 ). No. But the authors of African American Communication affirm this position. I began reading hoping to find a substantiated challenge to my prior assumptions. The authors' goal is to demonstrate how and why African Americans-because of their collective experience of slavery, subjugation, and powerlessness throughout American history-communicate differently than European Americans in interpersonal interactions. They argue that Black identity, communicative competence, language style, and relationship formation and maintenance are distinct strategies adopted to navigate a dominant European power structure that poses barriers to maintaining cultural authenticity and to gaining access to power.
Chapter 1 begins with ontological claims about Blackness and difference without questioning their essential assumptions. There has been a long and continuing dispute between African American scholars regarding the validity of evoking racial differences in a postmodern world that de-centers and deconstructs notions of race. A debate in The Black Scholar (Black World Foundation, 1993) between scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Molefi Asante, and Gerald Early is a good example. European scholars from Derrida to Baudrillard to Lyotard have also weighed in....