Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (African American Life) - Softcover

Vershawn Ashanti Young

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081433248X ISBN 13: 9780814332481

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In ""Your Average Nigga"", Vershawn Ashanti Young uses his own experiences to examine how black masculinity is shaped by identity performances of racial authenticity, academic literacy, class mobility, and sexuality. Moving between autobiography, autoethnography, and scholarly analysis, Young critiques proponents of ""code-switching"" whose solution to the black ""literacy gap"" requires inner-city youth to adopt white English vernacular at school and to reserve black English vernacular for home. ""Your Average Nigga"" exposes the factors that make black racial identity incompatible with literacy for blacks, especially black males. Drawing on scholarship in both performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young argues that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between black and white linguistic performances harm inner-city blacks by requiring them to choose between abandoning their customary ways of speaking and behaving at the risk of alienating themselves from their families and communities and retaining their speech and behavior as a marker of racial authenticity while isolating themselves from mainstream society. Young also shows that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between black and white racial identities leave blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are ""black enough."" For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Ultimately, Young argues that far from denaturalizing supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists have contended, racial performance only reinscribes the essentialism that it is believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.

About this title

Review:

In an engaging style, Young mixes narrative autocritography, his mother's tongue and wit, analysis of literature on race, African American history, and language and literacy studies to argue against the dominant ideological model of literacy and for a theory of code meshing-a 'technique [that] meshes versions of English together in a way that's more in line with how people actually speak and write anyway.' Although he knows code meshing is not a panacea, he sees it as one way to improve the retention rates and achievement of black students in higher education. Read Young. Argue with him. Take him to task. You may not agree with his every point, but you will come away from this book thinking deeply about racism, sexuality, class, gender, their role and yours in the teaching of literacy."--Elaine Richardson "associate professor of English and applied linguistics at Pennsylvania State University and author of Hiphop Literacies "

Your Average Nigga is a brilliantly constructed book that is as equally captivating as it is intellectually stimulating. What's especially appealing about Your Average Nigga is that is can be used in a number of disciplines from Linguistics to American Studies because of the complex lens in which Young explores literacy and identity."--Souls

Vershawn Young's Your Average Nigga has the ingredients of a good novel: dazzling prose, a seductive plot, and a critical and likeable narrator. Beyond its wonderful storytelling, however, this manuscript is undergirded by a provocative theorizing about racial, gender, and sexual identity vis-?-vis language use."--E. Patrick Johnson "associate professor of performance studies and African American studies at Northwestern University and author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity "

Punctuated throughout with verve, passion, and rigor, Vershawn Ashanti Young's Your Average Nigga is a smart and provocative addition to the burgeoning field of black masculinity studies."--Mark Anthony Neal "associate professor of African-American studies at Duke University and author of New Black Man "

The ironic title of this sociological autobiographical presentation of the dilemma in which many upwardly mobile blacks find themselves says it all. Including solid illustrative material, it is a compelling and thought-provoking piece of work."--Choice

About the Author:

Vershawn Ashanti Young is assistant professor of rhetoric and African American world studies at the University of Iowa.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 081433248X
• ISBN 13: 9780814332481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176