"Creolization" and hybrid folk traditions add ___: More notes and links

D R A F T

"Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in [/] males, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it." -- James Baldwin. Quoted in Patrick B. Mullen, The Man Who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 13-14.

Mullen has an important discussion of hybridization of white and black cultural traditions in a series of folk revivals from the 1930s through the 1960s and beyond, and Alan Lomax' role in it -- 92-94

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THE ATLANTIC IN PARIS

Dispatches From Ta-Nehisi Coates

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/english-is-a-dialect-with-an-army/278300/

English Is a Dialect With an Army

The Atlantic in Paris: Dispatch #10

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Aug 2 2013, 6:50 AM ET

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I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air. That is the whole point of conquest. But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding, and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes and yet finds oddly compelling. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual. The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code from which all white people can "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world.

Coates doesn't use the "c-word," but I like the way he says, "... once those ways are apprehended by the conquered -- as they must be -- they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding, and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes and yet finds oddly compelling." Exactement.

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