The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance

Abstract

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.