Problems of Race: representation through contrived dialect

An artist’s attempt at imitating, whether intending to be parody or not, can be a source of pure comedy. Yet, serious attempts at depicting the Other—identities in society excluded a voice, self-representation, thereby, power in society—can become mere caricatures of those identities. Classic pieces of literature such as Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Joel Chandler Harris’ stories depicting the fictional character of Uncle Remus are examples where major attempts are made to accurately depict the dialect of Southern blacks. Classics maybe; though, problematic for sure. The authors’ intentions may have been benign, though the construction of the Southern black voice (dialect) in written text when juxtaposed with standard white dialects comes off as linguistic exaggeration and therefore parody of the Southern black identity.

Twain’s representation of Jim in Huck Finn is problematic, not because Twain fails to develop complexity in his character, nor does Twain reduce Jim to the superstitious Negro stereotype as depicted with the hair ball scene early on in the novel, nor does Twain’s use of the word, nigger reduce Huck Finn to a racist work. But while the few occasions where Jim’s voice finds momentum beyond a mere phrase uttered it also opens up Jim’s manner of speaking to the reader—a clear shift from the familiar presented by Huck’s overarching narrative. The longest narrative for Jim occurs upon Jim and Huck’s meeting on the island where Jim explains how and why he has escaped. Although Jim’s speech is largely understandable—not exaggerated to the degree as Uncle Remus’ speech—the process of using the standard English alphabet with its deep orthography (compared to the rather shallow ones of Spanish or Japanese) to represent the phonetic pronunciation of Jim’s speech can be problematic when the white characters are, for the most part, using the language as was considered prescriptively correct. This cannot be explained away as the result of depicting the character’s illiteracy—even Pap Finn’s speech is more decipherable than Jim’s. The result, then, is something like an exoticized simulation of oral speech of the Southern black. Although Jim does have a voice and there’s a sense of his human agency, accurate representation looks more like caricature than the real thing.

Harris’ harshly stereotypical albeit nostalgic depiction of the Uncle Remus character goes beyond this linguistic exoticizing to the point where the narrative can be largely unintelligible. Looking at the story of “Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox,” we can see a more exaggerated depiction of Southern black speech. While the difference in Jim’s words are in slight spelling derivations of standard English for phonetic effect, the difference in Uncle Remus’ words are more frequent and look like a whole different language altogether. Moreover, Uncle Remus’ narrative is constructed within the larger narrative—in standard English, arguably, the master’s voice granting agency to Uncle Remus’ narrative. A clearer portrayal of the Other

Although these two examples of linguistic parody are unintentional attempts within textual speech, they do resemble the scathing lampoon of Japanese identity in the Warner Bros. cartoon, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. To compare content of the former texts with the latter would be absurd. Rather, the connection worth noting is how the speech of the Other in the cartoon is represented. The authors’ intentions for any of the texts, while possibly conciliatory, cannot dismiss the effect in representing the speech in such a way that it is substandard. The Japanese soldier in the cartoon is clearly a caricature ripe with every Asain stereotype at the writer’s disposal—not just Japanese—but the character’s speech is most often indistinguishable at best, cacophonous at worst. The intention is to distance the character from the audience, more alien than human.

How the speech of the Other in written speech is handled may be a difficult task for the author attempting authenticity rather than a distorted semblance of an identity…