Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (African American Life Series)
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 LiteraciesVershawn 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-à-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 AuthenticityPunctuated 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 ManVershawn 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-à-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 AuthenticityPunctuated 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