by Adam Manno via charlestoncitypaper.com
A renewed interest in Gullah has propelled the language to one of the highest rungs in academia.
Charleston native and performance artist Sunn m’Cheaux spent the fall semester at Harvard teaching an introductory version of a course on Gullah: A language indigenous to the Lowcountry region often described as a combination of English and Central and West African languages.
The pidgin language originally allowed enslaved African people from various tribes to communicate with each other and with their overseers, and is still spoken by African-American communities across coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
The Gullah class is the first of its kind at the Ivy League school. It’s part of the African Language Program within the Department of African and African American Studies.
The class is the brainchild of a graduate student who knows m’Cheaux. The student phoned him and asked if he would be willing to meet with the head of the program, Dr. John Mugane. M’Cheaux, who graduated from Goose Creek High School and didn’t go to college, found that Dr. Mugane was impressed with how quickly m’Cheaux was able to teach him some Gullah basics.
“He starts talking about getting my information and taking a picture for the website, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Wait a minute — did I just get hired?'” m’Cheaux said in a phone interview with CP.
Mugane argues that offering Gullah, along with the 44 other languages taught in the program, increases students’ chances of accurately portraying different communities. “To engage in intellectual and professional work in the Gullah community, we deem it necessary even critical that scholars be literate in Gullah whose basic demonstration is an ability to hold non-trivial conversations with the people they write about, including (and especially) in Gullah, the language of the people they write about,” Dr. Mugane said in an e-mail to CP.
M’Cheaux says that his time bouncing between Charleston, Los Angeles, and New York as an artist and activist influenced his teaching methods. “Ultimately, my arts and entertainment career kind of dovetailed into social activism and commentary, and in a sense, I feel like this is an extension of that as well,” m’Cheaux said. “How to use literal and figurative language to communicate with people and teach people how to make it their own.”
This kind of approach is especially necessary with Gullah — a language that is passed down orally without established standards for grammar and spelling. Aspects of the language may be familiar to English speakers, such as “han’ baby,” which means small infant, and “knee baby,” which can be interpreted as toddler in English.
“I want to build these students’ intuition in order to know when to apply something literally and figuratively, because that will help bring the language to life,” m’Cheaux said. “Those are figurative terms, not necessarily literal terms, but once you look at them literally, it makes total sense.”
M’Cheaux uses the few Gullah reference books and literature available as course materials, but has largely stuck to developing his own curriculum throughout the semester, which includes video chats between students and native speakers.
To read more, go to: https://charlestoncitypaper.com/TheBattery/archives/2017/12/19/harvard-introduces-gullah-class-taught-by-a-charleston-born-artist
Posts tagged as “African Americans at Harvard”
Instead of growing Afros, staging riots or organizing sit-ins, this generation of protesters are crafting witty digital projects to rally themselves. Back in November, several black students at the University of Michigan launched a social media campaign on Twitter, using the hashtag #BBUM, an acronym for “being black at the University of Michigan,” to describe their unique and often irritating experiences as black students at a predominantly white school. Among their frustrations were the usual: hearing how they gained admission because of affirmative action policies; not being “black enough” because they achieved excellent grades and “sounded white”; having to be the spokesmen and -women for black America in history class; or, on the other side of that spectrum, being ostracized because they weren’t acclimating to their new settings fast enough and instead were choosing to be rowdy, urban or culturally demonstrative on campus.
News of the campaign spread, and black students from peer schools like Cornell University and Duke University adopted the idea to articulate their own sentiments. But as is the norm for high-achieving students, these digital protests could no longer be contained in 140 characters and are now evolving beyond tweets. The black students at Harvard and Georgetown universities are kicking up the effort a few notches and incorporating a visual element into their respective demonstrations.
At Harvard, several black students took pictures of one another holding up signs with statements and questions that have been posed to them by their white peers (and, at times, by other black students). Their campaign is hosted on Tumblr and is promoted and shared using the #itooamharvard hashtag. There’s also an accompanying video production about the campaign that will premiere on March 7. The visuals are compelling narratives and all relate to race:
Harvard University reports that it has accepted only 2,029 students for admission from an applicant pool of just over 35,000. Therefore, only 5.8 percent of all applicants to Harvard were accepted for admission.
Harvard chooses not to disclose how many Black students submitted applications for admission. But it does release data on admitted students. This year, 11.5 percent of all admitted students are African Americans.
Blacks were 9.4 percent of the entering class at Harvard in the fall of 2012.
article via jbhe.com