Literacy in a Long Blues Note

Coretta M. Pittman is associate professor in the Department of English at Baylor University. She teaches undergraduate courses on race and rhetoric and writing and social justice and graduate courses in African American Literature and Critical Literacy Studies. Her research focuses on literacy and rhetoric at the intersections of race, class, gender, and popular culture.

In this study Pittman asserts that the highly stylized, written conventions of writers like Anna Julia Cooper, the aural dimension of the folk captured by classic blues singers, and the southern Black folk language in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston served to contest racial injustice as well as provide entertainment as a healing balm. In addition to Cooper and Hurston, the representative women Pittman chose to make her point include Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Grimke, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey. The author sees in the literature and music of the New Negro Renaissance writers and musicians a form of literacy that affirms and honors the oral origins as specular literacy. The volume comprises five chapters, each devoted to classic women writers and blues artists. Pittman notes that in a particularly violent and uneasy time of Black codes and Jim Crow, the Black women she focuses on had a lot to say and the courage to say it, with the purpose of convincing Black and white audiences that Black people were human, intelligent, and capable.--B. Taylor-Thompson "CHOICE" Coretta M. Pittman has taken on a complex topic with multiple strands to weave together from a wide range of subfields. Highlighting how cultural interventions were shaped by race affiliation and social class, Pittman's development and illustration of the concept of 'specular literacy' provides a productive intersectional perspective to womanist/Black studies and will push literacy studies in new directions.--Sarah Robbins, author of Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women's Cross-Cultural Teaching