ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the issues surrounding African Americans and their struggle for self-definition within the United States of America, through an exploration of various assertive modes of expression. In a culture whose dominant historical voice has been white, there is a vital need for African Americans to present their lives, past and future, as of equal importance in the ‘American story’. As Werner Sollors writes, ‘For this reason, what is called “memory” . . . may become a form of counter - history that challenges the false generalizations in exclusionary “History”’ (Sollors 1994: 8). African American ‘voices’ actively express ‘memory’, as Sollors refers to it, present ‘counterhistories’ to resist the tendency to exclude, and articulate African American identities to break the imposed ‘silence’ inherited from slavery and perpetuated in the written history and social frameworks of the USA. This chapter will emphasise the dynamic quality of the contest between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ in African American culture and how this process has been integral to a wider struggle for political power and authority in the United States. This concept of expressive ‘voices’ takes a variety of forms: slave songs, autobiography, fiction, political speech, rap music and film, but together they create an alternative mode of communication through which the African Americans both state their own culture and assert their difference, while positioning themselves alongside the often more dominant voices of white mainstream culture. These ‘repositories of individual memories, taken together, create a collective communal memory’ (Fabre and O’Meally 1994: 9) that represent a black counterhistorical identity.
