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Something that really interested me during Thursday's discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin was a shared discomfort (to put it lightly) about the way that Stowe portrays the speech of the slaves. The line between mimicry and mockery is a fine one, and I agree with what seemed to be the general consensus on Thursday, that Stowe crosses it regularly. When I was reading, the thing that stood out to me about the speech of the slaves was that it seems somewhat inconsistent; if I am remembering the Intro to Linguistics class I took first semester freshman year, a hallmark of a separate dialect (or language, if you have the army) is that it follows patterns and rules, and the slave speech seems somewhat haphazard in its construction, as Stowe portrays it. Additionally, I thought it was interesting that Eliza and George seem to speak in a more "refined" (or, white) manner than the rest of the slaves, mirroring the idea that they are considered in some ways less "black" because of their ancestry.

In a very modern example of art that provokes us to think about who has the right to borrow or imitate what, Vampire Weekend (one of my favorite bands) was given a rather critical cover story in last month's Spin Magazine (http://www.spin.com/articles/vampire-weekend-graduates ). The band plays indie rock with Afro-Caribbean percussion. The article, in my opinion, is rather poorly written, but it brings up a rather important question: Should we be uncomfortable that four wealthy Columbia graduates, none of whom have any African or Caribbean heritage, are so blatantly using this as part of their music? Listening to the music, it is clear that there is not meant to be any echo of a minstrel show, unlike when reading slave speech written by Stowe. However, there is still something I can't quite put my finger on that makes me feel that this should make me slightly uncomfortable. I don't know; I would be interested to discuss this.