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|“The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names” -Toni Morrison, epigraph to Song of Solomon |
|"There is nothing that there is not; whatever we have a name for, that is" -Yoruba proverb |
Naming: Cultural Form
Naming: Cultural Form
Names: a cultural form that can be historicized but also, an everyday phenomenon. The name thus both sensuous & supersensible, having no materiality and yet structures daily life
This section will regard practices of naming not only as practices which reflect and designate identity, but will focus specifically on its reappropriative potential, by attending to various creative, post-slavery onomastic innovations. Naming thus figures, in this project, not only a form of address (and thus matters for those of us concerned with intersubjective ethics) but also an agential political act and a gesture with recuperative/reinventive/reappropriative potential.
Working in the background of my thinking: what might be called a sociolinguistic approach: “how [names] reflect power relations and express resistance” (160; "Who Named Slaves and Their Children?") Where we might depart from - the linguistic heritage of colonialism: slavery engaged in processes of unnaming and renaming
The Phenomenon of Double Naming, and the Limitations of Official Archives
The Phenomenon of Double Naming, and the Limitations of Official Archives
‘Recent research challenges the old idea that masters assigned names to slaves or that slaves imitated masters’ systems of naming’ (1993, 727) (161, “Who Named Slaves and Their children?”)
| "...although slaves often seem to have been given European names by their owners, at least as indicated in the official records that were kept (‘the public transcript’), the owners of slaves were not always their name-givers. And even when slaves were given official names by their owners, different strategies of resisting these names were possible (‘the hidden transcript’), maybe as a result of the changes in how the enslaved populations valued and interpreted the world depending on the circumstances in which they lived. The case of the schoolchildren who did not know their official names reveals that slaves and their children might have used alternative (maybe African) names in their every- day life and that official names were not important to them." (168; "Who Named Slaves and their Children?") |
Hidden names in other contexts: Muslim Hausaland ("Injurious Names: Naming, Disavowal, and Recuperation in Contexts of Slavery and Emancipation")
Trying to situate this phenomenon of "double naming" as a legitimate tradition -- here I am making the point that there is an immense continuity between these two instances of double naming....
Sokoto Caliphate (1900): hidden name whispered into the ear of the infant + public name given in ceremony (ranar suna)
children born after a series of miscarriages, still-births or children who did not survive early infancy, were often named in a way that sought to defend them against spiritual forces seeking to carry them off. [...] seek to “hide” the child behind a “worthless” name: Ajuji, on the dung-heap; Ayashe, let it be abandoned; Bawa, slave (182, "Injurious Names")
Refocusing attention on post-slavery practices of re-naming
Refocusing attention on post-slavery practices of re-naming
Historically, there has always been a strong African element in Afro-American names, adding support to the assertion that Blacks did not come to America "without culture (106) (Kerrigan Black, "Afro-American Personal Naming Traditions)
"day-naming" conventions in Jamaica (using Twi words, from the Asante people of Ghana) (now extinct as a practice, having become pejorative
West African day-names
“But it is safe to say that these names were denuded of all meaning outside the context of slavery” (338, "Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica)
“But it is safe to say that these names were denuded of all meaning outside the context of slavery” (338, "Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica)
in what way were the significance of these ancestral names either enhanced or made obsolete because of the experience of slavery? restoring a sense of continuity
Returning to History
Returning to History
“in the opening two decades of the twentieth century, numerous people Africanized their “Christian” names, partly in response to the international rise of pan-Africanism alongside local cultural nationalisms that opposed the mimicry of English cultural forms” (90, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa)
“in the opening two decades of the twentieth century, numerous people Africanized their “Christian” names, partly in response to the international rise of pan-Africanism alongside local cultural nationalisms that opposed the mimicry of English cultural forms” (90, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa)
situating this phenomenon historically: linguistic-onomastic event occurred not just alongside but was motivated by the political movement of pan-Africanism (Garvey, CLR James, Nkrumah, Senghor, Du Bois) and Black consciousness (1960s)
“Names that carried particular social histories from the nineteenth century, including slave names, were transformed into new—or rather, precolonial and “traditional”—African names" (90, The Power to Name")
“Names that carried particular social histories from the nineteenth century, including slave names, were transformed into new—or rather, precolonial and “traditional”—African names" (90, The Power to Name")
Solomon -> Attoh-Ahuma
Macaulay -> Ajasa
Adam L. Jacobs -> Adeoye Desalu
Thomas Williams Waters -> Kwamina (Waters) Ayensu
Isaac Augustus Johnson -> Algerine Kelfallah Sankoh
The Power to Name
The Power to Name
Malcolm X in March, 1964
What is remarkable about this posting: names are typically conferred or imposed, not disavowed
Malcolm X and the Absence of the Name
Our project is preoccupied with archival absences
The name, if it is thought in an existential register, involves already the notion of absence -- a name "functions in the absence of its bearer" (181, Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am)
part of the task: to disentangle names from a person - to free someone from the imposition and strictures of a single name
"Mr. Muhammad taught that we would keep this 'X' until God himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth" -Autobiography of Malcolm X
"Mr. Muhammad taught that we would keep this 'X' until God himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth" -Autobiography of Malcolm X
X as a holding place, a tactical absence
is not only meant to reflect a "lost" or disrupted history/genealogy but also 1) performs a refusal to go by the name that has been imposed on him and, more importantly, 2) expresses a forward-facing potential to become (the name cannot, then, accommodate this important political aim - to become)
in other words, the X (the void that a history of slavery has produced) is not an absence at all but a decision -- for Malcolm X it provides the conditions of possibility for a radically open and unknown ontology and politics
Works Cited
Works Cited
Benson, Susan. “Injurious Names: Naming, Disavowal, and Recuperation in Contexts of Slavery an Emancipation.” In An Anthropology of Names and Naming, edited by Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn, 177-199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Black, Kerrigan. “Afro-American Personal Naming Traditions.” In Names, by The American Name Society, 105-125. Potsdam, N.Y: Routledge, 1996.
Burnard, Trevor. “Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 3 (2001): 325-346.
López, Laura Álvarez. “Who named slaves and their children? Names and Naming Practices Among Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas and Their Descendants With a Focus on Brazil.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2015): 159-171.
Newell, Stephanie. The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2013.
X, Malcolm and Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York City: Grove Press, 1965.
To learn more about nicknames, naming practices, and Jamaican patwa (patois) language rules, please visit the A Learner's Grammar of Jamaican: Part of the Open Grammar Project, deveoped by Dr. Annette Henry.
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