Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The theme of my talk (most generally put) is that the natural home of language is in talking; that the natural home of talking is in interaction; that talking-in-interaction is the product of describable organizations of practice that we now know something about; that these organizations of practice engender “places” or “positions” in the talk; that virtually
everything in conversation needs to be understood by reference to both position and composition; and, consequently, that a proper understanding of language and of its deployment and understanding in the natural world will require coming to terms with the practices of talking-in-interaction, which I take to be the most basic and primordial site of sociality, and therefore the central convergence of Language and Society. The tool for developing this theme empirically will be the humble object “uh” or “uhm.”

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: As has been well established by such scholars as James Snead, and observed more or less publicly and privately by everyday people, Western thought deriving from the European Enlightenment has a selective approach to past and present. Confident, strategic assertions of “past” being cleanly, surgically cut off from the “present” are belied, for example, by heritage and inheritance laws clearly suggesting not only the necessity for the “past” to inform the “present” in order to forge and maintain [white] power, but also the kind of national schizophrenia produced by such contradictions. As James Baldwin has written, the result is an America that cannot “dare confront the ravage and the lie” of history. On both the page and the stage, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks opens up space where “past” and “present” overlay each other, the “third space” of Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom, “2 cliffs where thuh world had cleaved intuh 2.“ As the play moves through these spaces, characters find themselves in what Parks identifies as ”rep and rev”—the repetition of historical trauma and drama. In this “drama of accumulation,” spectators and readers come to grips with their own immersion in this repetition, a repetition that the Enlightenment West’s emphasis on “accumulation and growth” (Snead’s phrase) disavows.