This study provides a qualitative examination of African American Language (AAL) in use and explores the interaction between phonological, syntactic, and rhetorical features of AAL and situational factors related to event structuring, speaker goals, and audience composition. Data for this research is derived from the speech of four prominent African Americans who spoke during the 2008 State of the Black Union. Analysis of their speech suggests that switches to black preaching style help speakers to redefine their relationship with audience members. Overall, shifts in style correspond to shifts in interactional framework, suggesting that black preaching style allows the speakers in this study to temporarily cloak themselves with the status and respect associated with black preachers, providing a favorable context for the reception of their message while allowing for the display of their ethnic affiliation with the black community. (African American Language, style, audience design, rights and obligations, black preaching)*

This article explores the ways that Flint residents report on their encounters with various kinds of “outsiders” who are influenced by mass‐mediated images that position Flint and its residents in a certain way. Through the voicing of outsiders who engage in the circulation of negative discourses about Flint, residents then insert their own voices as they contest negative discourses about the city. Here, the images that they project about life in Flint provide a powerful counternarrative about what it means to have lived in the city during its deindustrializing period. This suggests that oral history interviews are an important site for the discursive production (and contestation) of individual and collective identities for Flint residents.

This article illustrates the ‘moving parts’ involved in the stylization of the voice of the Black preacher in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor with the ultimate goal of uncovering what these linguistic features help the performer to accomplish in interaction. Overall, while Pryor often utilizes hyperbolic and exaggerated features of Black preaching traditions and potentially Southern-inflected speaking styles in his performances, I argue that he engages in a type of linguistic subterfuge, blending elements of his own voice into a more favorable depiction of a witty, street-wise preacher. In fact, stretches of working-class speech, whose features overlap considerably with Pryor's ‘stage voice’, may blur the line between Pryor's ‘own’ personal stance and that of the preacher that he is constructing. (Black preachers, performance, stylization, comedy, African American English)*

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other racializing norms of "authenticity." In the next chapter, Kamran Khan skillfully shows how mutually co-constructive languaging and racialization are fundamental components in the consolidation of a panopticon consisting of the security state aided and abetted by protofascistic horizontal surveillance, whereby the "white listening subject" is enlisted in the "preventive" profiling of members of racialized "suspect communities," such as individuals who are "seen" or "heard" as Muslims. Next, Sabina Perrino astutely documents the extent to which these racialized processes that weaponize exclusion to reinforce a mythical intimacy have saturated linguistic practice and performance in Italy and other countries where far-right anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. In the chapter that follows, Hilary Parsons Dick skillfully analyzes how overt racism, masquerading as "common sense" and "plain speaking," has been re-mainstreamed in US politics and society by Donald Trump and his supporters, in part through racializing discourses which associate illegality first with non-European descended immigrants and then, by extension to all racially othered citizens. In the final chapter, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman cogently demonstrate how racialized compliments, although they may be ostensibly framed as positive assessments, constitute a particularly pervasive and insidious form of covert racism, given the fact that they operate from the assumption that racially othered people and their languages are inherently inferior.With the publication of this volume, there is no longer any excuse for any of the institutions of learning with which any of us are associated to delay any longer in establishing courses that deal explicitly with the dynamic and mutually co-constructive relationships between the full expanse of possible semiotic repertoires (linguistic, visual, musical, etc.) and the inextricably and intersectionally entwined mechanisms of hegemony, including ethnocentrism/race, patriarchy/cisheterosexism, and accumulative plunder/capitalism. In fact, I can think of no better textbook for such a course than this one.