“Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Community through Language” Opens at the Avery Research Center in January

January 12 through April 4

CHARLESTON, SC – Collegeof Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History andCulture will host the groundbreaking traveling exhibition Word, Shout,Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Community through Language on viewfrom January 12, 2012 through April 4, 2012. Curated by Alcione Amos ofthe Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum, Word, Shout,Song looks at the life, research, and scholarship of Lorenzo DowTurner, perhaps the first African-American linguist. It also focuses onhow his discoveries linked communities in Africa to the New Worldthrough language. In assembling this exhibition, most exciting to mewas how I was able to connect words from Gullah, English, and Portuguese to their African origins, eighty years later, based on Turner’s work in the 1930s, said Amos. His work is still relevant today.

Word, Shout, Song is three stories in one: scholarship and success againstthe odds, a quest to crack a linguistic code, and a discovery spanningcontinents. The exhibition presents Turner’s pioneering work in the1930s, which established that people of African heritage, despiteslavery, had retained and passed on their cultural identity throughwords, music, and story wherever they landed.  His research focused onthe Gullah/Geechee communities in South Carolina and Georgia, whosespeech was dismissed as baby talk and bad English. He confirmed,however, that the Gullah spoke a Creole language that still possessedparts of the language and culture of their captive ancestors. Turner’slinguistic explorations into the African diaspora led him to Bahia,Brazil, where he further validated his discovery of Africancontinuities.

The exhibition begins with a look at Turner’s early life.Profoundly influenced by his college-educated father on the importanceof academic excellence, Turner (1890–1972) obtained successively higherdegrees in English from Howard, Harvard University, and the Universityof Chicago. Denied teaching positions at white institutions, he builthis career in academia at several black colleges, including hisundergraduate alma mater. A summer stint teaching at the now-SouthCarolina State University, however, is where he first heard the Gullahdialect that would captivate him for the rest of his career. Convincedthat the speech pattern was not illiterate English but instead adistinct language incorporating words and structure from Africanlanguages, Turner focused his interest into a lifelong project.

Turner studied various African languages, including Twi, Ewe, Yoruba,Bambara, and Wolof as well as Arabic, to link to Gullah vocabulary.Through his pursuit of information, he became the first African-American member of many organizations, including the Linguistics Society ofAmerica.

Word, Shout, Song recounts his travels to SouthCarolina and Georgia and abroad to London, Paris and, finally, WestAfrica to record and compare the speech of hundreds of informants. Hisjourneys feature fascinating stories of adventure and discovery as wellas of the difficulties he encountered with bulky equipment and remoteaccess.

A major linguistic achievement occurred when Turnerdetermined the ring shout, a Gullah religious dance, was a possibledirect inheritance from enslaved Muslims—the name shout being derivedfrom the Arabic word Sha’wt, which referred to movement around a sacredobject rather than sound. Another example resulting from Turner’s earlyGeorgia recordings is a later major discovery by scholars Joseph Opala,Tazieff Schmidt, and Cynthia Koroma who, in 1990, realized a song passed down through generations connected the Mende people of Sierra Leone totheir American kin in Georgia.

A section of the exhibitionfocuses on Turner’s research on culture in Bahia, Brazil where a muchlarger number of enslaved Africans had been brought than to the UnitedStates, yet featured the same languages that influenced the Gullah. TheAfro-Brazilian religion Candomblé heavily incorporated Africansurvivals; and when informants recognized words in the Sea Islandrecordings, Turner again saw language connecting the worlds of theAfrican diaspora.

Turner’s many writings, presentations, andpublications included his book, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect,published in 1949; and it is still the standard reference for Creolelanguage research today.

Highlights of Word, Shout, Song include:

• Turner’s recording device and special-character typewriter
• Rare recordings of Gullah speech and songs and rare photographs of informants produced by Turner
• Audio and written comparisons of words that are similar and from languages spoken in the Americas and Africa
• The section Singing for the Ancestor: A Song that Made the Roundtrip to Africa
• The section The Black Seminole: The Gullah that Got Away that recountsthe history of fugitive slaves from Georgia and South Carolina whosedescendants are now found in Florida, Texas, and Mexico and speak anancient form of Gullah

Organized by the SmithsonianInstitution’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC and based onone of its special collections, this traveling exhibit version of Word, Shout, Song was made possible by the James E. and Emily E. ClyburnEndowment for Archives & History at South Carolina State University.  The Avery Research Center will hold an open night reception on January 12, 2012 at 6pm featuring special guest speakers Camille Akeju,Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum and Dr. Johnnetta Cole, Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African Art.  Tickets are now available for the reception.  

Call the Avery Research Center at 843.953.7609 for more information.