African American tropes in popular film

“African American Tropes in Popular Film” is an in-depth study of African American cultural language forms in seven popular film texts. Using the work of Walter Ong, the study is framed as an exploration of African American orality, using the mass media as a context. The study's primary method is rhetorical criticism, with triangulation from audience research via two focus groups. An African American focus group finds the language forms highly enjoyable, creative, and meaningful, whereas a Caucasian focus group finds them to be entertaining, but lacking the points of connection to the text identified by the African American group. In the rhetorical criticism, a variety of tropes are identified throughout the texts as well as new types of the language form that Gates (1988) called the “black trope of tropes” (p. 51), signifying. The performance dimension of trope enactment is also explored, resulting in findings about the way that tropes are keyed for performance (Bauman, 1977) and contain performance qualities. Despite the highly scripted nature of language in popular film, this study informs us about present-day African American orality in the form of trope usage: Tropes are a highly creative and unique way of communicating meaning that have deep connections to the African American oral tradition.