I. Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Rosie. I'm an assistant professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
And I'm really delighted to be here today. It's really great to talk to you.
And in 2017, Hari Kondabolu released the documentary The Problem with APU,
addressing the representation of The Simpsons character APU, the Indian immigrant who owns the Kwik-E-Mart.
Which which click. Thank you. Got it!
And for Kondabolu, APU represents a caricature of a South Asian American immigrant and his voicing by a white actor
for the purposes of entertainment can be compared to blackface minstrelsy in the 20th century.
We've all heard someone put on an accent before in Bermuda.
It's typically through the stock phrase down the road, which can be used to demonstrate key pronunciation features of the Bermudian English dialect.
But isn't this common type of dialect play an innocent, relatively harmless?
Perhaps perhaps predictably, the answer, according to associate linguists like myself, is that it really depends.
In the case of The Simpsons, Hank Azaria is voicing of APU is problematic because,
as so often with dialect parody, the mock accent isn't really about the phonetics of Indian English speech.
Not that there's anything wrong with any of these dialects,
but what it's really about is the stereotypes that these arbitrary features of pronunciation
have come to represent in a society in which South Asian Americans are racialized as other.
In other words, when a when approaching any type of dialect parody,
we need to take into account the social context, as well as the balance of power between imitator and imitated.
In order to understand the social meaning of what's going on. Sorry.
And more often than not, what language is used as a relatively safe, covert way to express racist,
sexist or classist prejudices under the guise of humour when it's used by privileged groups?
And we've seen this very recently, for example, in Donald Trump's discussion of bad hombres.
Jane Hill, for example,
has described mock Spanish in the United States as part of the everyday language of white racism seen recently in Donald Trump's comments.
And it's very easy for parodies to get away with this type of dialect parody because it's it's
very common for them if people object that they're simply accused of lacking a sense of humour.
Today, I'm going to discuss a type of language mocking that's common in Bermuda amongst white men.
In my Ph.D. research, I've shown through qualitative and quantitative analysis that this specific type of dialect mocking
upholds power imbalances in Bermuda and society and reinforces harmful stereotypes about black Bermudian.
And I should say here, before I start talking to you about my data that I'm using these labels black and white, not uncritically,
but in line with the goal of understanding mock language as it's used to construct these racialized categories in Bermuda.
Doing a Bermudian accent is a favourite party piece amongst white Bermudian and so-called expats,
which is the term that's usually used for whites immigrants in Bermuda.
And as a white Bermuda and myself born to non Bermudian parents, I grew up surrounded by this type of dialect parody,
this type of language mocking, and it's also been known to have been done on stage.
Then not the Amum show was there, not the show was a live comedy stage show popular with white audiences in the 1980s,
comprising a troupe of five wealthy white, successful businessman acting out comedy skits in strong Bermudian accents.
That and these are accents that they do not themselves have or use in their everyday life.
In this gets characters with strong accents are all unhelpful customer service assistants,
homeless or unsuccessful job seekers with undesirable qualities like swearing, low intellect or alcoholism.
One scene set in a courtroom involves a criminal on trial having to be translated into standard English so that the judge can understand.
I argue that these are not just performances of Bermudian English or Bermudian ness generally, but specifically of black Bermudian English,
and they have been interpreted by many members of the black community as such in Bermuda, as you can see from these quotations here.
Clearly, then the not the Amum performances link black Bermudian accents to negative personal qualities, and they propagate harmful stereotypes.
They're part of the common phenomenon of white people assigning homogenising attributes
to disempowered groups and then appropriating these linguistically for social gain,
in this case, humour or supposed humour during sociolinguistics fieldwork in 2016.
I also found that white speakers engage in the same type of mock language that's happening on stage in recorded interviews with me.
Perhaps assuming that as a white comedian, I would also be an injuria of this type of dialect party,
though perhaps these performances should come with a health warning. I'll now give you some examples.
I was going to play audio, but if you'd like to listen to them, you're very welcome to contact me.
I'll just give you the transcripts on the screen.
So in the first example here, you've got someone putting on a very strong Bermudian accent and pretending to be somebody drunk in a job interview.
And then in the second example, there you've got someone being very, very strongly ridiculed, basically in a made up story.
Now, it's clear from these examples, of course, that the speakers are constructing ridiculous caricatures of Bermudian this in their performances.
Now it's also evident from the discourse surrounding these caricature so that the performers commenting on
their own linguistic performances that these caricatures are being constructed as black in the performances.
Sometimes it's clear from the content, which often mocks black majority political stances such as pro-independence,
and sometimes the speakers actively say that they are performing blackness, as in these examples here.
Now, despite these kinds of direct statements that they are voicing black Bermudian
when challenged or asked about the meaning of their performances in interviews,
these speakers describe them quite defensively as an act of self-parody.
So here I am saying, but you guys are in a way making fun on stage, aren't you making fun?
And they say, Absolutely, I'm going to make fun of my own people. I'm making fun of Bermudian.
I'm not that claiming not to be doing anything racialized or racial icing whatsoever.
This exchange summarises a strong belief amongst the performers that they are entitled to perform in the way that they do
hear the speakers positioned themselves as Bermudian is making fun of Bermudian and appealing to the mainstream ideology.
That mock language is not offensive if it's performed by an in-group member.
They also appeal to the political ideology of oneness common amongst white Bermudian that's often used to shut down conversations about race.
This is part of the ideology of colour-blind racism in Bermuda.
The white speakers position what's very obviously performance of the other as performance of the self.
Though I don't have time to go into it today, this is also confirmed by the quantitative acoustic analysis of the recordings that I've done.
So they're claiming to perform features, linguistic features, pronunciation features that they have in their own speech.
The quantitative evidence shows that they do not have these speech. These speech features in their own language.
So basically, I've shown qualitatively and quantitatively that these speakers are parodying features
in their performance that they do not have as part of their normal repertoire.
In other words, this is linguistic minstrelsy disguised as linguistic self-mockery, and ultimately,
it's a practise that racialized speakers and reinforces racist stereotypes rather than deconstructing them heroically, as the speakers claim.
The approach used in this study allows an insight into the ways in which speakers
selectively construct and deconstruct categories of race and Bermudian ness authenticity.
The analysis reveals inconsistencies between what the performers do with their speech and what they say they're doing with their speech,
and therefore provides useful and a useful tool in scrutinising claims of self parody,
as well as shedding light on racialized and racist linguistic practises.
Thanks very much.