CL 3/26

If we discuss the influence of speech community vs. a discourse community within the movie Birth of a Nation, we could say that the obvious conceptualization of the speech community and the African Americans working for the Camerons would be there sense of kinship in their living quarters. In this case, they were most likely not all blood related, but all most likely adopted a sense of kinship due to the living conditions and emotional toll that may have been put upon all of them. They most likely (and I say most likely a lot, because it hard to pick up on certain speech community aspects with out voice recording) speak with traditional African tounge and use certain dialect that only African American would be quick to pick up on with each other. On the contrary, the speech community conceptualized with the Camerons or Stonemans is of actual kinship its self (kinship of separate families of course). Born into and raised in wealth, these two families share lingustic forms and regulative rules that no African American slave nor poor American would understand in that time. If we discuss the aspect of the discourse community, I would believe there to be two communities separating the Camerons and the Stonemans. Both were well off families, being involved in politics in some way, but each had their different ways and opinions that differed from one another pertaining to politics and the economy, The Camerons, for example, made their money by production of cotton. This required the use of slave labor, was was obviously frowned upon by an abolitionist Stoneman.

When people watched this movie, the ability to communicate meaning behind what was going on, what I assumed, was very black and white… figuratively and literally . There were rich white people who either lived in the south and owned slaves or there were rich white people who lived in the north who didn’t own slaves, and who were probably against the idea of slavery. And then there were just poor people wandering the streets. I haven’t seen more than 3% of the movie, but I can assume there wouldn’t be any portrayal of a well off, educated African American in the movie. This is because, the movie was made to view the polar differences of communities. Reading the wiki page, the movie also makes African Americans out to be unintelligent, sexual predators during the reconstruction era. If this movie’s goal was to convince the audience of a false pretense toward African Americans, then I would say it did a good job.