Dr. Ramona L. Hyman 1601 Barton Rd., Apt. 4106 Redlands, CA 92373
rhyman@llu.edu (256) 337-4175 (cell)
Abstract for CLA Conference Panel: Black Liberation and the Literature of the Civil Rights Movement Paper Topic: The Intertextual Voice of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as Articulated in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Address to the First Montgomery Improvement Association Meeting” Montgomery 1955 is wrapped around my mind. I find myself meditatively engaging the historical event that took place in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. More specifically, this paper treats the liberation voice of the boycott, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I argue that King’s voice is an intertextual voice as defined by Julia Kristeva. Pedagogically speaking intertextuality, as conceived by Julia Kristeva, concerns itself with “. . . text
[1] as a network of sign systems situated in relation to other systems of signifying practices (ideologically marked sign usage) in culture” (
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory 568). It, says Leon S. Roudiez, is as Kristeva suggests, “. . . the transportation of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position” ( qtd in Kristeva 15). This new articulation results from what Kristeva suggests is the creation of a new text when it enters into and thus combines with other texts. As Kristeva says, “[t]he text is . . . a productivity, and this means . . . that it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (36). The result of that neutralization is the birthing of a new text, I maintain, the Montgomery Bus Boycott is an example of this “permutation of texts.” The two opposing texts--i.e., those for and those against bus segregation in the broad sense are representations of texts that interacted, thus formulating a new text-- bus integration. King as the voice is essential to this text as his voice fuses texts to formulate a vision of bus integration. King’s inaugural sermon birthed in the African American (and the European American) folk in Montgomery a new vision of what they could become. King’s intertextual voice, moreover, was influenced by two modalities: historical and religious, a religion grounded in Christianity and shaped by the African American liberation tradition. This examination of King’s voice is read through the first speech he delivered during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, i.e., “Address to the First Montgomery Improvement Association Mass Meeting.” Dr. Ramona L. Hyman serves as an Associate Professor of Humanities at Loma Linda University. Her work has been included in journals and anthologies such as
Confirmations: Anthology of African American Writers (Marrow Press),
African American Review, and
African American Pulpit. She has served as a speaker for the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s speaker’s bureau, and she is the author of the collection of poetry
In the Sanctuary of a South. [1] I am identifying text here as all types of type, print as well as non print texts.
