"The Crisis of Vernacularity"

Sometimes, when reading, I like to type out a passage to help me think about it a bit more...and of course, reference and have for the future...and share with others :)

For black intellectuals such as [C.L.R.] James and [Stuart] Hall, the engagement with vernacularity not only marks the coming to and deployment of popular consciousness, but also signals a (or sometimes the) major transformation in their work. It constitutes the moving away from one mode of intellectual production in the direction of another. Vernacularization entails the relinquishing of certain privileges, guarantees of access, academic status, and credibility in order to assume a decidedly different set of historical responsibilities. Vernaculization is never a historical inevitability; it is, rather, the direct consequence of a moment of intellectual crisis. It is that conjecture when black figures, recognized by the dominant culture as conventionally trained and active intellectuals, confront in their work an incommensurability between their occupation in the academy (or the arts world) and their experience as minority spokespersons, a tension between the kind of work they are producing and the consequence it is having (or, failing to have) in the world. The crisis is fueled not by a fear of being silenced, but the prospect of a dual insignificance: excessive or extraordinary successful interpellation, on the one hand, and a complete severing of the links between the black intellectual and his or her originary community, on the other hand.

-What's My Name (2003) by Grant Farred, pg. 22.