I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture - Paperback

by Patricia A. Turner (Author)

I Heard It Through the Grapevine explores how rumors that run rife in African-American communities, concerning such issues as AIDS, the Ku Klux Klan and FBI conspiracies, translate white oppression into folk warnings, and are used by the community to respond to a hostile dominant culture.

Front Jacket

Entertaining and absorbing. . . . Information that blacks and whites have about one another is largely based upon rumors. Turner's monumental work traces the origins of rumors that have often fomented tragedies in race relations since the early encounters between Europeans and Africans.--Ishmael Reed, author of Japanese by Spring

Author Biography

Patricia A. Turner is Senior Dean of the College Dean/Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education; Professor, Department of African American Studies and World Arts and Culture at the University of California at Davis, and the author of Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (1994).