Abstract
We examine the way group membership and its relation with ethnicity is interactionally constructed in an interview between an interviewer who presents himself as favorable towards black music and black people and an interviewee who is a former slave. The interview, which took place in the 1940s Deep South in a context in which racial inequality was still institutionally embedded, focused both on the interviewee’s memories of slave life and on current life and opinions about music. The discussion of each period is characterized by a different genre: while extended turns and lengthy stories occur while discussing the antebellum period, the discussion of the postbellum period is characterized by short and heavily negotiated question and answer sequences. However, throughout the entire interview, the interviewee maintains coherence by frequently shifting alignments and basing group memberships on quite diverse criteria, as such challenging its relation with ethnicity as initiated by the interviewer.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
