Black English in Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor

Abstract

This article is an attempt to demonstrate how the author Harvey Pekar, in his comic book called ‘American Splendor’, uses the linguistic variety known as Black English to feature the characters of his stories. This will be done through the analysis of three comic books of the series, which has no translation to Portuguese. The theoretical background used is the book “Tense marking in Black English,” by Ralph W. Fasold, which gives some notions about the behavior of Black English, both linguistically and socially. The objective is to identify if there is a correspondence between the way the black characters of the comic book speak and the definition of Black English given by Fasold in his book “Tense marking in Black English.”