Paper short abstract:

Drawing on auto-ethnography (as an Afrikaner linguistic anthropologist), as well as interview materials and reflexive mass-media language discourse by and about various contemporary Afrikaner publics, I explore the sociopolitical dynamics of raciolinguistic suicide in Afrikaner interactions.

Paper long abstract:

Can contemporary Afrikaners be the sympathetic subjects of language endangerment and language loss? What prevailing ethno-racial co(n)texts problematize claims of threatened cultural identity and language sovereignty for post-Apartheid Afrikaners within and beyond South Africa? Drawing on auto-ethnography (as an Afrikaner linguistic anthropologist), as well as interview materials and reflexive mass-media language discourse by and about various contemporary Afrikaner publics; this paper explores the sociopolitical dynamics of what I term raciolinguistic suicide in the maintenance and leveraging of cultural identity among different scales of Afrikaner publics: interactions between diasporic Afrikaner kin; anomic discourse in Afrikaner popular culture; Afrikaner public intellectual debates around the sovereignty of Afrikaans; as well as the raciolinguistic negation of Afrikaaps as a viable language sphere within which Afrikaans might attain political salvation and undergo a re-racialization as a genuinely post-colonial language in a genuinely multi-lingual post-Apartheid South Africa. Bringing together genealogies of black consciousness and black radical thought (Biko 1978 and Newton 1973) as well as pragmatist semiotics (Silverstein 1993, Peirce 1955, and Du Bois 1935) this paper explores an the anthropology of radical hope’s (Lear 2006) existential horizon.