Paper short abstract:

Technologies of speaking and writing enable new social roles for Moro Christian women. Through language socialization and literacy events associated with a Moro ethnic movement women perform a conservative Christian role while, informally, they craft a more progressive Christian subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the link between new technologies of speaking and writing and the spread of Christianity in the Arab-Islamic state of Sudan. For the marginalized Moro people, Christian conversion is linked with an ethnic-indigenous project that arguably owes its success to a Moro literacy campaign that produced more than 30 books, the New and Old Testaments and now uses a variety of media (newspaper, cassettes, Facebook, Youtube) for its cause. Most adult Moro, especially women with no formal education, can nonetheless read and write Moro. This paper focuses on how women achieve a new social role as moral and spiritual leaders through the literacy program. Mastery of the new written "language" (Biblical Moro) indexes this new Christian subjectivity and is achieved through a process of language socialization (Schieffelin 1986) through texts and 'technologies of speaking' (Blommaert 2007) which potentially influence the way Moro think about themselves. In addition to reading and writing, they acquire the formulaic and ritualized genres of praying and preaching and other practices (hymn-writing, record-keeping etc.) which involve certain linguistic skills (entextualization, indexing Biblical Moro, prosody etc.) and culminate in the performance of faith through written, verbal and embodied techniques which I examine as literacy events. I will also examine how the literacy campaign which enabled this is run by Church leaders who construct a discourse of ethnic "purity" and in so doing maintain "traditional" Moro patriarchal norms. Women are complicit in promoting these conservative values in their preachings, but craft a more progressive subjectivity in informal practices.