Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Fiona McLaughlin
(University of Florida)
Friederike Lüpke (University of Helsinki)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Language and Literature
- Location:
- David Hume, Lecture Theatre A
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Language in Africa has long been a site of political imagining. This panel seeks to explore instances or moments in which ideas about language in Africa capture the political imagination, and to consider how such moments connect actors, speakers, and writers, or how they are disruptive.
Long Abstract:
Language in Africa is a powerful site of political imagining. These imaginings include indigenous perspectives captured in naming and associating languages with place as well as colonial and postcolonial visions of language mapping (Irvine & Gal 1995). The ambiguous status of colonial languages as spoils of war (Yacine 1966) and as instruments of oppression continues to fuel heated debates, yet African alternatives are also colonially created (Makoni 2013). Discourses of the vernacular (Adejunmobi 2004) are played out in Nyerere's vision of standard Swahili as a unifying national language, in Senghor's vision of a French-speaking Senegalese citizenry, in the Academy of African Languages' (ACALAN) contemporary vision of a network of cross-border vernacular languages, or in Sulemaana Kantè's master plan for decolonising the African mind through a bottom-up standardisation project (Donaldson 2017). This panel explores moments in which ideas about language in Africa capture the political imagination. Such moments range from managing linguistic diversity in rural and urban polities constituted on the principles of firstcomer-newcomer dualisms (Lentz 2013), to the writing of the South African constitution which embraces multilingualism as a vision for the new nation, and to the teaching of tifinagh at a Tuareg cultural center in Bamako as a site of remembrance and a political vision of a greater Tamazgha. How do different actors/speakers/writers imagine language, and how is the political imagination mapped onto language(s)? How do these moments connect different actors/speakers/writers, and how are these moments disruptive? We invite papers that address these issues.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Patterns of social and spatial organisation that differentiate between firstcomers and newcomers are widespread in Africa. This paper explores their impact on the association of languages with spaces in configurations that are not built around the notion of the ethnolinguistic nation state.
Paper long abstract:
Patterns of social and spatial organisation that differentiate between firstcomers and newcomers are widespread in Africa. Communities are built on the premise of heterogeneity to facilitate the accommodation of strangers, and movement and migration (of women, children, members of professional groups, labour migrants, etc.). This paper explores the impact of this dualism on the association of languages with spaces. On which basis are languages linked to spaces? To what extent are the multilingual repertoires of their inhabitants included in or erased from their ideological representations? And what is the meaning of 'language' in places that defy ethnonationalist notions of language territorialisation?
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes a first look at spoken and written language practices in Marché Centenaire, Dakar's Chinese market, in order to explore the ways in which Chinese merchants first established a tenuous belonging in the market.
Paper long abstract:
Pidgins are ways of speaking born of necessity in interactions between strangers whose linguistic repertoires have little or no overlap. This paper explores the emergence of a pidgin in Dakar's Chinese market, Marché Centenaire. Beginning in the late 1990s, a new type of small-scale entrepreneurial migration from China took root in Senegal, and by the early to mid-2000s the Chinese presence in the city had diversified from that of the engineers and manual laborers who worked on large, Chinese government funded building projects to include a modest merchant class whose collective businesses have made the name Centenaire synonymous with the Chinese market. This paper takes a first look at language practices, both spoken and written, within the Centenaire market to explore the ways in which Chinese merchants first established a tenuous belonging in the market.
Paper short abstract:
Has political imagination affected the current linguistic scenario of the Cameroonian Grassfields? We review evidence telling of (i) hegemony created via language and (ii) deliberate language change due to political conflict. Case studies illuminate both past and present African histories.
Paper long abstract:
Due to its impressive linguistic diversity, historical linguists generally refer to the Cameroonian Grassfields region as the Bantu homeland. Such a view transcends, if not utterly ignores, the possibility that language histories may in fact be heavily influenced by the language ideologies held by their speakers.This paper reviews linguistic and ethnographic evidence from several Grassfields societies, suggesting that language ideologies together with local forms of socio-political organization and imagination may engender processes of language change that cannot be captured solely by a "language drift perspective".
After clarifying the basic principles of the Grassfields political tradition-centered around the figure of the chief as well as chiefdom-specific secret societies-the paper focuses on historical and contemporary cases of connection between language and political imagination.
The historical case is discussed through the Bum chiefdom, whose history reveals the radical importance of language as a tool for the creation of political hegemony in a previously fragmented area.
The contemporary case, taken from the Kuk chiefdom, is especially interesting as it provides the opportunity to observe an ongoing process of deliberate language change motivated by political conflict within the chiefdom.
Both cases (i) exemplify and extend the significance of Kopytoff's internal African frontier theory, and (ii) are possibly relevant to better understand current political and sociolinguistic processes (like, e.g., the emergence of urban youth languages) in a number of African countries.