Paper short abstract:

Using Tobago as an auto-ethnographic case study, this presentation is a reflection on some of the rituals of Afro-Caribbean hospitality and on how they enrich the process of data collection and analysis in the science of linguistics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a reflection on some of the rituals of Afro-Caribbean hospitality and on how they enrich the process of data collection and analysis in the science of linguistics. Using Tobago as a case study, the paper is an auto-ethnographic reflection on/evaluation of Tobago’s very complex condition of hospitality, the cultural/linguistic/gestural codes that operate within this condition, and thus the nature of the ‘research site’ produced by this condition. The discussion is thus around the kinds of rituals of exchange and interaction that situate the researcher/interviewer/guest in various entanglements in relation to the ‘research site’, the respondent, and the host. These entanglements become imperative dimensions in the process of collecting linguistic data for analysis. Put another way, the paper will argue that there is a networking set of entanglements which the researcher experiences and must be involved in, and which in fact constitutes the process of data collecting and analysis. What, for instance, are the rituals of entry into a community for linguistic study? What new paradigms of relations are made possible by entering into these rituals of hospitality? What new approaches to resolving tensions might be relied upon within this entangled process of determining/selecting and analysing data? What does hospitality feel like in communities identified for linguistic study and research? What constitutes ‘data’ in such a scenario, and how are we necessarily entangled in it? What new tools/skills or epistemological positionings are required to work through our entanglements in data?

Paper short abstract:

Bruno Gwelo’s ‘Mayibuye’ about researchers engaged in Robben Island cultural heritage deals with (over-)identification understood as housing in former prison actors’ lives. The paper focuses on (pan)optical sight lines and method acting as examples of caminar instead of taken-for-granted caminos.

Paper long abstract:

'Mayibuye' is an unpublished study-cum-story by Bruno Gwelo about a research training group engaged in biographical in-depth studies of former Robben Island prisoners and guards. Located at Cape Town’s UWC campus, the task of the PhD candidates is to appropriate and re-enact the lives of selected eye-witnesses in preparation of a new guided tour to the island.

The text resonates to the panel topic and description in quite a few ways, e.g., when the prison’s conventional panoptical setup comes to be repeated in the visual axis between Robben Island and the city, disciplining both prisoners and Cape Town citizens. The 'oseaanopticon', as it is called, is less an optical-and-concrete surveillance-pathway – no hay camino – but something to be performed, yearned for by the prisoners and feared by the mainland citizens, to be eye-walked: hay que caminar.

The deliberate (over-)identification of the PhD students with the actors of former Maximum Prison stands for another subliminal, non-verbal and body-affecting, abstract path to be taken: that to be(com)ing guest in a hosting person's more or less welcoming and comfy life. The group’s mode of pursuing knowledge is method acting à la Stanislavski: ‘method’ combining ‘meta’ for development and ‘hodos’ for way, instancing once again the need to caminar, not a given and taken-for-granted camino.

Onesmus, Rachel, Joey, Gayatri, Bruno and ‘Ons Suster’ each appropriate their role models in a necessarily individual way, leading to alienation between themselves and varying degrees of indifference when one the group disappears on, literally, her oseeanopticon path.

Paper short abstract:

The talk is about the possibilities of creating reality with and through art in liminal spaces and how the intercultural living together in urban spaces is and can be (re-)arranged in the context of power relationships.

Paper long abstract:

The talk is about the possibilities of creating reality with and through art in liminal spaces and how the intercultural living together in urban spaces is and can be (re-)arranged in the context of power relationships. Using the city of Ulm in southern Germany as an example and following the approach of interpreting the whole city as a stage with different actors, it will be examined how performative, creative, artistic and resistant acts in everyday life may open liminal spaces. The role of the so-called „Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung“ in connection with the significance of sensual perceptions will be taken into account. Understanding intercultural and creative everyday practices as artistic and meaningful encounters, the common historically grown concept of art mediation in German institutional and educational contexts is questioned. The agency and possibilities of (actual) participation of transcultural players in a globalized migration society will be investigated. Further the transformational power of back-and-forth translations interacting with others in intercultural situations of coincidence, rupture, irritation and inconsistency concerning dominant regimes of knowledge will be discussed. In this connection the role of the researcher himself/herself - his/her physical presence and sensual perception – will be highlighted.

Paper short abstract:

While meditating on the poetics of lɔba (proverb-riddles) as collaborative performance that showcases Dagaaba individual and collective linguistic competence and cultural knowledge, we consider whether lɔba could become a training space for future griots and linguists.

Paper long abstract:

The word lɔɔri (singular)/ lɔba (plural), translates from Dagaare to English as 'proverb-riddle(s).' Lɔba are often performed alone or as a prelude to storytelling in Dagaaba folkloric settings and traditions. As Hampaté Bâ (1980, p.167) asserts, we cannot understand a people's history or culture or their spiritual world without a painstaking exploration of their oral traditions as found in their stories: legends, epics, aetiological tales, myths, proverbs, riddles, songs, instrumental narratives, and poetry, etc., which even today, still take precedence over the written word. In this presentation, we meditate on the poetics of lɔba as collaborative performance using the rhetoric of stimulus and response to showcase Dagaaba individual and collective linguistic competence and cultural knowledge. We will end with a tentative contemplation as to whether lɔba could be considered as a training space for future griots (xylophonists, dirgers, praise singers, diviners, etc.) and linguists.

Paper short abstract:

Considering a range of LGBTQIA2S+ expression from more formal collective trans-performances in Puerto Rico to less formal individual trans-performances on a beach in Kenya, we investigate the matrices that shape and are shaped by non-cis-hetero-normative people of African descent.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, we take our cue from a broad array of LGBTQIA2S+ performances across Africa and its diasporas to envision temporal, spatial, socio-cultural and political trans-locations and super-positions that unsettle the neat discursive boundaries that are normally taken for granted between such notions as: 1) colonial vs. postcolonial vs. neo-colonial ‘eras’; 2) Atlantic vs. Indian Ocean contact ‘zones’; 3) Old vs. New ‘Worlds’; 4) chattel enslavement vs. wage ‘labor’; 5) pure/authentic vs. hybrid/corrupted ‘blood’ and ‘traditions’; 6) rights vs. power ‘struggles’; and 7) active vs. passive ‘resistance’. The indomitable, contradictory and shape-shitfting Atlantic-Saharan-Indian Ocean, colonial-neocolonial-decolonial, and other trans-dynamics that are propelling Africa toward a renewed demographic, economic and cultural centrality on the planet are perhaps nowhere better evidenced than in the daily efforts of non-cis-hetero-normative Africans to survive and lead fulfilling lives. By considering a wide range of LGBTQIA2S+ expression from more formal collective trans-performances on an urban stage in Puerto Rico to less formal individual trans-performances on a beach in Kenya, we acknowledge and investigate some of the multiplex texts and textualities that constitute the matrices that shape and are shaped by non-cis-hetero-normative people of African descent.

Paper short abstract:

Through u[buntu] we can reconcile people and offer hospitality to each other. Beyond the context of South Africa, u[buntu] is a universal demand that must and should be a reality in the academic field because within knowledge production, there should be no walls separating intellectuals.

Paper long abstract:

U[buntu] stems from all the various Bantu languages. Originating from Africa and more specifically from Senegal, the word u[buntu] is close to the word buntu which means “door” in my mother tongue Wolof. According to Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the word u[buntu] means to make humanity together, to realize our humanity in reciprocity. The word buntu in Wolof also symbolizes hospitality, humanism, and reciprocity, so my door does not need to be closed, it needs to be open, and this opening symbolizes hospitality.

The door is also symbolizing this wall which separates us from one another. It must remain open. Therefore, my choice of the word u[buntu]. U[buntu] was used in South Africa to overcome Apartheid and all the atrocities that were committed in this period. Accordingly, this word can be used to reconcile people and offer hospitality to each other. Beyond the context of South Africa, u[buntu] is a universal demand that must and should be a reality in the academic field because within knowledge production, there should be no walls separating intellectuals. Therefore, u[buntu] must be put in place again against identity-based tensions. The rise of Ethno-nationalism is a major crisis of our time, and this crisis requires ubuntu to do u[buntu] together. The notion of humanity in general has a content beyond the reality of the tribe and it is not an empty word. Humanity is the first universal that must be opposed to all our particularism.

Paper short abstract:

Acknowledging the dialectal, dialogical, and dialectical aspects of language, this presentation adopts a decolonial approach to unpacking how linguistic landscapes depict African descended people both across the Afro-Atlantic as well as across colonial and neocolonial paradigms of domination.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation considers the public representation of people of African descent in the Afro-Atlantic in general and in Puerto Rico in particular, from a multimodal critical discourse analysis perspective. Puerto Rico is a particularly interesting case, because: 1) during the first 350 years of its colonial history, the majority of the island’s inhabitants were of African descent, while during the following 170 years of its colonial history, conscious policies of ‘whitening’ the island by promoting immigration from Europe have been adopted first by the Spanish (1493-1898) and then by the US (1898-present) administrations; and 2) while, as is the case with many other islands of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still a colony in the older sense of the word, over the past decade it has also become a neo-colony under a regime of structural adjustment imposed by the US banks, similar to the regimes that have been imposed by the World Bank/IMF/WTO on the so-called ‘independent’ nations of Africa and the Americas. Responding to Bakhtin’s critique of the study of discourse for its failure to acknowledge the dialectal, dialogical, and dialectical aspects of language as a point of departure, I adopt a decolonial approach to unpacking how linguistic landscapes depict African descended people both geographically across the Afro-Atlantic as well as temporally across colonial and neocolonial paradigms of domination.

Paper short abstract:

We show how race, gender, class and ecocide are so inextricably intertwined in the Afro-Atlantic that any one could not exist without the others, thus upending Western anti-racist, feminist, Marxist and ecologist discourses and shedding light on how hegemony operates and is subverted in real lives.

Paper long abstract:

Across the Afro-Atlantic, novel understandings of hybridity and rhizomatic connection are helping us to acknowledge the multiplex dimensions of intersectionality. As a result, the pluri-genetic and multi-directional trajectories of ethnocentrism/racism and other systems of discursive and coercive domination are becoming better understood. This has allowed us, for example, to abandon the futile quest to determine a singular fundamental, unifying dynamic to which can be traced all of the different systems of domination that are ruining our lives, in favor of a more intersectional recognition that ethnocentrism, patriarchy, economic plunder and anthropocentrism are inextricably and irretrievably intertwined and mutually conditioned and co-dependent. The colonial history of the Afro-Atlantic provides ample evidence that any one of these systems could not exist without all of the others, and the intensification of any one of them involves a concomitant intensification of all of the others. While such an approach seriously questions and complicates traditional Western anti-racist, feminist, Marxist and ecologist discourses, it is already proving its merit in achieving a more nuanced grasp of how profoundly manipulative (but also vulnerably contradictory) hegemonies have operated in real lives, and how such hegemonies have been unsettled and subverted in countless ways by real people in the Afro-Atlantic. Because these subversive acts are situated within rhizomatic networks where a multitude of dynamics of identification, counter-identification and dis-identification are constantly reconfiguring themselves, it is becoming increasingly clear that some of the most promising frameworks are those that allow for simultaneously trans-raced, trans-genedered, trans-classed and trans-speciated performances.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation shows how the vibrant contact that has linked all the peoples of Africa for millennia has resulted in a situation where it is almost impossible to domesticate language under the colonial gaze and/or to pretend that there are unitary languages, cultures and identities.

Paper long abstract:

By positioning ourselves/allowing ourselves to be positioned as ‘experts’ on language, we as linguists have wittingly/unwittingly usurped and enclosed the epistemic sovereignty to determine what is linguistically real, true, normal and good which was enjoyed by all of our ancestors as part of our commons for all but the last few thousand years of the 300,000 year long durée of human history. While we trivialize and dismiss the work of those linguists who ‘make the road by walking’, that is, who actually let living language speak to them, we glorify the work of ‘serious’ theorists whose ultimate goal is to enclose real language by forcing it into a preconceived theoretical framework designed to predict and control it, thereby reducing it to a supposed ‘realer’ universal system, beyond the reach of all but us, the initiates with degrees in Linguistics. In the process, we not only kill language, but we also extinguish humanity’s powers over the ‘awesome materiality’ of language (Foucault), allowing that awesome materiality to be used against us instead, in the interests of domination. This presentation demonstrates how the vibrant waterborne and overland contact that has linked all of the peoples Africa for tens of thousands of years has resulted in a situation on the ground where it is almost impossible to pretend under the colonial gaze that there are unitary languages, cultures and identities, and where it is more difficult than usual to domesticate language by imposing our theoretical straightjackets and neat categories.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social meanings of sensory language. Remembering language practice as part of strolling in the foreign environment of a city, specialized terms for smell and odour turn out to bear deep resonances in terms of linguistic hospitality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the possibilities of understanding the deep social meanings of those domains in language that have often been considered marginal, maybe rare, or extraordinary in linguistics. Remembering language practice as part of strolling in the foreign environment of a city, specialized terms for smell and odour turn out to bear deep resonances in terms of linguistic hospitality. Inhabiting the world as migrants and foreigners here involves dealing with the invisible, with smell and scent, as well as creating through language highly evasive spaces in which encounters with the material are healing and sustainable. Language as artful practice and shared insight as well as resonating memory is presented using the example of Luwo, a language spoken in South Sudan.