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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.