Franz Fanon started his famous Black Skin, White Masks (1952) with a chapter on language, ascribing it ‘a basic importance’. Many missionaries and colonial officers would have agreed with him: a lot of time and energy was spent describing, prescribing, creating and controlling linguistic categories, reifying them as named and listable languages, during the colonial era. These processes of categorization and reification were rooted in the nineteenth-century nation-state assumption of an alleged isomorphy between language, ethnicity, and topography, and in their turn fed colonial-administrative categorisations and hierarchisations of identities construed as ‘tribes’.
Much of the literature in postcolonial theory glosses rather easily over the complex sociolinguistic, language educational and language policy histories of former colonies, often yielding to a binary opposition between the imperialism of Europhone languages, on the one hand, and indigenous African languages, viewed as an undifferentiated resource of subversion and counterforce, on the other. One of the main risks in this is a denial of complex histories of linguistic innovation and re-appropriation, as testified by debates and conflicts over language at more local levels, in the sense of Stroud’s notion of ‘linguistic citizenship’, and of linguistic futures rooted in past imaginings.
Changes of recent decades in Africa’s linguistic landscape show signs of added complexity. While colonial history undoubtedly remains a crucial factor in language policies on the continent, more recent developments related to intra-continental migration, global economy, etc. have influenced developments, informing choices and determining futures (e.g. the growing role of English in countries like Rwanda, DR-Congo and Morocco, the teaching of Mandarin in school curricula, etc.). At the same time, the role of some African languages has become institutionalized in some contexts (e.g. South Africa’s choice 11 official languages, 16 official languages in Zimbabwe). It remains to be seen whether and how these developments are to be interpreted in terms of ‘decolonisation’ or ‘neo-colonialism’. At the same time, authors have raised the limitations of a Western-European policy model which is rooted exclusively in a logic of lists of ‘languages’, numbers of speakers, language rights, and singular language/ethnicity/culture-choices. Are alternative forms of linguistic citizenship imaginable which ring more true to the lived sociolinguistic experiences of language users in the global South today, while addressing the unequal terms that continue to run through educational practice, official language policy, etc.?
In this call for contributions we welcome papers and presentations as well as forms of artistic expressions: stories, (slam-)poetry, performance on the issues of language and colonialism in its broadest sense. People with personal experience on the matter are especially encouraged to react. All languages spoken in Africa may be used.
Much of the literature in postcolonial theory glosses rather easily over the complex sociolinguistic, language educational and language policy histories of former colonies, often yielding to a binary opposition between the imperialism of Europhone languages, on the one hand, and indigenous African languages, viewed as an undifferentiated resource of subversion and counterforce, on the other. One of the main risks in this is a denial of complex histories of linguistic innovation and re-appropriation, as testified by debates and conflicts over language at more local levels, in the sense of Stroud’s notion of ‘linguistic citizenship’, and of linguistic futures rooted in past imaginings.
Changes of recent decades in Africa’s linguistic landscape show signs of added complexity. While colonial history undoubtedly remains a crucial factor in language policies on the continent, more recent developments related to intra-continental migration, global economy, etc. have influenced developments, informing choices and determining futures (e.g. the growing role of English in countries like Rwanda, DR-Congo and Morocco, the teaching of Mandarin in school curricula, etc.). At the same time, the role of some African languages has become institutionalized in some contexts (e.g. South Africa’s choice 11 official languages, 16 official languages in Zimbabwe). It remains to be seen whether and how these developments are to be interpreted in terms of ‘decolonisation’ or ‘neo-colonialism’. At the same time, authors have raised the limitations of a Western-European policy model which is rooted exclusively in a logic of lists of ‘languages’, numbers of speakers, language rights, and singular language/ethnicity/culture-choices. Are alternative forms of linguistic citizenship imaginable which ring more true to the lived sociolinguistic experiences of language users in the global South today, while addressing the unequal terms that continue to run through educational practice, official language policy, etc.?
In this call for contributions we welcome papers and presentations as well as forms of artistic expressions: stories, (slam-)poetry, performance on the issues of language and colonialism in its broadest sense. People with personal experience on the matter are especially encouraged to react. All languages spoken in Africa may be used.
Michael Meeuwis is a professor of Lingala and African linguistics, history, culture and society at Ghent University. He obtained his master’s degree in African Philology and History at the University of Ghent in 1990, and his master’s in General Linguistics at the Universities of Antwerp and Amsterdam in 1991. In the following years, he obtained a PhD by conducting a sociolinguistic-ethnographic study of the Congolese community in Belgium, worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of The Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders, and worked as a professor of Anthropological Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.
His research domains include history of the European production of ‘knowledge’ (history of the human and social sciences) in African colonial contexts and consequences for present-day coloniality of knowledge, history of colonization and missionary in Africa, Europe-Africa representations and imaginations, the sociolinguistics of the Democratic Republic of Congo, general African socio- and political linguistics, and postcolonialism and coloniality. |
Inge Brinkman is a professor of African Studies at the Department of African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. Her fields of research include: African literature, African popular culture, and African history. The themes of her research engage African literature, performance, popular culture, narrative, literacy and books in the wider context of communication and public debate in terms of cultural history. Geographically, the focus is on Kenya and Angola.
After having finished her studies in History and African Studies, professor Brinkman received a Ph.D. degree from Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 1996 with a thesis on oral and written literature, identity and gender in Central Kenya. She then worked at Cologne University (Germany) on a post-doctoral research project, studying violence and exile on the basis of fieldwork with refugees from South-East Angola. In the following years, she was engaged in several projects such as a research project at Ghent University on the relations between nationalism, religion and popular culture in Northern Angola. |
Professor Stef Slembrouck teaches Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, and a course on Language, Diversity and Globalization at Ghent University. His research concentrates on the role of interaction and communicative practices in the construction of institutional categories and identities, with particular reference to the domains of administrative practices, social welfare (esp. child welfare and protection), education and health. He has developed a particular interest in the implications of globalization-related and migration-affected multilingualism for language policy, language teaching and learning and the functioning of institutions.
From a theoretical-methodological point of view his work covers (i) the nature of discourse and spoken interaction, (ii) the relevance of conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, ethnomethodology, pragmatics and the work of E. Goffman for the study of recorded interaction in institutional contexts, (iii) the interface between social theory and language study and (iv) the globalization of language practices and the sociolinguistics of (urban) multilingualism in contexts of the global North and South. Slembrouck currently coordinates the strategic institutional partnership between Ghent University and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa), where he has an honorary appointment as an extraordinary professor. |
WORKSHOP IMAGE
Collège de la Sagesse by Chéri Samba (2003)