The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Babylon:The Language Dilemma and the Search for Social Justice in Africa
English Academy Review, 2019
The language debates in South Africa have been contentious on a number of platforms. Various critics are questioning the role of the languages in enhancing certain values in society as the marginalization of indigenous languages continues and others have called for emphasis of indigenous languages to underscore epistemic freedom. However, whilst it is crucial to strive for deprovincialization of Europe the imposition of which has led to linguisticides, decolonization is not about recolonization of historically advantaged languages such as French, English and Portuguese. Over the years scholars have presented strong arguments on issues of language. Eskia Mphahlele contended that it is mischievous for black Africans to use English less, because it is a language that emancipates and has created strong nationalisms especially in places such as East Africa. However, Ngugi wa ‘Thiongo emphasizes indigenous languages as languages that would redeem Africans from the throes of colonialism. This presentation argues for the positioning of all South Africa’s official languages on an equitable level as they exemplify ecologies of knowledge undergirded by social justice on a planetary level. Multilingualism and bilingualism will build better citizens intent on helping in the building of nationhood and diversity of a truly decolonized nation.
The world in one country: English in South Africa
Danubius Noster
As the allusion in the title to the unintentionally humorous phrasebook published in the nineteenth century suggests, broken English and mistranslation have long been a source of humour and condemnation. Both of them abound due to the increasing prevalence of English in the world and the challenges posed by learning and using a foreign language, and by using translation to bridge the gap between English and other languages. If we add to this the appropriation of English by its speakers beyond the lands of the English, we appreciate some of the issues the spread of the English language in the world brings to the fore. The Englishes spoken in the 21st century are an outcome of the history of the English language, which is in turn bound up with the history of the speakers of the language. In what follows, we will start at the beginning and consider in broad strokes how English came to be, where it went, and how and why it spread. For this I will use as a framework the four diasporas, o...
Postcolonial Studies, 2018
Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex fig-uration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The paper interprets this as the re-sult of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilized through the hegemonial project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilized this new order with a particular notion of language as an au-tonomous object. In the 19th century, language enters a conjunction of territory and cul-ture, which played out in Europe as a nationalist and hegemonial trajectory, and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus language can be understood to be an apparatus producive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualization, I show how today, these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language looses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with Global Aca-demic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialized, culturally neutral language.
Review: Le Sable de Babel: Traduction et apartheid (Alain Ricard)
The central argument in Alain Ricard’s Le Sable de Babel. Traduction et apartheid explores the complex relationship between translation as a practice that builds bridges and makes connections and apartheid as a set of concepts, laws and institutions that sought to implement racial separateness. Ricard emphasizes the ethics at work in dialogic translation; a practice that involves the creation of meaning and intercultural dialogue. Following the myth of Babel in the Bible according to which people were dispersed into different language groups, Ricard takes up Paul Ricoeur’s invitation to embrace translation as a means of overcoming these linguistic divisions with an ethics of hospitality across languages (Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 2004). Of course, any openness to transcend the boundaries of language and ethnicity through translation was banished under apartheid with the adoption of racist laws, the segregation of space and the virtual exclusion of translation from Bantu education programs. Through the separation of people by race came connections between territory (inhabited by whites, blacks, coloreds, Indians), language (Afrikans, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) and political rights in South Africa. Whereas many may have seen the form of despotism that was set up in South Africa under apartheid as somehow unique to that regime (1948-1994), Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the “decentralized despotism” under apartheid can and should be seen as exemplary of colonial relations of domination everywhere on the continent (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1997). Ricard builds on Mamdani’s observations and argues that African literature as a basic expression of freedom came up against a concept of human relations defined by the domination of one group by another across the continent.