Abstract:This chapter explores how language was used in the racial construction of differences and equalities in colonial and post-independent contexts by analyzing the meanings attributed to Portuguese as a language in the colonial era of Brazil and Angola, two former Portuguese colonies. Brazil and Angola played an important role in Portuguese colonization by both contributing and suffering the effects of the use of categories such as language and race as strategy of control and resistance. The chapter argues and ill… Show more
“…Building upon the earlier theorizing of Makoni & Pennycook (2006), Severo and Makoni (2020) summarize their view of language as a process, an invention , by recognizing that:(i) languages are historically and politically invented by a complex colonial apparatus that overlaid language, race, power, and religion in specific ways; (ii) the metalanguage used to frame communicative practices is historically invented and cannot be considered separately from the “objects” they describe and invent; (iii) the colonial linguistics that helped to shape languages had material effects on language policies adopted by colonial powers, as in the role of education in the institutionalization and systematization of languages, mainly by inserting literacy as a powerful representation of what counts as language; (iv) the concepts of language should be submitted to continuous revision so that we avoid using colonial frameworks to describe and problematize historical power relations.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
confidence: 95%
“…Further, with respect to language, Severo and Makoni (2020) argue that we must "problematize from a historical and critical perspective the concept of languages as fixed entities capable of being counted, systematized, and named." Viewing language as a social process, rather than products or "abstract and separate" entities "that exists prior to.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguistic Futuresmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Building upon the earlier theorizing of Makoni & Pennycook (2006), Severo and Makoni (2020) summarize their view of language as a process, an invention, by recognizing that:…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Further, with respect to language, Severo and Makoni (2020) argue that we must “problematize from a historical and critical perspective the concept of languages as fixed entities capable of being counted, systematized, and named.” Viewing language as a social process, rather than products or “abstract and separate” entities “that exists prior to…individuals and social practices,” allows researchers to reveal hegemonic ideologies and practices, such as the homogenizing ideology of “one‐language‐one‐nation” that undergirds several colonial practices, for example.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in‐depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language‐race‐land complex , the range of issues with respect to the co‐constitution and refusal of the colonial logics of language, race, and land. Specifically, we address the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa. Afrikaaps is a South African hiphopera that disrupts white settler colonial logics of language, race, and land through an interrogation and revision of white supremacist constructions of Afrikaans. This reinvention of language, race, and land frees the Afrikaans‐speaking, so‐called Coloured community from oppressive, colonial logics and offers them new ways of envisioning their linguistic, racial, spatial, and political‐economic futures. We argue that, for the artists–activists involved in this decolonial, raciolinguistic movement, Hip Hop becomes a critical vehicle for raising consciousness through language, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, and upending the white supremacist legacies of apartheid through a radical re‐education. Methodologically, we center Black and Indigenous artists’ voices, understanding them to be more than cultural producers but also cultural theorists. We draw upon our longitudinal, ethnographic cultural engagement with the Hip Hop artists involved in the theatre production and related forms of language activism (Alim & Haupt 2015, 2017; Haupt 2012; Haupt et al. 2019; Jansen 2019; Jansen et al. 2019; Stroud & Williams 2017; Williams 2018), as well as language and media analyses of the Afrikaaps production, soundtrack, and documentary film (Valley 2010).
“…Building upon the earlier theorizing of Makoni & Pennycook (2006), Severo and Makoni (2020) summarize their view of language as a process, an invention , by recognizing that:(i) languages are historically and politically invented by a complex colonial apparatus that overlaid language, race, power, and religion in specific ways; (ii) the metalanguage used to frame communicative practices is historically invented and cannot be considered separately from the “objects” they describe and invent; (iii) the colonial linguistics that helped to shape languages had material effects on language policies adopted by colonial powers, as in the role of education in the institutionalization and systematization of languages, mainly by inserting literacy as a powerful representation of what counts as language; (iv) the concepts of language should be submitted to continuous revision so that we avoid using colonial frameworks to describe and problematize historical power relations.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
confidence: 95%
“…Further, with respect to language, Severo and Makoni (2020) argue that we must "problematize from a historical and critical perspective the concept of languages as fixed entities capable of being counted, systematized, and named." Viewing language as a social process, rather than products or "abstract and separate" entities "that exists prior to.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguistic Futuresmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Building upon the earlier theorizing of Makoni & Pennycook (2006), Severo and Makoni (2020) summarize their view of language as a process, an invention, by recognizing that:…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Further, with respect to language, Severo and Makoni (2020) argue that we must “problematize from a historical and critical perspective the concept of languages as fixed entities capable of being counted, systematized, and named.” Viewing language as a social process, rather than products or “abstract and separate” entities “that exists prior to…individuals and social practices,” allows researchers to reveal hegemonic ideologies and practices, such as the homogenizing ideology of “one‐language‐one‐nation” that undergirds several colonial practices, for example.…”
Section: Inventing Afrikaaps: New Language For New Racial and Linguis...mentioning
This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in‐depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language‐race‐land complex , the range of issues with respect to the co‐constitution and refusal of the colonial logics of language, race, and land. Specifically, we address the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa. Afrikaaps is a South African hiphopera that disrupts white settler colonial logics of language, race, and land through an interrogation and revision of white supremacist constructions of Afrikaans. This reinvention of language, race, and land frees the Afrikaans‐speaking, so‐called Coloured community from oppressive, colonial logics and offers them new ways of envisioning their linguistic, racial, spatial, and political‐economic futures. We argue that, for the artists–activists involved in this decolonial, raciolinguistic movement, Hip Hop becomes a critical vehicle for raising consciousness through language, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, and upending the white supremacist legacies of apartheid through a radical re‐education. Methodologically, we center Black and Indigenous artists’ voices, understanding them to be more than cultural producers but also cultural theorists. We draw upon our longitudinal, ethnographic cultural engagement with the Hip Hop artists involved in the theatre production and related forms of language activism (Alim & Haupt 2015, 2017; Haupt 2012; Haupt et al. 2019; Jansen 2019; Jansen et al. 2019; Stroud & Williams 2017; Williams 2018), as well as language and media analyses of the Afrikaaps production, soundtrack, and documentary film (Valley 2010).
“…Seemingly as a matter of course, in the Languages section of the Imperial Gazetteer, Grierson notes whether each variety is ‘civilised’ or ‘uncivilised’, ‘cultivated’ or ‘uncultivated’, whether it is ‘capable of expressing ideas’ (1909: 367, 369, see also discussion in Section Two below) or can boast a literature ‘of merit’. Severo and Makoni (2020: 157) have described the employment of racialising language hierarchies during the enslavement of African people brought to Brazil for colonial exploitation. The term ‘Ladino’, they observe, was used to refer to those whose degree of acculturation by virtue of knowledge of Portuguese allowed them ‘some differentiated status in the slave trade’, while ‘Boçal’ was used to refer to those with no knowledge of Portuguese and who were therefore, in the eyes of the coloniser, ‘ignorant, rude, lacking in human feelings and intelligence’.…”
Section: Decolonising Geographies Of Languagementioning
This paper emphasises the decolonial importance of geographical engagement with the materiality of language as an embodied and embedded relation. It shows how abstractions of language(s) as discrete, codified and possessable objects participate in a ‘coloniality of language’ that risks obscuring alternative geographies of language within, against and beyond the territorialised monolingualism of the colonial nation-state. Through considering Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of Western modernity’s systematic ‘devocalisation of logos’ from a modernity/coloniality perspective, I argue that geographical consideration of language as a ‘revocalised’ relation could contribute to moving beyond colonial and (ethno)nationalist geographies of language.
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