Mobilité, migrations et littératures en réseaux

Abstract

© Cahiers d'Études africaines 1. À cette différence près que la théorie de l'« acteur-réseau » (Actor-Network Theory) ne concerne pas seulement les êtres humains, mais également les objets

Contextualizing the vernacular: Signposts from African languages, writing, and literature

“…Indeed, authors like Ngũgĩ who have called for writing in African languages, appear to be more committed to ensuring the authenticity of "African" literature than to fostering the independent growth of literature in African vernaculars. 16 For an overview of creative writing in selected African languages, see for example: Albert Gérard (1981), Graham Furniss (1996, Innocentia Mhlambi (2012), Karin Barber (2012), Xavier Garnier (2013, Mélanie Bourlet (2014), Sara Marzagora (2015), and Sara Marzagora and Ayele Kebede (2019). 17 Please see Pamela Olúbùnmi Smith (2005) for details of the translation.…”

1. Can “migrants” speak? Voices, narratives and performances

“…The injunction to learn French, which is supposed to be the sole vector of integration in France remains the number one goal for the vast majority of teachers. The regime of linguistic ideologies (Bauman & Briggs, 2003;Blackledge, 2000;Canut, 2007Canut, , 2008Canut, , 2010Certeau et al, 1974;Gal, 2006;Martin Rojo, 2010) that makes monolingualism and the standard language an identity factor and the key to integration hardly leads anyone to question linguistic plurality in its pragmatic dimension, particularly for illiterate people. The scope of these ideologies, although concerning all Western language policies, has been particularly coercive in Europe.…”

“…According to the same ideological paradigm, most Europeans tend to apply to African countries the nationalist linguistic ideology in which a language corresponds to a nation, a territory, a community, an ethnic group, and most important to an identity and a culture (Canut, 2008). Far from being universal, this reduction of language practices to a language-as-cultural-object-of-learning has become dominant, especially through colonization when the European school system imposed itself as a model of education all over the world (Canut, 2020b).…”

“…In recent years, many scholars (Bauman & Briggs, 2003;Canut, 2007Canut, , 2008Canut, , 2010 have documented the limitations of such associations between language, nation, community, and identity. They have shown that to solely associate migrant children to "their" supposed language and "their" culture of origin in order to promote otherness and the celebrated "diversity", as it is often done in French class-rooms adopting an "intercultural" point of view, may have perverse effects.…”

“…Linguistic expertise is regularly requested to account for this mobility. Ironically, linguistic divisions are usually based on linguistic cartographies elaborated by colonial administrators such as Delafosse, who used the logic of equating language, culture, and identity, with territory to assign speakers to only one supposedly "mother" language (Canut, 2008).…”