Multilingualism in transformative spaces: contact and conviviality
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Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
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Publisher
Springer Verlag
Abstract
South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical
displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting
to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing
aspirations of mobility, is part of people�s daily experience that often takes place on
the margins of conventional politics. A politics of conviviality is one such form of
politics of the popular that emerges in contexts of rapid change, diversity, mobility,
and the negotiation and mediation of complex affiliations and attachments. The
questions in focus for this paper thus pertain to how forms of talk, born out of
displacement, anomie and contact in the superdiverse contexts of South Africa,
allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical
faultlines of social and racial oppression. We first expand upon the idea of (marginal)
linguistic practices as powerful mediations of political voice and agency, an
idea that can be captured in the notion of linguistic citizenship, the rhetorical
foundation of a politics of conviviality. We then move on to analyze the workings of
linguistic citizenship in the multilingual practices of two distinct manifestations of
popular culture, namely hip hop and a performance by a stand-up comedian in
Mzoli�s meat market in Gugulethu, Cape Town. The paper concludes with a general
discussion on the implications for politics of multilingualism and language policy.
Description
Keywords
Multilingualism, Linguistic citizenship, Hip-Hop, Stand-up comedy, Conviviality, Cape Town
Citation
Quentin, E. & Stroud, C. (2013). Multilingualism in transformative spaces: contact and conviviality. Language Policy, 12: 289-311