Technorality, Literature, and Vernacular Literacy in Twenty-First-Century Africa

Abstract

THE MULTILINGUAL SOCIETIES of the developing world, the ideological significance of print media and the production of written texts for many modernizing activists will begin to diminish during the twenty-first century, often in conjunction with a revaluation of orality, or what I will henceforth describe as technorality.1 Wherever such activists privilege communicative efficacy, newer electronic and audiovisual media, as well as technologically mediated forms of orality, will begin to displace texts in print as preferred modes of communication. In this context printed texts may lose much of their strategic appeal as singular artifacts of modern culture for modernizers operating in poorer multilingual communities. This unfolding transition has important implications for the relationship between advocacy on behalf of ethnic groups and creative writing, particularly in vernacular languages.2 By vernacular, I mean language in its specific function as mother tongue. Most speakers and readers of Yoruba, the African language I will be considering, are mother tongue speakers of the language. In advancing these claims, I seek to extend the argument made by Sheldon Pollock, a scholar of South Asian societies, that the closing of the twentieth century might mark the end of what he calls "the vernacular millennium" (see "Cosmopolitan Vernacular" 14-15; "Cosmopolitan and Vernacular" 19; and, more generally, "India in the Vernacular") . In this article, I examine some factors that may account for the trend observed by Pollock, with special attention to the changing outlook on print literacy and technologically mediated orality in the African context. My