Abstract
The end of the apartheid era in South Africa inaugurated an increased mobility and accessibility to previously prohibited spaces. Although African migrant populations are still highly regulated in South Africa, their presence has also profoundly transformed the country’s present-day sociolinguistic and cultural landscape. The textual construction of the literary text in this study draws attention to the post-structuralist perspective which argues that languages are not closed entities but rather open systems utilised for expressive purposes in specific social contexts. Most significantly, recent sociolinguistic studies show that languages are no longer regarded as discrete systems in communication because they form expansive linguistic repertoires in contact spaces. Such an understanding of multilingual use facilitates communication across cultural, linguistic and national borders, thereby subverting exclusionary normative practices. The present article draws from translingual perspectives to examine communicative practices in literary discourse. A close textual analysis is adopted to identify how translingual practices make languaging a contested terrain meant to project multi-voiced and multi-perspectival discourses with transformative capacities in the context of the ‘rainbow nation’ metanarrative.
Highlights
Recent research into contemporary sociolinguistic and cultural realities in South Africa has raised intriguing insights and questions about the notion ‘rainbow nation’
We argue that Jinga’s translingual aesthetics has come to define the complex realities of African politics and fiction today
The novel represents a linguistic space that is transformed by the contemporary socio-political environment in South Africa
Summary
Recent research into contemporary sociolinguistic and cultural realities in South Africa has raised intriguing insights and questions about the notion ‘rainbow nation’. This presentation conveys the fickleness of the term rainbowism through black people whose lives are illustrative of precarity and political betrayal. The songs create a communal experience and stage a platform for cultural and national conversations which define a latent rainbowism that accommodates the vital and even vicarious experiences of the migrants This idea is earlier presented in the novel when the narrator criticises the divisive effects of Berlin’s cartography and distribution of African states, in his comments about the Limpopo River which is literally and figuratively used to examine the concept of borders: This is the river whose majesty, way back in 1884, at the Berlin conference, the hawk-like eyes of the colonialists did not miss. This is partly because navigation and transgression of boundaries is contaminated by frail policies and frayed ultra-nationalist politics that do not fully support the development of hospitality in a rainbow nation that embraces multilanguaging and multi-ethnicity in postapartheid society
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