Colonial Language Research Articles

Untranslatable Characters: James Clarence Mangan and the English Language

ABSTRACT Language still is a hotly debated topic in postcolonial circles. Both academics and writers strive to define which language should be used in postcolonial contexts and the impact of such choice. Two tendencies are prevalent. Detractors of the colonisers’ tongue argue that using colonial languages offers a continuum of the colonial quest, reproducing its mindset and hierarchy. Defendants of deploying colonial languages as abrogation tools assert these offer a twofold opportunity: the language expresses the nuances of postcolonial societies while reaching wider audiences. Despite its ethnographic peculiarities, Ireland is no exception to this dichotomy. The discussion has, however, mainly focused on Irish writers’ recent productions, to the exclusion of the early nineteenth century. By analysing James Clarence Mangan's attitude to language in his writings, this study shed some light on an area which deserves further study, contributing to the overall understanding of how postcolonial writers counter colonial constructions via language.

LITERACY AND ORALITY: BETWEEN ABROGATION AND APPROPRIATION IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S THE RIVER BETWEEN

Colonizers have used language as an instrument of socio-political and economic control during colonisation. This has enabled them in the process to establish power hierarchy based mostly on linguistic superiority by undermining native tongues. In recent years, theories of postcolonial discourses hold the view that colonialism has fundamentally affected modes of representation of colonised spaces. Through questioning and travestying western hegemonic discourses, writers from once colonised spaces have challenged and subverted the hegemonic power of the colonial language by inserting different strategies into their own language to suit socio-cultural contexts. For postcolonial literary artists, this consists in taking the language of the former imperial power, to unlearn its worldview and re-place it in a discourse fully adapted to ones’ own space and subsequently, produce new modes of representation in countering colonial canonical texts. In this sense, postcolonial discourse is crystallised by and replete with ‘abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’ in the canon of postcolonial studies. This suggests the writer’s use of linguistic structure of the borrowed language, the manipulation of its syntactical structure as well as its semantics, to convey stance against the colonizer. In its pronouncement, an effort is made to advocate for a critical rethinking of the legacies of colonial domination as well as its accompanying epistemologies. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o uses elements of oral tradition (orality) or better indigenous poetics in his fictional works, mostly The River Between, to express the meanings, feelings and experiences of his Gikuyu people. Thus, orality as a means of communication and carrier of the culture of those people to whom it is a mother tongue, has social, cultural, and political aesthetic roles to play in the African worldview. To achieve this, Ngugi employs historically significant events, moments and stylistic features which are characteristics of oral tradition to emphasise important key concepts that help to reconstruct positive moral values in conflict with foreign ones in a fragmented Kenyan society. Though many controversies surround Ngugi’s writing and its medium of reception, this paper contends that his fictions written in his mother tongue or in English and/or translated into English, are part and parcel of his endeavour to appropriate the literary enterprise not only as a weapon of active physical revolt and textual indignation but also as against (post)colonial pathologies. Ngugi refashions the colonial English language to show that his country, Kenya, is not a mere passive entity in tolerating colonial legacies; but challenges western hegemonic power dimensions, dismantles them to the point of bringing them under its own terms and conditions. The conceptual frameworks that underpin the study are New historicism (New Culturalism) and postcolonial theory. 
 
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Hausa Proverbs as a Dynamic Mode of Discourse between Tradition and Modernity

Proverbs are very common and employed in African societies, especially in Hausa. They arise in the midst of conversation. They are used for many purposes, in numerous circumstances and ways that, in many African societies, effective speech and social success depend on a good command of proverbs Usman et al. (2013). As such they held a very important place in traditional societies; dynamic mode of discourse, proverbs is also used as a major vehicle of transmission from generation to generation as people could not read and write. But, learning colonial languages (French, English, Portuguese) imposes to new generation the acquisition of new communicative competence. Consequently, new generation has no good command of their native language let alone proverbs whereas modern society is characterized by quick communication which gives no more room to proverbs. There have been many studies on topics related to the use, role, form, characteristic and functions of Hausa proverbs. To the best knowledge of the researcher no study was conducted regarding Hausa proverbs in traditional vis-à-vis modern society. That is what the paper tries to investigate in an attempt of filling up the gap. Participants were chosen through random sampling method while unstructured interview and surreptitious observation were used to collect data. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyse data. Analysis reveals that Hausa new generation is no more competent in their language in that they code switch, code mix or even borrow when communicating let alone use of proverbs. Still in use in traditional societies, proverbs are drastically threatened to falling in disuse in modern societies.

The Ambiguity of Devotion

This article offers a reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 experimental text DICTEE as performing purposefully ambiguous devotional work. As a meditation on unfinished struggles against colonial and patriarchal violence, DICTEE registers devotion’s role in both oppression and liberation. Cha’s engagements with female martyrs, Korean mudang shamanic practice, and colonial languages demonstrate the inseparability of structures of domination and traditions of resistance. The essay argues that even as DICTEE wrestles with inescapable forms of complicity, its efforts to transform perception denaturalize the violence of racial, gendered, and political divisions.

Factors Shaping Exports of Cultural Goods from Pakistan

In the era of economic globalization, cultural goods trade has assumed a vital role in overall bilateral trade. It has become an emerging and transformative force behind socio-cultural-economic development and an important source of inclusive growth. Once virtually unlocked, trade in cultural goods is now fast growing with world-wide market openings. Trade liberalisation in cultural goods thus needs to be treated as a priority policy issue in multilateral and regional trade negotiations. Despite large potential of exports in cultural goods, Pakistan has been unsuccessful in realizing it. This is mainly because of lack of due attention given to it by the policymakers. In this regard, this paper makes a beginning to investigate the determinants of cultural goods exports from Pakistan for the period 2003-2012 with its 157 trading partner countries. The Gravity model is used to identify factors that determine exports of cultural goods. Six major categories of cultural goods are used for the purpose of estimation. Results indicate that size of Pakistan and its trading partner countries’ markets as well as distance among them are important determinants of exports in cultural goods. Specifically, cultural goods exports are strongly and positively influenced by the growth of the GDP in Pakistan, while the trading partner countries’ GDP growth negatively influence cultural goods’ exports. Distance, representing transaction costs and trade barriers, negatively affect exports of cultural goods; while colonial ties, common language, common border and land area of the trading partners positively influence the export of cultural goods. Exports of cultural goods to landlocked countries are lower than other trading partner countries.

Aurore's Journey by Nadia Origo

Reviewed by: Aurore's Journey by Nadia Origo Karen Ferreira-Meyers Origo, Nadia, Aurore's Journey. Trans. Aquene Kimmel, ed. Cheryl Toman, La Doxa Editions, 2020. Pp. 110. ISBN 978-2-37638-041-2. 10€ (paper). One of the ways in which Francophone African literature can reach a wider audience in- and outside of Africa is through diligent and context-appropriate translation. French-Gabonese Nadia Origo's short novel was first published in French in 2007 by Société des écrivains and reedited in 2008 by La Doxa Editions (Origo's own publishing house). Origo has published a series of novels, Le voyage d'Aurore (2007), J'ai résolu de… (2008), Le bal des débutants (2012) and La valse des initiés (2014), and a collection of poems (Sanglotites équatoriales, 2014) as well as two volumes of traditional stories (Le royaume de Longo, 2008); her work has been applauded as original and testimony of a lively second generation of women authors from Gabon. The story of Aurore's Journey is mainly autobiographical: 20-year-old Nadia-Aurore is a young, dynamic and committed, although quite naïve, student at her university in Libreville. In July 2000, during the holidays, she travels to Ogooué-Ivindo, in the northeast Gabonese hinterland, with her two friends, Pilli and Gal from Forest-Source. The objective of the fortnight "journey" is ecological in nature: the trio wants to meet the local populations to explain how to exploit the equatorial forest resources harmoniously and to fight against widespread deforestation. Nadia-Aurore's ecological engagement shines through; this is quite understandable as, besides being an editor, she holds a PhD in geography and sustainable development, health and environment. In her foreword, Cheryl Toman, the editor of the translated novel, explains the importance of keeping the [End Page 197] main protagonist's name in the title: Aurore, in French, means dawn, and Origo's focus on shedding light on African realities is part of her ideological commitment to her roots. Aquene Kimmel's French translation is beautifully and poetically crafted. She translates, transcribes, feels and expresses Origo's original text. As a translator myself, I particularly appreciate expressions such as "thumbing through a rosary of excuses" (29), and that Origo's work is now available in English ensures that communication across language barriers can take place. It echoes what Toman notes in her foreword, namely that "one of the vestiges of colonialism is indeed the post-independence reliance on the colonial language, and this complicates matters for Africans themselves. The young members of Forest-Source indeed encounter disadvantages as they must rely on translators to get their message across to their fellow citizens in Fang and Kota villages" (13). The topics Origo tackles in this short but poignant novel–ecology, grassroots involvement and participation, sustainability, individual and collective commitment, ecofeminism, afrocentrism–make her work relevant and thought-provoking, and will surely spark debate for years to come. Researchers will be tempted to compare her work to other travel writers (both male and female) from Africa and beyond. They might also look at authors who are committed to fight for our natural resources. In addition, scholars working on autobiography and autofiction will find the novel an interesting example of how women narrate their stories. There will also be scholars and members of the wider audience interested in the portrayal of both positive (rules of behavior, politeness, for example) and negative (bribery, for example) aspects of Gabonese culture. All in all, Origo poetically described one of the most beautiful, pristine and "magnificent landscapes" (21) of Gabon in her novel, in her "literary postcard" (Toman, Foreword, 14) and Kimmel allows us to travel to that exquisite spot on earth through her skillful translation in English. As readers we "forgive" all stakeholders involved in the production of this translation for the small punctuation and translation errors, especially since none of them hinder our understanding and reading pleasure. Karen Ferreira-Meyers University of Eswatini Copyright © 2021 Women in French Studies

Diversity, Inclusion, and "Othering": Methodologies for Comparative Literature

Diversity, Inclusion, and "Othering":Methodologies for Comparative Literature Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay The Task of the Comparatist Comparative Literature has remained an elusive discipline of inquiry, as it has been perceived as "a subject of study, a general approach to literature, a series of specific methods of literary history, a return to a medieval way of thought, a methodological credo for the day, an administrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in university organization," and much more (Weisinger and Joyaux vii). Amidst these infinite possibilities, a comparatist must identify the key responsibilities of the discipline as a field of intellectual inquiry. The difficulty in defining the field, or at least the difficulty in coming to an agreement about the definition, is not essentially a crisis for the discipline. The field can and has accommodated the study of a wide range of literary works from varied geographical, historical, linguistic backgrounds, and engaged with other disciplinary modes of inquiry. Scholars have argued that the search for definition is ultimately a futile exercise for a field that resists categorization of knowledge into discipline-specific fields of inquiry. For example, Haun Saussy has shown that scholarly attempts in defining Comparative Literature "through its objects of knowledge or methods" remain inefficacious, and proposes to understand the discipline "as practice, a way of constructing objects" (340). Harry Levin, one of the founders of the discipline in the North American context, characterizes it as "an attempt to pool the resources of the variously related literature, to cross the linguistic barriers that confine them within the framework of national histories and provide an area for the consideration of their common features and underlying forces" (22). Levin's proposed attempt to transcend the boundaries of national histories in the study of literature has been echoed in the works of René Wellek, another founding figure of the American school of Comparative Literature, [End Page 180] who notes that "'Comparative' literature has become an established term for any study of literature transcending the limits of one national literature" (167). In the same essay, Wellek argued that it is entirely possible for single literature departments to engage in comparative studies of literature and proposed opening the study of literature beyond the association with a particular language; this approach would have eradicated the practice of dividing the teaching and scholarship of literature according to languages and instead embrace literature as a field of artistic expression and critical studies. An emphasis on the "literary" rather than the national and/or linguistic would have established literature as a unique cognitive entity driven by its own theories and methodologies; such an approach would have destabilized the monopoly of former colonial languages and their cultural empires could be forced to engage with other languages as equals. However, this approach has not been widely appreciated, and thus very few universities have merged their language-specific literature programs in order to create a "Literature" department. Paul de Man was aware of the challenge of self-identification that haunted the field, and in his 1967 "notebooks," he proposed that "comparative literature is an important auxiliary to the history of ideas, with obvious relevance for international studies" (230). This articulation of an "obvious" relationship between the fields of Comparative Literature and International Studies indicates the importance of locating Comparative Literature within a framework of internationalism and interdisciplinarity. Contemplating the discipline's definition and scope in early 1980s in "Comparative Literature as a Cultural Practice," Mary Louise Pratt welcomes the opportunity for Comparative Literature to work in "cooperation" with International Studies programs. Such endeavours promise to focus on the immediate cultural lives of the readers and students, allowing them to engage in intellectual inquiry about the world they inhabit. In the late 1980s, Earl Miner observed that "the least studied issue in comparative literature is what is meant by 'comparative' and […] what are the canons of comparability" (135). In the same essay, Miner elaborated that the "comparative" element in the study of literature allows us to understand how "critical systems" emerge by connecting the world, the poet/author, the poet/author's work, a text (the physical coding), a reader and the reader's perception of the poet/author's work. Rey Chow...

The Domestication Genocide of Settler Colonial–Language Ideologies

Settler colonial–language ideologies serve as one tool of dispossession within settler colonial assemblages of genocidal accumulation. We focus on the role of settlers in learning, codifying, and teaching Indigenous languages in order to analyze the language ideologies at play when language becomes colonized alongside the colonization of land. We develop a comparative reading of Dakota and Lakota bilingual-language instruction through the materials of Stephen R. Riggs during the nineteenth century and Ann Nolan Clark during the mid-twentieth century in order to examine the instantiation and continuity of settler colonial–language ideologies. We contrast these ideologies with how language ideologies formed in Europe as a component of the formation of race, which naturalized a link between people and land through defining conceptions of the human and the rational political subject. However, in settler colonial contexts this link between people and land, through language, does not function in the same way. Instead, Indigenous peoples' land is imagined as terra nullius and Indigenous peoples as less than human. We propose the concept of domestication genocide to demonstrate how settler language ideologies link land, legibility, and animacy as a part of these language teaching programs.

Kama La MackerelZOM-FAM

find in Homer, which seem designed both to illuminate and to enact a hidden unity in things, the ones we find in Sebald seem designed to confuse, entangling his characters in meanderings from which they cannot extricate themselves and which have no clear destination.” As an inveterate memoirist, Mendelsohn ’s ultimate quarry lies not in his literary subjects but in his own deepest convictions about these matters—convictions that have informed his own life and works. His book concludes, therefore, with a frank declaration of his own narrative optimism, centering on “a wandering [narrative ] technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique . . . with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things.” Of course, he knows that his optimism is not shared by all his authors—especially not by Sebald but also, in his darker moments, not by Auerbach either. Yet Mendelsohn holds firm to his narrative optimism as this artful book—full of its own digressions, peripheries , and doubts—wends its way to its own moving conclusion. Douglas Clayton Harvard University Kama La Mackerel ZOM-FAM Montreal. Metonymy Press. 2020. 104 pages. AS THE FIRST POETRY collection by a self-identifying queer/trans Mauritian artist , ZOM-FAM is a milestone in Mauritian literature. Titled “Man-Woman” in Kama La Mackerel’s native creole, the poetry collection explores what it means to craft life and love in the slippery spaces between diasporic, linguistic, and gender identities. La Mackerel’s poetry draws from an ancestral lineage imbued with both suffering and resilience. Originally from India, La Mackerel’s ancestors came to the island nation of Mauritius as indentured laborers, as part of the British Empire’s plan to continue supplying labor to colonial sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery. Working explicitly against “the silence / of history,” La Mackerel begins their collection by “invok[ing]” and “honour[ing]” their powerful female and femme ancestors . These powerful figures will deeply modulate the rest of the collection, be it as the determined child vendor of hot ounnde on the streets of Port-Louis or the bindi-wearing, kurta-clad trans ancestor whom the poet weaves out of their imagination when their mother’s remembrances fall short. The space of the island itself becomes one such femme story of “smothered flesh” and “dreamlike / landscapes,” haunted by brutal colonialism and assailed by contemporary nepotism. La Mackerel’s poetry deftly draws out the creolized heritage of the region, as the protection of the Hindu deity Durga Mā is invoked alongside that of Lavierz Nwar (the Black Virgin). While the collection’s poems are primarily in English, they have a strong multilingual undertow that hints at the island’s complex linguistic configuration, which includes colonial languages (English and French) and ancestral tongues (Tamil and Sanskrit) as well as native Mauritian creole. Paradoxically, these languages are vectors of incomprehension: laborer ancestors were doomed to a lifetime of exploitation by signing exploitative contracts they couldn’t understand, while La Mackerel’s father chanted prayers in unknown tongues to save his newborn from mofinn, a Mauritian flavor of “misfortune” (see Arnaud Carpooran, “Mofinn [1],” in Diksioner Morisien: Premie diksioner kreol monoleng, 3rd ed. [University of Mauritius, 2019], 844; for other literary representations of the mofinn in Mauritian literature, see, for example, Ananda Devi’s Pagli [2001]). La Mackerel suggests that real expressions of love and intimacy take other forms. The most powerful encapsulation of this “secret language” comes to us through the poet’s father: unable to express his love in words, he pours it into the twenty-year-long labor of erecting a family house on former servant quarters. The other side of love, however, is violence : La Mackerel recalls “the bitter burn of his [the father’s] right hand against my child face / whenever he caught me in a dress.” The poet deftly explores queer childhood survival strategies on the tropical island, as they eschew masculine gatherings around alcohol under the jackfruit tree for the wafting aroma of spices and feminine confidences in the kitchen. Ultimately, La Mackerel moves beyond these binaries and rejects the body and official documents that “dictate [their] gender,” instead refashioning the “torn skin & paper” into a “fierce femme...

The Decline of Indigenous Language in African Literature: A Model of the Yoruba Language

“African literature has presented a lot of problems especially what is to be considered African literature, in which language it should be written, what it should be about, and who should be considered an African writer“(Ndede, 2016:2). This article discusses the linguistic hegemony of the colonial languages with particular reference to Yoruba. “The Yoruba country lies roughly between latitudes 6° and 9°N and longitudes 2° 30’ and 6° 30’ East. The area spreads across the republics of Benin and Togo. The Yoruba are also found in such places as Sierra Leone, Gambia and across the Atlantic in the Caribbean and South America especially in Brazil” (Atanda, 1996; cited in Salawu, 2004).According to Arifalo and Ogen, Yoruba people are forty million worldwide and they further assert that the Yoruba ethnic group is one of the biggest in West Africa (Arifalo and Ogen, 2003; cited in Salawu, 2004).

TERMINOLOGY AS A SPECIAL LINGUISTIC LAYER IN THE MODERN ARABIC LANGUAGE

This article deals with the problems of the formation and functioning of modern terminology in the countries of the Arab East. It is important to trace the factors that influenced the process of forming its lexical composition. Following the national liberation movement of the Arab countries, starting from the second half of the 20th century has repeatedly raised the issue of the ofcial status of the Arabic language at the regional and global levels. The nationalization of education was a fundamental principle of the language of the Arab countries’ policies. It was about switching the entire national education system to Arabic, and the introduction of classical language as everyday communication.The transformation of the political situation in the Arab region was accompanied by the systematic repression of the colonial language, lexical enrichment of the composition of the modern literary language, the development of a national terminology. The rapid growth of science and technology has led to the emergence in the Arabic of many new concepts and intensive borrowing of foreign language terms. The task was to provide the new content in education that meets the needs of the world’s scientifc and technological progress. In the process of adaptation, foreign-language terms are adapted to the conditions of functioning of the Arabic language. The sociolinguistics approach to the study of Arabic terminology has allowed us to identify the main trends of its development.

Reseña: Macedo, Donaldo (Ed.) (2019). Decolonizing foreign language education: The misteaching of English and other colonial languages. Routledge.

El libro reseñado considera las diferentes maneras en las que se puede descolonizar la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en el salón de clase. El libro incluye 11 capítulos que examinan las diferentes ramas de la enseñanza y propone sugerencias para lograr esta descolonización.

Membaca Tubuh-Tubuh Patuh: Representasi Penciptaan Identitas Pribumi Melalui Tubuh-Tubuh Patuh di Hindia Belanda dalam Film Moeder Dao De Schildlapegelijkende

In the early twentith century, the Dutch colonial government launched a development program designated towards the modern Western world in the Dutch East Indies. This is due to the penetration of capital from Europe. In this process, they embraced the natives as part of the new world. The colonial authority used certain knowledge discourse systems that worked in various modern colonial institutions, such as offices, schools, religious institutions, mining, transportation, factories. In other words, the natives who originally had different knowledge from the colonists were subtly made to follow the logic of the colonial authorities. This paper will show various representations in the film Moeder Dao de Schildpadgelijkende, about how the practice of Western colonialism discourse in the Dutch East Indies during trying to internalization their knowledge system into the Indigenous knowledge system.Discourse is a disciplinary technology through the practice of certain knowledge to create docile bodies through a certain normalization process. In this process, a person acts treated in such a way is to enter into the system of knowledge pressed by the authorities. The indigenous body becomes the working locus of colonialism’s power and knowledge. A docile body exists a form of certain norms and rules in society. In this knowledge building, the logic of the colonial language as a tool for the formation of indigenous identities. The tangibility of inferiority created in the naratives arose from the perspective of the colonial rulers towards natives living in Western standards. Although the native people could meet Western standards, under the discourse of colonialism, it was still a subject that had to follow the colonial power itself.

Donaldo Macedo (Ed.): Decolonizing Foreign Language Education—The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages

Donaldo Macedo (Ed.): Decolonizing Foreign Language Education—The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages

O português brasileiro como uma língua colonial

Neste texto, resenhamos a conferência proferida pela professora Esmeralda Vailati Negrão no ciclo de conferências promovido pela Abralin Ao Vivo. Nessa conferência, Negrão discorre, entre outros tópicos, sobre aspectos sintáticos do português que podem ser resultado do contato linguístico entre diferentes povos que dividiam o espaço territorial do Brasil. A autora defende que, para que se possa compreender a estrutura da língua, é preciso que se pense o português brasileiro como uma língua colonial, resultante do multilinguismo existente durante sua consolidação. Com isso, a discussão levantada por Negrão ajuda-nos a expandir novos olhares em relação à constituição do português brasileiro, tanto voltados a sua estrutura, quanto voltados ao seu contexto sócio-histórico de surgimento.

Signs in the linguistic landscape as markers of an ethnic group’s identity and ownership

Whereas the geography of a certain area is certainly linked in many ways to the ethnic group occupying it (or who used to occupy it), the link between the land and the language/s spoken (or that used to be spoken) can only become visible through the linguistic landscape, which not only asserts identity and ownership but can also help to reinforce prestige and vitality of the languages employed. The problem is that if the local heritage language is a minority or regional one, only in few cases can it be used to affirm the identity and ownership of its speakers. There are two sine qua non conditions for the local language to appear in the linguistic landscape: 1) The language must have gone beyond the 'threshold of literacy', i.e. it must have developed as a written language, with its own orthography and literature; 2) The language must be allowed to be used in the linguistic landscape and/or enjoy a degree of official recognition. This article presents five case studies on the presence of local minority/regional languages in the linguistic landscape based on the author’s research: two in Italy (Udine and Milan) and two in Southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur and Bandar Seri Begawan, the capitals of Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam respectively). The very interesting situation in Macao will also be touched on, where the colonial language, Portuguese, has been given prominence in the linguistic landscape in spite of the fact that only a tiny percentage of the population can speak it. In this case, Portuguese is portrayed as a kind of heritage language (as well as an international language) that does not need to be mastered as its main function is symbolic, i.e. to help Macao retain its special status as a Special Administration Region of China.

Traducir las escrituras desterritorializadas: del elogio de la creolidad del autor al elogio de la marginalidad del traductor

This paper offers an analysis of heterolingualism and translation in La grande drive des esprits by Gisèle Pineau (1993) and its Spanish translation, Una antigua maldición (1999). Based on the literary theories around Creoleness and on the theories of translation centered on a "new translation ethics", it analyzes heteroligualism and "writing-translation" in Pineau's work looking at the various mechanisms deployed in its Spanish translation, which privileges linguistic creativity. The paper has a dual goal: (1) to characterize the language of Pineau's work as deterritorialized in order to identify the ways in which the creole language is inserted in it and allows the author, along the lines of the creolists' ethical and aesthetic proposals, to offer a language of resistance against hegemonic colonial language uses; and (2) to examine the translation techniques employed and bring forth theoretical adaptations fitting to analyze this type of translation. The paper concludes with a reflection of the translator's possibilities to retain or "recreate" (marginalize?) the heterolingualism of the original work.  Key words: heterolingualism; writing-translation; creole; linguistic recreation; marginalization

Language as a Liberation Aesthetic: Ngũgĩ’s Use of Gĩkũyũ in Mũrogi wa Kagogo [Wizard of the Crow] and Other Works

This paper examined the aesthetics and politics of writing African literature in local vernaculars as opposed to writing in what proponents of this discourse have termed as colonial languages, like English and French, amongst others. The focus of this article is on the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the most vocal critic of ‘imperial languages’, and also an ardent advocate for African languages as well as a practitioner of his vernacular language, where most of his published fictional works are in his native Gĩkũyũ language of Kenya. This paper then critically examines Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s application of the Gĩkũyũ language in his novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo (2006), translated as Wizard of the Crow, and his other works in the language. This paper inevitably engages with the writer’s stance on the use of vernaculars in increasingly globalizing cultures. Article received: December 18, 2019; Article accepted: January 31, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2020; Original scholarly article

Indigenizing radio in Ghana

Radio is hailed as Africa’s medium of choice in the global communication age. Introduced as a colonial tool of information, education and entertainment in the early 1930s, radio broadcasting was mainly in colonial languages as colonial administrators perceived local language broadcasting a threat to their empire building and ‘civilization’ agendas. The fortunes of local language broadcasting did not dramatically change in the independence era when broadcast media were in the firm control of the state. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, mostly resulting from a more liberalized media environment, local language broadcasting has undergone unprecedented growth. Drawing on written archival material, including internal communication among policy-makers, audience letters, key informant interviews and findings from a recent audience study, this article charts the progressive development of local language radio broadcasting in Ghana, and engages with the role played by early audiences and broadcasters in indigenizing broadcast content.

Old languages in new academic spaces: emergent pedagogy for tertiary programmes in Pacific languages

ABSTRACTThis paper considers an appropriate pedagogy for indigenous language programmes at tertiary level in a context in which a former colonial language has become the default as both medium of instruction and subject of academic study. This pedagogy is guided by an overarching commitment to decolonisation of the academic space, is grounded in the sociolinguistic realities of each specific context, and remains flexible enough to accommodate the complexities that are inevitable when a language is made welcome for the first time in a new domain. A recent expansion in the number of languages offered for study at the University of the South Pacific serves as the backdrop to this discussion.