Contested Communities : Communication, Narration, Imagination [1 ed.] 9789004335288, 9789004335264

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Contested Communities

Cross/Cultures readings in post/colonial literatures and cultures in english Edited by Gordon Collier Geoffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 190

asnel Papers asnel Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (gaps) Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies Katja Sarkowsky (President Englisches Seminar, wwu Münster) Formatting, layout, and final editing: Gordon Collier

VOLUME 21

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/asne

Contested Communities Communication, Narration, Imagination Edited by

Susanne Mühleisen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Francis Bott (1904–1998), “Struktur in Rot” (1955; oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm). © Susanne Mühleisen. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957435

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-33526-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33528-8 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures

vii I. ON CO M MUNITY

Introduction: On Community Formation, Manifestation, and Contestation: Acts of Membership and Exclusion xi

SUSANNE MÜH LE ISEN

Community and the Common xxv

ROBERT JC YOUNG

II. CO M M U NIC ATI ON

AN D TH E

S PEECH COM M UN IT Y

The Native Speaker in World Englishes: A Historical Perspective STEP HAN I E HACKER T

3

Orality and Literacy in Verbal Duelling: Playing the Dozens in the Twenty-First Century DARIA DAY TER

23

Prestige Change in Contact Varieties of English in Urban Diaspora Communities SUSANNE MÜH LE ISEN & ANNE SCHR ÖDER

51

Diasporic Cyber-Jamaican: Stylized Dialect of an Imagined Community ANDREA MOL L

69

’Africa is not a Game’: Constructions of Ex-Colonized and Ex-Colonizer Entities Online E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

95

The Indian Tabloid in English: What Type of Community Does It Speak To, and How? DAGMAR DEUB ER

113

III. NARR AT ING AC ROSS

THE

NATION

Thuggee: Thornton, Taylor and the Literature of Banditry in Colonial India 131

T OBIAS D ÖRIN G

Haunting Conflicts: Memory, Forgetting, and the Struggle for Community in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant 149

KATJA SARK OWS KY

Whose Hillbrow? Xenophobia and the Urban Space in the ‘New’ South Africa 171

JOCHEN PETZOLD

Orientation and Narration: Aboriginal Identity in Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 187

STEP HAN LAQUÉ

A ‘furry subjunctive case’ of Empathy: Human–Animal Communities in Life of Pi and the Question of Literary Anthropomorphism 203

ROMAN BARTOS CH

Migration, Rhizomic Identities, and the Black Atlantic in Postcolonial Literary Studies: The Trans-Space as Home in Pauline Melville’s Short Story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” 219

SUSAN ARNDT

IV. L A N G U A G E , S T Y L E ,

A ND

BELONGING

IN

MUS IC CULT URE S

Community and Language in Transnational Music Styles: Symbolic Meanings of Spanish in Salsa and Reggaetón 239

BRITTA SCHNE IDER

Language Crossings in Transnational Music Cultures: Bottom-Up Promotion of Kiswahili Through the Music Industry in Uganda 261

JUDE SSEMPUUMA

V. C O U N T E R -A R G U M E N T

Cross Talk: Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation CAROLYN COOPER

279

At Whose Cost? A Critical Reading of Carolyn Cooper’s Keynote Lecture “Cross Talk: Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation” CAROLINE KOEGLER

291

Notes on Contributors

303

Index

309

List of Tables and Figures

D A Y T ER Figure 1:

Demographic factors in modern dozens.

Figure 1: Figure 1:

Generational differences in diasporic Caribbean Creole. Two-level approach to Cameroonian identity.

Figure 1: Figure 2:

The Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican (C CJ ). Annual frequencies of future forms.

Figure 1: Figure 2: Table 1:

Occurrences of GWW mentioned in The Post 2004–2009. Layers of communities of identification in the forum. Editions of The Post online containing the token ‘GWW ’.

Table 1:

Approximate number of words (in 1,000) in the corpus per newspaper per category. Illustrative headlines on the Haiti earthquake from three newspapers (search on websites, 22 April 2010). Average sentence length (in words) in the corpus per newspaper per category. Direct-speech quotations (in percent of text) in the corpus per newspaper per category. Illustrative headlines from the Mumbai Mirror and the Times of India (corpus, national celebrities/entertainment, corresponding articles). Colloquial lexical items (in percent of total number of occurrences of colloquial and neutral variants, see appendix for absolute figures) per newspaper (Google Advanced Search, 22 April 2010). Number of articles related to the Haiti earthquake (12 January 2010) published between 13 January and 19 January 2010 per newspaper (search on websites, 22 April 2010).

34

M ÜH L E I SEN AN D S CH R ÖDE R 59 63

MOLL 70 84

A N C HI MB E 100 102 99

D E UB E R

Table 2: Table 3: Table 4: Table 5: Table 6:

Figure 1:

119 120 122 122 125

125

119

viii

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES

Number of visual elements (per 1,000 words) per newspaper in the corpus. Figure 3: Contracted forms in direct-speech quotations (per 1,000 words) in the corpus per newspaper. Appendix: Absolute figures for lexical items in Table 6 (Google Advanced Search, 22 April 2010).

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Figure 2:

121 123 128

I O N C OMMUNI TY

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Introduction: On Community Formation, Manifestation, and Contestation Acts of Membership and Exclusion

S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. John Donne, “Meditation XVII ” (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.)

I

and most often quoted statements in English literature, John Donne’s “no man is an island,” the idea of ‘man’ as a social being and the individual as part of a larger group, a community, is seen as essential to humanity. We are all members of a community or, rather, many communities, from the smallest, most concrete membership in a biological family to more abstract memberships in larger entities like a nation which, ever since Benedict Anderson’s timeless treatise on the concept of the nation, has been referred to as an “imagined community” 1 – a notion to which the title of the present volume also alludes. The conceptualization of nations in an organic family-tree model has been critically deconstructed in both feminist and postcolonial theory. 2 But what both the biological family and the nation we are born into might have in com1

N O NE OF THE MO ST FA MO US

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 2 Anne McClintock, “‘ No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997): 89–112.

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mon is that membership in these groups is first of all non-volitional, and opting out of them requires some active revocation on the part of a member. For other communities, membership and the boundaries of in- and outgroup are less clear and, more often than not, also less pre-defined: typically, it is constructed on an assumption of shared features which may range from common values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, professional group to joint interests and practices. But how is membership in such communities achieved, manifested, tested or contested? How voluntary or involuntary is the identification with a particular group? And how are acts of belonging – or exclusion – performed in communication, in narration, and in the creation of cognitive categories, in imagination? The idea of community and what it might refer to is itself one of the most elusive of concepts, one that has taken on new meanings over time and is in a perpetual process of redefinition, first of all in a general sense but also with regard to the narrower context of anglophone postcolonial studies in which this volume is positioned. As Brydon and Coleman remind us, “community is less a given than “a relation constantly under negotiation.”3 At the same time, they contend, communities “remain important forms of collectivity for generating trust and feelings of belonging and for enabling humans to engage in collective action towards chosen goals.”4 How is this collectivity achieved in communication, narration, and imagination? And how has the concept of community been transformed in both scholarly discourse and real-life spaces – for example, through migration and translocation? The complexities of shifts of a sense of belonging have been explored in ethnographic studies such as Baumann’s investigation of interactions of a multi-ethnic space in London, Contesting Culture. Here, Baumann shows how community might mean very different things not only across “self-evident communities of culture,”5 ethnic or religious groups but also across age groups and different generations. As he argues, discourses of identity are continuously challenged in a larger context of culture (often equated with ethnicity) and community. Given the intricacy and elusiveness of the concept of community, I will try to approach the potential meanings and changes of the meaning of community from a very basic linguistic angle, before

3

Diana Brydon & William D. Coleman, “Globalization, Autonomy, and Community,” in Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts, ed. Diana Brydon & William D. Coleman (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2008): 2. 4 Brydon & Coleman, “Globalization, Autonomy, and Community,” 5. 5 Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourse of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 72–73.

Introduction

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widening the scope to include sociological, sociolinguistic, and narrative perspectives.

Coming to Terms with ‘Community’ The term ‘community’ is first attested in the English language in 1395 in the sense of “the generality of people; the people as a group” (O E D ). By the time of John Donne’s writing, in the early-seventeenth century, it had already taken on a number of diverse meanings, from a simple reference to a group of people to ascriptions of shared rights and status (“The body of people having common or equal rights or rank, as distinguished from the privileged classes; the commons; the commonalty,” OED ) and, finally, also to the abstract construct of “a commonwealth; a nation or state” ( OED ). Thus, ‘community’ came to stand for a larger political entity before the European idea of the nation-state – held together, in Anderson’s terms, through an act of imagination “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”6 From the early-eighteenth century onwards, the term was used to denote specific groups within a larger society, especially religious communities but later also, more generally, “a group of people distinguished by shared circumstances of nationality, race, religion, sexuality, etc.” ( O ED ). It is perhaps no coincidence that this more specific sense of community emerged first in a diasporic context – the Jewish (religious) community in London – but also after larger movements of voluntary and forced migration between continents had taken place, forming different ethnic, linguistic and religious diasporic groups in the New World. Especially for dislocated Africans in the Americas, new social bonds and interdependences emerged as the result of a shared destiny rather than common heritage. These New World communities indicate a change of focus from a social organization based on ethnic, linguistic, and, generally, genealogical ties to a restructuring of group membership based on other factors such as the common fate of the Middle Passage: In Mintz and Price’s classic work The Birth of African American Culture this is described as the “shipmate principle,” wherein those who shared passage on the same slave ship entered a special “shipmate relationship,” almost equal to kinship, which “became a major principle of social organization and continued for decades or even centuries to

6

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities, 15.

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shape ongoing social relations.”7 Maroon populations, spread out across many parts of the Americas, are primary examples of such communities based on a shared fate.8 Their creative restructuring of both social organization and language (e.g., in the formation of creole languages such as Surinamese Ndjuka) have been great sources of inspiration for anthropological and linguistic studies.

Tradition and Modernity in Community Concepts Not only have scholarly engagements with the concepts of community developed over time but they differ in their disciplinary focus. In sociology, the distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association) first gained attention in Ferdinand Tönnies’ work of the same name and has been debated, added to, and contested ever since. Tönnies contrasts Gemeinschaft as concerning real and organic connections with Gesellschaft as relating to ideal and mechanical formations in human relationships.9 Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the difference between community and association is, then, also one between inner and outer relations as well as private and public life – “Gesellschaft is the public, the world,” away from home, whereas “all familiar, trusted and exclusive life happens in the Gemeinschaft.”10 There are strong and unconcealed evaluative and emotive undertones as well as temporal aspects in Tönnies’ delineation of the concepts, often supported by linguistic collocations – schlechte Gesellschaft (‘bad association: i.e. company’) but never schlechte Gemeinschaft (‘bad community’). Gemeinschaft as the older term and concept also stands for a traditional way of life where there is an implicit understanding

7

Sidney Mintz & Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston M A : Beacon, 1992): 43. 8 Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (1973; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1996). 9 “Die durch dieses positive Verhältniss gebildete Gruppe heisst, als einheitlich nach innen und nach aussen wirkendes Wesen oder Ding aufgefasst, eine Verbindung. Das Verhältniss selber, und also die Verbindung wird entweder als reales und organisches Leben begriffen – dies ist das Wesen der Gemeinschaft, oder als ideelle und mechanische Bildung – dies ist der Begriff der Gesellschaft”; Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag, 1887): 3. 10 “Alles vertraute, heimliche, ausschliessliche Zusammenleben (so finden wir) wird als Leben in Gemeinschaft verstanden. Gesellschaft ist die Oeffentlichkeit, ist die Welt. In Gemeinschaft mit den Seinen befindet man sich, von der Geburt an, mit allem Wohl und Wehe daran gebunden. Man geht in die Gesellschaft wie in die Fremde. Der Jüngling wird gewarnt vor schlechter Gesellschaft; aber schlechte Gemeinschaft ist dem Sprachsinne zuwider”; Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 4.

Introduction

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shared by all its members, Gesellschaft as the newer term for modernity with all its alienations and fragmentations, where an explicit consensus of people with different backgrounds and views has to be reached through negotiation and compromise. Loss of Gemeinschaft and a sense of bereavement is also often at issue in migrant and diasporic communities whose members seek to re-establish and maintain organic ties of kinship and ethnicity as well as associations of religion and language in a larger host Gesellschaft which is perceived as disaffecting. As Gerd Baumann has shown in his study of various immigrant groups in London’s Southall,11 however, the concept of community will also inevitably undergo redefinition in second-generation immigrants. Commenting on the controversy over Tönnies’ dichotomy, Norbert Elias notes that “the fusion of statements about structures and statements about ideals in sociological theories” puts us a notorious predicament.12 In Zygmunt Bauman’s foreword to his work Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, the emotive and often romanticized idea of community in times of globalization and postmodern society is highlighted and the Tönniesian dichotomy of warm community and cold society evoked: in ruthless times, times of competition and one-upmanship, when people around seem to keep their cards close to their chest and few people seem to be in any hurry to help us, when in reply to our cries for help we hear admonitions to help ourselves, when only the banks eager to mortgage our possessions are smiling and wishing to say ‘yes’, and even they only in their commercials, not in their branch offices – the word ‘community’ sounds sweet. What that word evokes is everything we miss and what we lack to be secure, confident and trusting. In short, ‘community’ stands for the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us – but which we would dearly wish to inhabit and which we hope to repossess.13

The search for Paradise Lost in an increasingly globalized and fragmented world has apparently led to a retraction into “warm circles,” a term coined by Göran Rosenberg to grasp the naive immersion in human togetherness in fragmented local communities.14 Ghettoization, as Bauman calls this movement, is an 11

Baumann, Contesting Culture. Norbert Elias, “Foreword: towards a theory of communities,” in The Sociology of a Community: A Selection of Readings, ed. Colin Bell & Howard Newby (London: Frank Cass, 1974): xii. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 3. 14 Göran Rosenberg, “The Warm Circles of Politics: Patterns of Belief and Belonging in the Wake of the Nation-State,” in Politik, Religion und Gemeinschaft: Die kulturelle Konstruktion von Sinn, ed. Bernd Henningsen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005): 285–302. 12

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES

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expression of the failure of the modernity enterprise to resolve the dilemma of its two opposing desires for security and freedom. Such ghettoization might also be found in what is commonly called “communities of practice”15 in sociolinguistics – communities which are defined by their engagement on an ongoing basis in some common endeavour: a bowling team, a book club, trainspotter groups, a church congregation. In the twenty years that have elapsed since Eckert’s and McConnell–Ginet’s definition, this community will, more often than not, be a virtual and online community, Facebook communities, fandom communities or twitter users who regularly engage in news and discussions about ballet or other practices – many of them imagined in the original sense proposed by Anderson: in fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.16

Shared codes – be they language, regional or social varieties of a language or style of speaking and shared vocabulary – are part of what is required to gain access to a group. For some, the acquisition of a special in-group code or, in the case of religious communities, sacred languages is a mandatory requirement for membership.

Communication and Community The notion of a speech community, one of the most central and also most debated concepts in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, has developed, in the identification of social groupings, from large abstract entities (‘shared language’) via common abstract characteristics (e.g., class, gender) or co-presence (e.g., neighbourhood, workplace) to regular joint activity (e.g. book club). In recent years, the focus of community in sociolinguistics has been on diasporic communities17 and the effect of globalization on the sociolinguistic makeup of postcolonial and multilingual situations.18 The global spread of English clearly 15

Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell–Ginet, “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461-88. 16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15. 17 See Rosina Reiter Márquez & Luisa Martín Rojo, The Sociolinguistics of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2014). 18 See Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010), and Monica Heller, “Language and the Nation-State: Challenges to Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.4 (August 2008): 504–24.

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plays the outstanding role here. If, as Anderson states, religious communities like Christendom or Islam “were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script,”19 the language of the imagined global community is clearly English and the written script is digital. Admission to membership is no longer tied to the inner circle of the creed but has been extended to speakers of varieties and contact varieties of English as well as second-, third-, etc. language speakers of English – as long as the profession of faith has been stated. The appropriation of English by speakers beyond national and cultural boundaries and the consequent adaptation of the language to new social and cultural contexts in the so-called New Varieties of English may be indicative of the dynamics of the concept of (speech) community, including conflicts which may arise from self-identification and membership without long traditions of social and cultural relationship. Yet, as Marcyliena Morgan points out, such conflicts, rather, highlight the importance of exploring the notion of speech community in its capacity to relate linguistics and identity, politics and society: The concept of speech community binds the importance of local knowledge and communicative competence in discursive activities so that members can identify insiders from outsiders, those passing as members and those living in contact zones and borderlands.20

Narration and Community In modernity, identity is seen as not something that is simply given; rather, identification with a community is perceived as a volitional act – the sole limitation being that the group with which one wants to identify may not accept the newcomer. As Jock Young put it in a nutshell, “Just as community collapses, identity is invented.”21 Yet identity cannot be seen as merely a successor to community; rather, group membership is very much part of one’s social identity, part of the negotiation of belonging and unbelonging. Nowhere is the social construction of identity and belonging more visible than in stories. Life experiences which are tied together to construct a coherent biography are told in the form of narratives, stories about the self; in Dan McAdams’s words:

19

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 13. Marcyliena M. Morgan, “Community,” in Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 33. 21 Jock Young, The Exclusive Society (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999): 164. 20

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Identity is a life story. A life story is a personal myth that an individual begins working on in late adolescence and young adulthood in order to provide his or her life with a purpose.22

Narratives about the self are interactional processes23 and require positioning of the self in relation to co-actors in the story, a fact which is also observable in fictional narrative, as Davies and Harré write in their seminal discussion of positioning: In telling a fragment of his or her autobiography a speaker assigns parts and characters in the episodes described, both to themselves and to other people, including those taking part in the conversation. [... ] In this respect the structure of an anecdote serving as a fragment of an autobiography is no different from a fairy tale or other work of narrative fiction. 24

This should by no means imply that works of fiction are all autobiographical; rather, positioning, the act of giving certain protagonists agency over others, may also be used in narrative fiction as a means to create identity and to negotiate belonging or unbelonging in the web of the story. For literary scholars, narrative and the idea of community as created by the existence of a common archive of stories is as important as the processes of remembering and forgetting past experience. Narratives of dislocated and transformed identities, of memory and trauma, stories which are often told in postcolonial literature, are vital for the creation of reading communities where shared experiences, perspectives, and values, real or imagined, then form an invisible bond between writers and their readership and also between readers with similar experiences in the subsequent appraisal of literary works. Both literary and linguistic perspectives form the core of the interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of community in postcolonial contexts.

Contested Communities The present volume presents a selection of contributions based on papers delivered and discussed at the 21st annual conference of the Association for the New English Literatures/Gesellschaft für Neue Englischsprachige Literaturen 22

Dan P. MacAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: William Morrow, 1993): 5. 23 Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou, “Narrative as interaction,” in De Fina & Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2012): 86–124. 24 Bronwyn Davies & Rom Harré, “Positioning: The Discursive Construction of Selves,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1990): 49.

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(GNEL ; now called G APS ), ‘Contested Communities: Communication, Narration, Imagination’, held at the University of Bayreuth in 2010. The conference sought to provide a platform for discussion and exploration of the idea of community, real and imagined, in all facets that respond to postcolonial conditions: in discourse communities in postcolonial multilingual situations as well as in identity constructions in literature, stories, and music in postcolonial locations. A focus on African studies, for which the University of Bayreuth is well known, was kept in close consideration in the organizing of panels, roundtables, and papers – albeit not exclusively with attention to the African continent but also on the diaspora, which would thereby take into account multidirectional perspectives of the transfer of culture, knowledge, and media beyond established routes from North to South. Besides the theoretical and content-related debates, the conference was also meant to provide a forum for the Association to reflect on its own interdisciplinary academic community, in that scholars in linguistics, literature, and cultural studies were invited to explore their shared investment in postcolonial studies. In the regrettably long time between the actual conference and the publishing of this volume, discussion of precisely the question of a shared interdisciplinary perspective led to a re-launching and renaming of the association as the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies/Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (G APS ). The renaming of the Society reflects a broader inclusion of and intensified communication between scholarly fields where postcolonial themes are investigated – the core subjects literary studies, cultural studies, and linguistics but also related disciplines like history, media studies, and the social sciences. The outcome of this conference, the present volume, clearly reflects this increased emphasis on interdisciplinarity.

Structure and Scope of This Volume In the first part, “On Community,” R O B E R T JC Y O U N G leads off by introducing the concept in his keynote chapter, “Community and the Common.” Young explores and questions the making of imagined communities – be these national, religious, linguistic or ethnic – from a broad historical, sociological, cultural, and linguistic perspective. In line with such philosophers as Jean–Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben, he debates whether the model of the postmodern community is constructed on singularities rather than on shared features. The idea of the “post-identitarian” community, Young argues, might be better captured metonymically than metaphorically, temporally rather than spatially. Such a “community without community” can exist only in its activity and, ultimately, in participation. As he exemplifies in an analysis of the artistic

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expression of the Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue, the “neither here nor there” aspect of the community is also made manifest in literary works. The second section of the volume, “Communication and the Speech Community,” contains a number of contributions on the challenges of using language as a common ground for speaker groupings in World Englishes and discourse communities. But who is the native speaker of English in this global setting? The first chapter, by S T E P H A N I E H A C K E R T , “The Native Speaker in World Englishes: A Historical Perspective,” tackles the problem by providing a comprehensive historical discourse-analytical approach, thereby questioning the central role that the concept of the native speaker has played in Western linguistics. Communities of practice which engage in particular ritualized forms of insults are in focus in D A R I A D A Y T E R ’s chapter, “Orality and Literacy in Verbal Duelling: Playing the Dozens in the Twenty-First Century.” By linking early studies of the linguistic practices of verbal duelling by urban African-American and Caribbean adolescent males to today’s continuations of the speech event by more fragmented demographic groups, she shows how language practices can be constitutive for group membership and, at the same time, can be reshaped by its members within the limits of the established frame. Linguistic practices as well as linguistic codes travel across time and space, taking on new functions and communities. In their theoretical and empirical discussion in “Prestige Change in Contact Varieties of English in Urban Diaspora Communities,” S U S A N N E M Ü H L E I S E N and A N N E S C H R Ö D E R reflect on the social, cultural, and linguistic factors that contribute to a shift in role and prestige of often stigmatized varieties such as Caribbean Creoles and Cameroonian Pidgin English in new diasporic metropolitan environments. Diasporic communities take on various forms and, increasingly, will be found in the virtual space of computer-mediated communication. In her contribution, “Diasporic Cyber-Jamaican: Stylized Dialect of an Imagined Community,” A N D R E A M O L L uses data from web-forum interactions between Jamaicans and expatriates to investigate the validity of traditional sociolinguistic concepts such as stability in linguistic varieties and dialects. As her data analysis demonstrates, self-conscious sociolinguistic styling and selective dialect performance are important tools for a discursive creation of diasporic membership in cyberspace. The question of membership and discourse community in a Cameroonian online web-forum is explored in E R I C A N C H I MB E ’s article “‘Africa is not a Game’: Constructions of Ex-Colonized and Ex-Colonizer Entities Online.” Taking a notorious scam case in a Australian–Cameroonian personal relationship as a starting point, he explores how group membership (anglophones vs.

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francophones, ethnic or religious groups) is negotiated by mapping ideological positionings along demarcation lines of ex-colonial subject and ex-colonizer. In Anderson’s Imagined Communities, newspapers play a particular role in the construction of the nation through shared readings. In her contribution, “The Indian Tabloid in English: What Type of Community Does it Speak to, and How?” D A G M A R D E U B E R uses this as a starting point to explore the print-media landscape of contemporary India. Her analysis of linguistic and text-typological features in a corpus of Indian newspaper articles shows the ways in which they construct their readership communities. “Narrating Across the Nation” is the third heading under which literary scholars explore postcolonial identity-formation and belonging in a wide range of Anglo-Indian, African, Caribbean, Aboriginal Australian, and Canadian literary texts. In Robert JC Young’s introductory chapter, we read that “community is consensual, about tolerance. We don’t talk about communities of criminals, for example, we speak of gangs” (6). T O B I A S D Ö R I N G , however, does use organized communities of bandits in nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian fictionalized accounts as a starting point for his exploration of the idea of community. His chapter, “Thuggee: Thornton, Taylor and the Literature of Banditry in Colonial India,” provides a careful and contextualized reading of historical narratives, demonstrating that communities – past and present – may be imagined “from within just as from without” (153): i.e. in the minds of non-members of those whose images are constructed in the form of a coherent Other. K A T J A S A R K O W S K Y follows with her contribution “Haunting Conflicts: Memory, Forgetting, and the Struggle for Community in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant.” In her close reading of this Trinidadian-Canadian novel, she explores how memory and forgetting – both in the fictional world, in the form of dementia, and in the postcolonial real world, in the form of collective history – work in the construction of selfhood and community in lives fragmented by personal and diasporic experience. Space and locality are important elements in J O C H E N P E T Z O L D ’s contribution “Whose Hillbrow? Xenophobia and the Urban Space in the ‘New’ South Africa.” His analysis of two contemporary South African novels (Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow), which are set in the same location of Johannesburg, includes the notion of race and ownership in the contestation of an urban community. In the next chapter, “Orientation and Narration: Aboriginal Identity in Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence” by S T E P H A N L A Q U É , the public and fictional memorialization of the ‘Stolen Generations’ of Aboriginal Australian children between the 1880s and 1970 is the focus of a close analysis of Nugi

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Garimara’s 2001 novel. Different types of knowledge which are constitutive prerequisites of membership in Aboriginal and white-Australian culture have to be negotiated not only in the fictional account but also in the transfer from the writer’s community to the (non-Aboriginal) readership. The positioning of characters is an ordinary technique in narrative. In his “A ‘furry subjunctive case’ of Empathy: Human–Animal Communities in Life of Pi and the Question of Literary Anthropomorphism,” R O M A N B A R T O S C H investigates the positioning of animals in the fictional world and in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi in particular. Human–animal communities, he argues, can be tested and imagined in works of fiction “as a form of resistance to the essentialist discourses of colonialism (and specieism)” (234). S U S A N A R N D T offers a broad perspective on postcolonial theory and modernity in “Migration, Rhizomic Identities and the Black Atlantic in Postcolonial Literary Studies: The Trans-Space as Home in Pauline Melville’s Short Story ‘Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water’.” Using Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome rather than the root to describe the dynamics of identity in complex and polyphonic cultures, she provides a reading of the British-Guyanese author’s writing which transgresses either/or dichotomies of belonging in transatlantic space. The next main section of this volume is dedicated to an exploration of “Language, Style, and Belonging in Music Cultures.” B R I T T A S C H N E I D E R ’s contribution, “Community and Language in Transnational Music Styles: Symbolic Meanings of Spanish in Salsa and Reggaetón,” explores the question of language use as negotiations of belonging in music styles which themselves have transnational origins. In her analysis of language choice and code-switching, she demonstrates how questions of authenticity, class membership, and ethnicity are playfully undermined in the changes of the symbolic meaning of language choice. In the next chapter, J U D E S S E M P U U M A looks at linguistic choices and community building in an East African context. His “Language Crossings in Transnational Music Cultures: Bottom-Up Promotion of Kiswahili Through the Music Industry in Uganda” offers a wide perspective on language policies in multilingual Uganda, on the traditional association of languages with particular ethnic and religious communities, and on recent developments in crossing and mixing involved in the use of Luganda, English, and Kiswahili. The volume ends with a debate which takes issue with language and stylization in Jamaican music culture. C A R O L Y N C O O P E R ’s provocative chapter returns to a discussion about whether or not certain Jamaican music lyrics can be interpreted as homophobic threats. Cooper’s firm stance against accusations of homophobia sparked a heated but quite fruitful debate at the conference.

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C A R O L I N E K O E G L E R ’s “At Whose Cost,” a response to Cooper’s, sums up some

of the discussion points and perspectives raised at the conference. Her critical reading of “Cross Talk” as an academic provides a personal perspective on the issues raised and discussed at the conference.

W OR K S C I T E D Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Baumann, Gerd. Contesting Culture: Discourse of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996) Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Bell, Colin, & Howard Newby. The Sociology of Community: A Selection of Readings (London: Frank Cass, 1974). Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010) Brydon, Diana, & William D. Coleman. “Globalization, Autonomy, and Community,” in Renegotiating Community. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts, ed. Diana Brydon & William D. Coleman (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 2008): 1–30. Brydon, Diana, & William D. Coleman, ed. Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 2008). Davies, Bronwyn, & Rom Harré. “Positioning: The Discursive Construction of Selves,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1990): 43–63. De Fina, Anna, & Alexandra Georgakopoulou. “Narrative as interaction,” in De Fina & Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2012): 86–124. Eckert, Penelope, & Sally McConnell–Ginet. “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461–88. Elias, Norbert. “Foreword: Towards a Theory of Communities,” in The Sociology of a Community: A Selection of Readings, ed. Colin Bell & Howard Newby (London: Frank Cass, 1974): i–xxxix. Heller, Monica. “Language and the Nation-State: Challenges to Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12.4 (August 2008): 504–24. MacAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: William Morrow, 1993). McClintock, Anne. “ ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 89–112. Márquez Reiter, Rosina, & Luisa Martín Rojo. The Sociolinguistics of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2014).

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Mintz, Sidney, & Richard Price. The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston MA : Beacon, 1992). Morgan, Marcyliena M. “Community,” in Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 31–33. Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford U P , accessed May 2015) Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973; Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1996). Rosenberg, Göran. “The Warm Circles of Politics: Patterns of Belief and Belonging in the Wake of the Nation-State,” in Politik, Religion und Gemeinschaft: Die kulturelle Konstruktion von Sinn, ed. Bernd Henningsen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005): 285–302. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag, 1887). Young, Jock. The Exclusive Society (Thousand Oaks CA & London: Sage, 1999).

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by reflecting on some of the questions raised by the call for papers for the conference, entitled ‘Contested Communities: Communication, Narration, Imagination’, on which this volume is based. What exactly is being contested here? Is it the communities that are being contested or the question of whether they are communities at all? At first, it seems to be the communities themselves: WANT TO BEG IN

Both in actual communities – based on everyday interaction between its members – and in imagined communities, membership is constructed on an assumption of shared features – be it common values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, professional group or joint interests and practices. But how is membership in such communities achieved, manifested, tested or contested? How voluntary or involuntary is the identification with a particular group? What conflicts of interest may arise in cases of membership in several, possibly conflicting groups? What determines the stability or transience of a community? What new forms of community have developed in the wake of globalisation, translocation and digital media communication? What role do narratives, memory and trauma play in the creation of imagined communities?

But having raised these questions about how communities are formed, the call for papers goes on to raise the larger question about the very concept of community: This interdisciplinary conference tries to critically investigate the usefulness of the concept of community in postcolonial language situations as well as in postcolonial texts and media.1

1

See A S N E L , “Call for Papers: Contested Communities: Communication, Narration, Imagination,” 21st Annual G N E L / A S N E L Conference, University of Bayreuth, Germany, 13–16 May 2010.

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The issue moves, therefore, to the question of how useful the concept of community can really be in postcolonial language situations, texts, and media – in other words, how useful or how appropriate is the concept of community at all? Which leads to the question, what is or could be a ‘concept’ of community? Which leads to the question, what is a community? In invoking the phrase “imagined communities,” the Call for Papers alludes to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies.2 But the interest in that book is much more on nationalism than on community: it was Anderson’s revolutionary way of defining the nation in particular as an imagined community that has proved so useful. While interrogating the nation, he more or less takes community for granted. Before Anderson, nations were generally defined in terms of material, external entities. This traditional approach is best represented by Joseph Stalin in his great 1913 essay, Marxism and the National Question – an essay that is so good some have argued that it must have been written by Lenin. Whoever the author was, he argues that there are five essential components that make up a nation: a stable, continuing community, with its history and traditions a common language a distinct territory economic cohesion a collective character – a distinct culture3

Later writers on nationalism such as Anthony Smith essentially follow the same enumerative approach.4 The problem is that none of the individual components in Stalin’s list of what makes a nation appears to be essential. You can take any or several of them away without its disabling the structure of a nation. The question that follows is: how do these ingredients in random combinations add up into something more than themselves, to the totality of a ‘nation’? Attempts to solve this problem shifted the focus towards the internal, ideological processes by which a nation generates, or even actually invents, the perceived and felt identity of what Frantz Fanon calls a “national consciousness.” It was Anderson who offered an alternative account of the nation which historicized it in terms of the technology of the years when nations were first invented at the end

2

See Benedict Anderson, Imaginary Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 3 Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London: Martin Lawrence, 1936). 4 See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

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of the eighteenth century, stressing the significance of the development of capitalism and print culture in general for the generation of the nationalist sentiment of what he famously called an “imagined community.” In Anderson’s account, it was print culture that allowed millions of people, who do not know each other or even know of each other and may live far away from each other, to come to share a sense of corporate identity as citizens who exist within the geographical unity of a common border and the ideological unity of a common culture and language: “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”5 Anderson points to newspapers and novels in particular as being instrumental in the production of the simultaneity of this communal “homogeneous, empty time” that allows the formation of a national culture (and thus, it might be remarked in passing, unexpectedly seems to assume that all countries have national rather than regional newspapers, and that they are monolingual). In this account, the novel in particular emerges as a privileged cultural form demanding analysis of its cultural and political project, and Anderson's analysis has underpinned much of the postcolonial work on nationalism and the novel, such as that initiated by Homi Bhabha’s collection Nation and Narration.6 No nation, it would seem, without print culture. What is interesting in the present context is that Anderson produced his new account of the nation by defining it as a ‘community’, which is identified in turn with the act of ‘communion’. In doing so, he showed that his idea of a community was an explicitly Christian one, particularly a group of people, such a monastic community or a church community, who take communion together, participating in the religious ritual of eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood by taking the bread and the wine that affirms their common faith. Anderson’s analysis thus somewhat problematically perpetuates the long tradition by which the nation is defined in terms of a shared religion, and often identified with it: what makes the nation a community is that it engages in acts of ‘communion’. Although the word ‘community’ in English can be used to mean ‘state’ or ‘nation’, particularly in earlier centuries, Anderson’s account of the basis of the nation as ‘imagined’ also implies that the nation is what we might call today a virtual community, a small group imaginatively expanded through technology, in this case the mechanism of print culture, into the nation. In our day, more recent technological transformation has led to new forms of virtual community, though these tend to be transnational rather than national. A question remains, however: what can a community really be if it is only ever imagined? In what sense is it a community? 5 6

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. See Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990).

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Is ‘community’ a term often used to create a reality that does not exist? Take the idea of ethnic communities. It is often said in Britain or the U SA after some issue has erupted that politicians will be consulting with leaders of, say, the Caribean or Asian communities. It is often objected, however, that these socalled leaders are often self-appointed and unrepresentative. And what does a term as broad, or as ambiguous, as ‘Asian’ mean in this context? Beyond a sense of being ‘Asian’ or ‘Caribbean’ in terms of their family background, why or how do people actually belong to say ‘the Asian community’? And must all Asians be typecast as belonging to the Asian community? Can you be Asian and not belong de facto to the Asian community? Where can it be found? How does it work as an organizational, economic, or in some way material structure in which people participate – apparently whether they like it or not? I noticed a good example of this in a newspaper report on the failed New York Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. The article about him included the following paragraph: Saud Anwar, a surgeon who founded the Pakistani-American Association in Connecticut, said: “We were totally devastated, in disbelief, that someone in our community did this.”7

We are not told, however, whether Faisal Shahzad actually belonged to the Pakistani-American Association. He was deemed to be in their community by virtue of having been born in Pakistan, being a man, and living in Connecticut. Many communities of this kind are in part imagined, in the sense that their participants do not actually belong to them. Otherwise, it is also often used merely as a metaphor, rather like the delivery lorries for the British supermarket chain ASDA , which bear the message ‘part of the Walmart family’. In what way, it might be asked, is Walmart, a huge multinational public company renowned for its low prices achieved by squeezing its suppliers, often in non-Western countries, and for not recognizing trade unions, a ‘family’? The word is increasingly being used as an attempt to present corporate capitalism in a more socially acceptable light. So, too, with ‘community’, which is a term more often than not used metaphorically, even in Anderson’s account of an ‘imagined community’. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by community, but there is a case for arguing for the separation of actual, real identifiable communities from the use of the term to describe all sorts of classificatory groupings, such as the ‘Asian community’ or even such terms as a ‘speech community’

7

Anna Fifield, “Terror suspect’s neighbours tell of shock,” Financial Times (7 May 2010): 10.

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(what does it mean to say that I’m in a community with probably billions of people all over the world who speak English?).8 Anderson’s Christian concept of community returns us to one of the earliest ways in which community has been conceptualized: that is, the religious one where community describes a small group of adherents who live a life in common around a certain set of values or beliefs (compare the modern ‘commune’, which continues the idea of shared spirituality, in a New Age way). By contrast, the French idea of commune took a different direction, characteristically secularizing the concept. The French ‘commune’ is similarly derived from the medieval communia – that is, a small group of people who live a shared life in which things are held in common – but has become the basis of a political unit, in which the commune designates a small, local geographical area, the smallest political unit of the state, no bigger that a village (we might compare the attempt, in the nineteenth century, by Henry Maine and then Mahatma Gandhi, whose communes were termed ashrams, to develop the village as a political model in an anglophone context). It was also the French commune that prompted the extension of the idea of living in common with specific reference to property rights, as in communism. Communism, however, despite its use of soviets, then effectively separated the idea of community from the local, developing the Third International as a world-revolutionary community. In the vast majority of cases, however, including the original forms of communism, community involves a notion of the local. In English this is clearly evident in the use of ‘community’ as an adjective – community hall, community newspaper, community nurse, community politics – where community always designates something small scale and confined to a particular neighbourhood. The smallness of the community is why it seems to be legitimate to call political minorities – ethnic, religious, or sexual – communities, even if their numbers are very substantial. We speak of the gay community, but we don’t often hear people referring to the heterosexual community. Whether real, virtual or imagined, what all these accounts of community share is the idea that a community is linked to a certain smallness, particularity, if not the local, and to the practice of living in common with other people, proximateness. Particularity and proximity as key elements are somewhat different from the idea that to be a community, or for an individual to be part of a community, there must be something that the members of that community have in common, whether it is a nation, a place, a language, a set of values, a 8

Much recent work in linguistics has called into question the coherence of the idea of a speech community. For a classic definition, see William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972).

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geography, a religion, etc. After all, you may share these entities with different sets of people, in which case you belong to a whole range of different communities, from your professional association as a lawyer, to your religious identity as a Sunni Muslim, to your nation, etc. In many ways this might seem to parallel the ways in which people talk today about identity. Identity is constructed, not given, it is claimed, rather in the way, as with most communities, apart perhaps from nation and ethnicity, it is possible to freely choose to which community you belong. So now we consider all people to have multiple identities according to different roles and preferences, though it remains the case that when anyone comes to the passport control booth there is only one identity in which the official will be interested. When people talk about multiple identities, in fact, they do not acknowledge that there are different levels of identity among these – to take my own case, for example, my identity as a father is a good deal more significant, both personally and legally, than my membership of the community of the Friends of the Botanic Garden in Oxford. In fact, the use of the term ‘identity’ to describe who or what you feel you are, your sexuality, whatever, should be distinguished from the usually unchangeable forms of legal identity that you have as a citizen of the state. In this way, we might also want to distinguish between being a member of the imagined community of the nation – one in which your membership is essentially superfluous and insignificant from the nation’s point of view unless you are one of the very few who cut a great figure in the nation – from membership of a community in which you play an active role. And for most people it is participation that forms part of the real meaning of the word ‘community’. So, to particularity and proximity we can add participation. To say that you are part of a community on the basis of shared features as such means that no distinction is made between communities whose members are actively involved in that community and a general typology of classification. I may have shared features with everyone who is wearing a tie, or who has blue eyes, but that does not mean that we are part of a community. Communities must always at some level involve the charged modalities of a lived life: of particularity, proximity, and participation. In Keywords, Raymond Williams remarks that ‘community’ is a word that in English maintains an almost 100% positive aura.9 Community is consensual, about tolerance. We do not generally talk about communities of criminals, for example, we speak of gangs – unless it is through a humorous reference to ‘the criminal fraternity’. There is not even an equivalent of an adjective derived from 9

Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; London: Fontana, rev. ed. 1983). Cf. Raymond Williams, “The Importance of Community,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989): 111–19.

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‘community’ with the kind of negative aura that we find with ‘parochial’ or ‘provincial’. If someone is described as being very community-minded, we hardly see it as a synonym for his or her being small-minded. This beatific aura is sustained by the fact that, as Jean–Luc Nancy has pointed out, our thinking about communities, and the tendency to identify community with local identifiable participation, has been permanently governed by a romantic sense of loss – the idea that there aren’t communities like there used to be.10 Thinking about community has been governed by its perpetual disappearance over the past couple of centuries, and probably even before, so much so that the very notion of community now also involves the sense of its own evanescence as a form of living and of experience. Community becomes an object of desire, and frequent attempts are made to re-create it or extend it into other forms, not just the imagined community of the nation but also what we might call the ‘vicarious’ communities of TV soap operas. Facebook, meanwhile, could be described as a community without a community. A number of philosophers, notably Jean–Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben, have tried to step outside this particular paradigm in order to redefine community in a new and different way by using Georges Bataille’s work as their starting point.11 It is important to recognize that their interest in community begins with its relation to communism, in which historically, as they see it, community writ large has become totalitarian. The descent of communism into totalitarianism means, in this view, that community itself will always be potentially tainted. This, together with a preoccupation with Bataille’s notion of sovereignty, has led them to try to redefine the form of community itself to create a non-coercive model. Instead of trying to find new ways in which people form communities based on the traditional model of more or less any set of shared features as a group, they have offered what we might call a model of a postmodern community constructed on singularities: that is, individuals who remain singular individuals in a community which has no boundaries or lines of exclusion.12 The question becomes what relation such singularities may have to each other in a philosophical context in which totalities and 10

See Jean–Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, tr. Peter Connor et al. (La Communauté désœuvrée, 1986; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991). 11 Bataille did not present his ideas about community, however, in any straightforward way. Some useful material is collected in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985), and Georges Bataille, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell & Jason Kemp Winfree (Albany: State U of New York P, 2009). 12 See Jean–Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, tr. Robert D. Richardson & Anne E. O’Byrne (Être singulier pluriel, 1996; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2000).

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essences, and the politics of identity-formation with respect to the same and the exclusion of the Other, have been disallowed. How do you conceive of a community that is not based on identity, Agamben asks, not based on being something – being French or Muslim or gay – but on being in common, via the notion of the singular plural?13 How do you theorize a community without closure, without othering, a community which allows the singularity and difference of each of its members? How, in other words, can you reconcile community and difference, a “community without unity” as Nancy puts it?14 A community of affiliations without collectivity or a sense of belonging, is an entirely paradoxical idea, of course, which is why these philosophers have defined it negatively, particularly through Nancy’s term désœuvrement – which is strictly untranslatable in English but means the opposite of a quality that we largely associate with community: namely, that it is something that works, a workingtogether. Literally, désœuvrement means something like disworkly, unworking, even unworkable, and has been translated as “inoperative” and also as “uneventfulness.”15 Its inoperativity is what makes it, in Agamben’s formulation, always a community to come – something in the process of being constructed for the future but not yet in the now. Rather than an imagined community, it becomes a kind of phantom or phantasmatic community. How do Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben develop this idea of an unfinished community? The texts in which they have developed their ideas are extremely elliptical and hard to negotiate. To simplify, we might try to conceptualize a ‘post-identitarian’ community according to a language model, which is a model that is in fact invoked by Agamben. It is language itself, he remarks, that grounds “the antimony of the individual and the universal” that marks the basis of any community: The word “tree” designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits the proper universal significance in place of singular ineffable trees. In other words, it transforms singularities into members of a class, whose meaning is defined by a common property.16

In language there is no mediation between these two antimonies, Agamben argues, beyond that of the article, which simply slides from one to the other – from the indefinite to the definite article, from ‘a’ to ‘the’. The example, on the 13

See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt (La comunità che viene, 1990; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). 14 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 71. 15 The Inoperative Community, 156. 16 Agamben, The Coming Community, 8.

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other hand, he argues, by being a particular that (arguably) holds for all cases of the same type, retains its singularity while standing in for the whole. “The proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds.”17 The structure of the example, therefore, is one of metonymy, and we can think through Agamben’s argument according to Jakobson’s famous account of the relation of the two axes of metaphor and metonymy, the first based on equivalence, the second on contiguity.18 Thinking about community has hitherto operated on the paradigmatic vertical axis that Jakobson identifies with metaphor. If you are constructing a sentence, you select the words according to a vertical axis of meanings whereby you substitute one possible word for another. This, says Jakobson, is the axis of synonyms and of metaphor – this is my house, my home, my castle. The words are different, they mean slightly different things, but they all have something in common whereby one can be substituted for the other. This is how our thinking about community works – everyone in a community is there because they broadly share an underlying meaning, however different they may be. Each member of a community is substitutable even if their loss may seem irreparable. But what if we tried to think about community not as metaphor, a relation of sharing and substitutability, but as metonymy, or, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, clinamen, a relation of leaning or contiguity and therefore also of contingency, of interruption, unworking?19 This would be the modality of the example, the part that stands for the whole, and considering that we are now on the linear or horizontal axis, this means that this relation is structured according to a certain narrative or temporality, or of unfinished becoming. The community that is structured temporally rather than spatially without a sense of belonging or identity, without any shared features at all, a “community without community,” as Nancy puts it, is by definition unrepresentable and exists only in its activity, or activism if you will, through which it establishes its affiliations, rather than coming from any pre-constituted identity which it, rather, interrupts, refuses and unworks, or undoes.20 Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the State. Wherever these singu-

17 18 19 20

Agamben, The Coming Community, 9. Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 254–59. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 4. The Inoperative Community, 71.

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larities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.21

Agamben’s account of the community to come to some degree anticipates Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude (indeed, it was Hardt who translated Agamben’s book into English), and we could see their concept of the multitude as an attempt to formulate Agamben’s idea of community in political terms.22 The problem, however, has been that, by virtue of being unrepresentable, it has been hard for people to grasp exactly what the multitude is. It does not correlate with the general idea of a collectivity – or a community. One useful analogy would be to compare the conceptualization of community in this way with Frantz Fanon’s idea of culture in his essay “On National Culture,” which in certain ways, I would argue, anticipates this idea of community without community.23 For Fanon’s national culture is a culture without culture in any ordinary sense. In the essay, he begins by criticizing the nationalist account of culture which always looks back to retrieve the past, trying to repopulate the living present with its faded ghosts – we could compare this with the traditional holistic account of community. In doing so, Fanon develops a critique of the assumptions of négritude. One assumption behind négritude was that the absence of a nation could be compensated for by the re-discovery of a culture. Sometimes this was figured as a national culture. That culture makes and produces the nation is the assumption behind all forms of nationalism: the nation becomes the expression, the soul, in Renan’s famous formulation, of the common culture.24 This was essentially the kind of view being expressed in Fanon’s own time – for example, in Alioune Diop’s essay on colonialism and cultural nationalism.25 But Fanon dismisses this, criticizes such accounts of culture as essentially comprising the realm of the mortician and the pathologist, and suggests, rather, that far from being a pre-existing culture that makes or defines the nation, just as a pre-existing identity tends to define the traditional community, it is the struggle for the nation that makes and defines its culture: “The existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people’s struggle

21

Agamben, The Coming Community, 86. See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 23 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 1966), 206–48. 24 Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 1882), in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge 1990):19. 25 Alioune Diop, “Colonialisme et nationalisme culturels,” Présence Africaine 4 (1955): 5–15. 22

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against the forces of occupation.”26 Culture becomes an expression of the dynamic process through which the nation is fighting for itself and creating itself in doing so, a set of popular practices in the present rather than an academic retrieval of a past that has to be remembered and memorialized through the dead and the institutions devoted to them. It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.27

The new English translation of The Wretched of the Earth, whose greater accuracy also loses something of Farrington’s poetic idiom, describes not a “zone of occult instability” but a “zone of hidden fluctuation,” which loses the medical resonance.28 Fanon’s original phrase “ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte,”29 literally describes a muscle disability, a subluxation or partial dislocation in the shoulder. He employs these evocative words, which we could retranslate as ‘this place of unobservable disequilibrium’, désœuvrement in fact, to describe the transformative process, the struggling beneath the surface, of a national culture in formation as a part of the popular liberation struggle that is generated from the people, or, we might say today, the multitude. For Fanon, national culture is in some sense not about culture at all in any conventional sense – for him, the popular struggle is the national culture, the culture is the struggle, which Fanon calls the “terrible stone crusher, the fierce mixing machine” of popular revolution.30 This is very different from Agamben’s singularities peacefully demonstrating in Tiananmen Square, but its dynamic is similar in certain respects. In both cases, these singularities have something of being-in-common. It is clear what that might be in an anti-colonial war such as the struggle in Algeria. But what would being-in-common mean for the (non)communities of the multitude? What they would share, presumably, is a certain kind of political objective. How

26

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223. The Wretched of the Earth, 227. 28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Richard Philcox (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 2004): 163. 29 Frantz Fanon, Les Damnées de la terre (1961; Paris: Maspero, 1970): 157. 30 The Wretched of the Earth (1966), 50. 27

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would it relate to redefining a new form of communism? This is the importance of the concept of being-in-common. The common involves a certain kind of sharing, not in terms of shared features but the sharing of commonalities. In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri revive the medieval concept of the common, a mutual, collective space which they claim is neither public nor private and predates the development of modern property relations.31 The best example would be the space of land, many of which still exist in England, which is known as ‘the common’. This is land that is used in common by the local population, who have the right to graze their animals on it, or even grow crops – so, in modern terms, it is both public and private at once, or a piece of land for which the distinction does not exist. That, in a way, is the definition of the common – neither public nor private. How does this work? Close to the centre of Oxford in England there is a huge stretch of about three hundred acres of meadowland by the river Thames called ‘Port Meadow’ which is a common that has been there for a thousand years; each citizen of Oxford has the right to graze a horse or other livestock on it. The Freemen’s collective right to graze their animals on Port Meadow was recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. It has never been ploughed. In a medieval England with comparatively low population, the common allowed subsistence farming by common people – that is, the non-aristocrats, non-clergy, who owned no land. The rise of populations in the eighteenth century whereby commons became over-used, to the detriment of all, together with capitalism’s need for factory workers in the cities, produced the enclosure movement, in which local landowners fenced off common land and dispossessed the people of it. The common was the common land of the community which it sustained. The link between community and the common was therefore more than just etymological. Things being in common don’t necessarily create a community – for example, the modern anti-enclosure or anti-property creative commons copyright. Creative commons licence establishes a contemporary form of common but not one that creates a community, even if arguably any community must have a common for it to be a real community. A community is not about sharing an identity, nor even perhaps about participating in a common struggle, à la Fanon, nor even about having something in common with other people, but about participating in the common. Near Port Meadow, within the colleges of Oxford, academics still speak of ‘rights to common table’ or just ‘common’, meaning their share of food that is served daily without charge. So, in Pendennis, 31

See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 2009).

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Thackeray writes: “Then they went to hall, where Pen sat down and ate his commons with his brother freshmen.”32 The common is not just things you have in common, or common property rights such as ‘tenants in common’, nor even a relationship to the person who in English law is still termed a ‘common prostitute’. The common is something in which you participate and which you partake of by virtue of being a member of the community which is neither public nor private. In other words, it is not predicated on your identity, whatever it may be, singular or multiple, nor on sharing particular features, but the result of actively participating in a social or institutional formation of some sort that is not a mere reflection of personal preferences, interests, or origins: particularity, proximity, and participation. You might say that your right to have rights, by virtue of being a legitimate citizen of a state, is a version of this form of commons which you share with all other citizens. Hardt and Negri’s attempt to show the unrecognized extent to which we still have the benefit of a shared commons, in a society devoted to emphasizing property and the private, is certainly provocative, and in some respects does take us back to thinking about the nature of community itself, which is not so much about sharing a particular feature as about participating in the common, a common which is neither private nor public. Even so, it leaves intact the basic conundrum of the postmodern community as a ‘community without community’, and it is to this that I wish to return. Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben’s radical attempt to rethink the community backwards, without the elements which had previously been regarded as foundational to it, is somewhat skewed by their project to undo the history of totalitarian communism. If we take communism away from the concept, it is an open question whether it suffers from the holistic paradigm from which Nancy et al. seek to release it. Communities are not imprisoned; their borders are open. The use of the unexamined term ‘community’ to describe the nation has the unfortunate effect of distorting the community into the image of the nation, with all its disadvantages of nationalism and totalitarianism. Nancy suggests as much himself when he discusses the seemingly endemic link between community and nostalgia. Just as nationalism is often the creation of diasporic figures, the idea or practice of community is often the creation of those who have moved beyond it, and it is they who nostalgically create the sense of its bounded and edenic harmony. The nostalgia is misconceived: community, in some sense, is always lost; it is always marked by lack and evanescence, change and disappearance. Communities become self-conscious through a series of interruptions, 32

William Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, 2 vols. (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849), vol. 1: 168.

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and it is only the common interruption that, paradoxically, creates the community, as a self-conscious entity, around specific events. The narrative of a community, as a result, stutters, hinges on moments of life and death, accident and disaster, leaving and undoing. Everyone who is part of a community in a sense exists in a precarious and tangential relation to it because the community itself is a space of interruption, disjunction, and dissolution. It is as much about discontinuity as continuity, separation and disconnection as union, conflict as harmony, silence as speech. Community is the interruption of silence, in moments of inarticulacy, of stuttering, the things you cannot say, the unspoken common between us, if you will. Community is somehow ‘neither here nor there’, which is why it becomes too hard to conceptualize and define. Instead of conceptualization and definition, community can be more fruitfully approached as a poetics. I want to conclude by exploring that idea in the work of a contemporary Irish poet who figures something of the aspects of community as “ce lieu de déséquilibre” in his poetry: Bernard O’Donoghue. O’Donoghue writes much, though not exclusively, about the community in which he grew up, Cullen, near Cork in Ireland. At one level, his poetry is dedicated to celebrating the lives, the knowledge, the emotions, of those who for the most part slip in and out of history leaving no trace and who, certainly from the perspective of academic knowledge, remain invisible, or at most exist only as objects of a certain kind of statistical knowledge. Much of his poetry is preoccupied with memory, and memorializing the living and the dead, the dear departed, as the phrase goes, those who arrive and then suddenly take their leave according to the incidental moments of birth and death. In general, readers of his poems have never heard of those who are being memorialized before reading the poem. These are, as it were, anonymous people, subalterns, to use the way academics might now describe them, the people not without history but whose history does not get recorded. Their immediate context is very clear – they are the people of Dev’s – de Valera’s – Ireland, the severe, pinched, and impoverished Ireland that followed for many decades after independence. O’Donoghue offers us in his poems people, not just the individual observing eye which has become the norm for much contemporary poetry which records a series of moments in the poet’s individual and special sensibility. O’Donoghue does offer us that, but there is more than just the single isolated poet in his poetry. He writes about others and manages to make them subjects in both senses, at once public and private. O’Donoghue, we might imagine too quickly, is a poet of community in a traditional sense. He celebrates, without in any sense sentimentalizing, the richness, poverty, wisdom, foolishness, humour, of the lives of ordinary people, but also presents to us in a matter-of-fact way their struggles and moments of

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defeat, the violence of hardship, the frequent violence of masculinity that accompanies it, the emotional repression, punctuated with sudden violent moments of emotional expression, together with the long communal wealth of shared lives. His poems show the people with whom they are concerned in moments of unanticipated drama, which provide the focal point and raison d’être of the story that is being told. Within the poem this is its narrative function, but it is also suggested that it is precisely the dramatic interruption which constitutes the community as a series of moments, not a processual reciprocal organism. This is the eventful rather than the uneventful community, and it is the interruptive event itself that creates the community according to its arbitrary staccato rhythm: a community of seriality far more persuasive than that which Agamben describes. Take a poem like “Ceo Draiochta (Magic Mist),” which narrates the story of the day Matt Bridgie fell into the threshing drum during harvest time. The slow lead-up to the moment of the accident when Bridgie’s scream is heard two miles away is followed by an anticlimax of deliberate bathos: That was it really. A man passing From town tied a belt around the leg And administered a cigarette. Pieces of rubber from the Wellington And clots of sock were scraped From the hopper. Ultimately Some compensation was paid, enough For a rudimentary false leg And a few rounds of drinks. Matt showed signs of a latent Family talent for composing verse, And often sang well past closing time.33

What is so interesting about the poem is the way it is told as a narrative of the community, a local legend. You are half-way into the poem before you are told that the poet himself was one of those at school two miles away, and so experienced “that famous day” only in hearing the scream. All the detail that we are given has been recounted from other retellings, a communal perspective which reabsorbs Matt himself as his accident gives him a certain stature which he subsequently develops as a poet and singer in the local pub. It is not a tragic event in anyone’s eyes, however much anyone feels the shock at the time. Rather, it is part of an intermittent violence that does not so much re-animate the

33

Bernard O’Donoghue, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2008): 50.

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community and communal feeling as create the community, becoming part of its mythology, the common in which everyone shares, which is both public and private at once. The mythologizing might lead us to think of the community as a continuous narrative, but what the poem offers is simply one of a series of disasters. It is these disasters that, as is said, ‘bring the community together’: that is, perform the space of the common. What remains unstated in that phase is that the community only realizes itself momentarily in such traumatic moments that create its narrative of creation and dissolution. The community is brought together and then, in an inevitable systolic rhythm, moves apart again. It is moving poems like “Ceo Draiochta (Magic Mist),” “Concordiam in Populo” or “The Mule Duignan” that make us realize that what is really necessary is not so much to deconstruct the community as, rather, to start to understand the complex structures of emotion and behaviour that community involves. Rather as people tend to associate India with non-violence because of Gandhi, without realizing that Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence was necessary and meaningful only because India was and is such a violent country, our idea of the non-violence and cosiness of the community misunderstands what community is trying to achieve – to alleviate the violence intrinsic to its social formation. This is what O’Donoghue perceives so tellingly. He writes frequently about the larger everyday violence of life, which some people, such as “O’Regan the Amateur Anatomist,” the subject of an early poem, intermittently repeat, or others, as in the portrait of the father saving the crow or the wounded rabbit in “Gunpowder” attempt to ameliorate and assuage. In every case, O’Donoghue makes us aware of a certain unethical relation to others that forms part of living in a community – especially in relation to those on its fringes, and here, thinking of India, we remember the link between community and communalism. One poem, “Unknownst to the People,” is especially compelling in this regard: O’Donoghue focuses on the appearance of a family of travellers camping at the edge of the village, who come and go without trace, unwelcomed, unembraced, and unknown. This is one of several poems in the Selected Poems about travellers or tinkers. Here their exclusion is lightly compared to the notorious Catholic Penal Laws in the reference to Art O’Leary, who, in a complicated story, was lawfully shot in 1773 because he had refused to sell his horse to a Protestant for £5. The compassion and interest shown here in this travelling family, the lived details of their ordinary lives as well as their elusive coming and going, the sense of embarrassment that the locals feel when speaking about them, conjures up an important ethical and political stance that shows the ethical challenge to communities that underlies the poetry. This moving poem challenges our sense of the communal and community – the degree to which individuals, communities, and larger imagined communities – can sustain

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themselves through denial and an unethical relation to the world outside themselves. But the point is that it is not just that those in the community do not reach out to those who live at the fringes of their world. They do not reach out to each other. “Ter Conatus” (three times he made the attempt) is the story of a sister and brother who have farmed together for sixty years, “never touching once.” In old age she develops cancer, but it is diagnosed too late, and the brother, living so long without expressing himself, finds himself altogether inexperienced in the emotional intimacy and support that should be the foundation of his new role of carer for his sister. After she has died, the neighbours notice sympathetically that the farm is being neglected: [...] the rolled-U P bales, standing Silent in the fields, with the aftergrass Growing into them, and wondered what he could Be thinking of: which was that evening when, Almost breaking with a lifetime of Taking real things for shadows, He might have embraced her with a brother’s arms.34

O’Donoghue’s poetry, while celebrating the common of the communal, never lets us forget that its warmth comes often at the cost of its lack and denial, its repression and emotion unexpressed and unsaid. That is also community – the hesitation, deferment, the moment of stuttering inarticulacy, in the unspoken common.

W OR K S C I T E D Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt (La comunità che viene, 1990; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1993). Anderson, Benedict. Imaginary Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). A S N E L , “Call for Papers: Contested Communities: Communication, Narration, Imagination,” 21st Annual G N E L / AS N E L Conference, Uof Bayreuth, Germany,13–16 May 2010. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Minnesota U P , 1985). Bataille, Georges. The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell & Jason Kemp Winfree (Albany: State U of New York P , 2009). Bhabha, Homi K, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Diop, Alioune. “Colonialisme et nationalisme culturels,” Présence Africaine 4 (1955): 5–15. 34

O’Donoghue, Selected Poems, 89.

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Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la terre (1961; Paris: Maspero, 1970). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove 1966). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Richard Philcox (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 2004). Fifield, Anna. “Terror suspect’s neighbours tell of shock,” Financial Times (7 May 2010): 10. Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Cambridge MA : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 2009). Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Labov, William. Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1972). Nancy, Jean–Luc. Being Singular Plural, tr. Robert D. Richardson & Anne E. O’Byrne (Être singulier pluriel, 1996; Stanford CA : Stanford U P , 2000). Nancy, Jean–Luc. The Inoperative Community, tr. Peter Connor et al. (La Communauté désœuvrée, 1986; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1991). O’Donoghue, Bernard. Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2008). Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 1882), in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge 1990): 8–22. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Stalin, Joseph. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London: Martin Lawrence, 1936). Thackeray, William. The History of Pendennis, 2 vols. (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849). Williams, Raymond. “The Importance of Community,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989): 111–19. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; London: Fontana, rev. ed. 1983).

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II C OMMUNICATION

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S P EECH C OMMUNI TY

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The Native Speaker in World Englishes A Historical Perspective

S TEPHANIE H A CKER T

Introduction

I

of this volume, which addresses the concept of community in postcolonial contexts, this chapter explores a central linguistic notion: i.e. the native speaker, from a World Englishes perspective. Despite its centrality, the native speaker remains one of the least satisfactorily defined – and thus most controversial – concepts of the discipline; it brings to the fore a number of theoretical and methodological problems. The native speaker is, of course, crucially tied to other basic – but equally ill-defined – linguistic notions such as language or speech community, the latter functioning as the link between a linguistic system: i.e. a language, and its users: i.e. its native speakers. As Peter Patrick has pointed out, the problem of relating all of these concepts “is not trivial.”1 My focus in the following will be on the native speaker. The notion of the native speaker has been described as a “common reference point for all branches of linguistics.”2 For generative linguists, for example, Chomsky's assumption of an “ideal speaker–listener, in a completely homogenous speech community,”3 is crucial. Native-speaker intuitions are tapped not only as a data source but also as the final arbiter of the grammaticality or acceptability of particular syntactic structures. For sociolinguists, the notions of native speaker, mother tongue, and speech community play an important role in relation to, for example, minority language rights,4 apart from the method1

N ACCOR DANCE WITH THE GENERAL TOP IC

Peter L. Patrick, “The Speech Community,” in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling–Estes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 573. 2 Florian Coulmas, “Introduction: The concept of native speaker,” In A Festschrift for Native Speaker, ed. Florian Coulmas (The Hague: Mouton, 1981): 1. 3 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1965): 3. 4 See, for example, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas & Robert Phillipson, “‘Mother tongue’: The

4

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ological focus on particular kinds of native speakers as authentic providers of speech data. On a more practical note, in English-language teaching, being a native speaker is the key to job opportunities, but the native speaker functions as a model not only in the classroom but also in second-language acquisition research. Over the past twenty-five years or so, however, dissatisfaction with the concept has grown, particularly in connection with the study of the so-called ‘World Englishes’, which are often divided into ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ or ‘nativized’ varieties. While the former are associated with countries which were either settled primarily by English-speaking people or where English-speaking people provided the linguistic model to other inhabitants:5 i.e. the U K , the U SA , Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the latter occur as increasingly autonomous forms of the language in non-Western settings such as India or Singapore and are often also summarized under the heading ‘New Englishes’. In the study of World Englishes, the native speaker plays a double role: first, the native/non-native distinction is often invoked in modelling the historical spread and current status of English as a global language; second, native speakers are generally seen as the ‘owners’ of the language: i.e. as speakers variously privileged or burdened with establishing, maintaining, and distributing linguistic norms and standards through research and teaching. As for the first point, model-making has always been an important part of the description of the language. Probably the most widely cited modern model of English worldwide is constituted by Braj Kachru's famous three circles. In this model, a series of linked ovals grows out of a set of unnamed states of English. The first oval depicts the “Inner Circle” of English-speaking countries or, as Kachru describes them, “the traditional bases of English, dominated by the ‘mother tongue’ varieties of the language.”6 The second and third ovals stand for the “Outer Circle” of postcolonial English-speaking countries, where “nativized” Englishes are used, and the “Expanding Circle,” which comprises “the rest of the world.” The three types of speech communities are, respectively, “norm-providing, norm-developing, and norm-dependent.”7 It is links such as that between theoretical and sociopolitical construction of a concept,” in Status and Function of Languages and Language Varieties, ed. Ulrich Ammon (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1989): 450–77. 5 Melchers, Gunnel & Philip Shaw, World Englishes: An Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003): 36. 6 Braj B Kachru, “World Englishes: Approaches, Issues and Resources,” Language Teaching 25 (1992): 3. 7 Kachru, “World Englishes: Approaches, Issues and Resources,” 5. With the recent increase in the spread and use of English in some countries, particularly European ones, the distinction between Outer Circle and Expanding Circle, or ‘nativized’ and ‘non-native’ Englishes, has been called into question, too. Sarah Buschfeld, English in Cyprus or Cyprus English? An Empirical

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The Native Speaker in World Englishes

5

the “traditional bases” of the language, the “mother tongue,” and the norm-setters that have prompted critics to renounce Kachru's description. Rampton, for example, notes that, when Outer-Circle Englishes “are described as the other tongue or nativized varieties, the English of the ethnic Anglos is still there in the background as the central reference point.”8 The question of ownership is implicated in models of English but becomes crucially relevant at the level of norms and standards. Native speakers are apportioned (or arrogate to themselves) the rights and responsibilities not only of saying what is correct, grammatical, or acceptable in the language but also of controlling the theory and practice of teaching in and research on the language.9 In principle, to claim ownership of a language implies a relationship of possession and control between a particular speaker group and that language. This relationship is basically metaphorical but obviously has real-world consequences, which have to do with authority and power and the privilege to oversee the language's development. A ‘prototypical’ approach to linguistic ownership is exemplified by Lionel Wee, who views the conceptual terms of ethnicity and historicity: for a given language X, a prototypical native speaker of X is one who is assumed to be proficient in X by virtue of having grown up speaking X. The prototypical native speaker is also a member of a particular ethnic community, where this community has a strong historical association with X.10

Investigation of Variety Status (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013) and Alison Edwards, English in the Netherlands: Functions, Forms and Attitudes (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2016), for example, demonstrate that the boundaries between second-language varieties and learner English are fluid and not necessarily dependent on prior colonization. This, in turn, has led to increased emphasis on globalization-driven approaches to the continued evolution of English today – cf. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond, ed. Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014) – and attention to individual features and feature combinations across varieties and situations. 8 Ben Rampton, “Displacing the ‘native speaker’: Expertise, affiliation and inheritance,” In The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader, ed. Roxy Harris & Ben Rampton (London, New York: Routledge, 2003): 107. 9 See, for example, Suresh A. Canagarajah, “Interrogating the ‘native speaker fallacy’: Nonlinguistic roots, non-pedagogical results,” in Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching, ed. George Braine (Mahwah N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999): 78–82; Sandra Lee McKay, Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches (2002): 42; and H.G. Widdowson, “The ownership of English,” T E S O L Quarterly 28 (1994): 386–88. 10 Lionel Wee, “When English is not a mother tongue: Linguistic ownership and the Eurasian community in Singapore,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23 (2002): 284.

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Linguistic ownership, in other words, implies the presence of a specific community of native speakers which is not only ethnically defined but also has a strong historical association with its mother tongue. Native-speaker status is acquired by way of being born into a particular speech community, with proficiency a result of early and continued exposure to the language in question. What Wee describes as the “prototypical native speaker” corresponds closely to the traditional view of the ownership of English as caricatured by Widdowson: England is where the language originated and this is where the English (for the most part) live. The language and the people are bound together by both morphology and history. So they can legitimately lay claim to this linguistic territory. It belongs to them. And they are the custodians. If you want real or proper English, this is where it is to be found, preserved, and listed like a property of the National Trust.11

The global spread of English has made this traditional stance problematic, and it is, as noted above, in the World Englishes context that the native speaker has become a seriously contested concept. In fact, the native/non-native dichotomy was recognized as a major problem in one of the earliest publications on World Englishes: On the one hand, our own English language […], presents us with vast arrays of neatly opposed dichotomies. For present purposes: ‘competence’/’performance’, ‘native’/’non-native’, ‘second’/’foreign’, ‘standard’ (or ‘Standard’)/’non-standard’ (or ‘sub-standard’) […]. On the other hand, as most of us will be prepared to admit, we inhabit a multidimensional universe […]. In other words, unqualified use of terms like ‘native’ and ‘non-native’, posing as categorical alternatives, soon forces one into some difficult metalinguistic traps.12

Still, as the following quotation attests, the matter remains unsolved to thisday: A good deal of effort is now being made to show the independent legitimacy of Englishes world-wide,13 but when these are described as the other tongue or nativized varieties, the English of the ethnic Anglos is still there in the background as the central reference point.14

11

Widdowson, “The ownership of English,” 377–78. John B. Pride, “Native competence and the bilingual/multilingual speaker,” English WorldWide 2 (1981): 141. 13 For example, The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, ed. Braj B. Kachru (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982). 14 Ben Rampton, “Displacing the ‘native speaker’,” 107. 12

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As this passage from Ben Rampton indicates, most of the efforts expended in the study of World Englishes have been descriptive,15 with a concentration on structural features. While this focus has led to numerous fascinating insights into the nature of contact varieties of English specifically and the principles and processes of language contact generally, a structural approach to the concept of the English native speaker appears to be insufficient or even misguided. 16 The crucial question is whether there are specific linguistic features which reliably distinguish native from non-native speakers of the language or, in other words, whether non-native speakers use particular structures that never occur in native speech. This has been denied by numerous linguists.17 But how can we approach the concept of the native speaker, then? Some researchers have suggested simply doing away with it. According to Ingrid Piller, for example, “the native speaker concept is useless and should therefore be discarded”;18 Rampton sees the “need for new terms”;19 and Acevedo Butcher suggests the “acceptance of new globally-minded terms by linguists.”20 Obviously, it would be exceedingly difficult to replace a term not only deeply entrenched in scientific usage but also common in everyday speech; another question is what would be gained by such a move.21 The present chapter takes a different approach and looks at the English native speaker by means of historical discourse analysis in order to explore the origins of some of the problems surrounding the concept today. A number of other writers have suggested precisely such an approach, but without actually putting it into practice. Thus, it is often pointed out that “nativeness constitutes a non-elective socially constructed identity rather than a linguistic category.” 22

15

For a recent example, see Rajend Mesthrie & Bhatt M. Rakesh, World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008). 16 For example, Afendras A. Evangelos, Sharon Millar, Mac Aogáin Eoghan, Ayo Bamgbose, Yamuna Kachru, Anjum P. Seleemi, Bent Preisler, Peter Trudgill, Florian Coulmas & Probal Dasgupta, “On ‘new/non-native’ Englishes: A gamelan,” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 304. 17 For example, Rajendra Singh, Jean D’Souza, K.P. Mohanan & N.S. Prabhu, “On ‘New/non native’ Englishes: A quartet,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 47–54. 18 Ingrid Piller, “Who, if anyone, is a native speaker?” Anglistik 12.2 (2001): 121. 19 Ben Rampton, “Displacing the ‘native speaker’,” 107. 20 Carmen Butcher Acevedo, “The case against the ‘native speaker,’” English Today 82 (2005): 13. 21 See Joybrato Mukherjee, “The native speaker is alive and kicking – linguistic and languagepedagogical perspectives,” Anglistik 16.2 (2005): 20. 22 Janina Brutt-Griffler & Samimy K. Keiko, “Transcending the nativeness paradigm,” World Englishes 20 (2001): 100.

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The native speaker is described as an "imaginary construct"23 surrounded by particular “discourses,” whose analysis is seen as “crucial to an adequate problematization of the concept,”24 and its rootedness in the history of Western linguistics is asserted.25 Such an approach to the concept of the native speaker falls squarely within the historiography of language ideologies as suggested by Jan Blommaert, for example, who notes that while the understanding of contemporary ideologies of language has already made significant strides, investigations into the historical production and reproduction of linguistic ideologies are still sorely lacking. In Blommaert's view, however, if we are to understand the synchronic functioning of ideologies of language, we must also look into the ways in which certain discourses, beliefs, and attitudes toward languages and their speakers come into being, become dominant, or disappear again.26

The Early History of the English Native Speaker As a look at the O ED attests, the native speaker appeared on the linguistic scene in 1859. The phrase was first used by George Perkins Marsh, an American philologist, businessman, lawyer, and politician,27 in an address delivered at Columbia College in New York, in which Marsh argued for the introduction of ‘native’ (i.e. English) philology as a subject at American universities: The German is remarkably homogenous in its character. [...] Its grammatical structure is of great regularity [...]. At the same time, there is enough of grammatical inflection to familiarize the native speaker with syntactical principles imperfectly exemplified in French and English. 28 23

Claire Kramsch, “Guest Column: The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker,” P M L A 112.3 (May 1997): 363. 24 Thiru Kandiah, “Epiphanies of the deathless native user’s manifold avatars: A post-colonial perspective on the native speaker,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 105. 25 For example, Probal Dasgupta, “The native speaker: A short history,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 182–92, and Salikoko Mufwene, “Native speaker, proficient speaker and norms,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 111–23. 26 Jan Blommaert, “The debate is open,” in Language Ideological Debates, ed. Jan Blommaert (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999): 1. 27 See American National Biography, vol. 14 (1999), ed. John A. Garraty & Carnes C. Mark, 535– 37. 28 George P. Marsh, “Address,” In Inaugural Addresses of Theodore W. Dwight, Professor of Law,

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The term occurs again in William Dwight Whitney's classic on The Life and Growth of Language29 and then again in the early twentieth century in the work of Henry Cecil Wyld.30 At the same time, as can be seen in Marsh31 but also in other works, such as Jespersen's Growth and Structure of the English Language,32 the linguistic literature of the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is obsessed with nativeness in terms of language and culture: The Anglo-Saxon principle of adopting only such words as were easily assimilated with the native vocabulary, for the most part names of concrete things, and of turning to the greatest possible account native words and roots, especially for abstract notions – that principle may be taken as a symptom of a healthful condition of a language and a nation: witness Greek, where we have the most flourishing and vigorous growth of abstract and other scientifically serviceable terms on a native basis that the world has ever seen, and where the highest development of intellectual and artistic activity went hand in hand with the most extensive creation of indigenous words and an extremely limited importation of words from abroad. It is not, then, the Old English system of utilizing the vernacular stock of words, but the modern system of neglecting the native and borrowing from a foreign vocabulary that has to be accounted for as something out of the natural state of things.33

What this scenario – a few isolated occurrences of the phrase ‘native speaker’ plus plenty of attestations of related terms – suggests is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which people started to think differently about languages and their speakers. As a new term characterizing particular language users and setting them off from other groups, ‘native speaker’ provided an important way of conceptualizing and labelling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others. This linguistic identity and the boundaries it demarcated were determined by nationalist thinking:

and of George P. Marsh, Professor of English Literature, in Columbia College, New York (New York: By Authority of the Trustees, 1859): 72–73. 29 W.D. Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language (London: King, 1875). 30 For example, in Henry Cecil Wyld, The Place of the Mother Tongue in National Education (London: John Murray, 1906) and The Growth of English: An Elementary Account of the Present Form of Our Language, and Its Development (London: John Murray,1907). 31 George P. Marsh, “Address” (1859). 32 Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905). 33 Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999): 1.

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Modern linguistics sees itself as a forward-looking discipline, and regards the activity of linguistic analysis as either ideologically neutral (‘scientific’) or ideologically positive, in that most linguists rhetorically claim the equality of all language systems. […] Whatever the merits of this position, […] it [does not] encourage […] honest contemplation of the history of linguistics. […] many of its descriptive or methodological principles reflect the politics of European nationalism in the last two centuries. Notions such as ‘native speaker’ and ‘native speaker intuition’, ‘natural language’, ‘linguistic system’, ‘speech community’ have their roots in nationalist organicism, and the fundamental ‘vernacularism’ of linguistics needs to be seen as an ideology with a complex history and real political consequences. That ideology is alive and well today.

The link between linguistic nativeness, the speech community, and the ideology of nationalism obviously draws directly on the core meaning of the words native and nation, with natural also entering into the relationship. All of these words ultimately go back to Latin Ƶǎt-, the past participle stem of nasci ‘to be born’. In this way, the phrase ‘native speaker’ inevitably conjures up a sense of being born into a speech community and thus language, which implies a naturally determined, inalienable, and perfect competence and therefore right to ownership, and connects linguistic identity and social membership by way of the idea of the nation. And even though all of these phenomena may, in reality, be contingent and variable, they appear – via the naturalness association – as inherited and non-negotiable: in other words, destiny. The nineteenth century, and particularly its second half, was the golden age of nationalism in Europe. The new science of language, in the form of comparative-historical philology, had contributed crucially to this development:34 In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe […].35

The reverse was also true, however: in both Continental Europe and Englishspeaking countries, nationalism had fired interest in the study of language in general and national languages in particular. The basic assumption underlying nineteenth-century thinking on language and nation was that the former directly reflected the latter's qualities, and 34

See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991): 71, 84. 35 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861 (New York: Scribner, 1862): 22.

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particularly its mental, cognitive, and spiritual constitution, the ‘national mind’. In the view of Marsh, language mirrored thought both in the individual and in the nation qua aggregate of like-minded human beings: mind and speech, national and individual, modify and are modified by each other, to an extent, and by the operation of laws, which we are not yet able to define, though, in particular instances, the relation of cause and effect can be confidently affirmed to exist.36

This idea obviously goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, in Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (1836), had written that “language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations: their language is their intellect and their intellect their language: we cannot sufficiently identify the two.” 37 What this means is that language was not simply one symbol of nationality among others but its constituting element: Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion or of government, and contemporaneous nations of one speech, however formally separated by differences of creed or of political organization, are essentially one in culture, one in tendency, one in influence.38

For nineteenth-century writers, the identification of nations with languages happened “instinctively.”39 At the level of the speech community, this implied that the “natural condition” of language was that of national languages: a language which has passed from what we may call its natural condition of true and full vitality as a national speech cannot, apparently, be thus far preserved, with something of the pulse of life still beating in it, merely by such a knowledge of it being kept U P as enables us to read and translate it.40

At the individual level, the “instinctive” association between languages and nations crucially linked the native speaker with the nation: 36

George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, ed, with additional lectures and notes, by William Smith (London: John Murray, 7th ed. 1874). 37 Quoted in J.W. Donaldson, The New Cratylus; or Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language (London: J.W. Parker, 2nd rev. ed. 1850): 56. 38 George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, 153. 39 Edward A. Freeman, “Race and language” (1877), in Language and Linguistics, vol. 4: Language and Linguistic Theory 1865–1900, ed. Roy Harris (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995): 280. 40 George L. Craik, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest: With Numerous Specimens (London: Griffin, 1875): 54.

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The first idea suggested by the word Frenchman or German or any other national name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother-tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise, we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause.41

In other words, any speaker was less an individual than a member of his or her national speech community: though every man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own special features of character, his distinct peculiarities of shape, gait, tone, and gesture, in short, the individualities which make him John and not Peter, yet, over and above all these, he shares in the general traits which together make up the unity of his language, the unity of his nation.42

Such a view of language amounts to an immensely “powerful social theory” where personal identity (the identity of the individual as a native speaker of language X) is merged into a higher order community, the cohesion of which is guaranteed by a shared linguistic system of fixed form-meaning relations.43

This social theory is clearly a nineteenth-century development. Whereas various forms of national thought had emerged from the end of the Middle Ages onwards, nationalism as a coherent ideology can be traced to the post-Napoleonic period. It was then that political Romanticism, which believed in nations as the most natural human aggregates characterized by a specific, transcendent, historically transmitted essence, the ‘national soul’, turned into state-nationalism: i.e. the idea that each nation had “a natural or moral right to be incorporated in its own state, while conversely every state should incorporate the natural, organic solidarity of its proper constituent nation.”44 But nineteenth-century nationalism revolved not only around nations or peoples but also, and perhaps centrally, around races; in fact, as the following excerpt from Thomas Arnold's inaugural lecture at Oxford shows, for nine-

41

Freeman, “Race and language,” 280. George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, 152. 43 Christopher Hutton, “The language myth and the race myth: Evil twins of modern identity politics?” in The Language Myth in Western Culture, ed. Roy Harris (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2002): 132. 44 Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 2006): 21. 42

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teenth-century thinkers, language and race – as well as institutions and religion – crucially combined to define a nation. By the great elements of nationality, I mean race, language, institutions, and religion; and it will be seen that throughout Europe all these four may be traced up, if not actually in every case to the fall of the western empire, yet to the dark period which followed that fall; while in no case are all the four to be found united before it.45

With regard to the link between language and race, one possibility for linguists to position themselves was to view language as an organically-structured ‘mother-tongue’, and to see in the bond between mother and child the primal site of socialization. In this bond, the link between race and language was determined indirectly, but at a fundamental level by the primary socialization of the child.46

The ideology of the mother tongue plays a crucial role for George P. Marsh, whose 1859 text features the first-attested use of the phrase ‘native speaker’. In his introductory remarks, Marsh equates the "tones of the native language" with “the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast.”47 Thus, what mother's milk does for an individual's physical development is achieved by the native language in his or her intellectual and emotional progress. Later on, the native language of speakers of English is described as “the mother tongue” (59), “the English tongue” (68), “the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (69), “our national speech” (70), and “the Anglican speech” (76). Its native speakers are described as the “AngloSaxon race” (79) or the “Anglican people” (80); they comprise “the Englishman and the American.” In other words, English is not only the national language of Britain and the U SA , but also the language of a race: i.e. the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. As historians have amply described,48 during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Anglo-Saxonism was a 45

Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History, Delivered in Lent Term,

M D C C C X L I I : With the Inaugural Lecture Delivered in December, M D C C C X L I (London: T.

Fellowes, 5th ed. 1860): 25. 46 Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999): 7–8. 47 Marsh, “Address,” 59. 48 See: Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo Saxonism (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1981); Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo Saxons (Hanover N H : U P of New England, 1982); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United States

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powerful conceptual framework encompassing the British Empire and the U SA in a logic of racial exceptionalism based on both descent and culture. In that framework, language played an important role, as the traits of the Englishspeaking people – among them an expansionist drive, a youthful and manly character, and an emphasis on political liberties – were seen to be travelling along lines of Anglo-Saxon blood. Much of Anglo-Saxonism went along well with American republicanism and destinarian nationalism, as, just like the Anglo-Saxons of earlier times, Americans were seen to have a special mission in the world, which consisted in transforming and redeeming other nations by ‘exporting’ their republican institutions, but invocations of Anglo-Saxon unity and supremacy emanated from both Britain and the USA , as the following excerpt from a widely quoted address given in 1898 by Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903, attests: I have been called the apostle of the Anglo-Saxon race, and I am proud of that title [...]. I think the Anglo-Saxon race is as fine as any on earth […]. I refuse to think or to speak of the U S A as a foreign nation. We are all of the same race and blood. I refuse to make any distinctions between the interests of Englishmen in England, in Canada and in the United States [...]. Our past is theirs – their future is ours [...]. We are branches of one family.49

Particularly toward the end of the nineteenth century, Britons looked to the U SA for political lessons. Noticing both external and internal threats, among them European rivalries, colonial nationalism, and working-class unrest, political thinkers such as John Robert Seeley50 advocated a reorganization of the British Empire along American lines in order to endow it with greater coherence and stability. This ‘Greater Britain’ was to involve exclusively the white settlement colonies: i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and was to be based on the criteria of language and race. According to Seeley, once Britons learned to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it England, we shall see that here too is a United States [...] a great homogenous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.51

Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88.4 (March 2002): 1315–53. 49 Quoted in Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 35. 50 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1971). 51 Quoted in Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 21.

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Thus, the sociocultural scaffolding of this new empire-nation was to be provided by language, religion, and law; the biological basis was to be Anglo-Saxon blood. The followng quotation from the turn of the century once more explicitly links the English language with “the Anglo-Saxon race” and names the parts of the world to whom this “speech” then belonged: The English Language. – The English language is the speech spoken by the Anglo-Saxon race in England, in most parts of Scotland, in the larger part of Ireland, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, in South Africa, and in many other parts of the world. In the middle of the fifth century it was spoken by a few thousand men who had lately landed in England from the Continent: it is now spoken by more than one hundred millions of people. In the course of the next sixty years, it will probably be the speech of two hundred millions 52.

Incidentally, these are precisely the territories that were to be included in Seeley’s ‘Greater Britain’ – but also the countries which, more recently, have been labelled “the traditional bases of English, dominated by the ‘mother tongue’ varieties.”53 This returns us to the beginning of this chapter and the question of why the English native speaker has caused so much controversy in the World Englishes context. If, as just shown, mother-tongue English is described as belonging to certain parts of the world only, speakers from other geographical, national, and racial backgrounds are automatically denied nativespeaker status, no matter what their actual linguistic competence or proficiency is actually like – which is precisely the state of affairs criticized in the following: Discussion of World Englishes frequently makes a division of the different Englishes (or varieties of English) into two groups, labelled “Old/ Native/Inner Circle” Englishes/Varieties, on the one hand, and “New/ Non-native/Outer Circle” Englishes/Varieties on the other. […] Speakers of some Englishes (e.g., British, Australian) are native speakers of “English” while those of others (e.g., Indian, Nigerian, Singapore) are not. […] varieties such as IE [Indian English] and SE [Singaporean English] have, both linguistically and acquisitionally, the same status as varieties such as AE [American English] and BE [British English].54

52

J.M.D. Meiklejohn, The English Language. Its Grammar, History, and Literature: With Chapters on Composition, Versification, Paraphrasing, and Punctuation (London: Holden, 19th ed. 1899): 272. 53 Braj B. Kachru, “World Englishes: Approaches, issues and resources,” Language Teaching 25 (1992): 3. 54 Rajendra Singh et al., “On ‘New/non-native’ Englishes: A quartet,” 46, 48, 61.

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Conclusion This chapter has looked at the notion of the native speaker from a World Englishes perspective. In this field of study, the concept plays a double role: first, in model-making: i.e. by dividing varieties – and, of course, speakers – into ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ ones, and, second, in the debate about the norms and standards of the language which are to be recorded and taught. It was shown by means of a discourse-historical approach that at least some of the associations that burden the native speaker and make the concept's application to the World Englishes context problematic have a long history. As mentioned above, the term ‘native speaker’ was first attested in Marsh;55 in that speech, as well as in much of the contemporaneous and subsequent literature, it is associated with, among other things, Anglo-Saxon nationalism and racism. In sum, just like its contemporary counterpart, the nineteenth-century English native speaker was employed to ‘other’ particular speaker groups and assert ownership over the language. A final question is, of course, what all of the foregoing means for the contemporary native speaker in the World Englishes context. Obviously, the discourses that have been outlined briefly in this chapter have either lost some of their force, have changed considerably, or have been abandoned altogether. AngloSaxonism, for example, went out of fashion around World War I, and explicitly racial ideologies are no longer publicly accepted. So, shall we get rid of the native speaker, too? Apart from the fact that it appears at least difficult, if not outright impossible, to do away with a term not only deeply entrenched in scientific usage but also common in everyday speech, an important question in this context is what would be gained by doing so. As numerous authors have pointed out,56 the native speaker remains a useful reference point in both linguistics and language pedagogy, provided that a usage-based approach is adopted. Moreover, as noted by Kandiah from a postcolonial perspective, the fact is that large numbers of ordinary people, even those who do not explicitly use the term ‘native user’, consciously or unconsciously assume the notion in many of their ordinary interactions, so that there is no way we can pretend it has no reality.57

55

George P. Marsh, “Address.” For example, Joybrato Mukherjee, “The native speaker is alive and kicking,” 20. 57 Thiru Kandiah, “Epiphanies of the deathless native user’s manifold avatars: A post-colonial perspective on the native speaker,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 90. 56

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And, Kandiah continues, “The real question then is what the nature of that reality is.” A tentative answer might be that the native speaker is an ideograph connecting contemporary linguistics with some of its nineteenth-century roots. The term ‘ideograph’ was coined by McGee, who sees in it the crucial link between discourse and ideology.58 According to McGee, ideographs rather than arguments function as the central meaning-creating elements of political rhetoric, for example: Though words [or phrases] only (and not claims), such terms as ‘property,’ ‘religion,’ ‘right of privacy,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘rule of law,’ and ‘liberty’ are more pregnant than propositions ever could be. They are the basic structural elements, the building blocks, of ideology.59

Ideographs acquire meaning both synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, every ideograph is defined by the relations which it entertains with other ideographs. Diachronically, in order to endow an ideograph with meaning, an analogue for its proposed present usage must be found in an earlier, precedent usage. According to McGee, “both of these structures must be understood and described before one can claim to have constructed a theoretically precise explanation” of any ideology.60 An important characteristic of ideographs is that they are socially determined: i.e. each member of a particular community is socialized into a specific ideographic vocabulary, which will then guide his or her thought or behaviour and thus constitute a prerequisite for ‘belonging’ to the society. 61 On the other hand, there will always be disagreement as to the identity, legitimacy, or definition of specific ideographs within a given society, too, so that there is always a certain variability in ideographic usage, which, in turn, is a prerequisite for change. Ideographs are thus by no means static phenomena; their meaning and usage are subject to constant contestation and renegotiation. The present chapter has attempted to reconstruct part of the historical dimension of one particularly powerful linguistic ideograph – the native speaker. The social realities on which earlier uses and meanings of this ideograph were predicated have changed drastically with postcolonial changes in the status and function of English worldwide. New affiliations and loyalties with regard to English have developed and have caused confusion as to the ethnic and socio-cultural identity of a language and its speakers. This, in the 58

Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66.1 (February 1980): 4–5. 59 McGee, “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology,” 6–7. 60 “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology,” 14. 61 “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology,” 15.

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view of many scholars, makes the application of the native/non-native binary problematic and calls for terminological and conceptual revision.62 With regard to the so-called ‘New Englishes’, for one, the concepts ‘speaker’ and ‘variety’ or language must be clearly separated. While there can be no doubt that native and non-native speakers exist, it seems questionable to speak of ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ varieties or languages other than in the sense of ‘variety or language not possessing native speakers’. While this may be appropriate in the case of rudimentary pidgins, to label Indian or Singaporean English ‘nonnative’ is unjustified, even if the latter have only a minority of native speakers. Often, the label ‘non-native’ as applied to varieties or languages appears to imply instability, owed to a lack of native speakers. As Mufwene points out, however, the native speaker is not the critical nor necessary factor in the development of the norm itself or for its preservation. Although in most communities native speakers have assumed this role, more for preserving than developing the norm, several linguistic communities have done well, communication-wise, without them.63

In other words, New Englishes cannot be ‘non-native’ varieties or languages, neither if the label is meant to refer to the lack of native speakers nor with reference to the absence of stable norms. To sum up, the present chapter does not argue against the concept of the native speaker in general but against its application or usefulness in certain situations. It appears unrealistic, however, to think that we can break out of traditional, institutionalized ideologies without trying to understand, as best we can, the history of those ideologies and how they came to be as powerful as they are. The above reflections have endeavoured to make a start in this direction.

W OR K S C I T E D Acevedo Butcher, Carmen. ““The case against the ‘native speaker’,” English Today 82 (2005): 13. Afendras, Evangelos A., Sharon Millar, Eoghan Mac Aogáin, Ayo Bamgbose, Yamuna Kachru, Anjum P . Seleemi, Bent Preisler, Peter Trudgill, Florian Coulmas & Probal 62

See, for example, Syed A. Sayeed, “The notion ‘native speaker’: A philosophical response,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 103–108. 63 Salikoko Mufwene, “Native speaker, proficient speaker and norms,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 116.

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Dasgupta. “On ‘new/non-native’ Englishes: A gamelan,” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 295–321. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Arnold, Thomas. Introductory Lectures on Modern History, Delivered in Lent Term, M DCCCXL II . With the Inaugural Lecture Delivered in December, M DCCCXL I (London: T. Fellowes, 5th ed. 1860), http://www.archive.org/stream/introductorylect 00arno/introductorylect00arno_djvu.txt (accessed 8 March 2009). Backus, Ad. “Seeking the holy grail of nativeness,” in Annual Review of South-Asian Languages and Linguistics, ed. Rajendra Singh (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007): 47–54. Blommaert, Jan. “The debate is open,” in Language Ideological Debates, ed. Jan Blommaert (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999): 1–38. Brutt–Griffler, Janina, & Keiko K. Samimy. “Transcending the nativeness paradigm,” World Englishes 20 (2001): 99–106. Buschfeld, Sarah. English in Cyprus or Cyprus English? An Empirical Investigation of Variety Status (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013). Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch, ed. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014). Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “Interrogating the ‘native speaker fallacy’: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results,” in Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching, ed. George Braine (Mahwah N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999): 77–92. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA : MIT Press, 1965). Coulmas, Florian. “Introduction: The concept of native speaker,” in A Festschrift for Native Speaker, ed. Florian Coulmas (Janua Linguarum, Series Maior 97; The Hague: Mouton, 1981): 1–25. Craik, George L. A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest: With Numerous Specimens (London: Griffin, 1875). Dasgupta, Probal. “The native speaker: A short history,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 182–92. Donaldson, J.W. The New Cratylus; or Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language (London: J.W. Parker, 2nd rev. ed. 1850). Edwards, Alison, English in the Netherlands: Functions, Forms and Attitudes (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2016). Freeman, Edward A. “Race and language,” in Language and Linguistics, vol. 4: Language and Linguistic Theory 1865–1900, ed. Roy Harris (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995): 261–88. First published in the Contemporary Review 29 (1877). Garraty, John A., & Mark C. Carnes, ed. American National Biography, vol. 14 (New York: Oxford U P , 1999). Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1981).

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Hutton, Christopher. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999). Hutton, Christopher. “The language myth and the race myth: Evil twins of modern identity politics?” in The Language Myth in Western Culture, ed. Roy Harris (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2002): 118–38. Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905) Kachru, Braj B. “World Englishes: Approaches, issues and resources,” Language Teaching 25 (1992): 1–14. Kachru, Braj B., ed. The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982). Kandiah, Thiru. “Epiphanies of the deathless native user’s manifold avatars: A post-colonial perspective on the native speaker,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks CA & London: Sage, 1998): 79– 110. Kramer, Paul A. “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88.4 (March 2002): 1315–53. Kramsch, Claire. “Guest Column: The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker,” P ML A 112.3 (May 1997): 359–69. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 2006). MacDougall, Hugh. Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover N H : U P of New England, 1982). Marsh, George P. “Address,” in Inaugural Addresses of Theodore W. Dwight, Professor of Law, and of George P . Marsh, Professor of English Literature, in Columbia College, New York (New York: By Authority of the Trustees, 1859), http://name.umdl.umich.edu /age3247 (accessed 15 December 2005). Marsh, George P. Lectures on the English Language, ed., with additional lectures and notes, by William Smith (London: John Murray, 7th ed. 1874). McGee, Michael Calvin. “The ‘ideograph’: A link between rhetoric and ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66.1 (February 1980): 1–16. McKay, Sandra Lee. Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2002). Meiklejohn, J.M.D. The English Language. Its Grammar, History, and Literature: With Chapters on Composition, Versification, Paraphrasing, and Punctuation (London: Holden, 19th ed. 1899). Melchers, Gunnel, & Philip Shaw. World Englishes: An Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003). Mesthrie, Rajend, & Rakesh M. Bhatt. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008). Mufwene, Salikoko. “Native speaker, proficient speaker and norms,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 111–23.

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Mukherjee, Joybrato. “The native speaker is alive and kicking – linguistic and languagepedagogical perspectives,” Anglistik 16.2 (2005): 7–23. Müller, Max. Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861 (New York: Scribner, 1862). Patrick, Peter L. “The Speech Community,” in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling–Estes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 573–97. Piller, Ingrid. “Who, if anyone, is a native speaker?” Anglistik 12.2 (2001): 109–21. Pride, John B. “Native competence and the bilingual/multilingual speaker,” English World-Wide 2 (1981): 141–53. Rampton, Ben. “Displacing the ‘native speaker’: Expertise, affiliation and inheritance,” in The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader, ed. Roxy Harris & Ben Rampton (London & New York: Routledge, 2003): 107–11. Sayeed, Syed A. “The notion ‘native speaker’: A philosophical response,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 97–109. Seeley, J.R. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1971) http://www.archive.org/stream/expansionofengla00seeluoft/expansion ofengla00seeluoft_djvu.t (accessed 19 January 2009). Singh, Rajendra, ed. The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998). Singh, Rajendra, Jean D’Souza, K.P. Mohanan & N.S. Prabhu. “On ‘New/non-native’ Englishes: A quartet,” in The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, ed. Rajendra Singh (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1998): 45–61. Skutnabb–Kangas, Tove, & Robert Phillipson. “‘Mother tongue’: The theoretical and sociopolitical construction of a concept,” in Status and Function of Languages and Language Varieties, ed. Ulrich Ammon (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1989): 450–77. Wee, Lionel. “When English is not a mother tongue: Linguistic ownership and the Eurasian community in Singapore.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23 (2002): 282–95. Whitney, W.D. The Life and Growth of Language (London: King, 1875). Widdowson, H.G. “The ownership of English,” TES OL Quarterly 28 (1994): 377–89. Wyld, Henry Cecil. The Growth of English: An Elementary Account of the Present Form of Our Language, and Its Development (London: John Murray, 1907), http://www.archive .org/stream/growthofenglishe00wylduoft/growthofenglishe00wylduoft_djvxt (accessed 23 May 2009). Wyld, Henry Cecil. The Place of the Mother Tongue in National Education (London: John Murray, 1906).

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Orality and Literacy in Verbal Duelling Playing the Dozens in the Twenty-First Century.

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Contesting Community

A

the language of contested communities in postcolonial contexts runs into two major obstacles. In contrast to the Old World communities which formed the empirical basis of traditional ‘community studies’1 – undifferentiated, non-conflictual, and with a pool of definite attributes such as members’ origin, language, location, and class – postcolonial communities are anything but monochromatic. The analytical conundrum caused by this struggle over ideas and practices of collective identity in postcolonial settings is aggravated by the struggle over the term ‘community’ itself. The concept is fraught with ambiguity and is, ironically, one of the most fiercely contested notions in the humanities. Multiple meanings have been attributed to the concept over time, mostly because the ball has been passed from one discipline to another, each concentrating on the aspects of community that were most pertinent to its area of investigation. Since Tönnies introduced the concept of Gemeinschaft in 1887,2 sociological glosses of the term have been coalescing around the idea of ‘locality’: i.e. the assignment of community membership was understood as based on geographical proximity and cohabitation. However, after Margaret Stacey announced that the concept ‘community’ was hopelessly debased as a 1

N ATTE MP T AT INV ES TI GAT ING

William Williams, The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956); Ronald Frankenberg, Village on the Border: A Social Study of Religion, Politics and Football in a North Wales Community (London: Cohen & West, 1957); Colin Rosser & Christopher Harris, The Family and Social Change: A Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). 2 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag, 1887), tr. by Charles P. Loomis as Community and Association (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

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tool for social analysis, since nobody could provide a reliable definition either of “the defined geographical area” in question or of the boundaries of the group in which the sense of community inhered,3 the torch has been taken up by linguists. Ferruccio Rossi–Landi recognized the constitutive nature of language in the community,4 and Dell Hymes in his model of ethnography of communication relies heavily on the notion of a ‘speech community’ – an actual group of people who share rules for conduct and the interpretation of speech.5 The focus on spoken communication and face-to-face interaction reflects the interest of anthropologists in the study of small groups of native peoples – for instance, in the Pacific Northwest – for which this delimitation of the scope of ‘community’ was a convenient point of reference. By the end of the twentieth century, the drift of globalization had brought the margins to the centre, and with the help of new technologies people began to associate steadily with those who shared none of the features previously claimed necessary for admission to a community. While commonalities and patterns in language-use can undoubtedly be observed in such communities, these markers of belonging have sprung up in the process of interaction within the community rather than having been present there initially as a background shared by all members. To accommodate this development, John Swales coined the term ‘discourse community’ 6 to describe the relations among a group of people united by common goals or purposes, who may be dispersed all over the world and frequently communicate by written means exclusively. The key unit of his analysis is the notion of genre – the organizational pattern of written communication which belongs to and defines discourse communities.7 As an instantiation of a discourse community, he offers to look at a group of stamp collectors who live in different parts of the world but are brought together by common interest in the postal history of Hong Kong. The primary means of communication for the group consists of letters, occasional phone calls, a bi-monthly bulletin, and a specialized auction catalogue which contains multiple abbreviations and references intelligible solely to members of the community. 3

Margaret Stacey, “The Myth of Community Studies,” British Journal of Sociology 20.2 (June 1969): 134–47. See also Paul Hoggett, Contested Communities (Bristol: Policy, 1997): 6. 4 Ferruccio Rossi–Landi, Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). 5 Dell Hymes, “Toward Ehnographies of Communication: the Analysis of Communicative Events,” in Language and Social Context, ed. Paolo Giglioli (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 54– 55. 6 John Swales, “Approaching the Concept of Discourse Community,” paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1987. 7 John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990).

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25

Not surprisingly, after enjoying the limelight for some time the notion of discourse community was also subjected to heavy criticism for the lack of a clear definition and for harbouring internal contradictions. For instance, the “academic discourse community,” one of the main subjects of Swales’ analysis, can hardly be seen as sharing the same goals or genres in any meaningful sense.8 A more convenient elaboration of the idea of community is supplied by sociocultural theory. Étienne Wenger proposed a ‘community of practice’ 9 as a starting point for analysis: in contrast to a diffuse understanding of discourse community, community of practice has a clear definition referring to a group of people brought together by mutual engagement in a joint enterprise. Consequently, it was observed that by way of doing things together, the participants in the activity develop ways of relating to each other, common knowledge and beliefs, common ways of speaking – in short, practices.10 Looking at a community of practice rather than a speech community or a discourse community allows a researcher to incorporate noteworthy epiphenomena when individuals with no apparent shared background drift together and over time develop shared ways of speaking which become the marker of community membership. At the beginning of this section I mentioned a terminological stumbling block associated with the investigation of postcolonial communities. Hopefully, establishing some of the terrain on which the use of the term ‘community’ rests has revealed the precise nature of this stumbling block. The perpetual struggle over the meaning of ‘community’ leaves a researcher without a necessary point of reference to conduct a study of language of a community, since the scope of such a study and the appropriate reference group for analysis remain problematic. Certainly, some aspects of the concept are undisputed: for instance, Deborah Tannen’s general claim that “it is the creation of [...] shared meaning – communication – that makes a collection of individuals into a community.”11 However, such definitions are so nebulous that they preclude any possibility of final agreement. On the other hand, a concrete list of features (age, gender, origin, location, and class) that qualify individuals for community membership, provided by traditional community studies, reminds one of a punchline to an old physics joke – “a spherical horse in a vacuum” – referring to a concept

8

Erik Borg, “Discourse Community,” E L T Journal 57.4 (2003): 398–400. Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). 10 Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell–Ginet, Language and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007). 11 Deborah Tannen, Conversational Style: Analysing Talk Among Friends (Norwood N J : Ablex, 1984): 21. 9

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theorized so far away from reality that it can hardly be of any practical significance in applied analysis. It would be a tall order to attempt a final resolution of this issue in a brief chapter. What I aim to illustrate below is how the idea introduced into the study of community with the concept of community of practice can be taken even further in order to provide an analytical tool suitable for dealing with a particular speech event. Undeniably, postcolonial contexts defy the straightforward view of community as homogeneous and stable; the fluid identities of people in postcolonial settings confound traditional systems of measurement. For example, Robin Cohen questions the very existence of a distinctive Caribbean identity, since virtually nobody in the Caribbean is native to the area, and the transportation of African identity to the New World through slavery and the resulting admixture of other peoples resulted in immeasurable hybridity and diversity.12 If the only productive way to approach a postcolonial community is through one of the secondary constructs ‘discourse community’ or ‘community of practice’, then the focus of analysis will be on the specific forms of language that arose in that community – genres, or ‘ways of speaking’ – and the very process of creative adaptation whereby various sets of linguistic norms become fused in the emerging system of a creole. One thing is particularly noteworthy: not only may groups of people joined by common goals form a community that fathers genres as an offshoot of its existence, as illustrated by Hong Kong’s stamp-collector community with their special auction catalogue, but that genres and ways of speaking can themselves become the primary unifying factor. Evidence for the possibility of such a scenario may be found in a diachronic examination of a community which tracks the process of its formation, subsequent development of community-specific ways of speaking, and, finally, the emergence of these ways of speaking as the primary binding force of the community (in other words, a salient genre becoming a constitutive genre). In particular, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how the community of lower-class black urban youth gives rise to a specific speech practice, the game of dozens, and how over time the speech practice evolves into a powerful centripetal force which brings together into a community a collection of extremely dissimilar individuals, even in the absence of another common goal or shared background. By looking at the game of dozens, a playful exchange of insults found among urban youth in the African diaspora of the Caribbean and the U SA , I argue that a ‘way of speaking’ may in itself become the constitutive practice that engenders a community of practice. Peculiarly,

12

Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: U C L P , 1997): 138.

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the evolution of thought on the meaning of ‘community’ becomes a theoretical map of sorts for the history of a community and its signature speech event.

The Game of Dozens ‘The dozens’, also known in various sources as ‘sounding’, ‘signifying’, ‘joining’, ‘yo momma’ and under several other labels, is an instantiation of ritual insults – a speech act which formally resembles a simple insult but operates under different felicity conditions. Games consisting of playful exchanges of insults appear to be fairly widespread among adolescents: there exist, for instance, linguistic accounts of Turkish ‘verbal duelling’,13 ‘tantalisin’’ in Guyana, or similar sessions of mutual abuse in locker rooms in New Zealand.14 An unmistakably cognate practice of ‘rhyming’, an instance of ‘talking broad’, can be found in the Caribbean.15 However, the prototypical dozens was described as characteristic of lower-class African-American teenagers living in urban settings in the U SA .16 Several studies have attempted to show continuity between similar practices in Africa and the American dozens, confirming the hypothesis that the game of ritual insults has its roots in African speech practices and was brought to the U SA during the slave trade. As early as 1963, Donald C. Simmons suggested some possible West African sources from which American blacks may have devised their dozens: they included tone riddles, curses, and stereotyped sarcasm.17 More recently, Faraclas et al., in their comparative study of Nigerian Pidgin ( NP ) ‘wording’ and the dozens played by black teenagers in Harlem, presented compelling evidence for the fact that the two speech events are cognate: We conclude therefore that [...] numerous similarities between A A V E Sounding and N P Wording could only be attributed to cultural con-

13

Alan Dundes, Jerry Leach & Bora Özkök, “The Strategy of Turkish Boys’ Verbal Dueling Rhymes,” Journal of American Folklore 83/329 (July–September 1970): 325–49. 14 Koenraad Kuiper, “Sporting Formulae in New Zealand English: Two Models of Male Solidarity,” in English Around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. Jenny Cheshire (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991): 200–209. 15 Roger Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1983). 16 John Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult,” American Imago 1.1 (November 1939): 3–25; Roger Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens,” Journal of American Folklore 75/297 (July–September 1962): 209–20; William Labov, Language in the Inner City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). 17 Donald Simmons, “Possible West African Sources for the American Negro ‘Dozens’,” Journal of American Folklore 76/302 (October–December 1963): 340.

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tinuity between West Africa and the communities of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas.18

From the beginnings of its documented history to the creation of its most comprehensive linguistic account by William Labov in the 1970s, the dozens had matured into a full-fledged genre with well-developed formal features and a set of recognized rules. The game of dozens is, as the name suggests, framed as playful activity, and involves participants hurling insults at each other before an audience. At first glance, the goal of the game is to outdo the opponent in coarseness of insults (also known as ‘sounds’ or ‘disses’); indeed, it is easy to draw such a conclusion by looking at exchanges like the following: — Why don’t you get a real job? — Your mother. — That’s a low blow; speaking of low blows, how’s your mother? — Well, your mother’s like a railroad track – laid all over! — At least my mother doesn’t use telephone poles for tampons!19

However, there is method to this apparent madness. Labov sketched ten formulae to account for the all-pervading patterns in his material,20 and four clear rules which, if broken, lead to the game breaking out into the pragmatic space of truth-conditional insults. First of all, the dozens is not played tête-à-tête: it is a collective game, where the role of the audience is crucial. The number of players may vary from two to four and more, and the participants are not fixed for every session but may drift in and out of the exchange, with new players self-selecting from the audience. What is more important, the audience is not only a provider of new participants but also an ultimate judge: every insult uttered by a player is subsequently evaluated by the onlookers. The second, more important rule of the dozens states that the insults shall not be personal. Thurmon Garner, for instance, remarks that personalized attacks are considered a low form of retaliation, and the language, though offensive, must be impersonal.21

18

Nicholas Faraclas, Lourdes Gonzales, Migdalia Medina & Wendell Villanueva Reyes, “Ritualized insults and the African diaspora,” in Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles, ed. Susanne Mühleisen & Bettina Migge (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005): 62. 19 Simon Bronner, “’Your Mother’s Like. .. ’ Formula in Contemporary American Ritual Insults,” Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression 6 (1982): 199. 20 Labov, Language in the Inner City. 21 Thurmon Garner, “Playing the Dozens: Folklore as Strategies for Living,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69.1 (February 1983): 47–57. An elaboration on this rule suggests that an insult, rather than

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The third rule states that a sound is not to be denied but to be answered with a sound. A ritual insult is an invitation to a game, a match of wits, and therefore participants should keep the exchange going for as long as their stock of ready-made sounds or personal verbal dexterity allows them. Significantly, every sound links up with the previous one. Simple substitution of a component is not appreciated and is regarded as lack of wit, unless it occurs in ready-made sequences where the first line predetermines the second. Truly good players elaborate on the topic provided in the previous sound, taking it to the next level of inventiveness. The fourth main rule of the dozens concerns the attributes quoted in insults. Ritual insults in sounds can be distinguished from literal personal insults by the greater outlandishness of characterization, metaphoric exaggeration, and excessive use of hyperbole.22 Absurdity and blatant untruth help to clarify intentions. Such insults as (1) below are so obviously far from reality that they are patently untrue, and the speaker does not risk being taken personally and provoking serious confrontation: (1)

His mother was so dirty, when she get the rag take a bath, the water went back down the drain.23

The topics addressed in the dozens cover a wide but well-defined range of themes: promiscuity or masculine characteristics of the opponent’s mother, her ugliness, blackness, fatness or skinniness, old age or poverty. The description of attributes carries specifically pejorative value: age is old, clothing is ragged or dirty, appearance is ugly or nasty, sexual behaviour is loose or immoral, smell is stink, wealth is poor, food is poor or disgusting.24 Interestingly, images from mass media and commercial culture are frequently employed in denigrating similes. Without entering the debate on whether the genre-defining features are primarily formal25 or functional,26 one may point out that both sets of demands are satisfied by the dozens (at any rate, the dozens in its 1970s state-of-the-art manifestations). As a result of a collective effort by sociologists and psychobeing impersonal, should not be taken personally: thus, the responsibility for retaining the dozens within the area of ritual insults lies with the insultee. 22 Stephen Murray, “Ritual and Personal Insults in Stigmatized Subcultures: Gay – Black – Jew,” Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression 7 (1983): 189. 23 Labov, Language in the Inner City. 24 Language in the Inner City. 25 Amy Devitt, “Refusing Form in Genre Study,” in Genres in the Internet, ed. Janet Giltrow & Dieter Stein (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009): 27–47. 26 Carolyn Miller, “Genre as a social action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2 (May 1984): 151–67; Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings.

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logists to puzzle out the functional aspects of the game, the ‘valve for aggression’ theory has been developed,27 which suggests that both the repression of the African-American population by the whites and the submissive position of a boy in matriarchy had coalesced to shape the speech practice that was aimed at venting this repressed aggression in a harmless manner.28 To return to the argument presented at the beginning of this chapter, in the early decades of its documented history the dozens was regarded as an independent genre which had grown from the fertile soil of constant communication within a clearly delineated group of people – a community – in the urban areas of the U SA . The researchers may have admitted that the dozens was one of the signature genres of the communities under consideration, but membership in the communities was assigned on the basis of completely different features. Variably, it was a community formed on the basis of geographical proximity and cohabitation as well as age,29 or, in addition to shared demographic background, it was brought together by a common endeavour such as joint field trips.30 In the focus of Abrahams’ investigation in the early 1960s was a community united by all of the above features. However, the specific verbal practices were seen solely as a by-product of communal existence and under no circumstances could be recognized as constitutive. On a still shot of ‘the dozens community’ through a Labovian lens, one sees groups of adolescent lower-class AfricanAmericans, predominantly boys, who lived in the same neighbourhood of Harlem, New York, and engaged in the same activities day after day: the boys were united by age, sex, race, proximal habitation, income, and social class, and one of the multiple ways of doing things together that they developed was a type of verbal duelling.

The Dozens on TV : Continuity of a Genre It is a common refrain of contemporary pragmatic study that a researcher must approach a speech event diachronically as well as synchronically. In the re27

For example, Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult”; Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens”; Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia U P , 1969). 28 Several alternative explanations have been offered – for example, Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964; New York: Aldine Transaction, 2006), and Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! (New York: Dial, 1969), suggest that the main purpose of the dozens is to practise for the more complex verbal endeavours in future life, while Joseph White, “Toward a Black Psychology,” Ebony 9 (1970): 25–52, contrary to the prevailing view, argues that through the dozens teenagers learn to “keep cool” and react in non-violent ways to a threatening situation. 29 Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult.” 30 Labov, Language in the Inner City.

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mainder of this chapter I aim to demonstrate that while the game of dozens has preserved remarkable homogeneity over the years, in its modern context it has matured into the constitutive practice of a community significantly more diverse in the make-up of individual members. As has been pointed out by Peter Snow,31 a major problem in the research of insults is methodological: owing to controversial public opinion on the subject of obscene language, a researcher inevitably encounters difficulties in obtaining uncensored material. I have attempted to overcome the problem by drawing modern data from the TV shows Yo Momma, which ran on MTV in 2006–2008, and Vilification Tennis, an independent show presented by entertainers from Minnesota, with a selection of episodes from 2009.32 Yo Momma is a reality television game show which features verbal contests of adolescent boys and girls strikingly similar to those described by Labov and other scholars of the dozens. In its advertising campaign, Yo Momma is marketed as real-life verbal battles among lower-class urban kids, conveniently shot on camera in their traditional hang-out locations in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The show is brought into an improvised studio in a run-down depot only for the final round. Therefore, producers endow it with almost ethnographic recording-like value. However, a certain amount of editing and post-production is indeed present, as the existence of sounds which did not appear in the final cut demonstrates. It is not known how much scripting is involved, although the producers insist that the reality show is unscripted, and there is no reason to suspect otherwise. Vilification Tennis, in turn, is an independent live comedy show which takes place at different locations in Minnesota during festivals and is occasionally shot on static camera by an amateur crew. Despite the formal presentation with contestants on stage and the audience sitting in the pit stalls, the amateur filming, spontaneity of reaction, and flow of the show suggest that

31

Peter Snow, “The Use of ‘Bad’ Language as a Politeness Strategy in a Panamian Creole Village,” in Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles, ed. Susanne Mühleisen & Bettina Migge (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005): 23–43. 32 Altogether, thirty-two episodes were transcribed and coded to form a corpus of 240 insults. It is a part of a larger corpus which additionally includes transcriptions of the T V show Baggin’ from VH1, and 260 insults from earlier material. See: Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens”; Milicent Ayoub & Steven Barnett, “Ritualized Verbal Insult in White High School Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 78/310 (October–December 1965): 337–44; Bronner, “‘Your Mother’s Like. .. ’ Formula in Contemporary American Ritual Insults”; Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult”; Garner, “Playing the Dozens: Folklore as Strategies for Living”; Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die!; Labov, Language in the Inner City), all coded for the same features.

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Vilification Tennis is the closest to a documentary – truly unscripted and nonproduced.33 A comparison of the coded features in the two-part corpora of older and modern dozens allows one to state with certainty that the similarity of the verbal games seen in 1939, 1964, the 1970s, and the 2000s in different urban centres of the U SA could not be plausibly attributed to the universals of human discourse, but speaks, rather, for the existence of a consistent and recognizable speech event widespread in ethnically diverse settings. A set of ten formulae as outlined by Labov34 adequately covers most of the insults transcribed in the more recent corpus; the four key rules of the dozens are invariably adhered to by the modern-day players; and the range of themes demonstrates equal stability across time. The comparative examination of the insults in the corpora shows how the dozens has grown into a well-established genre with defined framing devices, or markers of footing,35 over the years. These markers, when encountered in a speech event, immediately invoke a frame of the dozens in the minds of players and call for respective interpretation of the utterances. Since the dozens has a long history behind it, it is inevitable that it connects to the mass of other texts in the sphere of intertextuality. When constructing their disses, players weave – sometimes unconsciously – a complex net of allusions. These allusions are always effortlessly recognized by other community members and may refer, for instance, to classic sounds such as (2): (2) (3)

33

Your momma eat Dog Yummies.36 She don’t eat animal crackers; she is animal – in crackers!

In case of both shows it can be argued that a T V programme does not represent naturally occurring language. While admitting to this weakness of material, I may offer two reasons not to discard the data immediately. First, the dozens is an inherently on-stage speech event, during which participants expect to be looked at and judged by spectators. Shy teenagers, who would probably slip into restrained conversational behaviour in front of the cameras, are not likely candidates for such an activity (especially since the players for Yo Momma are self-nominated). Secondly, the extreme speech behaviour (which is usually seen as an aspect of Observer’s paradox likely to be provoked by the presence of a camera), with participants trying to present themselves in the best light and drawing on every available verbal resource, is the norm for this naturally combative and entertaining activity. However, no blind generalizations should be made on the basis of this analysis, and the methodological restrictions should be borne in mind when deciding on the representativeness of the study. 34 Language in the Inner City. 35 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1974). 36 Labov, Language in the Inner City.

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Another type of intertextual connection is to the framing devices of other types of joking speech events: many modern insults are styled after the popular joke form ‘Do you know what the difference is [...]?’ (4)

You know what is the difference between Lory and Chewbacca? Lory has a bigger cup.

In addition, references abound to jokes which have become elements of Internet-era folklore (such as ‘computer dummy’ jokes about feeding cheese to a computer mouse and throwing a curtain over the monitor to close a programme window): (5)

You know how you can tell that Chris here was using a computer? It's not when there is a curtain on the screen, and it's not when there is cheese for the mouse – it's when the joystick sweats [the speaker imitates masturbation]

At the same time, this dimension of creativity is stabilized by well-recognizable markers which have preserved their essence during historical development. The speech event of the dozens is invariably a collective speech event, with the audience playing the role of an adjudicator. Up to the present time, the dozens relies on the stock of traditional themes and makes use of exaggerated and outlandish epithets to ensure its special perlocutionary quality: to impose on an utterance an illocutionary force of an insult which is nevertheless not taken personally. Interestingly, Yo Momma apparently recognizes its continuity with the classic dozens, as the jingle introducing the show includes the formula cited by Dollard: “I wouldn’t take it if I was you!”37 Since a more detailed account of establishing comparable units of analysis in the two parts of the corpus is redundant for the present chapter, hereafter I will concentrate on other aspects of the diachronic study. Despite the remarkable degree of stability that the dozens has demonstrated, the overwhelming changes in society could not leave the speech event unaffected. The ongoing effacement of the border between white and black communities, which had started in the middle of the last century, has led to a certain degree of diffusion. Even though social inequality still exists, if not legally then in the minds of many, the two communities living side by side inevitably converge in cultural and linguistic aspects. Marcyliena Morgan has aptly described the controversial reality: omnificent African-American verbal styles and repertoires continue to flourish, in spite of American middle-class values which both criticize 37

Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult.”

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and fetishize the culture and language. The concrete result of this dualism is a dominant culture which describes African-American speech as bad, uneducated, unintelligible, etc., while wantonly imitating and celebrating its wit, creative vitality, and resilience.38

The interest in African-American speech styles and speech practices is clearly manifested in popular culture, where the last years have seen the influx of rap and hip-hop artists making use of typically black language. The very fact that popular television channels like MTV introduced shows such as Yo Momma, centred on the dozens, speaks in favour of this convergence. This process was reflected, among other areas, in the demographic make-up of the dozens’ players. While earlier studies mention that very few females took part in playing the dozens, and there is no account of middle-aged players39 or whites,40 these three groups are broadly represented among the modern players (Table 1). White

AfricanAmerican

Age –17 18–29

Sex 30+

M

F

Number of insults by respective players

108

154

5

233

24

182

80

Total percentages

41

59

1.10

89

9.90

69.50

30.50

Table 1. Demographic factors in modern dozens.

There is generally a high level of diversity among modern dozens players. Unlike the typical neighbourhoods from the square one of the dozens’ linguistic description, Yo Momma and Vilification Tennis participants fail to share many pivotal characteristics of community members. Because both TV shows cast their scouting net countrywide, it is only in rare cases that final yo momma matches are played between persons who live in the same area, work or study together, or otherwise engage with one another regularly. There is usually no 38

Marcyliena Morgan, “More Than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African-American Culture,” in African-American English, ed. Salikoko Mufwene, John Rickford, Guy Bailey & John Baugh (New York: Routledge, 1998): 251. 39 According to Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle, older men engaged into other forms of “talking broad,” such as delivering longer rhymed toasts. 40 A single study, Ayoub & Barnett, “Ritualized Verbal Insult in White High School Culture,” was directed at finding white dozens’ players and discovered several white boys taking part in the verbal duel in an Ohio high school.

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clear line separating the groups of older and younger players during the game: all age groups are represented in almost every session. As to-date analysis of demographic dimensions of the dozens demonstrates, neither race nor sex can be considered a community-building factor that is shared by every player. Thus, at the core of the modern dozens-playing community is the speech event itself, the ritual verbal duelling among the insiders who know the rules and recognize the frame, and who may in turn gradually change the frame by virtue of regularly ‘doing things together’. In tune with the hypothesis presented here, the salient practice of a community has become its constitutive practice.

From Orality to Literacy When a community is analysed from the standpoint of a linguist, language of ingroups is often described as a ‘product’ at a given time.41 That is to say, language in a community evolves in the course of engagement in common activities, and longitudinal data on a salient linguistic practice may yield very heterogeneous results. This process is observable in the dozens, where a constitutive practice is slightly reshaped by community members over time while staying within the limits of a well-established genre. The tendencies exhibited by demographic variables are reflected in linguistic developments: since the make-up of the players demonstrates convergence between the white and black communities, the language of the dozens shows similar trends. These trends become manifest through the language features more characteristic of General American than of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE ) – for instance, when the non-standard colouring of speech is achieved by infusing slang terms and ‘rapspeak’ into otherwise standard language. One of the most drastic changes in the dozens’ formulaic pattern is connected with the admission of women as fully legitimate players: pregnancy and menstruation, topics previously under strict taboo, may now be broached by female speakers: (6) You know why you get a period? Because you fucking deserve it!

Further developments include the introduction of a new insult formula and new commercial realia into the epithets, loss of certain discursive strategies, as well as elaboration of syntactic structure of the sounds. Strictly speaking, there is a single blanket effect of societal evolution accounting for the observed pattern of changes. This pattern, I argue, can be regarded as indicative of a note-

41

Joan Cutting, Analyzing the Language of Discourse Communities (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000).

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worthy change in society and runs parallel to the development of a community from primarily oral, locality-based to primarily literate, practice-based. Describing the game of dozens, Dollard was amazed at its verbal richness, but at the same time he felt alien to this vital and ludic practice, where participants found joy in the sheer weaving together of challenging epithets. 42 He attempted to explain this foreignness by ascribing to the event a social function which does not and cannot exist in his own native community – venting of aggression at whites. What struck him as exotic was not merely the joking exchange of insults – as Dollard noted, he himself had observed a similar practice among white, middle-class male friends, who amiably hurl at each other accusations of sexual promiscuity, unmanliness or homosexuality. It was not the particular obscenity of language – it would have been racist to claim that black youths possess an inborn ‘obscene-language’ faculty while whites do not understand any vocabulary outside the scope of Miss Manners’ manual. It was the combination of those characteristics in a very systematic, ritualized manner, remarkably uniform across the U SA , that made researchers feel as if they had been looking in on a different world that deviates from their own in the ways people entertain themselves, express themselves – the ways they think. In what ways was a community of black youths playing the dozens different from their white counterparts as described in psychology books? Undoubtedly, Dollard was correct in talking about racial tensions in this group caused by their underprivileged position in American society, particularly in the period before the Civil Rights movement. However, it was noted above that many societies developed similar oral practices, and by far most of them were not straining under an overt heritage of slavery. Apart from that, there are social reasons for the content, but not for the formal side of the speech event. Especially in the 1930s (when first described), the dozens was a carefully structured oral event, a show of verbal prowess (thus proving that this quality was highly valued), which involved rhymed and rhythmically arranged, often formulaic and prefabricated remarks, as in the blues and the ballad. It appears to me that the key word here is ‘oral’. Scholars of orality admit that at present there are hardly any societies which can be termed completely primary oral: i.e. not influenced by literacy in any way. However, some societies are more oral than others. For a representative of a highly literate society – a scholar immersed in literate ways of thinking deeper than most others – a culture closer to the primary oral end of the continuum would have indeed seemed alien and deviant. Applying these considerations, it seems that a lowerclass black community at the beginning of the documented history of the 42

Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult.”

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37

dozens represented a more oral area on the oral–literate scale, and that its development over the years can be viewed through the lens of social movement towards the literate end of the scale. Primary oral and literate societies To repeat the words of Walter Ong, who put together the orality–literacy story in a most fascinating and revealing way, many early linguists dismissed the idea of a discrete division between written and oral language.43 They considered writing as merely representing speech in a tangible form. Writing was seen as a true form of language, and speaking as a faulty, incomplete form. In current linguistics, however, it is an accepted truth that the primary form of language is oral, while writing appears quite late in its development and often does not appear at all. The rediscovered relationship between orality and literacy has led the way to psychological and linguistic studies of primary oral cultures – those cultures that are unaffected by writing in any of its forms. This direction of research is different from, for instance, comparative studies of the speech of literates and illiterates in the contemporary U SA , since in the present even people who cannot read are so immersed in the culture of writing and print that they are brought up to think in ‘literate’ ways. The recognition of the existence of such inherently ‘literate’ and ‘oral’ ways of thinking has been one of the most striking results of research into primary orality. It is a mistake to think that only literate cultures can produce literature: oral cultures have created masterpieces – for example, the Iliad, production of which would not have been possible in a literate mind. Nevertheless, in the view of literates the line between illiteracy and stupidity tends to be blurred. 44 Nine features of the oral mode of thinking45 make up the framework which reveals the locomotive power behind the evolution of the dozens:        43

additive rather than subordinative aggregative rather than analytic redundant or ‘copious’ conservative or traditionalist close to the human lifeworld agonistically toned empathetic and participatory

Walter J. Ong, S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). 44 Cf. A.R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, tr. Martin LopezMorillas & Lynn Solotaroff, ed. Michael Cole (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1976). 45 Ong, Orality and Literacy.

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homeostatic situational rather than abstract.

Offering an analytic insight into such typicalities of an early oral psyche as its propensity to coordinative syntax, bulky collocations, and frequent self-repetition, as well as reluctance to discard formulaic expressions and great flexibility in terms of realia incorporation, this framework maps the migration of the dozens through linguistic routes from Labov’s time to the present. Oral thinking among American youths The concept of the ‘orality–literacy continuum’ arose within the scholarship of Homeric poetry. Is it justified to make a leap from the Odyssey and the Iliad to the ritual invective on the streets of Harlem in the 1960s? The answer is ‘yes’, if one takes into account an element linking Greek oral tradition to the advent of pervasive literacy. As Ruth Finnegan reminds us, Orality and literacy are not two separate and independent things; nor (to put it more concretely) are oral and written modes two mutually exclusive and opposed processes for representing and communicating information. On the contrary, they take diverse forms in differing cultures and, insofar as they can be distinguished at all as separate modes rather than a continuum, they mutually interact and affect each other, and the relations between them are problematic rather than self-evident.46

As a step in the continuum from primary orality to literacy, Ong has described as ‘secondary orality’ that which functions in modern literate contexts. Accordingly, it can be assumed that the practice of playing the dozens at the outset of its documented history is an example of such secondary orality. It is noteworthy that the label ‘oral’ need not be considered condescending or racist. However, it is easy to question the existence of an oral culture in the U SA in the twentieth century. For many, this country is a symbol of progress and of the merciless discarding of tradition. In this respect, I am inclined to agree with Ong: “Oral formulaic thought and expression ride deep in consciousness and the unconscious, and they do not vanish as soon as one used to them takes pen in hand.”47 Many cultures, he continues, have known writing for many centuries but have never completely internalized it: for instance, Arabic cultures or certain other Mediterranean cultures still rely heavily on formulaic thought and expression. It is beyond doubt that no completely primarily oral culture existed in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, keeping in mind that 46 47

Ruth Finnegan, Orality and Literacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988): 175. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 26.

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39

many cultures and subcultures, even in a high-tech ambiance, had preserved much of the mindset of primary orality to varying degrees, Edwards and Sienkewicz are fully justified in listing ‘sounding’, ‘signifying’, ‘playing the dozens’ etc. among instances of ritual invective in residually oral societies.48 The movement from primary orality to literacy does not equal ‘progress’ in its strict sense: development from primitive to advanced, from worse to better. However, the tenets of the globalized world of today urge this development and make it inevitable. Societies all over the world gradually give up their oral residue, and black youth is no exception. Through the years, playing the dozens has been preserved as a homogeneous speech event with merely minor changes. Even a cursory analysis makes clear the correlation between these changes and the process of expressive development from a residually oral to a more literate stage. More careful observation may yield insights into the dynamics of the process, and make the prediction of further development of the speech event possible. Playing the dozens: residual orality In his description of the low-income black community which provided the informants for his and others’ study of the dozens, Lefever remarks that it is similar to the ‘more primitive’ societies where the practice of verbal duelling is prominent: the Inuit (Eskimo) or the Tiwi.49 Both ‘primitive societies’ and lowincome urban areas are heavily oral in their forms of communication. Both have a minimum of social organization apart from kinship and peer groupings: in the more ‘primitive’ societies, social and political institutions are under-developed, while the African-American urban communities were shut out from them by segregation. This led to the adoption of an expressive life-style which relied heavily on such values as verbal skill and the art of body movement. The description of this expressive life-style is strikingly similar to the mentality of the societies living in the state of secondary orality. Since Lefever was interpreting data on the dozens gathered in the 1930s–1960s, that is essentially the period in the community life that he refers to. Earlier dozens demonstrate many of the characteristics of an oral mindset. Such a practice could generally have developed only in an oral society, where verbal skill is appreciated as performative art.50 Literate scholars frequently misinterpret such practices by taking the invective at face value, as if verbal

48

Viv Edwards & Thomas Sienkewicz, Oral Cultures Past and Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Harry Lefever, “‘Playing the Dozens’: A mechanism for social control,” Phylon 42.1 (1981): 85. 50 There are, however, ‘literate-society’ exceptions to this such as the ‘flyting match’ of Early Modern English poetry. 49

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abuse was sincere; only a member of an oral community can fully appreciate the degree to which the invective crosses the border between truth-conditional and performative.51 Notably, most of the features of the oral psyche (apart, perhaps, from the last one, ‘situational rather than abstract’) are observable in the verbal practice of dozens players. One such feature is a clear prevalence for additive thinking over subordinative thinking. The sounds quoted by Labov52 are evidently constructed by a person immersed in orality: they are organized as an additive list, rather than a subordinative structure typical of chirographic societies: (7) Your mama’s a weight-lifter! a butcher! a peanut man! a iceman... a Boston Indian.

The insult (7) is a cumulative list of abusive terms, which, had it been recorded in writing by a person of a literate mind (say, in a novel), would have been rendered in a more elaborate syntactic structure. Generally, the sounds recorded by Labov show a tendency to be short, unextended declarative sentences: (8) Your mother got a putty chest. (9) Your mother got on sneakers.

The second feature of oral thought, aggregative rather than analytic, pertains to the affinity of oral folk with formulae and word clusters. This feature is manifested in the fact that the dozens collected in different periods of time before Labov and by Labov himself demonstrate remarkable coincidence with his ten formulaic patterns. For instance, the response formula “At least my X ain’t” is used invariably in much of Abrahams’ collection (10),53 in Bronner’s examples (11)54, and by Labov’s group of respondents (12).55 (10) At least my mother don’t work in a coal yard. (11) At least my mother doesn't use telephone poles for tampons! (12) At least my mother don't live in the water-crack, like yours.

The fact that oral cultures retain formulae is connected with the psychodynamics of orality: when one cannot preserve information in writing, one needs to preserve it in the memory, and to memorize, one has to rely on mnemonic devices such as formulae or rhyme. For this reason, the incidence of rhymed 51 52 53 54 55

Edwards & Sienkewicz, Oral Cultures Past and Present, 112. Labov, Language in the Inner City. Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens.” Bronner, “‘Your Mother’s Like.. .’ Formula in Contemporary American Ritual Insults.” Labov, Language in the Inner City.

Orality and Literacy in Verbal Duelling

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41

dozens in the first part of the corpus is very high: more than a fifth of all sounds are rhymed. Redundancy of oral thought can be illustrated by the corpus of earlier dozens as well. It is revealed in the manner in which players deal with problematic situations when a speaker cannot immediately come up with a retort. Speaking before an audience, an orator – from an oral as well as literate society – is at risk of stumbling and losing the thread of her speech. The crucial difference is that in a literate world, she might peep into an outline or prompt and gather her bearings. In an oral world, she has no aids outside her mind; the orator merely has to keep going until she recovers her chain of thoughts. In this situation, self-repetition is highly useful: it allows one to gain time and conveniently creates an impression that the rhetor is doing it for special effect or to emphasize a point. When boys in Labov’s study fail to invent a retort immediately, they keep claiming the floor by producing a formulaic opening, and then resort to repetition to gain time: (13) Aww, nigger, you look like-you look like Jimmy Durante's grandfather!

Conservatism, or traditionalism of oral thought inherent to the dozens manifests itself in much the same way that aggregativeness does. The same sounds are carefully preserved by the community and are repeated year after year. For instance, a traditional rhymed opening (14) is cited in collections by Labov, by Abrahams, and by Garner.56 (14) I don’t play the dozens, the dozens ain’t my game But the way I fucked your mama is a goddamn shame.

Likewise, the topics for sounds appear to have preserved their essence over the years: such themes as a mother’s sexual promiscuity, her unfeminine looks or behaviour, or an opponent’s homosexuality are present throughout the history of the genre. Closeness to the human lifeworld is yet another important feature of orality. Interpretative accounts of the dozens unanimously point out the fact that small children first joined the groups of their own to play ‘clean dozens’,57 then proceeded to try and refine themselves in the art of ‘dirty dozens’. They did not 56

Language in the Inner City; Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens”; Deep Down in the Jungle; Garner, “Playing the Dozens: Folklore as Strategies for Living.” 57 In the clean dozens, normally played by younger children, no allusion is made to sexual matters, while dirty dozens are played by adolescents and young adults and involve extremely crude references to sexual intercourse and reproductive organs.

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flee into isolation and learn the rhymes out of a book; they came out onto the street and listened to their friends play, and then, by trial and error, styled out their own repertoire. That is to say, the art of dozens was learnt by apprenticeship. It was impossible to separate the verbal practice from the human lifeworld, because oral society had not internalized literate means of study – examining a list or reading a textbook. Rap Brown notes in a widely quoted passage: “The street is where young bloods get their education. I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit.”58 Undoubtedly, the sixth aspect – agonistically toned discourse – is fairly selfevident in the case of the dozens. The speech event itself is the best example of how oral folk tend to organize their practices and activities in combat-like fashion. The players clearly experience the game of dozens in antagonistic terms: they perceive themselves as engaged in a struggle which finally yields a winner and a loser. The seventh feature, by contrast – empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced – needs to be rendered in the terms specific to the speech event. In the dozens, there is no chance for a speaker to identify with the character in a narrative; narrator and hero are the same person. However, the participatory nature of the dozens is manifest in the role of the audience. The audience is not a silent listener, shut out from the speaking activity: in the dozens, the audience is the ultimate judge of the combat, and can egg on opponents to fight or support any of the players, or, more than that – provide new players when old ones throw in the towel. Participants cannot merely recite canned jokes; that will inevitably lead to defeat. In the dozens, one constantly orients herself towards the audience, listens to their reaction, and adjusts the performance accordingly. Thus, empathetic and participatory thinking is intrinsic to the dozens. Finally, the homeostatic nature of oral thought can be identified when looking at the repertoire of those playing the the dozens. This feature crops up in the dynamic body of images employed in the construction of insults. The themes of the dozens remain homogeneous: a mother is fat, dirty, promiscuous, black, ugly; an opponent is homosexual, weak or stupid, etc. However, in order to adjust to changing reality, the players reshape the stock of epithets drawn from the domain of commercial products, film characters, or celebrities. In the collection by Abrahams,59 the players refer to John Bargain Store (an American cheap store of the 1960s) and Thunderbird – the cheap sweet wine popular among drunkards in the U SA in the 1960s. In Labov’s corpus, the realia mentioned are 58 59

Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens.”

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43

Dog Yummies, an old dogfood brand, and Mighty White – a bread brand which disappeared from the shops in the 1980s.60 Dollard’s players refer to Tulane and Broad – the neighbourhood in New Orleans which used to be notorious for its high rate of criminality.61 In this way, the players adjust to the time-flow, discarding from their repertoire what is no longer current and relevant. Advance of the literate mode With desegregation, along with a higher degree of infiltration of African-American culture into the mainstream (and vice versa) and the spreading effects of globalization, the secondary oral mentality of society is giving way to a literate mindset. The advance of the literate mode of thinking manifests itself, among other things, in the speech event of the dozens. On the one hand, some properties of the oral psyche have been retained up to the present day. For example, the dozens is still undoubtedly an instance of agonistically toned discourse characteristic of an oral life-style. On the other hand, the additive nature of the dozens has been displaced by the subordinative manner of organizing thought, representative of a literate mind. Modern players do not rely on simple declarative sentences listing abusive terms, as was customary in earlier times. In the modern dozens, complex sentence structures are employed, with elements regulated in their hierarchy by conjunctions, adverbs, and other linking devices. Although the players do not always succeed in constructing a grammatical sentence with a complex syntactic structure, they persist in trying to do so, which is indicative of significant literate influence: (15) I can see you're a big low man, that's why you can be a good soccer goalie, because you're used to balls flying in your face.

As with the other features of orality described, the aggregativeness of oral thought has been undergoing changes in recent years. Linguistically, oral folk tend to rely on formulae and word clusters which stay unchanged for a long time, preserving the wisdom laboriously collected by their ancestors. Indeed, many of the formulae of the dozens have been preserved up to the present. However, as many as three formulae identified by Labov have become obsolete in the modern dozens: the ‘At least my X ain’t’ response formula is no longer used; and the formulae ‘Your mother raised you on X’ and ‘Your mother eat X’ have disappeared. A new formula, ‘Do you know what the difference [...]’ has been introduced (e.g., in (4) a speaker compares his opponent to a big furry alien character from Star Wars). 60 61

Labov, Language in the Inner City. Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult.”

44

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The manner in which an oral life-style loses its hold on the participants’ psyche is further displayed in their avoidance of redundancy. If self-iteration was previously a popular device among players to gain time and maintain the flow of words while thinking about the next sound, nowadays participants do not have this discursive strategy in their repertoire. Lack of skill in organizing oral performance separately from a mental ‘script’ is betrayed in failed sounds, when a player strives to provide a punchline immediately in the most concise and exact way, and, if she fails to do so, interrupts the delivery and acknowledges defeat. In (16) and (17), speakers immediately give up on the sounds without attempting to resort to self-repetition and rescue the sequence; obviously, their literate mode of thinking regards redundancy as a bigger discursive sin than a failed sound. (16) I heard yo mom just successfully talked a gorilla down; she was honoured for it; she was the only one could communicate with 'im, talk about ... damn! (17) This dude's breath smell like train smoke – he breath like ... damn it!

Concerning conservativeness of oral thought, dozens players have come a long way from the highly traditionalist mode of earlier times. In the modern dozens, it is not the preservation of tradition that counts but originality and inventiveness. These values are made explicit in the introductory speeches to Yo Momma, when the hosts state that they are looking for “originality, delivery, and sting.” The same tendency appears in the comments made by Internet audience on YouTube pages where Yo Momma episodes are posted: the most frequent negative evaluation a player can receive there reads ‘I have heard this one before’. The stock of themes has lost its traditional inalterability, too. Previously taboo topics such as pregnancy and menstruation are now freely topicalized by the players: female speakers draw on the body of commonly tabooed images available to women, since the typically male domain of sexual aggression is inaccessible to them. In the world of the modern dozens, the literate approach to learning holds sway. Collections of disses are widely available commercially, in book form62 as well as on multiple Web pages.63 The need for apprenticeship-like learning of 62

For example, James Percelay, Monteria Ivey & Stephan Dweck, Snaps: The Original Yo' Mama Joke Book (New York: William Morrow, 1994), and Double Snaps (New York: William Morrow, 1995); James Percelay, Monteria Ivey, Stephan Dweck & Ice T, Triple Snaps (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); and James Percelay, Snaps 4 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998). 63 For example, Yo Mama Jokes, http://www.ahajokes.com/yo_mama_jokes.html (accessed 1 January 2010).

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45

the dozens has lost its clout; whereas players do practise their oral delivery styles in real ‘verbal battles’ to achieve perfection, the composition of the jokes now belongs to the domain of literate practices. In the terminology of Ong’s framework: in a literate society, people do not have to rely on modes of practice that are close to the human lifeworld, because they are capable of preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus. Furthermore, the role played by the special audience of the dozens which used to account for its participatory qualities has changed. Even in Yo Momma, the show closest in its characteristics to the classic dozens, the audience has a propensity to sit back and fall into the role outlined for it by Goffman,64 removed from the speech event and participating solely through back-channel signals. The audience is no longer the ultimate judge of the sounds: in the shows, an appointed judge assumes this role (an objective evaluator, a host). Such a shift immediately diminishes the importance of the player’s attempts to orient towards the audience and to involve it into her performance. The player grows self-sufficient in her performance, delivering it independently of the surrounding world. Essentially, the involvement factor in this situation is equal to that of any spectator reading a book about the proceedings or watching them on the screen. Thus, the empathetic and participatory quality of the expressive lifestyle of secondary orality retreats with the advance of the literate mode. Finally, the dynamic change of the referenced realia is explicable against the background of the homeostatic nature of the oral psyche. The bundle of images that gained recognition among modern players includes Windows OS, BlueTooth technology, or Food Network – a TV channel that airs programmes about cooking: (18) What are you, Windows 98? [addressed to a player who is very slow to come UP with retorts] (19) Yo momma’s so stupid, she went to dentist saying she wanted a BlueTooth.

Surprisingly, in the constitution of these very insults a contrary trend emerges. A large share of ‘yo momma’s so stupid’ insults in the modern corpus refer to the hypothetical mother’s ignorance of the meaning of words, thus demonstrating the high linguistic awareness of dozens players. When participants sound on misunderstanding of a polysemous word or literal reading of an idiom, they unconsciously resort to the concept of a correct, fixed, dictionary word meaning. Such a dictionary meaning was inaccessible to oral folk, since datable texts preserving semantic layers for reference did not exist. 64

Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981): 138.

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(20) Yo momma's so dumb, they say "It's raining, chilly outside" and she went into a house and got a bowl! (21) Yo momma's so stupid, I told her drinks were on the house and she went got a ladder.

This degree of attentiveness to semantic meaning speaks for the move from a more oral to a more literate society.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, the notion of community was put under scrutiny, complex and fraught with tension as it is. Although it appears impossible to resolve this tension completely, the diachronic review of a particular community yields important insights into the issues of membership, shared background, and common practices. In particular, two central observations made in this chapter are pertinent to clarifying the question of community. First, membership, particularly in a postcolonial community, is seldom based on a straightforward list of tangible features such as age, race, gender, or local proximity. Whereas in the past these shared features might have been the centripetal force that brought together the members of a community, currently they are distributed on the principle of family resemblance at best. As the example of the game of dozens and its players has shown, a practice which arose in the course of ‘doing things together’ by community members grew to dominate all the other unifying factors: a salient language practice has become a constitutive one. Secondly, such a constitutive language practice is nevertheless a product of community interactions, and can thus be gradually reshaped by its members within the limits of its established frame. Specifically, the demographic shifts in the dozens community have introduced new topics for insults and the infiltraion of the domain of AAVE by standard language. Other vital changes include the reassembling of the formulaic inventory, which is paralleled by the developments in the stock of similes and the choice of discursive strategies. Despite the fact that the spatial arrangement and make-up of parties remained unaltered, the distribution of roles in the evaluative process reflects the general evolutionary path. It has been shown that these changes can be brought together in a meaningful way by referring to the oral–literate continuum. Because low-income black teenagers who comprised the dozens-playing community at its square one show many features of secondary orality, their heavy reliance on formulae and rhymes, conservativeness of language, and orally structured mode of delivery can be traced back to properties of the oral psyche. The movement towards a

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more literate mode of thinking caused remodelling of language practice which is observable in the diachronic corpus of the dozens. It is crucial that this movement is envisaged as an uncontrolled process akin to natural language change, and is by no means equated with economic or intellectual progress. It is often the case that the most basic concepts are also the most elusive. ‘Community’ appears to be the most elusive of all, which is a logical consequence of the fact that any community is a collection of individual human beings, as multifarious as snowflakes. It remains to be seen whether its riddle can be solved within the tenets of an interdisciplinary approach. However, as the example of the dozens demonstrates, any attempt at community studies should take into account its great dynamism and malleability, which is manifest in the way it reflects and at the same time shapes the extra-linguistic reality of community members.

W OR K S C I T E D Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle (1964; New York: Aldine Transaction, 2006). Abrahams, Roger. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies (Baltimore MD : Johns Hopkins U P , 1983). Abrahams, Roger. “Playing the Dozens,” Journal of American Folklore 75/297 (July– September 1962): 209–20. Ayoub, Millicent, & Stephen Barnett. “Ritualized Verbal Insult in White High School Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 78/310 (October–December 1965): 337–44. Baggin’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj6CjOdD0hA (accessed 1 January 2010). Borg, Erik. “Discourse Community,” EL T Journal 57.4 (2003): 398–400. Bronner, Simon. “ ‘Your Mother’s Like...’ Formula in Contemporary American Ritual Insults,” Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression 6 (1982): 199–210. Brown, Rap H. Die Nigger Die! (New York: Dial, 1969). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UC LP , 1997). Cutting, Joan. Analyzing the Language of Discourse Communities (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000). Devitt, Amy. “Refusing Form in Genre Study,” in Genres in the Internet, ed. Janet Giltrow & Dieter Stein (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009): 27–47. Dollard, John. “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult,” American Imago 1.1 (November 1939): 3– 25. Dundes, Alan, Jerry Leach & Bora Özkök. “The Strategy of Turkish Boys’ Verbal Dueling Rhymes,” Journal of American Folklore 83/329 (July–September 1970): 325–49. Eckert, Penelope, & Sally McConnell–Ginet. Language and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007). Edwards, Viv, & Thomas Sienkewicz. Oral Cultures Past and Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

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Faraclas, Nicholas, Lourdes Gonzales, Migdalia Medina & Wendell Villanueva Reyes. “Ritualized Insults and the African Diaspora,” in Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles, ed. Susanne Mühleisen & Bettina Migge (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005): 45– 72. Finnegan, Ruth. Orality and Literacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Frankenberg, Ronald. Village on the Border: A Social Study of Religion, Politics and Football in a North Wales Community (London: Cohen & West, 1957). Garner, Thurmon. “Playing the Dozens: Folklore as Strategies for Living,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69.1 (February 1983): 47–57. Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1981). Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1974). Hannerz, Ulf. Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia U P , 1969). Hoggett, Paul. Contested Communities (Bristol: Policy, 1997). Hymes, Dell. “Toward Ethnographies of Communication: The Analysis of Communicative Events,” in Language and Social Context, ed. Paolo Giglioli (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 21–43. Kuiper, Koenraad. “Sporting Formulae in New Zealand English: Two Models of Male Solidarity,” in English Around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. Jenny Cheshire (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991): 200–209. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). Lefever, Harry J. “ ‘Playing the Dozens’: A Mechanism for Social Control,” Phylon 42.1 (1981): 73–85. Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, tr. Martin LopezMorillas & Lynn Solotaroff, ed. Michael Cole (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard U P , 1976). Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as a Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2 (May 1984): 151–67. Morgan, Marcyliena. “More than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African-American Culture,” in African-American English, ed. Salikoko Mufwene, John Rickford, Guy Bailey & John Baugh (New York: Routledge, 1998): 251–81. Murray, Stephen. “Ritual and Personal Insults in Stigmatized Subcultures: Gay – Black – Jew,” Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression 7 (1983): 189–211. Mühleisen, Susanne, & Bettina Migge, ed. Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005). Ong, Walter J, S.J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Percelay, James. Snaps 4 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998). Percelay, James, Monteria Ivey & Stephan Dweck. Double Snaps (New York: William Morrow, 1995). Percelay, James, Monteria Ivey & Stephan Dweck. Snaps: The Original Yo' Mama Joke Book (New York: William Morrow, 1994).

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Percelay, James, Monteria Ivey, Stephan Dweck & Ice T. Triple Snaps (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Rosser, Colin, & Christopher Harris. The Family and Social Change: a Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). Rossi–Landi, Ferruccio. Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Simmons, Donald. “Possible West African Sources for the American Negro ‘Dozens’,” Journal of American Folklore 76/302 (October–December 1963): 339–40. Snow, Peter. “The Use of ‘Bad’ Language as a Politeness Strategy in a Panamian Creole Village,” in Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles, ed. Susanne Mühleisen & Bettina Migge (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005): 23–43. Stacey, Margaret. “The Myth of Community Studies,” British Journal of Sociology 20.2 (June 1969): 134–47. Swales, John. “Approaching the Concept of Discourse Community,” paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1987. Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). Tannen, Deborah. Conversational Style: Analysing Talk Among Friends (Norwood: Ablex, 1984). Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag, 1887). Tr. by Charles P. Loomis as Community and Association (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). Vilification Tennis: Videos, http://www.vilificationtennis.com/videos/ (accessed 10 November 2009). Wenger, Étienne. Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). White, Joseph. “Toward a Black Psychology,” Ebony 9 (1970): 25–52. Williams, William. The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). Yo Mama Jokes, http://www.ahajokes.com/yo_mama_jokes.html (accessed 1 January 2010). Yo Momma: Video Clips, http://www.mtv.com/shows/yo_momma/ (accessed 5 November 2009).

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Prestige Change in Contact Varieties of English in Urban Diaspora Communities S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

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of sociolinguistics that language displays a speaker’s identity, and this identification has two dimensions: on the one hand, language is taken to be an external form of behaviour which allows the identification of a speaker as a member of a particular group; on the other, language is regarded as the means of identifying oneself as belonging to a particular group, as being a member of a particular group.2 Thus, identification is both collective and individual. This sets a frame within which relationships are set and develop; a ‘we/us’ versus ‘they/them’, implying that “they are different from us and that we are different from them, and also, even if not explicitly, that they too are supposed to apply the same logic vis-à-vis ourselves.”3 The question of the identity of a person, however, is complex, as a person’s identity may be heterogeneous and dynamic, and – at times – may even consist of overlapping or contradicting identities. For socio-historical reasons, contact varieties like Pidgins and Creoles (‘P/C languages’) are often accompanied by low overt status in their speech communities, with conflicting attitudes held towards them by their speakers. 4 Two examples of the complex interface between language and identity are the cases 1

T I S O NE O F TH E B AS IC TE NE TS 1

Florian Coulmas, Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2005): 171. 2 Andrée Tabouret–Keller, “Language and Identity,” in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Florian Coulmas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 315. 3 Tabouret–Keller, “Language and Identity,” 316. 4 See: John Rickford, Standard and Nonstandard Attitudes in a Creole Community (Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Occasional Paper 16; St Augustine, Trinidad: U of the West Indies P, 1983); Susanne Mühleisen, “Is ‘Bad English’ Dying Out? A Comparative Diachronic Study on Attitudes towards Creole versus Standard English in Trinidad,” Philologie im Netz 15 (2001): 43–78.

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of Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (CE LC ) and Cameroon Pidgin (CamP).5 These two contact varieties of English are used not only within the regions of origin but also in so-called diasporic communities in Europe and South Africa. The present chapter provides a theoretical and empirical discussion of the changes in role and prestige of these contact varieties of English in urban diaspora communities. As has been shown in the case of Haitian Kreyòl in New York,6 Jamaican in London7 or Cape Verdean Creole in Lisbon,8 the urban diaspora constitutes a site where contact varieties are prone to undergo various transformations: structural, functional, and group-affiliational changes. Diasporic communities might therefore be seen as ideal exploratory fields where models of identity, language shift, and language prestige can be challenged or affirmed. The term ‘diaspora’ has been used in various contexts in recent scholarship.9 In this chapter, we will first present a brief overview of the possible meanings of the notion and discuss current research on contact languages in the diaspora. In the third part of this contribution, we will then look at two P/C language diasporic communities in more detail: 1) Jamaicans/English Caribbeans in Britain and 2) Cameroonians in South Africa. The conclusion will provide an outlook with regard to recent developments in P/C diasporic communities in the electronic media (see also articles by Anchimbe and Moll in this volume).

5

See: Susanne Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 2002); Anne Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003). 6 See Carole M. Berotte Joseph, “Haitian Creole in New York,” in The Multilingual Apple. Languages in New York City, ed. Ofelia Garcia & Joshua A. Fishman (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997): 281–300. 7 See: Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles; Mark Sebba, “Caribbean Creoles and Black English,” in Language in the British Isles, ed. David Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 276–92. 8 Christina Märzhäuser, “Cape Verdean Creole in Lisbon – young generation’s perspective,” T R A N S : Internetzeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 17 (2008), http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr (accessed 20 May 2013). 9 See: Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. John Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37; James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38; Steven Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’, Exemplified Among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora 6.3 (1999): 277–300; William Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” in Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Waltraud Kokot et al. (London: Routledge, 2004): 9–29.

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Overview of Research on Contact Languages in the Diaspora From the 1990s on, diasporic communities in Britain, the USA , and South Africa became interesting sites for linguistic investigations.10 The term ‘diaspora’ in itself, however, needs to be defined, because, as William Safran is correct in pointing out, Diaspora is a concept that is being used so widely that it has become an academic growth industry – not only in political science, but also in anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, history, and even literature. [...] the label has been stretched to cover almost any ethnic or religious minority that is dispersed physically from its original homeland.11

The term ‘diaspora’ originally meant, in Greek, ‘dispersion/scattering’ but has later also been used to refer to ‘settlement’ (especially with reference to the Jewish context, then usually spelt with capital ‘D’). It therefore encompasses both the displacement and the stable presence of a community.12 Vertovec distinguishes among three discernible meanings of the concept ‘diaspora:’ a) as social form, b) as type of consciousness, and c) as mode of cultural production.13 Their difference lies not only in a chronological adjustment of the notion, but also in its evaluative import. In the traditional meaning, strongly connected with the traumatic Jewish experience, the term has largely negative connotations derived from its associations of forced displacement, victimization, alienation, and loss. Diaspora as social form, then, has implications for social, political, and economic relations and orientations, including the maintenance of a collective identity, the continuation of ties with the homelands, the institutionalization of networks of exchange and creation of new communal organizations in the places of settlement, as well as the development of solidarity with “coethnic members in other countries of settlement” and an “inability or unwillingness to be fully accepted by ‘host society’ – thereby fostering feelings of alienation, or exclusion, or superiority, or other kind of ‘difference’.”14 A more recent approach investigates diaspora as type of consciousness, thereby placing greater 10

See: Rajend Mesthrie, English in Language Shift: The History, Structure, and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1992); Ben Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (London: Longman, 1995); Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles. 11 William Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” 9. 12 See Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles, 176, endnote 2. 13 Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’,” 278. 14 “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’,” 279.

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emphasis on a type of awareness of transnational communities which is ambivalent in nature: negative assessments based on the experiences of discrimination and exclusion are mixed with a positive identification with a particular historical heritage. The third type of meaning of diaspora – as mode of cultural production – arose as part of discussions of globalization and is used to refer to the production and reproduction of hybrid cultural phenomena.15 A rather positive and conscious self-identification as belonging to more than one heritage is part of this meaning. The difference in meaning of the notion of ‘diaspora’ will also become important when we discuss P/C linguistic diasporic communities whose code already reflects a certain hybridity due to the linguistic and cultural contact situation in which these languages developed. In the field of cultural studies, diasporas have long been the object of study. In the past two decades, however, linguistic publications on diasporic issues have also increased and fields such as migration linguistics 16 have emerged. As part of retaining a cultural connection to their homelands, diaspora communities are often committed to their survival as a distinct linguistic group. 17 Diasporic communities might therefore be seen as ideal exploratory fields where models of identity, language shift, and language prestige can be challenged or affirmed. Furthermore, ideas of ‘speech community’ as an ever-debated concept in sociolinguistics (cf. Hackert, this volume) might have to be reconsidered and redefined in the context of language study in the diaspora. The general pattern described for immigrant communities is that a language shift occurs within three to four generations.18 One might thus expect, also in P/C diaspora communities, bilingualism with minority language dominance to be the norm in the first generation, bilingual competence in the minority and the majority language in the second generation, bilingualism with majoritylanguage dominance in the third generation, and, finally, monolingualism in the majority language in the fourth generation.19 However, as has been shown in more recent research, any uni-dimensional and clear-cut model of language shift would seem too simple for real-life processes in the migrant communities, because

15

Hall, “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” 235. See Thomas Krefeld, Einführung in die Migrationslinguistik: Von der Germania italiana in die Romania multipla (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2004). 17 Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” 10. 18 René Appel & Pieter Muysken, Language Contact and Bilingualism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987): 42. 19 Appel & Muysken, Language Contact and Bilingualism, 42. 16

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these are negotiated between social practices of […] [immigrant] identity politics and textual practices of […] [immigrant language] use.20

For example, the status of Haitian Creole has changed tremendously because of the fact that it “has slowly become to be accepted and used in official domains as the bona fide language of the Haitians” in the U SA , particularly in New York City.21 Current studies have also shown that in Lisbon, Cape Verdean Creole has become the common code of identification for migrants from different regions, especially in adolescent contexts: In Germania [a secondary school in Lisbon, S.M., A.S.], white pupils mixed with the blacks from the area from the small communities of Africans, Cape Verdeans, Angolans, Guineans, Mozambicans. Germania was a great school, because it was at that time that I started to talk Creole with my Cape Verdean colleagues. Everybody wanted to learn to talk Creole, so I spoke it as well, I loved it, and old, nearly forgotten memories came back.22

That contact languages are particularly thriving in youth culture is confirmed by research in multilingual spaces like Montreal, where Haitian Creole and Jamaican Creole compete with one another for the status of the most popular youth code, particularly in the hip-hop and rap-music scene.23 In the following excerpt from the lyrics of a Montreal performer (Sans Pression, SP ), words from Haitian Creole and Jamaican Creole are used. Les ti mouns veulent represent / Les garçons autant que les filles car guess qui est enceinte / That’s right ta petite princesse / Celle qui s’habillait comme une skett mais vous vous en foutiez ça. The kids wanna represent / The boys as well as the girls ’cause guess who’s pregnant / That’s right, your little princess / The one who dressed like a slut but you didn’t give a shit.24

As the authors of the study explain, Haitian Creole elements can be found in the title of the song – “Ti Moun” (‘Little Kid’) – and Jamaican Creole influences are traceable in the word skett for ‘slut’ (an abbreviation of sketelle, from JC skettel). 20

Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles, 135 21 Carole M. Berotte Joseph, “Haitian Creole in New York,” 296. 22 Märzhäuser, “Cape Verdean Creole in Lisbon – Young Generation’s Perspective.” 23 Mela Sarkar & Lise Winer, “Multilingual Codeswitching in Quebec Rap: Poetry, Pragmatics and Performativity,” International Journal of Multilingualism 3.3 (2006): 180–81. 24 Sarkar & Winer, “Multilingual Codeswitching in Quebec Rap,” 187. Further page references are in the main text.

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Neither variety is part of the ethnolinguistic history of the speaker, who, according to the authors (187), speaks AAVE as well as Standard and Non-Standard Quebec French fluently. In an interview, S P explained that he had ‘picked up’ quite a bit of Haitian Creole through often being mistaken for a member of that community by other black Montrealers, by being a guest in Haitian Creolespeaking homes, and so forth, but that he did not consider that he really spoke the language. (187)

In the Montreal hip-hop scene, the two contact varieties have obviously found new users and new functions. Likewise, as the use of Caribbean Creole languages in Britain, specifically in London, and the emergence of London Jamaican shows, “unlike many other immigrant community languages – Caribbean Creoles show few signs of attrition or disappearing in their new environments.”25 It therefore seems as if the urban diaspora constitutes a site where contact varieties are prone to undergo particular transformations, such as structural, functional, and group changes in affiliation. In the next section of this chapter, we would like to explore this in more detail by looking at Caribbean English/ Creole and Cameroon Pidgin (CamP) linguistic communities in the diaspora.

Caribbeans and Cameroonians in the Diaspora a. Caribbean English/Creole in London The Caribbean region is well-known as home to various diasporic communities, most notably of African and Indian origin, to whom some of the classic characterization26 of social relationships in a diaspora apply. Others do not: they were created as a result of voluntary or forced migration from one home location – Afro-Caribbeans in the course of plantation slavery from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, Indo-Caribbeans as the result of indentured labourship which replaced the African workforce on plantations after emancipation in the 1830s. While the maintenance of collective identity and solidarity with co-ethnic group members can be attested, the ties to their ‘homelands’ are lost or attenuated for historical reasons. And, while Caribbean societies are still struggling to overcome the traumata of slavery and indentureship, there is no

25

Christian Mair, “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28.2 (2003): 232. 26 Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’,” 278–81.

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hostile host community in the Caribbean from which Afro-Caribbeans or IndoCaribbeans might feel excluded. The situation is different for those Caribbeans who came to Britain in the second half of the twentieth century as part of a work migration movement. For the first generation, all of the traits of diaspora as social form apply. This has gradually changed for the second and third generations, for whom later characterizations of diaspora – as type of consciousness and as mode of cultural production – are more appropriate. It is argued in this section that the use and transformation of Caribbean Creole, and particularly Jamaican Creole, have played a decisive role in this development. The fact that Jamaican Creole has emerged as a restructured symbolic code in the form of London Jamaican in the urban centres of Britain was confirmed in various studies in the 1990s and early 2000s.27 In a 2002 study by Mühleisen conducted in a West Indian community in London at the end of the 1990s, the focus was primarily on form, function of, and attitudes towards Creole in different generations of West Indians in the city. The research questions were as follows: a) How do speakers of different age groups identify with Creole/Patois? b) What linguistic function(s) do they use it for? c) What is the relationship between actual competence in Creole and its symbolic use? The data were collected in Lewisham, South London, and consist of participant observation, structured informal interviews with respondents of different age groups (ranging from thirteen to seventy-eight years old), and recordings of casual conversations in groups, with a particular focus on investigations of code-switching. For the first question, the perception of what constitutes Creole versus English was of crucial importance. When asked in a mixed casual conversation session whether they had to adapt their way of speaking when they first came to England, these first-generation respondents, both in their mid-seventies, made it clear that they thought the very question quite absurd: R3:

27

They [the British, S.M.] pretended they had, dat dey could not understand but I made dem to understand de same language, we're speakin de same language. // But dere was some people really, from Grenada and aders, St. Vincent and

See: Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents; Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles; Sebba, “Caribbean Creoles and Black English,” in Language in the British Isles.

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what not, dey had an accent, you see? Because dey aks me where I learn how to speak English and I say de minute I born. Well, I go to a shop once, at Loampit Hill, and I order a paper, (0.3) a newspaper, a pack a red paper, and a half ounce o’ tobacco. De man serve me. Him said to me ‘What language do you speak?’ I said de language I ordered dem inna. Him said what language I speak? I said de language I ordered de paper, de tobacco and de red paper inna.28

In these casual conversations, the unmarked (and referential) choice is Creole, and shifts to Standard English are made for specific purposes, e.g., for the quotation in R2’s narrative (“What language do you speak?”). Actual use versus alignment with Creole can be seen in the inverse relationship in the statement by some of the respondents on the opposite end of the age-scale (thirteen- and fourteen-years-olds): R34:

R37: R34:

When I went Jamaica at first I couldn't understand a word dey were sayin. And after a while, I would say about two weeks, you just understand the broken English there, sometimes they say cer%n29 words like (0.6) oh, I've forgotten now, but it's like (0.1.) you understand it. Some black (0.2.) you just feel that that's where your base is, your natural home, Jamaica/ //Yeah cos your family's from there, your own, innit. And it's like (0.1.) it runs in the blood to just understand that language.

For these adolescents, the notion that “it runs in the blood to just understand that language” is a symbolic link to their ‘ancestry’, independent of real linguistic competence. Their claim to membership in this imagined community ties in with Benedict Anderson's own definition of communities, which “are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”30

28

Transcription conventions: underlined passages mark a code-switch from English to Creole; (round brackets) indicate pauses in seconds. 29 Transcription convention: the % symbol stands for the production of a glottal stop, a salient feature of London English/Cockney. 30 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983): 15

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In this way, in the “act of identity”31 that resides in the use of Creole to align with an (assumed) community, we may distinguish between what I have called ‘staging identity’, the symbolic use of some salient features of Creole as mere tokens, and ‘performing identity’, the actual use of Creole features for a range of purposes. This becomes clear when we investigate the ways in which Creole is used in conversations with older respondents versus younger respondents. In Mühleisen (2002), a number of close analyses of conversations reveal that oldergeneration speakers use Creole for almost all conversational functions (referential, metalinguistic, directive, expressive), whereas younger speakers use Creole primarily for phatic functions: i.e. greetings, interjections, etc. The use of Creole here becomes a more symbolic verbal act. The following table gives an overview of generational differences in usage, speaker groups, and functions of Caribbean Creole in the diaspora. First generation

Second generation

Third generation

Variety

Distinct Caribbean C.

Jamaican Creole

London Jamaican

Homogeneity

Shared rules/features

Adapted rules

High flexibility/ creativity

Acquisition

L1

L1 and L2

L2

Identification

Regional Caribbean

Ethnic

Ethnic and stylistic

Group of speakers West Indian immigrants

Children of West Indian, African immigrants, other groups with immediate exposure

Members of black and non-black youth culture communities

Legitimacy

Birth/genealogy

Genealogy/identification

Identification/ performance

Use

Primary language of communication

Secondary language of communication

Situational

Communicative functions

All

Selected

Phatic/symbolic

Age

All age groups

All age groups

ca. 12–28

Table 1: Generational differences in diasporic Caribbean Creole

This symbolic value of Creole, as it is used by the second and third generations, has a further effect, another Creole transformation, which this time reflects the group of its users: while in the first generation Creole was spoken exclusively by West Indians of all ages and ethnic groups, Creole in Britain has since become 31

See: Tabouret–Keller, “Language and Identity”; Robert Le Page & Andrée Tabouret–Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985).

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the language of Afro-Caribbeans and, more generally, of black youth culture. On the other hand, cross-cultural use of Creole by adolescents of non-Caribbean heritage has become quite common. Although there are no detailed studies of Patois spoken by adolescents of African background, observation suggests that this is a customary practice, especially in peer groups of both African and AfroCaribbean adolescents. The fact that Creole in Britain has been such a prominent part of popular youth culture has the effect that Creole features are employed for prestige in the speech of adolescents of different (non-West Indian) backgrounds. Because Creole in Britain is inscribed as the language of black culture, any cross-ethnic use of Creole is highly marked and has to be seen again as a symbolic act of identity. In this sense, the notion of a ‘West Indian speech community’ can no longer be limited to ethnic identifications or as a mere reference to the language of origin of a given speaker’s ancestors. If one wants to use the concept of a speech community at all, it has to be in the sense of Robert Le Page’s and Andrée Tabouret–Keller’s notion of speech as both individual and communal acts of identity in which “the individual creates for himself [and herself, S.M., A.S.] the patterns of linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group with which from time to time he wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished.”32 The question remains, however, whether or not this verbal behaviour is accepted by the group. Independent of individual proficiency, white Creole use such as described above is often regarded with suspicion and hostility by the group the white adolescents want to identify with. This becomes evident in a number of statements, such as the following by a twenty-year-old black Londoner: Sometimes, when you hear a white guy doin it, when they say some%n like ‘Wh’appen’ or something, I didn’t really like it, I thought it was offensive, like they’re taking the piss out or something, you know what I mean? (field notes)

These statements reveal the value of Creole as a “we-code,” as an in-group language as opposed to a “they-code.”33 In its representation of black culture and identity, Creole use in the London diaspora may also – especially in adolescent contexts – in a more general way stand for the Other culture, a counter-culture to the mainstream with ‘subversive’ potential. This emerges from the one case where whites’ Creole use is commonly accepted by their black peers: when it is 32 33

Le Page & Tabouret–Keller, Acts of Identity, 181. Tabouret–Keller, “Language and Identity,” 316.

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used to defy and obscure communication, as an ‘anti-language’. One might conclude here that there is no single West Indian speech community in the London diaspora. Rather, there are many communities, each with its distinct socio-rhetorical patterns and evaluations. The affiliations with these groups are not wholly arbitrary, but they are more a matter of choice today than when the first generation of West Indians came to London. The identification with Creole as a code corresponds to a development in diasporic identities of the type Stuart Hall has described: Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing form of 'ethnicity.' [...] The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.34

In this sense, Creole has undergone a number of transformations in the diaspora – form, function, and prestige – but it seems as if this renewal has not resulted in attrition but has, rather, ensured its continued use in new contexts and by new groups of users. As communal organization is no longer tied to a specific locality and increasingly takes place in cyberspace as well, new P/C diasporic communities can be observed on the Web,35 a forum where the question of identity and self-identification, of belonging to or assuming membership of a particular group rests, even more on verbal rather than on visual clues. b. Cameroon Pidgin English in the (South African) Diaspora CamP is used within Cameroonian borders in many domains of social life, and its importance as a means of communication in Cameroon should not be underestimated. However, when it comes to the question of whether CamP can be seen as a language of cultural and national identity, it seems as if is not a

34

Hall, “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” 235. See Susanne Mühleisen, “‘.. . allyuh know how to parteeeeeeeeeeee. lawd!’ Linguistic Choices and Community Construction among Trinidadians in California,” paper delivered at the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Association of the New English Literatures, Münster, May 2009. 35

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language with which Cameroonians identify on a cultural level.36 The situation in Cameroon seems to be similar to the one described for Nigeria by Monolaji Adekunle, where “it is felt that national identity and preservation of a local culture can only be achieved through the indigenous languages.”37 CamP’s main deficit seems to be its lack of ethnic affiliation. However, as was shown by Schröder,38 while most Cameroonians would hesitate to associate CamP with national identity in the Cameroonian context and would definitely rely on the indigenous languages, such as Fulfulde or Duala, for these purposes, many would nevertheless see it as a means of distinguishing themselves from Europeans and associating themselves with other Africans. If I were asked to suggest a national language in Cameroon, I would suggest a language like Fulfulde, which I know is the most widely spoken African language in Cameroon. I would also suggest, I may not want to suggest Pidgin because Pidgin, as I said, has got not an African origin. […] But the one African language in Cameroon which is spoken by a crosssection of African ethnic groups is Fulfulde. (anglophone lecturer, Buea) C'est une, c'est une richesse aussi. Parce que, quelque part si nous commençons le pidgin, si vous ne comprenez pas le pidgin ici, nous allons parler le pidgin. Si on veut cacher quelque chose à un anglais. Un Anglais qui a été ici, il parle avec son américain, je ne sais pas moi, nous parlons pidgin, il ne va rien comprendre! C'est une particularité. Avec moi et le Nigérien, nous pouvons parler le pidgin. Ils vont piger quelques mots anglais qui ressemblent un peu à l'anglais, mais ils ne vont rien comprendre. Oui, ça veut dire que c'est une particularité aussi. Donc, moi je dis que vraiment, toutes, toutes les langues sont des richesses. Il vaut les développer, vaut mieux les développer. Oui. (francophone lecturer, Dschang)

It therefore seems, according to this study, that for a major part of the Cameroonian population, CamP does not evoke feelings of cultural and national identity at the national level. However, in an international context, many seem to accept the usefulness of CamP as a marker of a particular African or even Cameroonian identity.

36

Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English. Monolaji Adekunle, “English in Nigeria: Attitudes, Policy and Communicative Realities,” in New Englishes: A West African Perspective, ed. Ayo Bamgbose et al. (Ibidan: The Booksellers, 1995): 60. 38 Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 176. 37

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Context

Languages

Level of identity

Regional/local

Indigenous languages

Ethnic

National/international

CamP

Cameroonian/African

Table 2: Two-level approach to Cameroonian identity

These findings are supported by Féral, who observed that Cameroonians living in France would use CamP as a default language among themselves and as a language of a distinct Cameroonian identity (in the French context).39 In Schröder, it is therefore suggested that Cameroonian identity should be viewed as working on two levels, national and international.40 In contexts in which CamP competes with indigenous languages, the former’s lack of ethnic affiliation is the reason why it is not readily accepted and why people would not identify with this language. Focus here is on its hybridity and/or its European origin, and this could be referred to as an ‘ethnic identity’. However, in contexts in which CamP competes with the two official Cameroonian languages (French and English), attention shifts to the ‘Africanness’ of this language and to the fact that CamP has been appropriated by West Africans in general and by Cameroonians in particular. CamP may therefore be seen as a means of expressing a Cameroonian or possibly an African identity. (See Table 1 above.) Consequently, it might be believed 1) that CamP is used in a greater variety of functions in the diaspora than in the home country, and 2) that it should enjoy greater prestige in the diaspora than in the home country. These hypotheses will be tested in a forthcoming study on language-use among Cameroonians living in Germany. But if we look at the results from a study of Cameroonians living in South Africa, most notably in Cape Town, it would seem that these hypotheses could be immediately rejected. As, namely, Mai claims in her comparatively recent assessment of “Patterns of Language Use and Identity Among Cameroonian Migrants in Cape Town,” “immigrants still treat CPE [i.e. CamP] with as much disdain, as they would in Cameroon.”41 However, when describing the outline of her study and the group of immigrants she intends to study, she points out that “this group is particularly very interesting because every Cameroonian here speaks at least two languages, the most popular of which are English, French, and CPE [CamP]” (12). 39

Carol de Féral, Pidgin-English du Cameroun : Description linguistique et sociolinguistique (Paris: Peeters/Selaf, 1989): 33. 40 Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 180. 41 Mbong Magdaline Mai, “Assessing Patterns of Language Use and Identity Among Cameroonian Migrants in Cape Town” (M A thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2006): iii. Further page references are in the main text.

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In fact, as Mai states in her study, Cameroonians frequently code-switch between English, French, and CamP (75). And when she describes the meetings of a Cameroonian association, the Cameroon North Westerner Association (CANOWACAT ), which is described as “a replica of a real Cameroonian society as its members come from all parts of Cameroon” (81), the reader of her study quickly realizes CamP is used side by side with English and that CamP is needed in order “to include every single Cameroonian present in the meeting hall” (83). Thus, we do find many indications that CamP is indeed used by Cameroonians in Cape Town as a language of “cultural, economic, political and other topics” and that “it is still very popular and dominating in all spheres” (140). However, there seem to be a number of reasons why the fate of CamP in the South African diaspora seems to be so much different from what we hypothesized earlier and from the fate of Caribbean English in Britain. The reasons why CamP enjoys little prestige among Cameroonians in Cape Town are:  First, Cameroonians in Cape Town are divided; most notably, they are divided not along tribal lines but along the anglophone–francophone divide. Consequently, francophones use French as a language of identity, while anglophones use English (135). As shown by Schröder (2003b), CamP is not a neutral language that can be used to alleviate tensions between anglophones and francophones. Instead, it is perceived to be primarily an anglophone language.42  Second, many Cameroonians in the South African diaspora state that they use English more frequently in Cape Town than they did in Cameroon.43 They need it in order to integrate into and to function in the host society and they even seem to adapt to South African pronunciations.44 English is the language they need for work (140), and it is thus the language that improves and secures their economic situation (142). CamP has frequently been described as a threat to the acquisition and structure of English,45 and thus it is hardly surprising that Cameroonians in Cape Town are afraid of the supposedly detrimental influence CamP might have on their performance in English.  Third, as we outlined above, CamP is not felt to be a language of national identity, because, in comparison to the indigenous Cameroon42

Anne Schröder, “Cameroon Pidgin English as a Means of Bridging the Anglophone–Francophone Division in Cameroon?” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28:2 (2003): 321. 43 Mai, “Assessing Patterns of Language Use and Identity,” 139. 44 Although some informants claim to have learnt indigenous South African languages (Mai, “Assessing Patterns of Language Use and Identity,” 65). Further references are in the main text. 45 Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 120.

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ian languages, its lack of ethnic affiliation renders it more ‘European’ than ‘African’. In an international context, however, attention can be shifted to the ‘Africanness’ of this language and to the fact that it is a language appropriated by Africans, distinguishing themselves from Europeans and associating themselves with other Africans. However, it would seem that the South African context, this ‘other side’ of CamP, is less visible than in, for example, a European context,46 probably because in this context the language’s diasporic users need to distinguish themselves as Cameroonians from other Africans and not from Europeans. Thus, the hypotheses formulated above: i.e. that CamP might be used in a greater variety of functions in the diaspora than in the home country and that it should enjoy greater prestige in the diaspora than in the home country, should not be rejected out of hand; these hypotheses should still be tested in a diaspora community for which at least the last two points do not hold. The impression obtained from the observations made by Féral for France,47 the admittedly superficial personal observations of Cameroonians in Germany made by the authors of the present chapter, and some results from Youndjous’s study of code-switching practices among Cameroonians in Germany48 all seem to suggest that in the European context CamP may have a different standing than in the South African one. These issues will be investigated in more detail in an in-depth study on language-use and language attitudes of Cameroonians in the European diaspora, which will also include the aspect of adolescents’ speech and the fact that contact varieties seem to enjoy a greater degree of prestige in this age-group. The Cameroonian community in Germany is marked by the high educational level of its members and by the fact that most Cameroonians do not stay permanently in their host country.

Conclusion It is obvious that the cases of contact language use in the diaspora we have presented here are quite diverse – Jamaican Creole in London and CamP in

46

See Mai, “Assessing Patterns of Language Use and Identity,” 132–33. Féral, Pidgin-English du Cameroun, 33. 48 Wenga Suzanne Youndjous, “Code Switching Among Anglophone Cameroonians in Germany” (M A thesis, University of Bayreuth, 2007). 47

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South Africa and Germany. It is intriguing to see, however, that many similarities seem to emerge in a comparison of these cases:    

the differences between the prestige of the contact language in a national versus international context; the widening of the uses and groups of users; the shift in symbolic meaning of the code; and the diverse processes of identifying with the contact variety.

While it might be too early to draw definite conclusions from these tentative findings, we think that it would prove worthwhile to further scrutinize these parallel developments and to place linguistic diaspora studies in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework. Language-use and identity-formation in P/C diasporic communities is clearly more complex than simply using a homeland code to maintain the connection to one's ancestry. Rather, the identification process can be characterized as one that is in flux and in a process of renewal and transformation. In this age of globalization, hybrid identities seem to be well represented by the use of contact varieties, themselves a linguistic product of hybridization. In this sense, their users, whether or not they have genealogical ties to their linguistic origin, themselves form a community which is created by the style in which it is imagined.

W OR K S C I T E D Adekunle, Mobolaji. “English in Nigeria: Attitudes, Policy and Communicative Realities,” in New Englishes: A West African Perspective, ed. Ayo Bamgbose et al. (Ibidan: Booksellers, 1995): 57–86. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). Appel, René, & Pieter Muysken. Language Contact and Bilingualism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987). Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Coulmas, Florian. Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2005). Féral, Carol de. Pidgin-English du Cameroun: Description linguistique et sociolinguistique (Paris: Peeters/Selaf, 1989). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. John Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37.

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Joseph, Carole M. Berotte. “Haitian Creole in New York,” in The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City, ed. Ofelia Garcia & Joshua A. Fishman (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997): 281–300. Krefeld, Thomas. Einführung in die Migrationslinguistik: Von der Germania italiana in die Romania multipla (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2004). Le Page, Robert, & Andrée Tabouret–Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985). Märzhäuser, Christina. “Cape Verdean Creole in Lisbon – Young Generation’s Perspective,” T RA N S : Internetzeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 17 (2008), http://www.inst .at/trans/17Nr (accessed 20 May 2013). Mai, Mbong Magdaline. “Assessing Patterns of Language Use and Identity among Cameroonian Migrants in Cape Town” (MA thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2006). Mair, Christian. “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28.2 (2003): 231–48. Mesthrie, Rajend. English in Language Shift: The History, Structure, and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1992). Mühleisen, Susanne. “ ‘... allyuh know how to parteeeeeeeeeeee. lawd!’ Linguistic Choices and Community Construction among Trinidadians in California,” paper delivered at the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Association of the New English Literatures, Münster, May 2009. Mühleisen, Susanne. Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles (Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA : John Benjamins, 2002). Mühleisen, Susanne. “Is ‘Bad English’ Dying Out? A Comparative Diachronic Study on Attitudes towards Creole versus Standard English in Trinidad,” Philologie im Netz 15 (2001): 43–78. Rampton, Ben. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (London: Longman, 1995). Rickford, John. Standard and Nonstandard Attitudes in a Creole Community (Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Occasional Paper 16; St Augustine, Trinidad: U of the West Indies P , 1983). Sarkar, Mela, & Lise Winer. “Multilingual Codeswitching in Quebec Rap: Poetry, Pragmatics and Performativity,” International Journal of Multilingualism 3.3 (2006): 173– 92. Safran, William. “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” in Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Waltraud Kokot et al. (London: Routledge, 2004): 9–29. Schröder, Anne. “Cameroon Pidgin English as a Means of Bridging the Anglophone– Francophone Division in Cameroon?” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28.2 (2003): 305–27. Schröder, Anne. Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003).

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Sebba, Mark. “Caribbean Creoles and Black English,” in Language in the British Isles, ed. David Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 276–92. Tabouret–Keller, Andrée. “Language and Identity,” in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Florian Coulmas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 315–26. Vertovec, Steven. “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’, Exemplified Among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora 6.3 (1999): 277–300. Youndjous, Wenga Suzanne. “Code Switching Among Anglophone Cameroonians in Germany” (MA thesis, University of Bayreuth, 2007).

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Diasporic Cyber-Jamaican Stylized Dialect of an Imagined Community

A NDREA M OLL

Introduction

I

1

the term ‘dialect’ is associated with a specific place or region inhabited by a well-defined ‘speech community’. The identity of its members is thought to rest on their classification according to fixed categories such as social class and ethnicity, which are indexed by the use of linguistic variables. In addition, a ‘dialect’ is conceived of as a more or less stable linguistic variety, the systematic patterning of which can be detected and described only by the analysis of unmonitored and therefore ‘authentic’ speech. None of these assumptions, however, holds true when we consider the use of Jamaican Creole (henceforth JC ) in computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC ). Investigating web-forum interaction between Jamaicans and expatriates, this chapter therefore explores the validity of traditional sociolinguistic concepts for diasporic online communities and contributes to the growing field of CMC sociolinguistics.2 In particular, it provides new insights into the impact of global availability of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources3 on virtual identity management by focusing on both processes of sociolinguistic styling4 and dialect enregisterment via communicative practices.5

1

N TH E TR A DITIO NA L S OC IOL INGU IS TIC MO DEL ,

William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington D C : Center of Applied Linguistics, 1966). 2 Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, “Introduction: Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10.4 (2006): 419–38. 3 See Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010): 4– 5. 4 Nikolas Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007).

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Data and Methods The Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican (henceforth CCJ ), which serves as a database for the following analyses, consists of postings that were downloaded semi-automatically from the discussion board located on the website www.jamaicans.com.6 As figure 1 below illustrates, writers’ contributions were diachronically arranged according to their year of posting from 2000 to 2008 in order to form a largescale corpus of more than 16.6 million words that enables both quantitativevariationist and qualitative discourse-analytical studies to be carried out. The compilation of a web-derived offline corpus illustrating the use of vernacular varieties in CMC is in accordance with a recent tendency to use largescale corpora to research sociolinguistic phenomena.7 In contrast to studies of ‘netspeak’8 focusing on medium-specific features, however, the approach to CMC adopted in this chapter is more in line with the concept of ‘socially-situated computer-mediated discourse’ that aims at “demythologizing the alleged homogeneity and highlighting the social diversity of language use in CMC .”9 In this new sociolinguistic framework, “characteristic features of ‘the language of CMC ’ are […] understood as resources that particular (groups of) users might draw on in the construction of discourse styles in particular contexts” (421). Year

Number of tokens

2000

354

2001

104,077

2002

697,184

2003

1,808,513

2004 2005

1,477,049

1,683,851

2006

2,127,915

2007 2008

4,878,145 3,833,655

Total

16,610,743

Figure 1: The Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican (C C J ). 5

Nikolas Coupland, “Dialect Stylization in Radio Talk,” Language in Society 30 (2001): 345–75; Barbara Johnstone, “Dialect Enregisterment in Performance,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 15.5 (2011): 657–79. 6 The Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican was compiled by Christian Mair and associates at the University of Freiburg in 2008. 7 Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vol. 1: Synchronic Databases, ed. Joan C. Beal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 Cf. David Crystal, Language and the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001). 9 Androutsopoulos, “Introduction,” 421. Further page references are in the main text.

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The idea of linguistic features as stylistic resources is also fundamental to both Coupland’s research on ‘sociolinguistic styling’10 and Blommaert’s theory of a ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’: We now see that the mobility of people also involves the mobility of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources, that “sedentary” or “territorialized” patterns of language use are complemented by “translocal” or “deterritorialized forms of language use, and that the combination of both often accounts for unexpected sociolinguistic effects.11

All of these sociolinguistic approaches form part of what Penelope Eckert has called ‘third wave sociolinguistics,’12 an umbrella term for recent theories that take into account speaker agency and the possibility of socio-rhetorical affiliation rather than social membership in a specific linguistic community. They therefore maximally contrast with ‘first wave’ sociolinguistic approaches that assume the validity of categorizing speakers according to fixed social and demographic parameters. Although “socio-demographic information is accessible to ethnographically informed researchers”13 to a certain extent, drawing conclusions from the online presentation of a web persona to a real-life person is not a straightforward process. Besides retrieving information on writers’ country of origin and gender from the data,14 identification of the 2,128 users registered at the time of download was therefore limited to screen names and forum statistics such as their number of postings. This procedure is not only preferable in terms of respect for users’ anonymity, it is also in accordance with a focus on CMC interaction and aspects of linguistic online styling that foreground the study of crafted web personae rather than the role of ‘real’ internet users. But how do forum writers actually use JC as a sociolinguistic resource in processes of online identity management and how have certain linguistic features come to represent JC in the context of this online discussion forum in the first place? Before we turn to discursive practices and the role they play in ‘dialect enregisterment’15 to answer these questions, it is useful to describe the processes 10

See Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity. Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. (My emphasis.) 12 Penelope Eckert, Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 13 Androutsopoulos, “Introduction,” 425. 14 Thanks go to my colleagues Larissa Teichert and Johanna Holz for retrieving sociolinguistic background information from the data. 15 See Asif Agha, “The Social Life of a Cultural Value,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 231–73. 11

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of globalization in order to explain the transformation of JC from a more or less stable variety to a ‘linguistic and sociolinguistic resource’ that users employ for the purposes of sociolinguistic styling.

The Globalization of Jamaican Creole To better understand the role that JC assumes in CMC , it is useful to trace its spread from a local vernacular to a linguistic variety used all around the world by referring to several phases of ‘deterritorialization’:16 large-scale migration of Jamaicans after World War II led to the formation of diaspora communities and the concomitant emergence of new contact varieties such as ‘London Jamaican’,17 which is most often acquired as a ‘second dialect’ and used for symbolic purposes. Although contact varieties arguably still function as an index of ‘being Jamaican’, the use of JC has in the meantime often become dissociated from the concept of ethnicity owing to its commodification by the music industry as well as its symbolic appropriation by adolescents of non-Jamaican descent.18 What is common to all such cases is that, quite in contrast to the traditional sociolinguistic expectation of spontaneous, ‘natural’ speech, features of JC are employed in a more or less self-reflexive manner: the status of the Creole is changed profoundly – from an unselfconsciously used majority language linked to standard English in a complex linguistic continuum to a politically charged additional – and optional – communicative code whose chief function is to enable blacks to “perform” their ethnicity and negotiate community boundaries when necessary or desirable. In the liminal case, as represented for example by the selective and conscious adoption of Creole features by white adolescents, a structurally reduced rudimentary Creole no longer serves primary communicative functions but becomes a consciously deployed metacommunicative symbol whose chief function is to express distance from the adult middle-class social mainstream.19

16

Susanne Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creole (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, , 2002). 17 See Mark Sebba, London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction (London: Longman, 1993). 18 Ben Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (London: Longman, 1995); Paul Kerswill et al., “Reversing ‘Drift’: Innovation and Diffusion in the London Diphthong System,” Language Variation and Change 20.3 (October 2008):451–91. 19 Christian Mair, “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2003): 231.

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Mair’s observations have implications for linguistic deterritorialization that are also of special interest for the study of JC in diasporic web-forum interaction. First of all, JC may occur in processes of sociolinguistic identity management that include, but are no longer limited to, the discursive performance of ethnicity. From the perspective of Blommaert’s ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’, features of JC have thus become stylistic assets – that is, part of a pool of globalized linguistic resources that individual writers may consciously draw on in CMC , depending on their degree of acculturation. Second, it follows that, quite in contrast to the sociolinguistic situation in Jamaica, the use of JC no longer chiefly indexes social class differences. In the context of the CCJ , this demographic factor does not apply anyway, given that web-forum users “have an excellent command of written English and are largely drawn from the well educated professional middle classes.”20 Instead of social class, it therefore seems feasible to take up Coupland’s idea of “Lifestyle […] as an organizing principle of late-modern living,”21 a concept which is more in accord with the idea of agency propagated by ‘third-wave’ sociolinguistic approaches. Third, the different linguistic styles that occur in instances of ‘crossing’ as well as in the Jamaican diaspora – both in the ‘real’ world and in cyberspace – do not necessarily follow the pattern of the JC continuum postulated by Bailey22 and Bickerton23 in 1973. The next section will illustrate this range of different linguistic styles in the CCJ and point out some of the linguistic features that have become associated with a ‘Jamaican’ life-style in the discussion forum via locally situated processes of dialect enregisterment.

From Styling to Stylization Forum members differ not only in the extent to which they code-switch between JC and Standard English (henceforth StE). There are also distinctions in the way in which they employ features of JC . Despite considerable idiosyncracies in writers’ styles, we can arguably differentiate among at least four general stylistic ‘types’, which can be distinguished according to their degree of 20

Christian Mair, “World Englishes and Corpus Linguistics,” in The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Devyani Sharma (Oxford: Oxford U P , forthcoming). 21 Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity, 30. 22 Charles-James Bailey, Variation and Linguistic Theory (Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1973). 23 Derek Bickerton, “On the Nature of a Creole Continuum,” Language 49 (1973): 641–69.

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stylization. The following examples should serve to illustrate these four styles, starting with the least stylized one: (1) “cho unno a get saff a farrin” (Damn) you are getting soft (abroad) (2) “di tings dem weh yu haffi tink bout when dem start guh daycare” The things that you have to think about when they start to go to daycare. (3) “[…] suffice it fi seh mi ha small leather D n B wallet fi 23.50.” Suffice it to say I had a small leather D n B wallet for 23.50. (4) “itt will hurt imm sum way butt itt awlsoo help inn addar ways.” It will hurt him some way, but it also helps in other ways.

It has often been claimed that the boundary between spoken and written language, or ‘language of proximity’ and ‘language of distance’,24 is blurred in CMC , resulting in ‘pseudo-orality’. In accordance with this idea, example 1 looks as though more or less ‘authentic’ spoken JC has been transferred to the screen: Not only does the writer start her contribution with the JC interjection cho25 but she also uses the JC preverbal marking of aspect via the grammatical morpheme a as well as the JC second-person-plural pronoun unno. In addition, the non-standard spellings of saff ‘soft’ and farrin ‘foreign’ are phonetically-motivated in that they pay tribute to consonant-cluster reduction and the vowel inventory of JC . Nevertheless, example 1 represents a ‘styled’ version of JC insofar as the linguistic features described above are characteristic of a basilectal variant of JC that indexes low social class and rural speech in Jamaica. According to recent research on the spoken component of I CE Jamaica, such variants hardly ever occur in conversation among educated Jamaican speakers, who opt, rather, for mesolectal variants in informal settings.26 From this perspective, the use of basilectal variants in the ‘pseudo-orality’ of CMC can be characterized as ‘anti-formal’ in the sense that “an absence or a willful closing of social distance is signaled.”27 24

See Peter Koch & Wulf Oesterreicher, “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgebrauch,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985): 15–43. 25 “An exclamation expressing scorn, impatience, annoyance, disagreement, expostulation etc.”; Dictionary of Jamaican English, ed. Frederic G. Cassidy & Robert B. Le Page (Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P, 2002): 103. 26 See Dagmar Deuber, “‘The English We Speaking’: Morphological and Syntactic Variation in Educated Jamaican Speech,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 24 (2009): 1–52. 27 Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, with a French and Spanish Supplement edited by Jeannette Allsopp (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996): lvi– lvii.

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Example 2 represents an intricate noun-phrase structure, including both a relative and an embedded adverbial clause of time. Such elaborate syntactic structures are normally associated with the concept of language of distance 28 rather than with online production found in spontaneous speech. From this perspective, the massive use of basilectal Creole features such as a serial verb construction (start guh) and the modal verb of obligation haffi (related to StE ‘have to’) reads a lot more stylized than the use of similar JC features in example 1. While the non-standard spellings in the phrase di tings dem ‘the things’ are once again motivated by phonetic factors – in this case the absence of interdental fricatives from the consonant inventory of JC – this phrase is also quite noteworthy in representing a veritable ‘clash’ between JC and StE grammar: the plural is redundantly marked both by the StE inflectional morpheme {-s} and by the basilectal plural marker dem. Similar incongruities in register can be observed in example 3, where the highly formal-sounding expression suffice it to say is stylistically ‘boosted’ by the Creole particle fi. Lexical substitution, or relexification, is repeated at the end of this otherwise StE sentence and attests to the highly symbolic potential that even a single JC item may assume in the process of sociolinguistic styling. Last but not least, example 4 illustrates a specific case in which online styling is achieved less by the use of JC grammatical features29 than by the rigorous adoption of non-standard orthography. However, the use of ‘sociolinguistic and linguistic’ resources is also evident in this example, since consonant reduplication as a specific case of ‘eye dialect’ is associated with hip-hop orthography where the playful way in which these alternative spellings are created […] indicates a more general critique of linguistic standards, of the social inequities they help to reproduce, and of the constraints they impose on linguistic and cultural practice.30

In addition, the non-standard orthography that the writer in example 5 chooses for ‘also’ is both representative of a common spelling practice in the web-forum31 and reminiscent of African-American Vernacular English spelling

28

See Koch & Oesterreicher, “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz.” Apart from the absence of third person singular present tense {-s} in helps, example 4 is in accordance with the grammatical rules of StE. 30 Warren Olivo, “Phat Lines. Spelling Conventions in Rap Music,” Written Language and Literacy 41 (2001): 81. 31 See Andrea Moll, “Orthographic Practices in Diasporic Jamaican Online Communities: Between Idiosyncratic Usage and ‘Grassroots’ Conventionalisation,” in Codification, Canons, and 29

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practices. Whereas the digraph is often used there to graphically signal a non-rhotic pronunciation of words such as ‘lord’, 32 the orthographic variant indicates that respelling with is not limited to the context of rhoticity in the discussion forum. Categorizing individual writers’ styles according to these four stylistic types is often not a straightforward process. What all of them have in common, though, is their own characteristic mix of non-standard orthography, Creole lexical items, and morphosyntax. As already mentioned, however, this range of different styles does not mirror the Creole speech continuum as found in Jamaica. On the one hand, basilectal forms are clearly over-represented in the discussion forum. On the other, Lars Hinrichs questions the potential of spelling to substitute for phonetic differences made in face-to-face interaction, concluding that the position on the creole continuum of a stretch of text has no systematic relation to the writer’s choice of a StE or a deviant spelling. Consequently, the degree of standardness of spelling cannot be used as a factor in determining the place of any particular e-mail message on the creole continuum. (94)

What examples 1 to 4 definitely illustrate is that the outcome of individual styling processes in the discussion forum is not a stable new variety that could easily be described by quantitative-variationist methods. Rather, forum writers seem to more or less consciously draw on a shared pool of sociolinguistic and linguistic resources to style their specific web personae. Which features are part of this pool is a matter of conventionalization. The process by which certain linguistic features become associated with a specific variety has been referred to as ‘dialect enregisterment’, and it is arguably best investigated by discourseanalytic methods (see “The Negotiation of Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Identity,” below). In addition, verbal interaction and communicative practices in particular are also crucial to the perspective on language and identity adopted in Bucholtz and Hall’s ‘sociocultural linguistics’ model, which aims at a ‘coalition’ between sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.33 According to the authors, identity is Curricula: Prescription and Description in Language and Literature, ed. Ulrich Busse, Ralf Schneider & Anne Schröder (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2012): 275–94. 32 Lars Hinrichs, “Emerging Orthographic Conventions in Written Creole: Computer-Mediated Communication in Jamaica,” A A A : rbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29.1 (2004): 89. Further page references are in the main text. 33 Mary Bucholtz & Kira Hall, “Finding Identity: Theory and Data,” Multilingua 27 (2008): 151– 163.

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a relational and socio-cultural phenomenon that emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction rather than [...] a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories.34

Apart from interactional implicatures, stance, and the explicit mention of ethnographic categories or labels, identity can be indexed by the use of specific linguistic structures or styles, an approach which ties in well with Coupland’s notion of ‘sociolinguistic styling’ and the concept of globalized linguistic resources posited by Blommaert. The remainder of this chapter will accordingly deal with the analysis of communicative practices and the discursive negotiation of linguistic and sociolinguistic identity in the discussion forum, keeping in mind that “dialects are metalinguistic constructs, not empirical objects waiting to be described.”35 This perspective, however, does not preclude the possibility that dialects can be ‘imagined’36 as bounded entities and be assigned ideological values, a process that is, indeed, also part of Agha’s concept of ‘enregisterment’: 37 A set of features that have been enregistered with the same identity or situation can come to be thought of as an (objectively delimitable) variety: a register, in the more traditional sense, a style, a dialect, or a language.38

Normann Jørgensen39 therefore argues in favour of preserving the traditional concepts of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ when talking about ideological entities. At the same time, however, he dismisses them as a unit of linguistic analysis in contexts of ‘super-diversity’40 and the so called ‘poly-lingualism norm’.41 In his opinion, it makes sense to take linguistic practices as a starting point in such settings, where speakers may in fact use any linguistic resource available to 34

Mary Bucholtz & Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7.4–5 (2005): 586. 35 Barbara Johnstone, “Making Pittsburghese: Communication Technology, Expertise, and the Discursive Construction of a Regional Dialect,” Language & Communication. 31.1 (2011): 10. 36 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 37 See Agha, “The Social Life of a Cultural Value.” 38 Johnstone, “Making Pittsburghese,” 8. 39 See J. Normann Jørgensen. ed., “Polylingual Languaging Around and Among Children and Adolescents,” International Journal of Multilingualism 5.3 (2008): 161–275. 40 Stephen Vertovec, “The Emergence of Super-diversity in Britain,” C O M P A S Working Papers 25 (Oxford: University, Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, 2006): 1–42. 41 See Jørgensen, “Polylingual Languaging.”

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them in order to achieve a specific communicative goal regardless of their degree of linguistic competence in the source variety.

The Negotiation of Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Identity via Communicative Practices Written texts and media of all kinds [...] for many years received far less attention than spoken language in linguistic-anthropological and sociolinguistic studies alike. Now, however, they are important data sources for the study of linguistic representation and language ideology in these fields. 42

Since this chapter focuses on the analysis of web-forum interaction, the communicative practices analysed in the following are based on interaction in the written medium. In addition, these practices can be roughly subsumed under the label ‘dialect performance’ and are therefore also mediated, given that mediation is “at the heart of stylistic performance and reflexivity.”43 They thus represent an excellent example of what traditional sociolinguistic theory has regarded as ‘inauthentic’ data. However, Coupland not only argues that ‘everyday talk’ is becoming increasingly characterized by aspects of performativity and linguistic styling (28) but he also challenges the purportedly non-reflexive character of ‘spontaneous’ speech styles in the classical sociolinguistic interview that has long been considered to be the optimal way of eliciting ‘authentic’ speech data: Sociolinguistics has often treated its own empirical research settings as if they were platforms for speakers to produce ‘everyday speech behaviour’ rather than stages for performance. The classical sociolinguistic interview is a case in point, where devices used to trigger ‘casual speech’ [...] might be better described as stage-building for narrative performance. (185)

A number of recent sociolinguistic studies have therefore argued in favour of regarding performance and other modes of self-conscious linguistic practice as data worth investigating in their own right. Apart from the fact that dialect performance is a constant and longstanding phenomenon in the discussion forum and thus makes up for a quantitatively non-negligible part of the data, there are at least two further reasons why CMC performance lends itself as a starting 42 43

text.

Bucholtz & Hall, “Finding Identity,” 406. Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity, 180. Further page references are in the main

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point for further analysis in the context of this chapter. First, dialect performance as described by Bauman is consistent with the idea of consciously choosing from a pool of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources for the purpose of identity management: Identity is an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others.44

Second, Natalie Schilling–Estes’s study of Ocracoke English shows that performances not only demonstrate linguistic saliency in indicating which linguistic features are generally perceived as representative of a specific variety but also show that performance speech may display quite regular patterning, rather than the irregularity traditionally associated with a shift toward an exaggeratedly vernacular version of one’s dialect.45

This link between performance and more ‘ordinary’ linguistic production is arguably of heightened importance in the context of CMC writing in the discussion forum, where we are generally dealing with more or less crafted or stylized uses of JC (see the next main section). The communicative practices that will be analysed in the following therefore reveal an important insight not only into the discursive negotiation of identity but also into the mechanisms of dialect enregisterment and ultimately vernacular norm formation in a specific web community: Variationists have paid much less attention to the details of the discursive practices in which [overt representations of dialect] and performances arise, and we have not typically asked why people talk about or perform regional accents. These are important questions. Their answers shed light on the process by which people come to share ideas about what constitutes a particular nonstandard way of speaking and what it means to speak that way.46

44

Richard Bauman, “Language, Identity, Performance,” Pragmatics 10.1 (2000): 1. (My emphasis.) 45 Natalie Schilling–Estes, “Investigating ‘Self-Conscious’ Speech: The Performance of Register in Ocracoke English,” Language in Society 27 (1998): 54. 46 Barbara Johnstone & Dan Baumgardt, “‘Pittsburghese’ Online: Vernacular Norming in Conversation,” American Speech 79.2 (Summer 2004): 116. Further page references are in the main text.

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a. Vernacular lexicography The most accessible and direct way of studying processes of dialect enregisterment, hence also of vernacular norm-formation, is arguably to analyse discursive negotiations about which linguistic features belong to a dialect. Johnstone and Baumgardt call this communicative practice ‘vernacular lexicography’ and regard it as an explicit way of either norm-enforcement or norm-creation, depending on whether it suggests the incorporation of new elements or validates the status of already incorporated ones (130). Although such metadiscourse is not a ‘performance’ in the strict sense of the word, it is also highly self-reflexive and similar to performance, in that the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience.47

Even if phonological and lexical features are often more prominent in the explicit discussion of dialect norms, Johnstone and Baumgardt note that discursive negotiation is generally possible on all linguistic levels, including morphosyntax.48 The following two examples from the discussion forum deal with orthography and grammar. As already pointed out, spelling choices constitute an important stylistic and sociolinguistic resource in the context of online styling, and there is a high degree of orthographic variability, since “the non-standardized dialect writing allows for an individualizing on the linguistic level, as one personal trait of every chatter is his recognizable dialect.”49 The persistence of idiosyncratic spelling, however, does not preclude the simultaneous emergence of orthographic norms in the discussion forum.50 In the absence of an official writing system for JC , the conventionalization of spelling practices is necessarily subject to negotiation, a process in which members may orient to different orthographic role models. The postings below are excerpts from a 2004 debate on whether ‘patois’, a common term to refer to JC , should be an official language of Jamaica and the role that standardized orthography plays in the process of possible implemen-

47

Bauman, “Language, Identity, Performance,” 1. Johnstone & Baumgardt, “‘ Pittsburghese’ Online,” 128. 49 Beat Siebenhaar, “Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Variation in I R C – Implications for Qualitative Research,” Language@Internet (2008): 2, http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles /2008/1615/index_html (accessed 4 April 2011). 50 See Moll, “Orthographic Practices in Diasporic Jamaican Online Communities.” 48

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tation. User [4297]51 starts the discussion by detailing the advantages of his own spelling practice when compared to the so called ‘Cassidy–Le Page system’ (henceforth CLP ),52 which relies on a system of fixed correlations of “onephoneme–one-symbolization”:53 User [4297] “patois should be an official jamaican language. the principal thing that needs formalising is an official writing system (cassidy's is available among others; i also have my own which i consider superior).” […] “to add to that i believe mine is superior to cassidy's because it accounts for the nasalised sounds of jamaican speech.”

User [5092] subsequently challenges him by arguing in favour of the superiority of his own system, but he is immediately accused of deviating from the principle of phonemic writing: User [5092] “I agree with you that lack of standardization of the written language is a problem. But that could be overcome...easily. I'm working on a system with addition of new characters to the english alphabet and the use of diacritical marks as used in German, Russian, Greek and Spanish to change the sound of certain letters. As someone said below, "it's the sound" of the language that people all over the world loves.” User [4297] “your patois but i prefer to write phonetically and not use anglicisations.”

What both writers have in common is the fact that they claim authority by demonstrating their expertise via the use of linguistic terminology or their familiarity with orthographic role models. Reference to an external model is also evident in the next example, where user [3194] additionally asserts her authority by the use of ‘feature-dropping’: i.e. the strategic and symbolic use of vernacular features.54

51

For the protection of data privacy, screen names were substituted by consecutive numbers. See Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1961). 53 Frederic G. Cassidy, “Short Note on Creole Orthography,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 8.1 (1993): 136. 54 Johnstone & Baumgardt, “‘Pittsburghese’ Online,” 122. 52

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User [3194] “i personally, ongle recognise patois as written by Ms Lou...how bout you? chek dem lyrics deh doh ...which school do U subscribe to” I personally only recognise patois as written by Ms Lou… how about you? Check these lyrics there … which school do you subscribe to

Thorough quantitative and qualitative analyses of orthographic practices in the discussion forum show that writers are concerned with graphically representing JC pronunciation in forum discussions. Conventionalized spelling patterns include phonetically motivated variants such as those suggested by the CLP system or those used by Louise Bennett in her famous poetic works.55 In accordance with Coupland’s findings on the use of phonetic variables in sociolinguistic styling processes, phonetically-motivated spellings are often exemplified – and possibly stored in speakers’/writers’ minds – by so called ‘phono-opportunities’:56 i.e. single lexical items which over time may, however, assume a quasiemblematic character in indexing a specific variety. Relevant examples in the current context include spellings like ‘girl’ and ‘boy’, which graphically reflect palatalization processes in JC pronunciation. Not only do these spellings show a marked deviation from StE orthographic norms, they are also highly frequent in the data.57 According to the principle of ‘orthographic metonymy’ discovered by Alexandra Jaffe in her research on non-standard orthographies, they thus arguably function as indices of sociolinguistic identity: Once people step out of the framework of standard orthographies with categorical authority, they often manifest a desire to see their linguistic identities recognized by that orthography, to an intimate relationship with the form of the written word.58

While the tenor of the examples just quoted is one of serious discussion, metatalk about linguistic norms may also include playful moments, as in the following contribution: User [3563] “Me tuh! Mi ongle subscribe to di skool fi fools...cauz a desso di whole a wi enn up ennyway. Juss dat some still inna denial.” Me too! I only subscribe to the school for fools… cause it is there where the whole of us will end U P anyway. Just that some are still denying it. 55

See Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, 1966). Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity, 124. 57 See Moll, “Orthographic Practices in Diasporic Jamaican Online Communities”. 58 Alexandra Jaffe, “Introduction: Non-Standard Orthography and Non-Standard Speech,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 503. 56

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Humour is also an important element in the following debate on morphosyntax, where a newcomer to the forum asks advice on how to express future forms in JC . He receives an answer from “the original Jafaikan”59 – obviously a blend of ‘Jamaican’ and ‘fake’ – who underscores his humorous claim to authority by a considerable amount of feature-dropping. User [4578] “If I want to say something like "some people are teachers", "some are going to be a teacher" or "some are becoming teachers" in patwah, could I say something like: "some be a teacher/teacha" or "some ah be teacher dem" ? Or would it both be wrong? Thanks for your help!” User [4537] “sum peeple a teacha sum gwine bi teacha sum a dem gwine becum teacha I am the expert patwa person on here iiena, doan lissen to wa di adda ja.com peeple dem pon ere sey ya. […] mi is di hariginal jafaikan” I am the expert patois person here isn’t it, don’t listen to what the other ja.com people here say. I am the original Jafaikan.

The invariable future form gwine + verb is etymologically related to ‘going to + verb’ and therefore arguably more mesolectal than the basilectal form a go + verb. According to Mair, this form can, however, also be counted among the general over-representation of basilectal structures in the forum when it is combined with a JC subject pronoun.60 Leaving the question of further orthographic

59

‘Jafaican’ or ‘Tikkiny’ are also popular names for ‘Multicultural London English’ (see Paul Kerswill et al., “Reversing ‘Drift”). The development of this new contact variety is led by AfroCaribbeans in inner-city London, but it is considered by adolescents as an ethnically neutral way of speaking. 60 See Christian Mair, “Corpora and the New Englishes: Using the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ (C C J )to Explore Research Perspectives for the Future,” in A Taste for Corpora: In Honour of Sylviane Granger, ed. Fanny Meunier, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin & Magalie Paquot (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011): 209–36.

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variants and differing subjects aside, a rough comparison of annual frequencies for going to, gwine, and a go in the CCJ yields the following results: 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% going to

50,00%

gwine 40,00%

a go

30,00% 20,00% 10,00% 0,00% 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Figure 2: Annual frequencies of future forms.

Figure 2 corroborates Mair’s findings insofar as approximately one third (33.6%) of all future forms in the postings from 2008 are non-standard forms including either gwine or the JC basilectal future marker a go. The graph also shows that gwine existed in early contributions to the forum and that it gained in currency from 2005 onwards. By contrast, frequencies for the basilectal form a go seem to have stabilized from 2005 to 2008.61 Figure 2 thus confirms Schilling–Estes’ claim that dialect performance in metadiscourse may well point to regular features of a variety. The same hypothesis applies to the JC plural marker dem, as in teacher dem ‘teachers’, which seems to be so salient that it even occurs in the posting of a newcomer to the forum. Detailed discussion of plural marking in the data, however, needs to await further research. b. Translating culture Translations between StE and JC are part of dialect performance in the context of the discussion forum. as forum members can display their knowledge of JC and Jamaican culture. This type of activity sometimes even assumes a competitive character, as demonstrated in the following excerpts taken from what forum members call a ‘Patois contest’:

61

See Storytelling and Suss reports for a discussion of the frequencies in 2001 and 2002.

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User [3273] “Ok, someone post a passage in the Queen's English. (No more than 2 paragraphs) each contestant translate it to patois. […]” User [3573] “Jerk is a hot, spicy uniquely Jamaican seasoning which has been developed over centuries. Traditional jerking is a method of cooking highly spiced meat outdoors, slowly over a pimento wood fire.” User [3243] “Mek a tell oonu bout jerk. It cum strate fram Yaadman!” Let me tell you about jerk. It comes straight from yard,62 man! User [3273] “Bwoy mi a tell yu! Jerk peppa eenuh??? Di seasonin weh dem rub up pan it yu know seh a ongle yaad alone yu can find dat deh! An a nuh yessideh dem come up wid it needa! Yu know seh granny cook it outta door nuh choo? An a soh fi har madda dweet to so yu know seh wi stick to di evil wah wi know. An plus, soh long as di meat season good good, yu jus put it ova likkle pimento wood fiya” Boy, I’m telling you! Jerk pepper, isn’t it???? The seasoning that they rub on it you know that it is exclusively in Jamaica that you can find it. And they didn’t come up with it only yesterday either! You know that granny cooked it outdoors isn’t it? And so her mother did it too so you know that we stick to the evil that we know. And in addition, as long as the meat seasoning is very good, you just put it over a little pimento wood fire. User [3179] “Yuh si jerk, is a strickly Jumaican spice weh tek wi centuries fi develop it to perfeckshan seen. Now di tradishanal way fi jerk, is wan weh di meat tek it time cook ova a pimentah wood fiyah seen“ You see jerk is a strictly Jamaican spice that took us centuries to develop to perfection, you know what I’m saying. Now the traditional way (to cook) jerk is when the meat takes its time to cook over a pimento wood fire, you know what I’m saying.

The features of JC that I have marked in bold range from individual lexical items often exhibiting conventionalized spellings (e.g., ‘boy’, ‘yard’, ‘little’, ‘only’, ‘for/to’) to discourse markers (e.g., eenuh, seen, nuh choo) and grammatical structures, including the second-person-plural pronoun oonu, the relative pronouns weh and wah, and the JC progressive in me 62

In J C , ‘yard’ generally refers to someone’s home, but in the context of the discussion forum, it is often used to refer to Jamaica.

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a tell yu ‘I am telling you’. As already demonstrated for the use of JC future forms, all of these features frequently occur in the data and thus seem to form part of a pool of shared linguistic resources that users frequently draw on. JC features also figure prominently in another frequent ‘translation’ activity in the forum called ‘U SA vs. Jamaica’, which is illustrated by the following items (JC features marked in bold): (1) U S : Little Robert is dyslexic and has a spatial perception problem. J A : Si miss Ivy likkle washbelly lang mout big hed heeediat bway deh. Look at Miss Ivy‘s youngest child over there, long mouth, big head idiot boy. (2) U S : Sir, please don't throw my luggage like that. J A : Aye, buff-teet bwoy, tap fling up, fling-up mi bag dem suh man. Hey you boy with the protruding teeth, stop flinging my bags like that, man. (3) U S : Hors d‘heurves J A : Ah wah dis likkle sinting you a gi me? What is this little something you are giving to me? (4) U S : I think something is wrong with Susan, she might have the flu. J A : Lawd gad obeah tek up suzie! Lord God, black magic has taken up Susie! (5) U S : Sweetheart you're putting on some weight J A : Sharon a breed yuh a breed????? Sharon, are you pregnant?

Apart from providing writers with a stage for performing JC by massive featuredropping, what both communicative practices have in common is the fact that they do not constitute ‘translations’ in the strict sense of the word. Rather, writers often add information – for example, in the case of the Patois contest, where user [3273] translates the phrase “developed over centuries” by evoking his personal genealogy. Another important way in which writers tend to personalize an utterance is to make it more dialogic by using second-person pronouns, questions, and discourse markers. In addition, we clearly witness a shift in tone from a more neutral to an often humorous key, a phenomenon already mentioned in the context of vernacular lexicography. These linguistic observations illustrate that meaning is often multi-layered in performances, a finding which is corroborated by Johnstone’s research on dialect performance of ‘Pittsburghese’ in radio skits. According to Johnstone,

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performance often permits several interpretations at the same time, depending on the degree of acculturation of a given reader: The use of nonstandard or otherwise unexpected forms in performances can reinforce existing form–meaning links, call existing links into question, or create new links, and which combination of these possibilities actually depends on who is listening.63

In the following, I would like to briefly comment on two possible readings for the ‘translation’ practices quoted in this section. First of all, these translations and the section called ‘U SA vs. Jamaica’ in particular have a comic and thus entertaining effect. Based on his study of the performance of Welsh in radio talk, however, Coupland argues strongly against interpreting instances of parodic stylization as a clear indication of the performance’s intention to de-authenticate a specific variety. The result is often some kind of ‘second-level authenticity’64 based on discursive negotiation: I want to argue that stylized performance, including dialect stylization, can potentially deliver forms of personal and cultural authenticity that transcend local playfulness, so that the identificational effect is neither mere play nor outright parody. The social meanings that are constructed through the radio show talk do not, I argue, ultimately undermine or downgrade cultural Welshness. In fact, it is their quality of pastiche that immunizes them against the implication that these dialect forms might have been designed to capture “real” and historically continuous Welshness. That “straight” formulation might be too obvious and stark a claim to succeed in the late-modern climate. The stylizing of ingroup markers is arguably a characteristically late-modern symbolic practice that can achieve a distanced validation of speakers’ social identities. 65

Although JC is not exactly an endangered language like Welsh, Coupland’s observations can arguably be applied to the context of the Jamaican diaspora, where historical continuity and linguistic authenticity are at stake as a result of people’s mobility and the consequences this has had on their competence in JC . From this perspective, humour or irony as exhibited in these translation practices and the case cited above (under “Vernacular lexicography”) can be interpreted as both entertainment and playfulness as well as a means of overcoming linguistic insecurity.

63

Johnstone, “Dialect Enregisterment in Performance.” Coupland, Style, Language Variation and Identity, 184. 65 Coupland, “Dialect Stylization in Radio Talk,” 347. 64

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Second, the translations draw attention to cultural differences between the U SA and Jamaica, which function as indicators not only of interactional stance but also of more general language attitudes and ultimately sociolinguistic identity. This view accords with Bucholtz and Hall’s argument that stance is fundamental to identity construction; as Ochs (1992) has shown, direct indexicalities that link linguistic structures to interactional stances in turn form the basis for indirect indexicalities between stances and the social groups that (are thought to) typically take them.66

Comic effect is achieved by exaggeration, most often involving a breach of etiquette as in example 5 above, where the ‘translation’ is anything but polite. Interestingly, however, the StE versions are also far from neutral: the stark contrast between elaborated and technical vocabulary such as ‘dyslexic’ and ‘spatial’ in example 1 or ‘hors d’oeuvres’ in example 3 and their cultural translations into JC marks the StE versions as hyper-politically correct, cumbersome, and even elitist. The JC versions, by contrast, appear exaggerated, but arguably more down-to-earth, closer to the ‘real’ message and thus also more ‘authentic’ on the level of content. Given that many of the forum members indeed live in the U SA , these translations could be read as a form of ‘diaspora discourse’, in which expatriates creatively voice their understanding of cultural differences and hybridity, while at the same time aligning themselves via their interactional stance with what they think of as a Jamaican ‘life-style’. c. Storytelling and Suss reports This ‘discourse of diaspora’ is also evident in storytelling, where direct speech is almost always in Creole, except for outsiders to the ‘jamaican.com community’, who are quoted as speaking in StE. In general, storytelling is a very important category in the discussion forum, both for the enregisterment of an ingroupspecific Jamaican style and for the discursive negotiation of an ‘imagined’ online community. For one thing, it is one of the oldest categories in the forum and seems to have served as a veritable pool of JC linguistic resources that members draw on in their more or less stylized everyday interactions. Quantitative analyses such as the one conducted for the use of future forms detailed above indeed show a dominance of JC basilectal forms in the years 2001 and 2002. This part of the data consists almost exclusively of discussions about Jamaican cooking as well as episodic storytelling, both serving as stages for the celebration and recontextualization of Jamaican culture in an online forum mostly frequented by

66

Bucholtz & Hall, “Finding Identity,” 153.

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diasporic Jamaicans. In addition, such stories from the early days of forum activity seem to have acquired a quasi-legendary status as a cultural and linguistic role model: In a 2008 thread entitled ‘Your obscure claim to fame’, one user proudly claims to have been mentioned once in a so called ‘Suss report’, putting his inclusion in this type of forum story on a par with being on TV or figuring in a news story. ‘Suss reports’ and similar stories are also an important category for community-building: The word suss (not to be confused with the anti-police acronym for ‘Stop and Search’) is etymologically related to the JC word susu meaning ‘gossip’67 and, in accordance with a definition of ‘gossip’ as “easy, unrestrained talk or writing, esp. about persons or social incidents,”68 the story characters in Suss reports are always members of the online community. In addition, the following passage illustrates not just the fact that other forum members frequently comment on these stories in the pauses between different episodes but also indicates that these narratives are indeed often jointly constructed: User [4729] “mi inna di story either mi a real estate agent or juss hab big mout…. either way mi happy mi inna di story“” I‘m in the story either I am a real estate agent or have just a big mouth… either way, I‘m happy to be in the story

By actively contributing to the plot of the story in which they are themselves characters, forum members are thus arguably writing their own ‘history’ as a community. Shared history is one of the aspects of shared identity that Susan Herring postulates as a prerequisite for the existence of a virtual community, which she conceives of as a ‘metaphorical extension’ of the traditional association of community with a specific physical space.69 Another important aspect is self-awareness as a group, which is, inter alia, expressed by a reference to the website’s name. As the following examples taken from narratives and conversational stretches illustrate, definitions of community may, interestingly, not only relate to the new environment of CMC but also bear a resemblance to more traditional concepts of social groups and their location in ‘physical’ space:

67

Cassidy & LeP age, ed., Dictionary of Jamaican English, 430. John Simpson, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford U P ), http://www.oed .com (accessed 4 April 2011). 69 Susan C. Herring, “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Behavior,” in Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. Sasha Barab, Rob Kling & James H. Gray (New York: Cambridge U P , 2004): 14. 68

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(1) “Whazup cousin Mire, yuh waan si mi get a Assistant Managa jab a dung a di General Discustian community centa” [...] Part a di jab a some online doings yuhnoh.. Mi also manage di Centa an sen di sketel ooman dem fi get counsilling dung a di DearK branch affice” What’s up cousin Mire, should see I got an assistant manager job down at the General Disussion community center. […] Part of the job are some online doings you know. I also manage the center and send the [...] women to get counselling down at the DearK branch office (2) “Huddled together like a group of football players, was [X]’s online family, the jamaicans.com family, renewing acquaintances and greeting for the first time.” (3) “I had no clue that when Jamaicans.com people sey 7:00 P .m., dem actually mean 8:30 p.m” I had no clue that when Jamaicans.com people say 7:00 P .m., they actually mean 8:30 pm (4) “Let's see..... . I'm STILL Ms. Jamaicans.com??????” (5) “Returning to the town of Jamaicom was not easy for Phatty, but coming home was what she needed to clear her head...”

Example 1 is taken from a story where community is pictured as an online enterprise, given that both ‘General Discussion’ and ‘DearK’ are subsections of the Jamaicans.com discussion forum, with ‘DearK’ being the section mostly frequented by women to talk about relationships and love. Examples 2 to 5 illustrate the passage from imagining community as a family to conceiving of it as some kind of nation and ultimately and explicitly linking it to a virtual place. This is achieved by referring to Jamaicans.com as a people or including it in phrases such as ‘Ms. Jamaicans.com’, where it assumes the role often played by the name of a country, as in ‘Miss Germany’. Example 5 comes closest to the metaphoric extension of the traditional association of community with a specific physical space that Herring mentions by placing the story it is taken from in the virtual ‘town of Jamaicom’. The physical and social anchorage of the web community is thus the product of discursive negotiation, of shared social and communicative practices in the discussion forum. This perspective of community as a socially constructed entity is in accordance with both Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ and the concept of ‘community of practice’:70 70

See: Penelope Eckert, Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999).

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A community of practice is an aggregate of people who come together around some enterprise. United by this common enterprise, people come to develop and share ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values – in short, practices – as a function of their joint engagement in activity. Simultaneously, social relations form around the activities and activities form around relationships. Particular kinds of knowledge, expertise, and forms of participation become part of individuals` identities and places in the community. It is not the assemblage or the purpose that defines the community of practice, rather, a community of practice is simultaneously defined by its membership and the shared practice in which that membership engages. [my emphasis]71

Shared practices such as those analysed in this section of the chapter can thus arguably be assumeed to play a vital role in both dialect enregisterment and the construction of community. In fact, these communicative practices constitute the very means by which language and identity are not only negotiated but also called into being in the first place and where the intricate link between them is ultimately forged as well as continually re-instantiated, given that ‘feature-dropping’ is also a ‘solidarity-building’72 device.

Conclusion This chapter has illustrated that the traditional sociolinguistic concepts of ‘dialect’ and ‘speech community’ cannot easily be applied to the context of diasporic web-forum interaction, where writers self-consciously draw on a shared pool of linguistic resources for the purpose of sociolinguistic styling. The link between selected linguistic features and diasporic identity is discursively created and perpetuated by shared communicative practices that can be subsumed under the label ‘dialect performance’. In this context, storytelling assumes an important role both for the initial stages of enregisterment in the discussion forum and for the process of online community-building. In general, this focus on discursive negotiation and communicative practices for the analysis of language-use and identity management is in keeping with so called ‘third-wave’ sociolinguistic models, which see the speaker as an agent and his or her utterances as ‘acts of identity’.73 From this perspective, speakers,

71

Eckert, Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, 35. Johnstone & Baumgardt, “‘Pittsburghese’ Online,” 123. 73 Robert B. Le Page & Andrée Tabouret–Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985). 72

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or writers, are ‘actors and authors of their identity stories’,74 of which the ‘discourse of diaspora’ discussed in this chapter is an important facet. However, analysis of other types of identity discourse and the linguistic features associated with them, such as the negotiation of race, awaits further study.

W OR K S C I T E D Agha, Asif. “The Social Life of a Cultural Value,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 231–73. Allsopp, Richard. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, with a French and Spanish Supplement edited by Jeannette Allsopp (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. “Introduction: Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10.4 (2006): 419–38. Bailey, Charles–James N. Variation and Linguistic Theory (Washington DC : Center for Applied Linguistics, 1973). Bauman, Richard. “Language, Identity, Performance,” Pragmatics 10.1 (2000): 1–5. Beal, Joan C., ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vol. 1: Synchronic Databases (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Bennett, Louise. Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, 1966). Bickerton, Derek. “On the Nature of a Creole Continuum,” Language 49 (1973): 641–69. Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010). Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall. “Finding Identity: Theory and Data,” Multilingua 27 (2008): 151–63. Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall. “Identity and Interaction: a Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7.4–5 (2005): 585–614. Cassidy, Frederic G. Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1961). Cassidy, Frederic G. “Short Note on Creole Orthography,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 8.1 (1993): 135–37. Cassidy, Frederic G., & Robert B. Le Page, ed. Dictionary of Jamaican English (Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2002). Chambers, Ian. Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Crystal, David. Language and the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001). Coupland, Nikolas. “Dialect Stylization in Radio Talk,” Language in Society 30 (2001): 345–75. Coupland, Nikolas.Style, Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007).

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Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1994).

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Deuber, Dagmar. “ ‘The English We Speaking’: Morphological and Syntactic Variation in Educated Jamaican Speech,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 24 (2009): 1–52. Eckert, Penelope. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Herring, Susan C. “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Behavior,” in Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. Sasha Barab, Rob Kling & James H. Gray (New York: Cambridge UP , 2004): 338–76. Hinrichs, Lars. “Emerging Orthographic Conventions in Written Creole: ComputerMediated Communication in Jamaica,” A AA : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29.1 (2004): 81–109. Jaffe, Alexandra. “Introduction: Non-Standard Orthography and Non-Standard Speech,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 497–513. Jørgensen, J. Normann, ed. “Polylingual Languaging Around and Among Children and Adolescents,” International Journal of Multilingualism 5.3 2008): 161–275. Johnstone, Barbara. “Dialect Enregisterment in Performance,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 15.5 (2011): 657–79. Johnstone, Barbara. “Making Pittsburghese: Communication Technology, Expertise, and the Discursive Construction of a Regional Dialect,” Language & Communication 31.1 (2011): 3–15. Johnstone, Barbara, & Dan Baumgardt. “ ‘Pittsburghese’ Online: Vernacular Norming in Conversation,” American Speech 79.2 (Summer 2004): 115–45. Kerswill, Paul et al. “Reversing ‘Drift’: Innovation and Diffusion in the London Diphthong System,” Language Variation and Change 20.3 (October 2008): 451–91. Koch, Peter, & Wulf Oesterreicher. “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgebrauch,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985): 15– 43. Labov, William. The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington DC : Center of Applied Linguistics, 1966). Le Page, Robert B., & Andrée Tabouret–Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985). Mair, Christian. “Corpora and the New Englishes: Using the 'Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican' (C C J ) to Explore Research Perspectives for the Future,” in A Taste for Corpora: In Honour of Sylviane Granger, ed. Fanny Meunier, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin & Magalie Paquot (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011): 209–36. Mair, Christian. “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” A A A : Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2003): 231–48. Mair, Christian. “World Englishes and Corpus Linguistics,” in The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Devyani Sharma (Oxford: Oxford U P , Online Publication 2013, print publication forthcoming). Moll, Andrea. “Orthographic Practices in Diasporic Jamaican Online Communities: Between Idiosyncratic Usage and ‘Grassroots’ Conventionalisation,” in Codification, Canons, and Curricula: Prescription and Description in Language and Literature, ed. Ulrich Busse, Ralf Schneider & Anne Schröder (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2012): 283–302.

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Mühleisen, Susanne. Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creole (Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA : John Benjamins, 2002). Olivo, Warren. “Phat Lines: Spelling Conventions in Rap Music,” Written Language & Literacy 4.1 (2001): 67–85. Rampton, Ben. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (London: Longman, 1995). Schilling–Estes, Natalie. “Investigating ‘Self-Conscious’ Speech: The Performance of Register in Ocracoke English,” Language in Society 27 (1998): 53–83. Sebba, Mark. London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction (London: Longman, 1993). Siebenhaar, Beat. “Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Variation in I R C – Implications for Qualitative Research,” Language@Internet (2008), http://www.languageat internet.de/articles/2008/1615/index_html (accessed 4 April 2011). Simpson, John, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford U P , http://www .oed.com (accessed 4 April 2011). Vertovec, Stephen. “The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain,” in C OMP A S Working Papers 25 (Oxford: Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, Oxford University, 2006): 1–42. Wenger, Étienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999).

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“Africa is not a game” Constructions of Ex-Colonized and Ex-Colonizer Entities Online1

E RIC A. A NC HI MBE

Prologue

I

N

F E B R U A R Y 2 001 ,

A CER TAIN

AUSTR ALIAN

MAN,

G WW ,2 arrives in

Cameroon on a group overland trip through Africa and incidentally meets a Cameroonian woman, EBA , at the hotel he is staying at. This meeting turns into a love relationship which ends in marriage only a month later. After the marriage ceremony he invests heavily in Cameroon in real estate and cars, and opens a bank account in both his and his freshly wedded wife’s name. Less than two months later, the cordiality of the marriage starts waning, and he only then realizes that the house he had bought had been a scam organized by his wife. A series of revelations ensue, among them the fact that his wife is the mother of four children – something he never suspected – is a prostitute, and that she is in a relationship with a man who had been introduced to him as her cousin. Having invested over $30,000 in his new home, Cameroon, and his new family, he discovers that he has been in a closed circuit. He turns to the courts for justice and compensation. For over fourteen months he attends more than forty-five court sessions, tables several appeals, makes countless complaints to the authorities, including the President of the Republic, the Minister of Commonwealth Affairs, and the Canadian Embassy (since it is in charge of Australian consular activities), as well as other international organizations in Cameroon, and finally sets his car ablaze in front of the American Embassy in protest. He recovers some of the money from the bank account but loses ownership of the real-estate assets, which are handed over to his wife by the courts. In

1

Many thanks to my colleague Daria Dayter for comments on the initial version of this chapter. All remaining shortcomings are my own. 2 G W W , E B A , and K P are not real names but are used here for reasons of anonymity.

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November 2002, he leaves Cameroon after spending over twenty-one months of a honeymoon that turned bitter.3 GWW ’s story was covered by many newspapers and radio stations, and was debated in Cameroonian online forums. This chapter uses data drawn from one of these online forums between 2004 and 2009. Opinions about the matter have been divided; some accused the Cameroon judicial system for not protecting an innocent ‘investor’ who happened to have fallen into the wrong hands; others thought he was condescending by taking the matter to the courts; some more simply thought he had been too short-sighted and gullible. However, the matter suddenly moved, especially in online forums, from being a case of marital fraud and extortion to an anti-colonial struggle. As shown in the following, it turned into a battle for the independence of Cameroon and, by extension, Africa from European or Western colonialism and imperialism. This is because while many Cameroonians initially sympathized with G WW , that sympathy gradually eroded when he was continually portrayed by EBA and her group of supporters as a white man. GWW was thus treated as a colonial agent. In this way, anything that he had lost to his Cameroonian ‘wife’ was somehow legitimate reimbursement of what Cameroon had lost during colonialism. Interestingly, GWW is Australian, a citizen of a country that never had colonies in Africa. He is not even German, British or French, the three countries that had colonized Cameroon. But because he is white, he is placed in the colonial entity and treated thus: i.e. construed as an exploiter and imperialist.

Introduction The notion of discourse communities has significantly broadened in the last decade, given the considerable advances in technology, especially web 2.0, which gives internet users the opportunity to generate content of their own. Computer-mediated communication has taken different forms, and people have formed groups of different kinds that thrive in the virtual space provided by the internet. Whether we conceive of these virtual or online discourse groups as ‘communities of practice’, as Penelope Eckert does,4 or simply as ‘discourse

3

For comprehensive coverage of G W W ’s experience in Cameroon, visit his website: www .angelfire.com/dc2/glenn/index.html 4 Penelope Eckert, “Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender and Power All Live,” in Locating Power: Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz & Birch Moonwomon (Berkeley C A : Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1992): 89–99.

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communities’ like John Swales,5 it is clear that they have specificities that make them unique and that make it possible for members to interact smoothly even though they may not live in the same physical location or know each other personally. While members can effectively change names and profiles or disguise their identities in the virtual space, they still somehow adhere to and defend values, beliefs, and the in-group identity of their imagined community 6 in their virtual discourse practices. Although they may not have an explicit document that lists their goals and enterprise, these are often negotiated and reflected in the discourses they produce and in the difficulties, challenges, and obstacles they encounter and surmount in the course of their in-group ‘practice’. This is especially the case with certain online forums which start up as isolated remarks and comments on news stories or bits of gossip on the website of online newspapers but end up as groups of people who constantly write not only about the news stories they read but also about other matters of interest to them as a group. After effectively establishing themselves as members of a common group, there are strategies for chastizing or rebuking members, blocking access to nonmembers or out-group members, throwing out recalcitrant members and identifying non-conformist members and ‘spies’. Since there is often no moderator who is endowed with the powers to suspend or delete members’ profiles and accounts, the above regulatory tasks are achieved discursively and by all members of the community. The point of identification and belonging in such unmoderated forums, like the one investigated in this chapter, rests in both shared and imagined factors, since these are not verifiable beyond the virtual space. These factors include both natural and artificial features, including: race (white vs. black); origin (African vs. Western); history (colonized vs. colonizer); religion (Christian vs. Muslim), etc. The analysis below take into account the social interactive context of the group, since, as Karl–Heinz Pogner explains, discourse communities can be described as part of the social context of text production, reception, and revision, i.e. as a part of the context which does not simply exist as a fact in the outside world, but which is constituted, reified, confirmed, modified, changed, or otherwise actualized in the social interaction between writers and their readers.7 5

John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). 6 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 7 Karl–Heinz Pogner, “Writing and interacting in the discourse community of engineering,” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 856.

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The aims of this chapter are multiple: first, to illustrate how colonialism is still a factor in the construction of entities and communities in discourses both online and offline. Second, to illustrate how the labels ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ are still active indicators of in-group and out-group constructions and how these groups also reflect racial conceptualizations and injustices. Third, to establish that these historical outcomes are also played out in virtual space in ways similar to real-life situations where being white is often equated with being from a former colonizer country and being black is synonymous with being a citizen of a formerly colonized country. In the data, which are taken from the interactive web interface of the Post newspaper (www.postnewsline.com, Cameroon, see below), we find Cameroonians constructing themselves into an in-group on the basis of a black, African, ex-colonial, and independent state, and fighting back supposed neo-colonial onslaughts by a white (Westerner) person. Although this white person is not British, French or German – the three countries that had colonial holdings in Cameroon – he is still regarded and confronted as a colonizer. This is evident in the strategies used to present Europe and the rest of the West as colonizers, imperialists, and exploiters while Cameroon and the rest of Africa, and, by extension, the ex-colonized world as past victims who can now say ‘no’ to further exploitation.

The Data The data used in this chapter are from the former interactive website of the English-medium Cameroon newspaper The Post. In 2009, the Post moved to a new website and handed this site to a forum called Up Station Mountain Club, which brings together news stories, blog posts, magazine articles, etc. of interest to Cameroon, making them available and triggering interactions about them. Thus, most of the contributors to the original Post forum have remained, although the strong relationship they had with the ideology of the paper seems to have been lost. Some have also moved to the new website. In 2005, after GWW once again petitioned the Cameroonian Prime Minister about his case, the Post, like many other papers in the country, printed an article about it. That article elicited a lot of sympathy from members of the forum, who sent kind words of encouragement to GWW and even pleaded for forgiveness on behalf of EBA , GWW ’s Cameroonian wife. However, in 2009 GWW wrote a comment on the Post news story8 in which he suggested that the

8

See Elvis Tah, “Scammer Slammed 2-Year Jail Term,” The Post (2 March 2009).

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scammer, who happens to have the same last name as his ex-wife, may be related to her or is also from the Manyu area. The comment resurrected the whole incident, resulting in wholesale rejection of GWW as the contributors tried to defend Cameroon and Manyu. The initial sympathies expressed in the 2006 posts gave way to anti-colonial rhetoric. It is this news story and the ensuing interaction between members of the forum from 2 to 24 March 2009 that make up the data for this chapter. This material has been chosen because it shows how people lay claim to communities they believe they are part of and block others whom they believe do not belong to them. The corpus runs to 3,690 words. A brief digression into the GWW incident and its coverage on the Post forum may not be out of place here. The objective here is to show how dominant it was, especially online, and how Cameroonian online forums used it to construct in-groups and out-groups. Between 2004 and March 2009, a total of 67 editions of the online version of the newspaper contained at least one mention of G WW . Apart from the 2005 article, all of the other occurrences were in the forum section generated by readers. Some of the tokens were in comments posted by GWW himself in his bid to expose the injustices he suffered at the hands of the Cameroon justice system. As Table 1 indicates, the editions containing GWW reached a peak in 2006 (23 editions), three years after GWW had left Cameroon. These were mostly by GWW himself. Table 1 and Figure 1 (overleaf) show the recurrence of the topic in the online forum of the newspaper. Year 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 Total

No. of editions with G W W mentioned 1 12 11 23 15 5 67

% 1.5 18 16.5 34.5 22 7.5 100%

Table 1: Editions of The Post online containing the token ‘G W W ’.

The year 2009 has only one edition, perhaps because the Post moved to another website, leading to a breakdown in the normal interaction between members. Again, on this new website archives are only available upon demand, making it difficult for members to write comments after each edition is taken off the front page of the newspaper.

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40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

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GWW…

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Figure 1: Occurrences of G W W mentioned in The Post 2004–2009.

The several years of coverage of GWW show a longitudinal evolution in Cameroonian attitudes, from being those of sympathetic and assisting folk to revolutionary nationalists determined to defend the honour, no matter how sullied it already is, of their country from the behaviour of a ‘white’, ex-colonialist. I suspect that the latter line of thinking would have continued in 2009 and perhaps beyond, had the Post not moved to a new website.

Online Communities: Contestations of Rights and Justice The internet has become a platform for contesting past and existing communities or injustices, and also for creating new communities. As much as it is used for social networking and bonding, it has also featured prominently as a place where protests are staged, rights are asserted, and injustices are challenged, and where identities are consolidated, often in response to certain happenings in the real world. This is because groups of people, whether known to each other or not, are able to ‘imagine’ themselves as a community, hence function in ways that strengthen bonds between them, which are often discursively established and accepted on a similarly imagined basis of truthfulness. These truths include claims to common geographical (e.g., village, country, continent or international union) and racial or ethnic origin, shared history and culture, common religion, and similar political, social or intellectual ideologies. It is on the basis of these imagined truths that members open up on the forums, defend the ethics of the group, and spot and block non-members or intruders. The forums in which the above activities take place have been commonly referred to as ‘communities of practice’ and are defined by Eckert and McCon-

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nell–Ginet, based on the initial work by Lave and Wenger, in the following terms: An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social construct, a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages.9

What is important to note as far as the above definition is concerned is that the community is held together by ‘practice’. In the virtual space where physical practice is inhibited by the constraints of the medium, ‘practice’ resides predominantly within discursive behaviour – behaviour which signals belonging to a shared community. However, just like the normal, offline, real-life communities of practice, the virtual communities also exhibit aspects of the three critical dimensions of a community of practice identified by Wenger, namely: 1) mutual engagement, 2) joint negotiated enterprise, and 3) shared repertoire of negotiable resources accumulated over time. The online forum investigated here shares the above features: they meet online regularly and seem to share positions, especially concerning the country’s political situation; it is part of their enterprise to criticize the political system and call for change, and as Cameroonians living in different parts of the world, they share a repertoire of both historical and social events that hold them together. Again, they have known each other on the forum for several years and though they still disagree on certain topics, the ground they share is clearly stronger than their differences. Levels of identification within the community: Defending sub-communities While their response to ‘outside’ threat is often unanimous, it should not be assumed that these communities are always homogeneous. Rather, they are made up of sub-communities with characteristics that exclude other members of the larger group. These characteristics are often only discussed and negotiated but are hardly verifiable offline, hence indicating the powerful role played by discourse-framing in these virtual spaces. Although the Post forum studied here truly fits the description of a community of practice, three layers of identification or sub-communities, as shown in Figure 2 below, can be identified.

9

Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell–Ginet, “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 464.

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These layers are defended or contested when there is a felt need to identify with them.

Figure 2: Layers of communities of identification in the forum.

The biggest layer of identification is the national: i.e. Cameroon – a level Anderson identifies as one of the means by which newspapers induce a nation to imagine itself as a community. Although Anderson worked with hard-copy newspapers, the patterns of community-building are fundamentally similar in online newspapers. In the online forum and in the news story selected for this chapter, members make several references to Cameroon that show them as belonging to it, at least in this virtual space. In (1) below, UnitedstatesofAfrica tries to eject GWW from the forum because he is normally not a member, since he is not a Cameroonian. (1) UnitedstatesofAfrica: It will be wise if you refrain from coming to this site every hour and polluting it with your baseless hate and unhealthy criticism. This site was built for Cameroonians who are enthusiastic about change in country; Cameroonians who want to work together for a better Cameroon and rid our beloved country of the ills which plague her.

UnitedstatesofAfrica presents Cameroon, which he also condemns in harsh terms in his other posts on the forum, as “our beloved country,” indicating bonding not only with the country but also with other Cameroonians, who may or may not be members of the forum. Similarly, in (2), Hills attacks GWW for

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saying Cameroon is lawless and then defends the country,10 apparently because it is being attacked by a foreigner. (2) Hills: Again, check this out “I make a point about a thief and you go getting all racist as usual.” You talk about racism, yet you single out Cameroon as being lawless, and your country lawful… No need to refer your tiny brain to statistics and facts.

The second layer of identification is the historical (colonial) partition of Cameroonians into two linguistic groups: anglophones (English-speaking) and francophones (French-speaking). This is not played out in the story investigated here, but more on it can be found in Konings and Nyamnjoh’s Negotiating an Anglophone Identity11 and in Anchimbe’s paper “Constructing a Diaspora Anglophone Cameroonian Identity Online.” The third layer is the ethnic group, typified in the forum comments by the Manyu of the South West Region. Although Manyu, the name of the administrative unit, is used here, reference is being made to the Banyangi ethnic group. In the following excerpts, GWW identifies ‘Manyu guys’ for intentionally misinterpreting his comment on the forum (3). He is countered by two members of the group who feel insulted, hence have to defend the Manyus. (3) GWW : You manyu guys are really funny. I make a point about a thief and you go getting all racist as usual. You are just like welltrained pets, I throw the stick and you go chasing after it. Hahaha How can anyone take you ghosts seriously?

A further marker of a Manyu sub-community in the larger community is Mbu.B’s use of the in-group markers “Manyu sister” and “our troubles,” and the out-group marker “whitemen” (4). (4) Mbu.B This guy was actually dispossessed off his little fortune by a Manyu sister, now if you put the color or tribe first, I'll also release bomb shells against the 'whitemen, responsible for all our troubles'.12

However in (5), although UnitedstatesofAfrica is against GWW ’s position, he does not directly identify with the Manyus. He feels placed in the same sub-

10

Again, as my ongoing corpus of Cameroonian online diasporan discourse shows, over 85% of all posts on this forum portray negative impressions of the political and judicial systems of the country. Hills’s posts are also always negative. 11 Piet Konings & Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 12 The forum members’ posts have not been edited or corrected by me.

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community as the Manyus, perhaps because he is harsh in rejecting GWW ’s propositions about Cameroon and Manyu. (5) UnitedstatesofAfrica: “Manyu” types? hahahaha. I guess anyone who denies to listen to your rhetorics is now a “manyu” type huh? whatever happened between you and your “Manyu” people is strictly your business. […] The Manyu woman in question probably gave you the best sex in your entire life and since then you have refused to forget about the tribe. SMH!!!

In spite of the above sub-groups, the one of interest as far as the construction of ex-colonized and ex-colonizer entities is concerned is the national. The focus, as said above, is on how forum members uphold its integrity and protect its face from supposed threats by a foreigner whom they identify with colonialism and imperialism.

Discussion: Colonial Hangovers in Postcolonial Times Although the forum interaction investigated here takes place in 2009, the points of departure for many of the forum members are colonialism and the fate of Cameroon as an independent postcolonial state. Colonialism is the basis for the construction of the two entities, which seem to be at odds in the discourses produced. Immediately GWW is identified as white, he is linked to French and British colonialism, and this legitimizes all injustices he may have suffered in Cameroon, since these are presented as some form of payback for colonial injustices. He is blamed for them even though he is neither French nor British. From the positions held by the forum members, two camps are discernible: the first is pro-Cameroon, pro-Africa, anti-colonial, and almost anti-Western. Their aim is apparently to defend the honour of Cameroon and the ex-colonized world, especially Africa, as implied in the excerpt used as my main title, “Africa is not a game.” They want to protect these ex-colonies from further exploitation by the ex-colonizers, who may come in different neo-colonial guises. The second camp adopts a universal human position by being anti-corruption, anti-extortion, and anti-racism. They do not show support for the excolonizers or Europe; rather, they take a more humane perspective, calling for GWW to be treated as a normal unfortunate human being, and also for justice to take its course in Cameroon. For them, EBA has committed a crime and the judicial system has been complicit with it. Both camps use inclusive discourse strategies to signal that they belong together and construct the other as the opposite or enemy. In the following

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sections, the focus will be on how these two camps construct themselves into entities and how they construe the entity they are opposed to. Camp 1: Postcolonialist and Anti-Colonial Discourses 1. GWW is a colonial exploiter Since this camp considers the presence of the white man as a threat to an independent Cameroon, they represent GWW as an agent of colonialism. He is accused of exploitation, which is here conceived of as part of colonialism. In (6) below, UnitedstatesofAfrica rehearses this position, ostensibly reminding G WW that “this wasn’t the colonial era.” For him, there is a new reality in place which no longer tolerates the ills he identifies with “the tradition of the white man”: i.e. colonialism. As a consequence, he considers GWW to be not welcome on the forum, since it is not for “white men with the colonial mentality.” (6) UnitedstatesofAfrica: This GWW character is quite hilarious. You came to Cameroon to continue the tradition of the white man: shady dealings, extortion and exploitation. Fortunately, reality slapped you on the face and you soon realized that this wasn’t the colonial era. Ever since, you jump around this forum throwing insults here and there. Africa is not a game GWW and to borrow the words of Idi Amin, whatever happened to you in Africa was probably the realest moments of your life […] This site wasn’t created for white men with the colonial mentality like yourself who have nothing to say but to whine and moan about jilted love and curse Cameroon for their own misgivings.

While colonialism is at the heart of the excerpt in (6) above, Ron in (7) rather places his focus on the research and humanitarian interests whites have in the Pygmies in Cameroon. From the tone of the post, it is conceivable that the socalled help is also a form of exploitation: “need from our Pygmies.” (7) Ron: The Name GWW look fake to me. What the hell do [you] need from our Pygmies. go help your desperate whities.....

The excerpts in (6) and (7) use the exclusionary pronouns ‘you’ and ‘your’, e.g., “your desperate whities” (7), to refer to GWW and the ex-colonizer entity he is framed into. Both quotations attack the person and credibility of GWW by using the contemptuous and doubt-casting expression “This GWW character” (6) and suggesting that the name G WW is fake (7). By implication, the entity GWW represents or belongs to is also not credible and is inauthentic. In (8), Britishman continues this personal attack by suggesting that GWW is a porn photographer who is on an exploitation mission in Cameroon.

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(8) Britishman: Sorry you [forum members] are not well informed about the case of the said EBA . Ayuk is different from EBA . You know little or nothing about her husband [GWW ]. That is why you didn't see any wrong in him. He was a dropout at the age of 11 and became a porn photographer. He went to Cameroon for exploitations. Try to do investigations before writing.

In order to justify their rejection of GWW , the above members identify him not only with colonialism but also with other social aspects considered taboo in Cameroon such as pornography (8) as well as with educational underachievement. 2. GWW ’s case is return justice: Europe vs. Africa Another level on which the two entities are constructed is through a comparison of what obtains with Africans in Europe (West) and how G WW has been treated in Cameroon. For some, as the following excerpts illustrate, it is a form of justice, or revenge justice, since Africans in similar situations do not generally get justice in Europe. As suggested in (9), the way GWW is exploited by his Cameroonian wife is similar to the way some African men in Europe are exploited by the European women they get married to. Contrary to GWW , they do not often get the chance to go to court. (9) Altruist: GWW or whatever you call yourself. In your sick country, the consent of any of my brother who marries your women will not even be asked before he be thrown out. can you stop bitching and moaning about Cameroon? In fact, count it lucky that there were ever chances of court sessions. If I was the one in Europe, I will not even get that privilege to stand in court. From this day henceforth, never ever you damage the image of my people further. When it was sweet, we never knew. now that it’s bitter, we are being told. Be ashame!!!

Here, Altruist clearly sets the two entities apart through the use of inclusive expressions like “my brother” and “my people” and exclusionary denigratory expressions like “your sick country” and “your women.” Again, the supposed logic in these posts is ‘you are paid in the same coin here as “we” are in your country’. However, this logic is somewhat faulty, because G WW is not from Europe; he does not indicate any support for Europe in his posts. He is placed in this category simply because he is white. In (10), UnitedstatesofAfrica extends this Europe category to include the whole of the West, as in “Western countries,”

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“White man’s world,” and “Western media.” This implies that though he may not be from Europe he is still part of the Western entity. (10) UnitedstatesofAfrica: Millions of Africans are being frustrated by the law in Western countries but yet the Western media doesn't give a shit. We should not be forced to eat GWW ’s shit (excuse my language) because he is a white man. Give me a break!! […] millions of African immigrants are being tortured and humiliated in the White man’s world but nobody gives a shit. Yet, you want Africa to bow down and kiss your ass because you got duped by Manyu boys.

In (10), more levels of distinction are added – media and race. Since the forum is part of a newspaper, UnitedstatesofAfrica recommends that forum members ignore the issue of GWW , because Western media also ignore the plight of Africans in similar situations in the West. Secondly, he implies that they as black men or Africans should not be bothered by G WW ’s problem, simply because he is white. He moves the fight to a higher level where it is not only the defence of the country and the continent that is important but also the race. 3. GWW embodies Western social ills Two social aspects considered taboo and illegal in Cameroon are implicitly clipped to GWW on the grounds that he is a Westerner. These are homosexuality, which Hills says in (11) is “illegal in Cameroon,” and pornography, which for Britishman (12) is a form of exploitation. (11) Hills: By plenty of sex, you mean anal and or oral, right? How have you ascertained this fact. Thought gay stuff is illegal in Cameroon. Hey GWW , can you go a bit further...., How is it done, again is it done only in prison, have you done it with Ayuk before or he did it with you. Anyway yr biz. (12) Britishman: He [GWW ] was a dropout at the age of 11 and became a porn photographer. He went to Cameroon for exploitations.

These two taboos serve to influence other forum members who might otherwise have had sympathy for G WW . By invoking them, the bond between members of this camp is strengthened and their cause is given greater legitimacy. Camp 2: Universalist and Humane Discourses As said above, this camp is not really opposed to the first but is more considerate of and compassionate towards GWW . What makes them different, however, is that they criticize the political and judicial system in Cameroon just as GWW does. They entreat members of the forum to show some sympathy

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(section 1), to call for change in the system (section 2), and to use GWW ’s experience as a mirror to examine themselves as Cameroonians, especially those in the diaspora (section 3). 1. Let’s be human towards G W W The message of compassion and sympathy runs through the comments of this camp; see also (16) below. However, in (13) Mbu.B attempts to remove the racial, ethnic, and national boundaries built around the two entities by members of the other camp. For him, it is not a matter of race or tribe – otherwise he, too, would have released “bomb shells against the whitemen” – but, rather, one of humanity. As he puts it, G WW is a “gentleman as another human” and thus deserves respect. (13) Mbu.B: Hills, respect. I'm not sure if you followed the GWW story and even if it turned out to be a tale for entertainment, I would personally sympathize with the character 'GWW '. This guy was actually dispossessed off his little fortune by a Manyu sister, now if you put the color or tribe first, I'll also release bomb shells against the 'whitemen, responsible for all our troubles'. But if we treat this gentleman as another human, who was shortsighted then we have a different set of arguments for or against. Well again we can start from the basics, this GWW person, reportedly suffered an injustice and couldn't find justice in our courts which we all know how it works and he uses such medium to shed his tears and I hardly see how he deserves the negative titles.

However, he shares responsibility for the supposed injustice suffered by GWW when he refers to the courts as “our courts,” with the (dys)function of which, as he says, members of the forum are familiar. Referring to EBA as “Manyu sister,” Mbu.B still conceives of the injustice as the burden of guilt of Cameroonians generally, hence suggesting that instead of blaming G WW , they should show compassion, since it is “our sister” and “our courts” that caused him pain. Again, he, contrary to the other camp, which regards GWW as a distraction on the forum, views him as someone who is shedding his tears in order to forget the ordeal. Forum members, by implication, should help him through this stage rather than insult and reject him. It is like providing a shoulder for someone to cry on. In the same vein, Rexon in (14) praises G WW for his steadfastness and restraint. (14) Rexon: It is surprising that anyone who [sic] want to denigrate a man of integrity like GWW . From his ordeal in Cameroon and the steadfastness and restrained he shown, any responsible mind would understand that he is a very kindhearted, loving and Godfearing

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person. Please Hills, show respect for this man as he is not the type you guys want to depict above.

Rexon tries to detach GWW from the ills he is identified with by members of the other camp, presumably on account of the fact that GWW is “very kindhearted, loving and Godfearing” (14). The ills include pornography, homosexuality, exploitation, and extortion. The religious factor he invokes, “Godfearing,” seems to fit well into the Cameroonian social system at the time, as typified by the multiplicity of churches. 2. Let’s join GW W to rebuke our system For Fon (15) and Nyamawanga (16), rather than blame GWW , Cameroonians should join him to call for change in the system. The image of Cameroon has been damaged enough already, Fon claims (15), and what GWW is doing only confirms what international organizations have said about corruption, etc. (15) Fon: I see GWW differently. As one who had followed his ordeal in Cameroon and his approach to life, it is not true that he is out to damage the image of Cameroon. His love for Cameroon can’t be disputed. What he hates about Cameroon, just as I do, is the system in place and not the people. I don’t think it is GWW who has caused various survey organizations to constantly rate Cameroon as the most corrupt nation on earth. Which is more damaging? Is it the system in place, that GWW is against, that damages our image or this gentle man?

3. GWW should serve as a mirror for us Adopting a similar position as Fon above (15), Nyamawanga (16) problematizes the whole idea of belonging to the community or entity ‘Cameroon’, whether at home or in the diaspora. His criticism is directed not only at state institutions but also at individuals. For him, EBA and KP are criminals. (16) Nyamawanga: I think being a Cameroonian is really becoming a problem. Even some of us who are in the diaspora are even worse than people who have never set their foot on a plane. I believe any body who followed the story of GWW in Cameroon should be ashame of what a fellow citizen can do to a foreigner. It’s S H AM E FU L to read people writing in support of Cameroonians like EBA , KP , etc. Please for those who don't know the story just google it and you will feel sorry for this GWW. I even hear, the said KP is an assistant mayor to one of those newly created councils in Limbe. (My god where are we heading to with such characters as leaders) and the said EBA is insane and she is permanently on chains. Please, I think we should show some compassion for GWW .

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It will never be a crime to love or get married but what that girl and her aunt did to GWW will always be a crime.

Contrary to the first camp, which constructs two entities, Nyamawanga focuses, rather, on the country, Cameroon, as a community. The exclamatory statement in bracket “(My god where are we heading to with such characters as leaders!)” illustrates the extent of his disgust and although he still considers himself to be part of the community (cf. the use of “we”), showing compassion is the only way to save the country’s face. So, placing the blame entirely on EBA and KP , he partly absolves the country of overall blame.

Conclusion: Contesting Affiliations – Online Discourse Communities of Practice While taking into account the notions of community of practice13 and discourse communities as discussed above, it can be said that the community of Cameroonians on the Post forum are held together not by any solid offline verifiable bonds but simply by the discursive presentations and rapprochement they engage in. The ways in which they present themselves and the ideology-driven views they hold of ‘their’ country or linguistic group (anglophones or francophones) or ethnic group (e.g., Manyu) are accepted by other members generally as ‘imagined truths’ which can only be tested or verified in the consistency of members’ posts and ideas on the forum. For these ‘truths’ to be confirmed, members therefore have to stick to certain unwritten rules, since the forum has no moderator, and endeavour to promote the course of the group even when they disagree. Those who do not conform are immediately identified and either warned or rejected on the forum. They could have been evicted, but since there is no one with administrator rights, rejection takes place discursively through, among other methods, advice to conform or otherwise leave, insults, indifference to posts by the non-conforming member, and identifying the member with an out-group entity, hence treating them as an opponent or enemy. The last option is used by some members of the forum to create distance between themselves and G WW . First, he is identified with colonialism and the West (Europe) which perpetrated colonialism, and his presence in Cameroon is also presented as a continuation of colonialism and exploitation. To make this strong enough, many suggestive words are used that place GWW and themselves on opposing platforms: colonizer vs. ex-colonized. As Table 2 below 13

Jean Lave & Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991); Penelope Eckert, “Communities of practice.”

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illustrates, references to ‘white’, ‘colonial’, ‘Europe’ on the one hand and ‘black’, ‘Cameroon’, ‘Africa’ on the other show how these two entities are constructed on the forum. Belonging

Out-group: colonial

In-group: postcolonial

Neutral

Token word [n=3690] white + man, men, skin, ass Whities Western Europe Colonial black man, people Africa, African Cameroon, Cameroonian(s) Manyu + sister, boys, guys human + being, rights

Occurrences 8 1 2 1 3 2 8 42 9 3

% 0.2 0.02 0.05 0,02 0.08 0.05 0.2 1.1 0.2 0.08

Table 2. Tokens of in-group and out-group markers

It is interesting to note that GWW is thrust into the colonial entity even though he is not a European. He does not contest this himself, perhaps because 1) someone else points out that he is actually Australian, or 2) he is, as he says elsewhere, of Irish descent, or 3) he finds it a distraction from the more serious issue. Contestation, however, can be witnessed in the way ‘Manyu’ is presented and defended by some members of the forum, as in examples (3), (4), and (5) above. What this tells us is that postcolonial communities have several layers of identity in which communities of practice function without necessarily affecting the broader national community.

W OR K S C I T E D Anchimbe, Eric A. “Constructing a Diaspora Anglophone Cameroonian Identity Online,” in Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction, ed. Rotimi Taiwo (Hershey PA : I G I Global, 2010): 130–44. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Eckert, Penelope, & Sally McConnell–Ginet. “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992):461–90. Eckert, Penelope. “Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender and Power All Live,” in Locating Power: Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz & Birch Moonwomon (Berkeley CA : Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1992): 89–99.

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Konings, Piet, & Francis B. Nyamnjoh. Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Lave, Jean, & Étienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991). Pogner, Karl–Heinz. “Writing and Interacting in the Discourse Community of Engineering,” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 855–67. Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990). Tah, Elvis. “Scammer Slammed 2-Year Jail Term,” The Post (2 March 2009). Wenger, Étienne. Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998).

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The Indian Tabloid in English What Type of Community Does it Speak to, and How?1

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by which a nation is able to imagine itself as a community, as Benedict Anderson has argued in his Imagined Communities.2 Anderson draws attention in particular to the circumstances of consumption, the “mass ceremony” of reading,3 but newspapers are, of course, also designed to address and construct particular national and social class-based communities. Specifically in the case of the tabloid, it has been observed in the context of an analysis of the British press that “a matey and jovial community between news organ and readers [...] is inscribed into the very language of the medium.”4 A book-length study devoted to the way the British tabloid press constructs a community through its language has been presented by Martin Conboy in his Tabloid Britain.5 He shows that “Tabloid Britain is [...] based on an appeal to the imagined community of its readers” (47), one motivation for which is “the importance of national audiences even within the global network of communications” (47). He also observes that “in appropriating the idiom of the ordinary people of the country – the non-elite – 1

EWSPAPERS ARE O NE OF THE MEANS

I am grateful to Christine Wender, then research assistant at the University of Freiburg, for her help in compiling the corpus used in this study, and to Andreas Sedlatschek for drawing my attention to the Indian tabloid in English. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 39. 4 Shelley McLachlan & Peter Golding, “Tabloidization in the British Press: A Quantitative Investigation into Changes in British Newspapers, 1952–1997,” in Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards, ed. Colin Sparks & John Tulloch (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 77. 5 Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language (London: Routledge, 2006). Further page references are in the main text.

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the tabloids have managed to produce a marketable combination of social class and language” (11). The British tabloid’s targeting of “an idealized reader of lower socio-economic status,” as Conboy has described it (15), raises the question of what could be the place of an English-language tabloid in India. Traditionally at least, English in India has been very much an elite language, and associated with formal domains of use. However, Indian society and with it the English-speaking segment has been changing since the early 1990s, when the country abandoned its post-independence socialist policies and opened up to international capitalism. There is now a substantial middle class with a more Western orientation in lifestyle, and members of the urban lower classes are striving to acquire English language skills, as international companies increasingly recruit call-centre workers from among them.6 Therefore young people in India today tend to have a positive motivation towards learning English as a national and international workplace language.7 Another change is that English is now used more in private domains, and young Indians seem to be more inclined to value specifically Indian-English features as indices of a modern urban Indian identity.8 Thus, English in India has been developing in recent times “in a complex network of local and global communicative needs.”9 It is in the context of the changing sociolinguistic landscape of Indian English as outlined above that one should see the emergence in recent times of the Indian tabloid in English. According to the journalists Ruth Maclean and Rachel Rickard Straus, it targets a young, urban, middle class audience.10 For example, these authors report as follows on the Mumbai Mirror, introduced by the Times Group – the publisher of the Times of India – in 2005 (and other regional Mirror titles which have followed): The Mirror titles share most content with their parent paper, the Times of India, but in a compact format with a sassier, lighter content to suit the young middle class urbanite. As Times of India supplements editor,

6

See, for example, Andreas Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009); Viniti Vaish, Biliteracy and Globalization: English Language Education in India (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2008); and Vineeta Chand, “[v]at is going on? Local and global ideologies about Indian English,” Language in Society 38 (2009): 393–419. 7 See Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English, 23. 8 Chand, “[v]at is going on? Local and global ideologies about Indian English,” 405. 9 Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English, 23. 10 Ruth Maclean & Rachel Rickard Straus, “The dawn of the Indian tabloid” (1 January 2009), http://macleanandrickardstraus.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/the-dawn-of-the-indian-tabloid (accessed 21 February 2011).

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Carol Andrade explains: “The Mirror is for readers who want something more manageable – it is particularly aimed at the commuter. You’ll find there’s quite a lot of overlap of content but they handle stories differently. Mirror is irreverent, it’s in your face, it’s vernacular, it’s one-onone – and it has been very popular since day one.”

Another Indian tabloid in English is the Mid-Day, which features the tagline ‘India’s best tabloid stories’.11 Having remade itself as a tabloid in 2008,12 the paper explains its new approach as follows: This light-hearted, easy-read, entertaining and mischievous paper now has a new objective – to make work fun. The focus is on the Young Urban Mobile Professionals across India (Y UMPI ) and the company is leaving no stone unturned to connect with them. A host of addictive, fun sections like What’s On, Hit List, Crosswords, Horoscope and Fun@work (Tues & Thurs) ensure the newspaper remains a welcome diversion for young professionals on the move or even a quick pick-me-up to perk up their day.13

While the Mid-Day and the Mumbai Mirror are creations of Indian media companies, the Mail Today is the product of a cooperation with a British tabloid: Mail Today, a daily newspaper in compact format, is published by Mail Today Newspapers Private Limited, a joint venture between the India Today Group and Daily Mail of London. Mail Today is a morning daily with a difference. Clean, lucid and straight-talking, Mail Today marries the credibility and authenticity of the India Today Group with Daily Mail's international standards.14

Influences from British tabloids are visible in the Mid-Day and the Mumbai Mirror as well. Apparently, according to the attributions of articles, the latter gets some of its international stories directly from the Daily Mirror, and one finds in both newspapers references to reports in all the major British tabloids (Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Sun). The present study will take the rather well-researched British tabloid as a comparative basis for an analysis of the ways in which the Indian tabloid in English addresses its particular readership. The analysis will contrast the tabloids’ approach with that of non-tabloid newspapers, and will consider aspects of both content and language-use. 11 12 13 14

http://www.mid-day.com/ (accessed 21 February 2011). Maclean & Rickard Straus, “The dawn of the Indian tabloid.” http://www.mid-day.com//about.htm (accessed 21 February 2011). http://epaper.mailtoday.in/about_us.aspx (accessed 21 February 2011).

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Background and Previous Research From the point of view of content, tabloid newspapers are characterized by a focus on scandal, sports, and entertainment and on private life, as opposed to the elite press’s focus on politics, economics, and society and on public life.15 There are degrees of these orientations, however, particularly in Britain, where there is more of a continuum of newspapers, whereas the situation in the U SA is more polarized.16 Five types of newspapers have been defined along the range: (1) the serious press (e.g., the Financial Times); (2) the semi-serious press (e.g., the London Times); (3) the serious-popular press (e.g., the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, the major mid-market tabloids in Britain); (4) the newsstand tabloid press (represented in Britain by down-market papers like the Sun); and (5) the supermarket tabloid press (a strong phenomenon in the U SA , whereas similar products elsewhere are usually magazines rather than newspapers).17 Differences between these types of newspapers are not limited to content, of course. In the more popular types of newspapers one can also expect to find, for example, more use of visual elements, a simpler vocabulary and syntax, and a more casual style.18 The language and discourse specifically of the British tabloid have been investigated in detail by Conboy, as already mentioned above. Stylistic devices discussed by him include the use of familiar names or nicknames and of abbreviated and colloquial expressions (22–25) as well as wordplay (18–19). Although the discourse of all newspapers tends to be characterized by national bias, this is especially true of the tabloids (46–68). The tabloids characteristically present news in an exaggerated, sensationalized, polarized, and simplistic way (15–18). The community with the newspaper that the tabloids want their readers to feel part of is emphasized by interactive elements (20–22), Also, tabloids tend to take a common approach across different sections, treating news and entertainment in similar ways (15). The Indian tabloid in English being a relatively recent phenomenon, there is no published research on its language yet (as far as the present author is aware), but various linguistic studies have worked with the long-established more serious newspapers as represented in the available corpora and more recently in

15

Colin Sparks, “Introduction: The Panic Over Tabloid News,” in Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards, ed. Colin Sparks & John Tulloch (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 10–12. 16 Colin Sparks, “Introduction: The Panic Over Tabloid News,” 16. 17 Sparks, “Introduction: The Panic Over Tabloid News,” 13–15. 18 McLachlan & Golding, “Tabloidization in the British Press,” 76–77.

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online form.19 Devyani Sharma, in addition to analysing a particular grammatical feature (the pluperfect), also makes some more general observations on Indian newspaper language. Basing her work on the press section of the 1978 Kolhapur corpus compared to parallel British and American data, she describes two features: (1) formality as evidenced by long sentences, few direct quotations, and few contracted forms; and (2) “indigenization”: i.e. the use of Indian features, where she cites the use of words borrowed from Indian languages as an example.20 The use of Indian-language – specifically Hindi – elements in Indian English-language newspapers is the focus of a more recent study by Rakesh Bhatt. Analysing the online editions of the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, he found an increasing incidence of (single-word and multiple-word) code-switches. These he interprets as a form of hybridity that opens up new possibilities of identity representations between the global and the local, the traditional and the modern.21 Thus, he argues, newspapers can be viewed as a site of sociolinguistic transgression, exploiting and building upon a generational division within the Englishknowing bilingual middle class, transgressively voicing the younger generation’s inclination to break away from the habitus of traditional linguistic and cultural practices.22

Generational differences, as well as register differences, also became apparent in Chandrika Balasubramanian’s corpus-based study of many registers including press language with regard to Indian features on the levels of lexis and especially grammar. Based on these findings, she has developed a model of speaker groups of English in India (inspired by Braj Kachru’s concentric-circle model of World Englishes) which distinguishes the following three groups: (1) an “inner core” of “educated older speakers” whose English is closest to “traditional ‘native’ varieties”; (2) an “outer circle” where Indian features occur in informal conversational registers of English; and (3) an “expanding circle” of

19

For example, Devyani Sharma, “The pluperfect in native and non-native English: A comparative corpus study,” Language Variation and Change 13 (2001): 343–73; Joybrato Mukherjee & Sebastian Hoffmann, “Describing verb-complementational profiles of New Englishes: A pilot study of Indian English,” English World-Wide 27 (2006): 147–73; Rakesh M. Bhatt, “In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (2008): 177–200; Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English; Chandrika Balasubramanian, Register Variation in Indian English (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009). 20 Sharma, “The pluperfect in native and non-native English,” 350–51. 21 Bhatt, “In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space,” 177–78. 22 Bhatt, “In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space,” 193–94.

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younger speakers where Indian features occur in many registers, including more formal ones.23

Data and Method The present analysis is based primarily on a corpus of Indian and British newspaper articles that were downloaded from the Internet in early 2010, most of them during the month of January. The articles are from seven newspapers, the three Indian tabloids described in the Introduction above as well as the Times of India as a more serious Indian newspaper, and the Times, the Daily Mail, and the Sun as representatives of the range of British newspapers (see preceding section). Four categories of articles are included in the corpus: international news, national news, international celebrities/entertainment, and national celebrities/entertainment. To the largest extent possible, articles on the same or similar topics were chosen. The number of articles is ten per newspaper per category and the total number of words in the corpus is about 150,000. The corpus was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Where a larger amount of data was required, the corpus analysis was supplemented by searches of the whole material on the respective websites, either through the websites’ own search functions (content searches) or through Google Advanced Search, with the search restricted to the website in question (word searches). 24

Analysis As mentioned in the preceding section, the corpus compiled for the present study consists of ten whole articles per newspaper per category, which means that the number of words varies between newspapers and categories depending on the length of articles. The word numbers are detailed in Table 1 overleaf. Because of the limited number of articles selected, the differences in word numbers that emerged in the compilation of the corpus must be interpreted with reservation, but some observations can nevertheless be gleaned from Table 1. First, among the British newspapers, it is clearly the Sun that has the shortest articles. The Daily Mail has the largest amount of text according to this compilation of articles, but the difference to the Times is mainly due to one text category, national news. The Indian newspapers apparently all tend to have shorter articles than the British ones. What emerges clearly are the different foci 23

Balasubramanian, Register Variation in Indian English, 235. Cf. also Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English, where Google Advanced Search is used extensively. 24

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of the Times of India and the Mumbai Mirror, which, as mentioned in the Introduction, are published by the same company: the Times of India has more text in the news categories, while the Mumbai Mirror has more on celebrities and entertainment. One can also see that the Times of India, the Mumbai Mirror, and the Mid-Day apparently write in more detail about national celebrities and entertainment (which means primarily Bollywood) than about international celebrities and entertainment.

International news National news International celebrities/ entertainment National celebrities/ entertainment Total

Times of India 5.5 4 1

Indian newspapers Mumbai MidMirror Day 2.5 4.5 2.5 4 2 1.5

Mail Today 6.5 5.5 3.5

British newspapers Times Daily Sun Mail 8 10 6 7 16 6 8 8.5 4

3

4

3

2.5

9

10

3.5

13.5

11

13

18.5

32

44.5

19.5

Table 1: Approximate number of words (in 1,000) in the corpus per newspaper per category.

Approaching differences in the focus of the content of the newspapers from another perspective, Figure 1 shows the number of articles that were published in each newspaper on the Haiti earthquake – the major international news event during the research period in January 2010, bound to be covered by both the British and the Indian press – within a week from the beginning of the coverage on 13 January. Overall, the Indian newspapers have fewer articles than the British ones but there is, among both groups, a clear leader for international news: namely, the Times of India and the London Times, respectively. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Figure 1: Number of articles related to the Haiti earthquake (12 January 2010) published between 13 January and 19 January 2010 per newspaper (search on websites, 22 April 2010).

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For a closer look at the coverage of this event, Table 2 presents selected headlines on the Haiti earthquake from three newspapers. Sun 1. 100,000 now feared dead in devastating Haiti earthquake (13 January 2010) 2. Aid floods into wrecked Haiti (14 January 2010) 3. Quake: urgent appeal for cash (15 January 2010) 4. Mum rescued amid Haiti hell (16 January 2010) 5. Second Brit is killed in Haiti (18 January 2010) 6. UK trebles aid for Haiti (18 January 2010) 7. Hope for kids … thanks to you (18 January 2010) Times 1. Frantic search for survivors after catastrophic Haiti earthquake (13 January 2010) 2. Haiti earthquake: timeline of recent quakes and tsunamis around the world (13 January 2010) 3. UN faces worst day in its history as 200 feared dead (14 January 2010) 4. Rescue teams and aid start arriving in Haiti (14 January 2010) 5. The irresistible rise of the aid industry (15 January 2010) 6. President Barack Obama launches drive for Haiti funds (16 January 2010) Mid-Day 1. Massive earthquake rocks Haiti; no info about Indians (13 January 2010) 2. Indian consul-general in quake-hit Haiti safe (14 January 2010) 3. Brangelina show their support for Haiti earthquake victims (14 January 2010) 4. 30,00,000 [sic] (14 January 2010) 5. Haiti quake: 4-year-old survives after being buried for 3 days (17 January 2010) Table 2: Illustrative headlines on the Haiti earthquake from three newspapers (search on websites, 22 April 2010).

Considering first the British Sun, many typical tabloid features can be noted in the selected headlines: interaction with readers (headlines 3 and 7), hyperbole (compare headline 2 from the Sun and headline 4 from the Times), human interest (headline 4 – note also the alliteration), and a focus on British interests (headlines 5 and 6). The Times, of course, has a focus on British interests as well, but there are also headlines about victims or about aid efforts on the part of other nations (headlines 3 and 6),25 which one does not find in the Sun. It also has more background information (headline 2) and adopts critical perspectives as well (headline 5). As the Times of India’s earthquake coverage is of the same type as that of the London Times and the present chapter’s focus is on tabloids, the third newspaper from which Table 2 provides selected headlines is the MidDay. What one does not see in these particular examples is the interactive element observed in the headlines from the Sun, but there are several features 25

Of course, these tend to be the “elite nations” that are perceived to be close to the home nation’s interests; cf. Martin Conboy, The Language of the News (London: Routledge, 2007): 160.

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that are also common in British tabloids: sensationalism (see headline 4, which consists of the death toll alone),26 human interest (headline 5), and a strong national focus (headlines 1 and 2). It is also quite revealing of the newspaper’s priorities that one of only eleven headlines related to the earthquake found in this newspaper in the week in question (see Figure 1) is about the celebrity pair Brangelina (headline 3). We now turn to the use of visual elements, which is expected to be more prominent in the tabloids. Figure 2 shows that among the British newspapers there is indeed a very clear difference between the Times and the two more popular ones in this respect, but that the Indian newspapers are less differentiated. 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Times of Mumbai Mid-Day Mail India Mirror Today

Times

Daily Mail

Sun

Figure 2: Number of visual elements (per 1,000 words) per newspaper in the corpus.

Next, we will consider the aspects of linguistic style also analysed by Sharma in the 1978 data from the Kolhapur corpus. First, from Table 3 (overleaf) it becomes clear that Indian newspaper language can no longer be said to be characterized by particularly long sentences. A differentiation between the Times of India and the three tabloids with regard to average sentence length cannot be established, whereas in the case of the British newspapers a hierarchy is discernible, with the Times showing the greatest average sentence length in the total data and the Sun the lowest, though the differences are not major ones. What is furthermore striking about the results in this table is the pronounced difference in average sentence length between the national news and the national celebrities/entertainment category in the Times of India, the Mumbai

26

There seems to be an extra zero in headline 4 which may be an error.

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Mirror, and the Mid-Day; among the British newspapers it is only in the case of the Times that one notes a certain difference.27 The very short sentences in the category ‘national celebrities/entertainment’ in the three Indian newspapers mentioned can be related to the amount of direct speech. As Table 4 shows, there is indeed a very considerable amount, and there is a contrast to the ‘national news’ category which is not seen to the same extent in any of the British newspapers.

International news National news International celebrities/ entertainment National celebrities/ entertainment Total

Times of India 21.1

Indian newspapers Mumbai MidMirror Day 20.7 21.1

Mail Today 22.4

British newspapers Times Daily Sun Mail 21.1 19.1 17.4

22.0 19.3

19.7 20.6

24.4 23.1

17.3 19.6

23.7 22.3

20.5 20.2

19.3 18.2

15.7

14.7

15.9

21.6

18.2

20.9

18.5

19.5

18.9

21.1

20.2

21.3

20.2

18.4

Table 3: Average sentence length (in words) in the corpus per newspaper per category.

International news National news International celebrities/ entertainment National celebrities/ entertainment Total

Times of India 16.0

Indian newspapers Mumbai MidMirror Day 29.9 19.6

Mail Today 15.6

British newspapers Times Daily Sun Mail 23.7 16.0 24.8

11.0 27.1

14.7 22.9

11.0 10.0

23.8 19.6

20.9 13.1

27.2 18.3

21.7 14.6

44.4

41.3

30.8

21.6

24.5

18.4

31.6

21.6

29.3

18.3

20.2

20.7

20.9

23.0

Table 4: Direct-speech quotations (in percent of text) in the corpus per newspaper per category.

27

It is not surprising that no distinctive patterns emerged in the case of the international categories since these include articles from international agencies and, as mentioned in the Introduction, the Indian tabloids also take over stories on international celebrities/entertainment from British ones.

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One of the features that are typical of direct speech quotations are contracted forms. As can be seen in Figure 3, Indian newspapers still tend to use fewer contracted forms than British ones, but, as already noted by Sedlatschek,28 there seems to be an increasing trend for these forms be used in Indian newspapers as well, and this seems to have been accelerated by the introduction of tabloids, the Mumbai Mirror showing a similar number of contractions in the present analysis as the Daily Mail. 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Times of Mumbai Mid-Day Mail India Mirror Today

Times

Daily Mail

Sun

Figure 3: Contracted forms in direct-speech quotations (per 1,000 words) in the corpus per newspaper.

In direct-speech passages in the Indian newspapers, particularly the tabloids, one can also observe the rendering of Indian speech patterns. In example 1 below, from the Mumbai Mirror, the discourse particle yaar (borrowed from Hindi) occurs, which has been shown in research based on the Indian component of the International Corpus of English to be particularly associated with the speech of younger Indians.29 (1)

Immediately after, as she was making her way backstage, Saif got up to applaud her. But as the couple made their way out together, he couldn't resist telling her, “I think you need to lose some weight, yaar.” (Mumbai Mirror, national celebrities/entertainment, “Just lose it“, 19 January 2010)

Example 2, also from the Mumbai Mirror, shows extended code-switches into Hindi.

28

Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English, 125. Claudia Lange, “‘ Where’s the party yaar!’: Discourse particles in Indian English,” in World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects, ed. Thomas Hoffmann & Lucia Siebers (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009): 207–25. 29

124 (2)

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A close friend of Sania (on request of anonymity) told this paper, “Bahut achcha hua ki shaadi nahi hui. Agar ho jati, to chalti nahin. Sania and Sohrab were just not made for each other. Her poor performance in Australia was due to the fact that she had called off her engagement. [...] “He would tell her isse baat mat karo, usse baat mat karo, yahan mat jao, wahan mat jao. (Mumbai Mirror, national celebrities/entertainment, “Where’s the love“, 29 January 2010)

In example 3.a we see uncorrected article omission in the Mumbai Mirror,30 while the Times of India inserts the article in brackets in a similar context (see 3.b). (3.a) When asked whether the Dinakaran controversy had dented the image of the judiciary, the CJI said. “No, I don’t think. People don’t take these things seriously. Media may project. The people view judiciary in a different perspective.” (Mumbai Mirror, national news, “SC collegium did not err on Dinakaran: CJI,” 12 January 2010) (3.b) Emphasizing the importance of RTI, the bench said: “RTI has over-reaching impact. Citizens who require such information should not misuse the information, thus saving the independence of (the) judiciary.” (Times of India, national news, “Office of Chief Justice comes under RTI: High court,” 12 January 2010)

Features of Indian English occur in the newspapers, especially but not only in direct speech. Consider, for instance, the use of the numeral lakh (a Hindi loanword meaning ‘ten thousand’) in example 4.a from the Mumbai Mirror; the Times of India in otherwise almost exactly the same sentence has million (see example 4.b). (4.a) The quake’s epicentre was only 16 km from Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 10 lakh, and aftershocks as powerful as 5.9 rattled the city throughout the night and into Wednesday. (Mumbai Mirror, international news, “Thousands die in Haiti quake,” 14 January 2010) (4.b) The quake’s epicentre was only 10 miles (16 km) from Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 1 million, and aftershocks as powerful as 5.9 rattled the city throughout the night and into Wednesday. (Times of India, international news, “Thousands feared dead as powerful earthquake rocks Haiti,” 13 January 2010)

Table 5 shows that the use of Hindi is one of the strategies, in addition to others like puns and direct questions, that are used in the Mumbai Mirror’s headlines. 30

On non-use of articles in Indian English, see Sedlatschek, Contemporary Indian English, 202– 13; Balasubramanian, Register Variation in Indian English, 100–104, 165–78.

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Mumbai Mirror 1. 5 January 2010 2. 18 January 2010 3. 22 January 2010 4. 29 January 2010

a

Salman ki paathshala

Kat Race Desia girl

Where’s the love?

Times of India Salman was the school bully Kat has just one project in hand this year! Vidya will only wear Sabya creations! Sania Mirza’s engagement called off

Table 5: Illustrative headlines from the Mumbai Mirror and the Times of India (corpus, national celebrities/entertainment, corresponding articles). ‘indigenous’ (Hindi).

Finally, we will take a look at colloquial words like mum or Brit (see the headlines from the Sun in Table 2 above), characteristic of the language of British tabloids. Ten examples of such items were identified through the qualitative corpus analysis and then searched for by Google Advanced Search, the corpus being too small for this type of quantitative lexical analysis. The results are shown in Table 6. Among the British newspapers, a fairly clear three-way differentiation emerged, with the Sun showing a great preference for the colloquial word in many cases, the Times tending to avoid most of them, and the Daily Mail occupying an in-between position. In the case of the Indian newspapers, one also notes a tendency for these colloquial words to be used more by the tabloids, but the overall picture is not quite as clear-cut.

Brit Pakb Aussie mum/mom/ mummy/mommy dad/daddy celeb cabbie cop pal ciggy/ciggie

Indian newspapersa Times of Mumbai Mid-Day India Mirror 5.2 2.3 56.0 36.0 33.3 81.5 14.6 16.2 18.1 34.6 31.4 90.0 19.6 3.5 32.4 59.4 16.6 4.2

31.1 77.3 63.9 83.6 3.4 3.2

25.9 35.2 49.0 12.0 14.3 4.7

British newspapers Times Daily Mail Sun 0.7 0c 7.4 31.8

8.9 0c 53.0 42.2

81.0 0c 82.2 73.9

10.6 2.0 12.8 11.8 1.4 2.0

46.8 3.5 90.8 4.8 1.5 6.0

76.9 87.4 62.3 55.5 13.7 18.2

Table 6: Colloquial lexical items (in percent of total number of occurrences of colloquial and neutral variants; see appendix for absolute figures) per newspaper (Google Advanced Search, 22 April 2010). a The Mail Today is not included here, because it is available online only as an e-paper and cannot be accessed via Google Advanced Search. b More widely used in South Asia than in Great Britain, where it is often derogatory; see “Pak: adj. and n,” O E D Online (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2010), www.oed.com (accessed 24 February 2011). c In the relevant sense.

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Conclusion The analysis has shown that there is a marked tendency towards informal style in Indian newspapers, which is more pronounced in the tabloids. Many of the strategies that have been observed in British tabloids were found in the Indian ones as well, but it has also become apparent that the Indian tabloids are not as differentiated from the more serious press as is the case with British tabloids, especially a down-market one like the Sun. While there are differences in content, form, and language, these are not always as pronounced as in the case of the British tabloids, and in some cases important distinctions between different categories of articles within each newspaper were noted, which actually overrode the distinctions between different newspapers. Overall, then, the Indian newspapers analysed here could be considered to represent the semi-serious and serious-popular categories of newspapers. A further noteworthy aspect is the indigenization of English, which in the comparison of the Times of India with the same company’s tabloid, the Mumbai Mirror, turned out to be more prominent in the latter. With these observations, one can place the Indian tabloid in English in Balasubramanian’s model of Indian-English speaker groups (see the section on “Background and Previous Research” above). The serious-popular type of newspaper that is the Indian tabloid is likely to appeal more to the expanding circle of younger speakers who use the more indigenized varieties of Indian English, while members of the more conservative inner core can be expected to prefer a newspaper like the Times of India, and the in-between group may be catered to by both. It has to be remembered, though, that indigenization is only one aspect and that the Indian English tabloid is also well advanced in appropriating international trends. Thus, the Indian tabloid in English speaks to a young generation of users of English in India that is both more global and more local in its orientation, and it does so by using English in a way that, on the one hand, follows the trend observed in native varieties of English towards informality in written language and, on the other, is localized in various ways.

W OR K S C I T E D Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Balasubramanian, Chandrika. Register Variation in Indian English (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009). Bhatt, Rakesh M. “In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (2008): 177–200.

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Chand, Vineeta. “[v]at is going on? Local and global ideologies about Indian English,” Language in Society 38 (2009): 393–419. Conboy, Martin. The Language of the News (London: Routledge, 2007). Conboy, Martin. Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language (London: Routledge, 2006). Lange, Claudia. “ ‘Where’s the party yaar!’: Discourse particles in Indian English,” in World Englishes: Problems, Properties and Prospects, ed. Thomas Hoffmann & Lucia Siebers (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009): 207–25. Maclean, Ruth, & Rachel Rickard Straus. “The dawn of the Indian tabloid” (1 January 2009), http://macleanandrickardstraus.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/the-dawn-of-theindian-tabloid (accessed 21 February 2011). McLachlan, Shelley, & Peter Golding. “Tabloidization in the British Press: A Quantitative Investigation into Changes in British Newspapers, 1952–1997,” in Tabloid Tales: Global Debates Over Media Standards, ed. Colin Sparks & John Tulloch (Lanham MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 75–89. Mukherjee, Joybrato, & Sebastian Hoffmann. “Describing verb-complementational profiles of New Englishes: A pilot study of Indian English,” English World-Wide 27 (2006): 147–73. Sedlatschek, Andreas. Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009). “Pak: adj. and n,” O E D Online (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2010), www.oed.com (accessed 24 February 2011). Sharma, Devyani, “The pluperfect in native and non-native English: A comparative corpus study,” Language Variation and Change 13 (2001): 343–73. Sparks, Colin. “Introduction: The Panic Over Tabloid News,” in Tabloid Tales: Global Debates Over Media Standards, ed. Colin Sparks & John Tulloch (Lanham MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 1–40. Vaish, Viniti. Biliteracy and Globalization: English Language Education in India (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2008).

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Appendix Absolute figures for lexical items in Table 6 (Google Advanced Search, 22 April 2010)

Brit British Briton Pak Pakistani Pakistan Aussie Australian mum mom mummy mommy mother dad daddy father celeb celebrity cabbie taxi driver cop police officer policeman policewoman police man police woman pal friend ciggie ciggy cigarette

Indian newspapers Times of Mumbai India Mirror 645 43 11300 1520 478 291 21300 1570 7590 954 30200 2180 1440 80 8430 415 1920 712 6060 259 943 486 192 197 17300 3620 3250 842 606 465 15800 2900 1800 339 49500 99 178 827 372 468 7200 2700 3440 427 1270 69 58 7 93 15 57 10 2670 88 13400 2490 43 0 974

13 2 450

MidDay 1990 927 638 514 688 1580 164 741 260 603 378 472 190 739 127 2480 349 640 780 812 453 3100 153 11 15 18 424 2530 34 2 738

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British newspapers Times Daily Sun Mail 1110 22700 108000 164000 218000 24200 3310 13100 354 0a 0a 0a 2000 1400 242 9890 15700 863 623 21600 7900 7800 19100 1710 4070 80600 22600 393 1510 305 18600 25900 1100 91 174 96 49700 148000 8500 4170 67200 21300 886 29700 1950 42500 110000 6970 4620 21400 97900 220000 585000 14100 98 98 544 667 667 329 596 1910 4150 1970 21200 603 2230 15100 2540 164 475 123 61 640 24 23 594 40 403 9370 19200 28900 63600 101000 0 19 833 146 11 443 33 1440 20100 9650

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III N ARRATING A CROSS

TH E

N ATION

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Thuggee Thornton, Taylor, and the Literature of Banditry in Colonial India

T OBIAS D ÖRING

L

E T U S B E G I N W I T H A T Y P I C A L S I T U A T I O N . The day was long and the heat intense as usual. The road was dusty, scorched, and dry, so that the travellers – tradesmen and professional treasure carriers – would welcome evening when nightfall offered some relief. Large chests with precious stones and money were their cargo, which they transported through the country across vast distances, on isolated roads. So it was fortunate that they had met another group of traders on the way going in the same direction, local people it seemed, who knew the country well and showed them where to find the best places for water, rest, and recreation. They also helped give protection: the larger group, which they now formed with them, would certainly be less exposed to possible attacks by ruthless robbers who were said to roam the place. So now, with nightfall, everybody’s mind was well at ease. The heat had cooled, the day had gone, the company was sitting round the fire, sharing stories, food, and songs:

We were sitting as usual, under some noble tamarind-trees; one by one we had sung our songs or related our adventures; and who could have guessed, had he seen us thus engaged, that a work of death was to ensue? [...] The moon rose majestically above the distant trees; her full, round, and yellow orb cast a mellow light upon our group. [...] “Nay,” said I, “we part not thus, Narrayum Das: let us separate as friends; receive my embrace; we are friends and brothers by profession.” We embraced, and before the others could press forward to salute me, I gave the jhirnee: “Pǒn lao!” I exclaimed. It was enough. The jemandar fell beneath my own handkerchief, and a few shrieks and groans told the rest – they all had died.1

1

Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (New Delhi: Rupa, 2001): 423.

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What I am quoting and retelling is a primal scene from the archives of colonial India. The immediate source is Confessions of a Thug, the first best-selling Anglo-Indian novel, published in 1839 by Philip Meadows Taylor. But the situation sketched is also found in many other texts and sources of the time; well into the twentieth century and even the most recent past, this has formed one of the most popular scenes about so-called ‘traditional India’: the loss of goods and life as the result of misreading the signs. These treasure carriers fall victim to their own credulity. Trying to protect themselves from organized bandits, they surrender to their power: the friendly travellers whom they encountered on the road are the very highway robbers whom they were desperate to avoid. The clandestine killers are, as the text has it, “brothers by profession” – that is to say, they merely profess brotherhood and are, in actual fact, professional murderers: a dreaded band of so-called thugs. But this awareness comes too late. The deception only ends when the signal for the killing has been given – “Pǒn lao” is the code-word – and the victims have been trapped. The scene also features the typical mode of killing which came to serve as something like a signature mark for thugs: they strangle their victims with a scarf (hence the reference to the handkerchief), robbing them at once of life and voice. This may be the reason why the act is represented here by the major perpetrator: the leader of the band gives voice to what his victims can no longer tell. As readers we are privileged to eavesdrop on his narrative about this terrible profession known by the name of thuggee. Philip Meadows Taylor’s book poses as the transcript of a long, almost interminable tale of revelation and self-discovery, the confessions of a life-long criminal called Ameer Ali, who narrates his story in enormous detail, making us privy to his thoughts, reflections, and emotions. The authorial English figure who frames the tale poses as his listener and occasional interlocutor, sometimes foregrounding the diegetic situation in which the confession is set, but mostly keeping silent and reserving comment on what he presents as a true account: The tale of crime which forms the subject of the following pages is, alas! almost all true. What there is of fiction has been supplied only to connect the events, and make the adventures of Ameer Ali as interesting as the nature of his horrible profession would permit me.2

Such a prefatory remark, familiar from many novels since Robinson Crusoe, here points to the actual conditions under which the author wrote this book. Taylor went to India in 1824, aged fifteen, trying to secure a place for himself in the East India Company, but eventually had to settle for a second-best choice and took 2

Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, xi.

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up service with the Nizam in Hyderabad, one of the local puppet princes of British government in India.3 In the early 1830s, the colonial authorities launched large-scale military campaigns against thuggee as part of their reform programme. Although it seems clear that Taylor never participated personally in these campaigns,4 he claims to have been frequently in conversation with many of the Indians who were eventually arrested, put under interrogation, and used as informers to rout the entire underworld of crime; in his autobiography, Taylor declares that, day after day, he “recorded tales of murder, which, though horribly monotonous, possessed an intense interest.”5 This precisely is the situation on which his famous book is modelled: the author as recorder, transcriber, listener, and interlocutor of a horribly murderous tale. Confessions of a Thug is a wildly melodramatic story of Oriental crime, frequently reprinted, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the earliest in a long series of textual and visual representations of thuggee, which soon became a central element in colonial fantasies of India, ranging from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897) to John Masters’ The Deceivers (1952) and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Victorian readers were quite prepared to take Taylor’s version at face value and devour it as a factual account – a reviewer for the Literary Gazette in London noted that “romance could invent nothing so hideous and contradictory”6 – and, indeed, it is not wholly devoid of facts. The book is clearly based on the comprehensive work of William Henry Sleeman, military leader of the massive anti-thug campaigns and their first ‘General Superintendent’, credited with the enormous honour of having routed the entire practice and thus brought safety to the roads of India. In the course of military service, Sleeman collected all the information he could gain about the rural underworld and its members in various comprehensive books, most famously Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix, descriptive of the system pursued by this fraternity and of the measures which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its suppression, published in Calcutta in two enormous 3

See Mary Poovey, “Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug,” Narrative 12.1 (January 2004): 8. 4 See Javed Majeed, “Meadow Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: the Anglo-Indian novel as a genre in the making,” in Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Bart Moore–Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1996): 88. 5 Meadows Taylor, Story of My Life (London: Zwan, 1989): 72. See Majeed, “Meadow Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: the Anglo-Indian novel as a genre in the making,” 88. 6 See Robert Grant Williams, “Shadows of Imperialism: Canonical Typology in Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug,” Dalhousie Review 72 (1992–93): 483.

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volumes in 1836. Yet such reports were expert reading, circulating mainly among government officials;7 so it fell to others to make his findings known more widely. Apart from Taylor’s fictionalized account, a reduced and abbreviated version of the ethnographic material which Sleeman had collected was produced in 1837 by Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs, and Notices of the some of the Proceedings of the Government of India, for the Suppression of the Crime of Thuggee; together with several other publications of the sort, these defined thuggee as a major issue on the colonial agenda. Just like the equally notorious practice of sati, it formed the focus for the rhetoric of reform, with the intended rooting-out of cruel practices from the social fabric of what was perceived as ‘traditional India’, the rhetoric by which the early 1830s became known as the period of reform and progress under the governor-generalship of Lord William Bentinck.8 Ever since, thuggee has been widely known and often studied, serving to epitomize the terror of tropical India and the problems of efficiently modernizing such a backward country. More recently, ethnographic and historical investigations have turned to thuggee with a different interest – trying to ascertain what, if anything, such notorious sources might tell us about actual social practices in nineteenth-century rural India. Were the so-called thugs just figments of the colonial imagination and discursive constructions, as some have argued,9 or do they point to real people and activities, professionals who would indeed have practised forms of ritual killing and widespread highway banditry? The most relevant engagement with this controversy is Kim A. Wagner’s recent work in historical ethnography,10 to which I am throughout indebted. However, my interest is not at all to arbitrate in debates about historical veracity, but in the textual work performed by Thornton’s record and by Taylor’s book and, with regard to the central topic of this volume, in the particular constructions of community they offer. I propose looking at thugs as a case study in imagining communities, with a particularly critical interest in the best-known model of this process, Benedict Anderson’s much-quoted Imagined Communities, remarkable not least because it introduces a category of eighteenth-century 7

Máire ní Fhlathúin, “The Making of a Master Criminal: The ‘Chief of the Thugs’ in Victorian Writings on Crime,” in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunders & Grace Moore (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2004): 36. 8 Fhlathúin, “The Making of a Master Criminal,” 31. 9 See Martine van Woerkens, The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, tr. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). 10 Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), and Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, ed. Wagner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2009).

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aesthetic debates into political analysis: i.e. the category of imagination. Anderson’s point is not that functional communities, such as the modern nationstates, are all simply imaginary, but that they can only form and know themselves through crucial acts of exercising the imagination. As he explains his central term: the nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.11

Many other formulations of his study, analysing the nation in terms of comradeship and cultural roots, could also be cited along these lines; his suggestion always is that these constitutive acts of imagination regularly take place among the members: i.e. within the group, which thus constitutes itself by imagining itself as a group, through such internal, mental acts. My argument, by contrast, is that communities can be imagined from within just as from without, so that the “image of their communion” may not just live in the minds of fellow-members but also, and perhaps even more strongly, in the minds of others who are not and never will be members of this particular community. Especially in a colonial setting, where the need to define lines of cultural belonging is constantly fuelled by anxieties about cultural loss, communal groups are not only constructed within the social spheres divided by colonial boundaries – which is Anderson’s central concern and main set of examples – but also projected across such boundaries, in the attempt to reconnoitre or invent the social structures of a dominated population. In nineteenthcentury India, the so-called thugs, I want to argue, formed such a case of social othering, a community for whom the factual evidence and cultural acts can only be determined from without. Since the 1830s, thugs have consistently been described as stranglers and street bandits, with a tightly knit communal structure, steeped in religious beliefs, practising well-defined ritual acts, speaking their own language, and generally acting as a closely defined secret sect. But this entire notion remains a spectre, strictly seen and documented from without and in particular by members of the British military or the East India Company – the most determined adversaries and eventual terminators of all thugs. As Wagner must therefore admit, the first and most immediate obstacle that faces the historian of thuggee is the fact that the thugs did not leave us any written sources of their own [...], the material we have was produced by British officials.12 11

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991): 6.

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This is above all the case with Sleeman, on whose comprehensive work all subsequent thug specialists must draw. Sleeman’s own accounts of thug life, thug views, thug beliefs, thug practices, and thug language draw largely on the testimonies given by people under arrest in long sessions of interrogation. The main tactic of the British campaign was to work through informers so as to elicit information on their brothers and to infiltrate their social networks. These talking thugs were known as ‘approvers’, and the transcripts of their cross-examinations, together with the trial records, form the major source of ‘inside’ information about their way of life. Yet all such written statements, to be sure, are no independent, reliable records, but products of the military apparatus that hunted thugs and had them punished. Between 1826 and 1832, under Sleeman’s direction, more than 1,500 men were captured and tried for this crime; of them, 1,400 were hanged or transported for life.13 So anything these captured thugs might leave on record was not just discursively controlled by the colonial authorities who produced the records but was also likely to be spoken in an attempt to save their lives – the more significant the forthcoming information may seem, the more importance might be given to such an informer, hence the tendency to offer particularly drastic accounts and divulge especially great secrets.14 This makes questions of reliability rather acute, and also gives a special edge to any reading of Taylor’s narrative. The framework of police interrogation and informing is precisely the communicative setting of Confesssions of a Thug: it stages a dramatic monologue, looking back at an entire life of crime and killing, by giving us as readers privileged insights into the way a clandestine society might work. I will now look at this text, and some of its related material, in more detail, with regard to three main questions: first, what sort of a community is being constructed here? Secondly, what are the strategies of this narrative construction: i.e. what role is given to the modes of communication, interrogation, and imagination? And, thirdly, how can we gauge the larger political function of such strategic acts: i.e. of imagining terror communities from without? This third point, then, does not just concern colonial India but also our present period, for which the issue of thuggee may serve as a test case for contesting other communities of crime and terror. As regards the first point, the following passage from Thornton’s book is especially relevant:

12 13 14

Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India, 15. See Poovey, “Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug,” 9. See Fhlathúin, “The Making of a Master Criminal,” 32.

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It will thus be seen, that the system of the Thugs is well devised to secure that concealment so necessary to the continued success of their horrid practices. The mode of destroying their victims, and of disposing of their remains, almost preclude the possibility of rescue or escape, of witnesses to the deed, of noise or cries for help, of effusion of blood, and, indeed, of any trace of the crime. An impenetrable veil of darkness is thrown over their atrocities.15

The greatest horror, then, is tracelessness. These killers perform their horrid work with such efficiency and skill, in such isolated places of the country, and have the corpses buried in such remote spots off the road, that no testimony of the crime remains. The travellers simply disappear from record: no witness, no voices, no noises, no blood, no clues remain – the murderous act, in other words, is not amenable to any retrospective reconstruction. It leaves no trace and has no signs and is therefore not open to any kind of semiotic intelligence: above all, it offends regular habits of reading. The thug atrocities are thus a metonym of Oriental darkness: an impenetrable veil, an inscrutable surface, an unreadable reality. What is more, the “system of the Thugs” can only work in such a way and continue to defy Western eyes when it manages to manipulate these eyes – deflect the outside gaze and make it see things differently. This concerns the thugs’ fabled techniques of disguise and deception, on which much of their power was seen to be based. As illustrated in my opening example, thugs succeed by make-believe. They let their victims think they can protect them from the threat they actually pose themselves; they offer company and help to travellers in need, posing as fellow-traders, wandering fakirs or harmless beggars, but use these innocent identities only for show, so as to trap their willing prey. This strategy is also highlighted by their given name. In the current English lexicon, the word thug is glossed as something like ‘a violent man’; the term, however, derives from Hindi thak, Marathi thak or Sanskrit sthaga and is glossed as ‘cheat’ or ‘swindler’, also ‘impostor’, ‘knave’, ‘rogue’, or ‘deceiver’. Hence its use for this particular community of criminals, otherwise also known as phansigars: i.e. ‘stranglers’.16 This semantic spectrum highlights the semiotic problem posed by people who appear as harmless, helpful brothers and travel companions, whereas they seem to have been, in actual fact, a tightly organized all-male community, with a strict hierarchy of command and control, with dark ceremonies of initiation, with a special language of secret communication, and with a logistic 15

Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1851; New Delhi, facs. repr. 2007): 11. 16 Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India, 25.

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network of support across the entire subcontinent. Working on the basis of a ritualistic ethos, recruiting new members at an early age, often on a hereditary basis, subjecting them to rigorous training in ruthlessness, deception, and murder, thugs are said to be worshipping the cruel goddess Kali, to whom all members swear submission and who would sanctify their bloody business by sending them omens whenever conditions are favourable for another coup; without such an omen, no thug is said to proceed, just as no thug would hesitate to murder when such an omen has arrived: not to kill his victim at this point would mean to disobey the goddess and incur her wrath. This is the kind of information gleaned from the approvers, summarized by Thornton in his book and popularized by Taylor in his novel. The community of thugs, in short, embodies the worst European nightmares about Oriental India: the darkest aspect of the backward, sectarian, hereditary, atavistic, ritualistic, and ruthless society which colonial authorities in the 1830s set out to reform for India’s own benefit. Surely, only when the roads were safe and people could travel without fear for their lives was the economic, social, and political development of the subcontinent possible. One special feature of the thug community merits a little more discussion: their interreligious basis, with both Hindu and Muslim members. This point is made in all the sources and, given the routine assumption of religious determinism and sectarian division among Orientals, it truly is remarkable: how can monotheistic Islam be combined in thuggee with polytheistic Hinduism? Thornton notes that the “Mussulmans” have adopted no small share of the customs and superstitions of the Hindoos; and [that] the Thug formula of fraternization seems to have obliterated most of the distinctive marks which remained.17

In Taylor’s narrative, the protagonist and central narrator Ameer Ali is presented as a Muslim, but at an early age receives instruction from his (adopted) father in the transreligious basis of the thugs: “It is necessary to your fully understanding this,” said he, “that I should give you an outline of our belief in the Divine origin of our profession, which is intimately connected with the faith of the Hindoos, and by whom we Moosulmans have been instructed in the art of Thuggee.” “This is wonderful indeed,” said I; “how do you reconcile any connection between the faith of unbelievers and that of the blessed prophet?”18

17 18

Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs, 112. Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 33.

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How indeed? Such wonderful reconciliation of what is otherwise construed as insurmountable religious barriers clearly calls for some discursive framing – all the more so, as all sources also keep another god in play: the Christian God, of course, whose superior power now brings punishment to criminal Hindus and Muslims alike. Since, as noted earlier, no inside records are available, the issue of religion, central to the constitution of thuggee, must be triangulated across this complex field. This was a major issue, too, in the cross-examination of ‘approvers’, who were sternly questioned on this point. Here is an excerpt from Sleeman’s own interrogation (reprinted by his hagiographer Sir Francis Tuker): Then by whose killing have all the Thugs who have been hung at Saugor and Jubbulpore been killed? God’s, of course. You think that we could never have caught and executed them but by the aid of God? Certainly not. Then you think that so far we have been assisted by God in what we have done? Yes. And you are satisfied that we should not have ventured to do what we have done unless we were assured that our God was working with us, or rather that we were the mere instruments of his hands? Yes, I am. Then do you not think that we may go on with the same assurance till the work we have in hand is done; till, in short, the system of Thuggee is suppressed? God is almighty. And there is but one God? One God above all gods. And if that God above all gods supports us, we shall succeed? Certainly. Then we are all satisfied that he is assisting us, and therefore hope to succeed in the Deccan? God only knows. Sahib Khan: If God assists, you will succeed, but the country is large and favourable and the gangs are numerous and well organized.19

19

Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman (London: J.M. Dent, 1961): 193.

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This is a curious dialogue. Sleeman is interviewing various ‘approvers’, apparently trying to elicit ethnographic information from them about their religious belief-system, but in fact establishing a providential argument to defend the righteousness and ultimate success of his own campaign by claiming divine sanction for it – and making his prisoners say so. Evidently it was not enough to have captured suspects and submitted them to interrogation; the transcript and publication of their statements seek to gain authorization from the killers that their own extermination follows divine will. The argument derives from the thugs’ own alleged religious rhetoric giving sanctioning to their deeds, a rhetoric which Sleeman – in a curious act of displacing and borrowing authority – now transfers to the British military: the recorded voice of a captured criminal is cited to confirm the religious rationale of colonial policy. This leads us directly to the strategies of narrative and communication used in Taylor’s novel. Despite its crude colonial framework and romance structure, Confessions of a Thug turns out to be a complex, hybrid text, variously analysed and studied with remarkably different results; Mary Poovey,20 for example, reads it as a critique, on Taylor’s part, of the East India Company. I shall confine my observations to just two sample passages, one about the relation between narrator and narratee, the other about the discursive practice of confession. The first example reflects the curious displacement of authority we also observed in Sleeman’s interview transcript, a similar and quite surprising gesture of exchange as if to seek or borrow some authority for the English record from the thug who is its subject. As mentioned earlier, the entire life-story in Taylor’s novel is presented as pseudo-autobiography and self-revelation, with Ameer Ali appearing as an intradiegetic narrator in the Bildungsroman of a rogue and killer, giving us a privileged glimpse into the clandestine system of thuggee. At just few points do we get a larger view of this communicative situation; one such point, significantly, is the exact middle of the text, the transition from chapter twenty-four to twenty-five. The passage begins with the unnamed English interlocutor’s musing about the larger import of what Ali has so far told him, stressing especially the matter of religion: A strange page in the book of human life is this! [...] Strange, too, that Hindoo and Moslem, of every sect and denomination, should join with one accord in the superstition from which this horrible trade has arisen.21

It continues with a detailed description of what Ali physically looks like, for the benefit of readers so they might imagine him more fully. This description of his 20 21

See Poovey, “Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug.” Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 252.

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outward appearance22 is remarkable enough: far from offering the gruesome visage of a dark and dangerous Oriental, it actually stresses his handsome looks and pleasant features, his “graceful, bland and polite” manners and “pure and fluent language” (255) alike. Even more remarkably, however, the English interviewer and reporter then enters into an exchange with Ali about the very description he has just produced: Listen, said I, and I will read it [the description of what you look like] to you. At every sentence the expression of his face brightened. When I had concluded, he said, It is a faithful picture, such as I behold myself when I look in a glass. You have omitted nothing, even to the most trifling particulars; nay, I may even say my lord has flattered me; and he arose and made a profound salam. (256)

This is a passage of uncanny specularity: the text we have just read is here declared to be a faithful mirror in which the Indian criminal described can truly recognize himself – a declaration made by this criminal but framed and reported by his English authorizer and writer, the superior discursive power who thus tries to turn his work into a faithful mirror of reflection. What exactly this mirror may reflect, however, remains doubtful – not only because flattery is an issue here, suggesting favourable distortion and idealization, but even more so because the binary relation between the real person and its mirror image must be blurred by the mutuality of double images in play. As such, this central moment may be taken as indicative of the startling reversal between the image of colonial authority and that of the Oriental thug, which has been noted to take place throughout the narrative; in Javed Majeed words, it is as if the thugs become a sort of reverse self-image of the British official turned author, who stands in the shadows attempting to crack the secret codes of the societies over which he administers.23

In Taylor’s tale, then, just as in many later Victorian narratives about colonial hearts of darkness, the relationship between the central narrator and narratee turns out to be a functional relationship of doubling. What follows from this for the central speech act on which the entire text is founded, the act of confession? In several responses to the novel, critics have pointed to the Foucauldian analysis of the confession, as “one of the main

22

Confessions of a Thug, 254–55. Further page references are in the main text. Majeed, “Meadow Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: the Anglo-Indian novel as a genre in the making,” 99. 23

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rituals” on which Western societies have relied “for the production of truth.”24 In precisely this sense, the silent sahib figure in Taylor’s Confessions has been seen as the “perfect Benthamite policeman,” an ideal figure of imperial discipline and surveillance, according to Foucault’s famous analysis, whose “authoritarian silence” is wrapping a “steel cage of implicit rationality around Ameer Ali’s irrational discourse.”25 However, as just indicated, the English interlocutor is not quite so silent, nor does he present Ali’s discourse as wholly irrational; on the contrary, there are several instances (as when Ali is grieving for the loss of his young son) when he is seen with sympathy: indeed, affection and concern – which makes his murderous intent and rationality all the more exasperating and atrocious. Instead of a routine evocation of Foucauldian categories, we should perhaps pay more attention to the points where the speech act of confession takes place in the narrative itself. In the thug’s tale there is one such telling moment when the gang has captured two thieves from a rival group, from whom they want to gain more information on the whereabouts of their companions: I had left the fellow badly wounded, but did not think there was any danger of his life. When he arrived, however, carried on a bed, it was evident he was dying; he scarcely breathed, and the rattle was in his throat. We did not, therefore, trouble ourselves further about him, but endeavoured to make the son confess; the whip and hot ashes were both resorted to again without effect, and all our endeavours only produced fresh execrations and abuse. [...] “You see,” [said] Mohun Lall to him, “you have no chance to escape; will you now confess and take service with me? I will protect you.”26

This scene is part of the intradiegetic narrative, but its central concern with confession offers an acute comment on the diegetic situation of the text as a whole. Not only does it suggest a violent link between confession and torture, making the other speak by making him suffer; just as clearly, the scene establishes a functional link between speech acts and social submission: “will you confess and take service with me?” is a question which also pertains to the larger confessional discourse in which it appears. Confession turns into commission, service offered and received in exchange for verbal utterance. This is relevant 24

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, tr.. Robert Hurley (Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté de savoir, 1976; tr. 1979; London: Vintage, 1990): 58. See also Williams, “Shadows of Imperialism: Canonical Typology in Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug,” 487. 25 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1988): 88. 26 Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 137.

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for two reasons: first, because the pattern of confession has long been used for the canonical acts of self-construction through self-writing in the Western tradition, with St Augustine and Rousseau offering the paradigmatic texts;27 the fact that here the figure of an obscure Indian criminal is commissioned to serve in the very same confessional pattern of self-explication appears to be significant. Secondly, the pattern of exchange – protection for confession – also involves a reflection of the legal process to which the captured thugs were indeed subjected in colonial India: the informers, whose utterance this text emulates, would try to save their lives by coming up with stories which might satisfy the authorities who decided over life or death. In this respect, the predicament of thug ‘approvers’ is just like Sheherazade’s in the most famous and notorious work of Oriental storytelling. In fact, the term ‘approvers’ is quite slippery and involves the implication that their activity – if not of killing, then of telling – was actually condoned by the authorities. The approvers, we might say, are the approved, and their confessional discourse is officially commissioned in the attempt to restore the superior acts of reading which thuggee, as argued earlier, would otherwise frustrate. This could lead us to a reading of Taylor’s text, and indeed of its entire textual archive, which does not reiterate dichotomies of power and Foucauldian surveillance, but which acknowledges the close entanglements and mutual implications of the different discourses involved. Where, however, does this lead us in our inquiry into the issue of contested communities? As argued above, thuggee appears to be a test case for the ways in which communities, unlike in Anderson’s formative account, may be imagined from without. But my reading of the textual sources, especially of Taylor’s novel, has served to complicate this notion and indeed to blur the supposed boundary that separates inside from outside. In particular, the uncanny specularity in the relationship between sahib and thug, and the functional circularity in the pragmatics of confessional discourse which we noted, may prompt us rethink the premise of this argument. No doubt, my brief analysis has focused mainly on a popular and fictionalized account, whose empirical or historical authority is shaky, to say the least. Yet, since issues of authority and authorization are one of its central concerns, the text indeed suggests a reading with bearing, too, on the other textual constructions of thuggee, such as Sleeman’s interrogation transcripts, from which I quoted and which appear to be equally obsessed with authorizing the colonial position. For this reason, I venture to suggest that contemporary engagements with these historical sources, including Confessions of a 27

See David Huddart, Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (London & New York: Routledge, 2008).

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Thug, allow us to make some fundamental points about what is here at stake. Above all, we should note that the opposition we began with, juxtaposing the dark underworld of atavistic Indian thugs to the modern sphere of British administrators, does not hold at all, for, all things considered, thuggee seems rather to be an eminently modern practice, a profession well adapted to fast changing social environments, a sophisticated and clearly enlightened activity, as far removed from notions of the backward Oriental worlds as can be. With their transgression of religious and of social boundaries, disregarding terms of faith or caste, thugs formed a functional and highly specialized professional association, seasonal in character and strictly target-oriented to economic profit. Their identities were made an instrument and tool to achieve this target, with their legendary skills at deceit, cunning, and disguise offering strong proof of both communicative and improvisational talents as well as social flexibility. Even the basic fact that their main site of operation were the roads – the lines of transport and communication which Karl Marx, in his 1853 article on British rule in India, singled out as principal markers of modernity28 – indicates the modernizing force and function of the thugs. This view is further corroborated by historical research, as when Wagner points out crucial parallels between thuggee and military expeditions, due to the fact that thugs “consciously emulated military ritual practices”29; in fact, their favourite victims seem to have been native officers and sepoys30 – that is to say, the class of subaltern functionaries produced by the colonial system and often intersecting with the so-called underworld they were meant to control. According to Christopher Bayly, “the ‘Thugs’ and their relatives drift in and out of service of the British and Indian regimes as watchmen, inferior police, and bodyguards.”31 When we take such notable increases in social mobility, in career options, personal life-planning choices, and self-determination as an index of modernization, we must say that the community of thugs must indeed appear eminently modern. Not only their transreligious basis, then, but also their transsocial constitution, comprising members of all castes and classes,32 forms a stark contrast to the notion of a rigid system of tradition and hereditary hierarchy in 28

See Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 319–24. 29 Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India, 111. 30 Kim A. Wagner, in Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, ed. Wagner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2009): 186. 31 Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 176. 32 Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India, 105. Further page references are in the main text.

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which individual choices are necessarily predetermined by a given place, in ‘premodern’ or ‘primitive’ society, as championed by Western discourse. If, on the contrary, “virtually anybody could be thug,” as Wagner claims (105), then thuggee cuts across such notions and reveals their biased nature. Re-reading the archival evidence, including popular accounts like Taylor’s, we should therefore consider thugs paradigmatic figures of societies in radical transition, societies in which skills of adaptation and adaptability, of flexibility, communication and constant re-invention of the self are the privileged modes of success. In this perspective, British campaigns against thugs were not really a military conflict, fought with firearms and non-material strategic weaponry, but a semiotic conflict over information management and strategies of reading. As Bayly argues, in its first incarnation ‘thuggee’ arose from an information panic: the feeling of the fledgling colonial administration that it knew nothing of local society and that the locals were combining to deny it information. 33

Hard economic factors, however, were also part of the problem and its attempted solution: according to an 1832 report on the early phase of anti-thug campaigns, the “monopoly of opium” turned out to have been an important factor in the financing of thug operations.34 What is more, major successes of the antithug department may not have been due to military strength but to economic power, enabling colonial officials to engage in ransoming, negotiating alliances, and forging coalitions with their supposed adversaries, who thus materially benefitted from showing – even from feigning – willingness to cooperate with the authorities. What thus emerges is a historical narrative of complicity and collusion, significantly different from the routine Orientalist myth-making about thugs and their unspeakable rites which we encounter in all popular accounts. In our changed perspective, thugs appear, rather, to be both product and agent of the modernizing forces determined to see India reformed and ‘civilized’. No other point may better capture this mutual dependency and mutual production of identities than the fact that Sir William Henry Sleeman was officially known as ‘Thuggee Sleeman’,35 an honorary title given to him even by his hagiographer Sir Francis Tuker, thus turning Sleeman into something of a Kurtz-figure: the term 33

Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, 174. 34 F.C. Smith, “Report on the Sessions of 1831–32,” in Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, ed. Wagner, 185. 35 See Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman.

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for a terminator whose projected identity builds on the exterminated brutes. It is against this background that we may actually regard thugs as in fact invented by the modernizing power which set out to have them killed. And it is in this respect, especially, that the community of thugs occupies the same discursive – and, quite possibly, the same political – position as the Taliban of our day,36 terrorist formations by ostentatiously traditional people whose deadly power the imperial narrative must first enlist but then declare dangerous and hostile to all civilized progress. According to Time magazine, General Stanley McChrystal, who until 2010 headed military operations in Afghanistan, was not averse to taking inspiration from literary examples: At a “particularly dreadful moment during the Iraq war, McChrystal sent his special operators copies of the Yeats poem “The Second Coming.” He directed their attention to the lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’ and told them that their mission was to turn those lines around.”37

In postcolonial literature, we are familiar with such a process of turning around lines of just this apocalyptic poem: “Things fall apart,” the title of Achebe’s novel, is also culled from Yeats’ Anglo-Irish text: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world[...] / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” McChrystal’s literary prompting of the war on terrorism, therefore, prompts me also to suggest the functional intersections between literary narrative and political imagination in nineteenth-century India just as in our world today. My brief reading of thuggee was mainly meant to make this point. As for our central question – what sort of a community the discourse of thuggee could have imagined or contested – I would like to conclude thus: whether or not thugs formed a historical grouping with some actual force, I do not know and cannot decide. I propose, however, that the main community that was indeed constituted through thuggee – just as it may be constructed in our days through the figure of the Taliban – was the community of their colonial exterminators, a coalition of the willing, unacknowledged executors of terrorist activity.

36

See Lydia H. Liu, “The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare,”

P M L A 124.5 October (2009): 1859–63. 37

Joe Klein, “General Stanley McChrystal,” Time (16 December 2009).

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W OR K S C I T E D Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Bayly, Christopher Alan. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996). Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca NY : Cornell U P , 1988). Fhlathúin, Máire ní. “The Making of a Master Criminal: The ‘Chief of the Thugs’ in Victorian Writings on Crime,” in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunders & Grace Moore (Aldershot & Burlington VT : Ashgate, 2004): 31–44. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté de savoir, 1976; tr. 1979; London: Vintage, 1990). Huddart, David. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (London & New York: Routledge, 2008). Klein, Joe. “General Stanley McChrystal,” Time (16 December 2009). Liu, Lydia H. “The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare,” P ML A 124.5 (October 2009): 1859–63. Majeed, Javed. “Meadow Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: The Anglo-Indian novel as a genre in the making,” in Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Bart Moore–Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1996): 86–110. Marx, Karl. Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Meadows Taylor, Philip. Confessions of a Thug (1839/1871; New Delhi: Rupa, 2001). Meadows Taylor, Philip. Story of My Life (1871; London: Zwan, 1989). Poovey, Mary. “Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug,” Narrative 12.1 (January 2004): 3–21. Smith, F.C. “Report on the Sessions of 1831–32,” in Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, ed. Kim A. Wagner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2009): 183–89. Thornton, Edward. Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1837/1851; New Delhi, facs. repr. of 1851 ed. 2000). Tuker, Francis. The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman (London: J.M. Dent, 1961). Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Wagner, Kim A., ed. Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2009). Williams, Robert Grant. “Shadows of Imperialism: Canonical Typology in Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug,” Dalhousie Review 72 (1992–93): 482–93. van Woerkens, Martine. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, tr. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: Uof Chicago P , 2002).

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Haunting Conflicts Memory, Forgetting, and the Struggle for Community in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant

K ATJA S ARKOWSKY

During our lives, we struggle to forget. And it's foolish to assume that forgetting is altogether a bad thing. Memory is a bruise still tender. History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided. This is how we awaken to the stories buried deep within our sleeping selves or trafficked quietly through the touch of others.1

D

AVID

C H A R I A N D Y ’ S Soucouyant (2007) is subtitled “a novel of

forgetting.” On the one hand, in the novel ‘forgetting’ indicates one of the character’s dementia, the illness of an individual that strongly affects not only herself but also her family; memory and its loss are explored as constitutive for a sense of self, both individually and familially. On the other hand, ‘forgetting’ also more broadly refers to the various collective processes of (conscious or unconscious) attempts to eliminate historical memory – both of the trauma of dislocation as experienced by minoritized groups and of the memory of the violence of nation-building by majority groups.2 Thus, like individual identity, collective identity is investigated as being dependent on processes of remembering as well as forgetting; likewise, dynamics of community1

David Chariandy, Soucouyant (Vancouver, B C : Arsenal Pulp, 2007): 32. I would like to thank the peer reviewer for her/his helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Obviously, the processes and function of forgetting for identity constitution differs significantly for minoritized and majority groups; in both contexts, however, the interplay between remembering and forgetting is crucial to a sense of collective identity.

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formation that evoke identity or identities as a crucial point of reference for belonging operate on the basis of remembrance and forgetting. Both processes are marked by fundamental anxieties. In the following, I would like to discuss some of these anxieties as they become manifest in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant. This novel can be placed in a context of other Canadian texts published around the same time, such as Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea (2005), Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007), or Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005); despite their differences in style, structure, narrative perspective, language, or cultural agenda, they all appear to probe the question of community-building in the face of migration and dislocation, while taken-for-granted community structures are not readily available. While all of them highlight the importance of individual and collective memory for attempted community-building (even if these communities then fail), Chariandy’s and, to some extent, Brand’s novels also explore the power of forgetting for these processes. What sets Chariandy’s debut novel apart from the others in this context is its – at times problematic – use of ‘illness as metaphor’ (Sontag): that is, on dementia – not only as an individually experienced illness with devastating effects on both the affected individual herself and her family, but also as a metaphor for cultural forgetting as a reaction to individual and collective trauma and guilt.

The Anxieties of Community: Memory, the Nation, and Canadian Literature Both remembering and forgetting, as numerous critics have reminded us, are not only central to the constitution and maintenance of, but also the demise of, communities.3 Benedict Anderson’s much-cited concept of the ‘imagined community’ refers to the community of the nation, and literature plays an important role in its construction. Renate Lachmann has highlighted the role of “the classical part of literature” in providing 3

See, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991), particularly 187–206; Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimension of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004); or W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2006). The very concept of collective and cultural memory implies the constitutive function of memory for a communal sense of self and belonging. This does not mean that either memory or this sense of self is to be understood as homogeneous or uncontested; on the contrary, what is being remembered and what is being eliminated is a highly charged issue, not only culturally but also politically. See, for instance, Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33; also Booth, Communities of Memory.

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the place where from the interplay between remembering and forgetting, everything that seems to confirm the identity of a group interested in building models is retained, nurtured, and carefully preserved. The mechanisms controlling exclusion and inclusion, as well as those governing suppression and emphasis, are geared towards axiological positions whose signifiers form the explicit concept of a culture.4

However, in the context of the canon debates and an increasing focus on what is ‘suppressed’, the role of minoritized literatures has moved to the forefront. 5 Novels such as Chariandy’s illustrate this dynamic and how the imagined community of the nation is intimately bound up with processes of remembering and forgetting, as part of the constitution of communities that may well happen within the framework of the nation, but that also transcend it, contradict it, or even seek to undo it. The communities in question are not only ethnic or religious in nature but, most prominently, diasporic communities, and, like the imagined community of the nation, they rely on narratives for their construction and perpetuation, including literary narratives. Sneja Gunew has called writers the “inventers of community.”6 While this would not apply exclusively to diasporic and so-called minority writers, it certainly resonates most strongly with writers and audiences for whom dislocation is part of their family history or individual experience, and for whom the question of location and community is particularly urgent. This resonance does not necessarily evoke a definite re-location to some real or imaginary homeland (though it may) but, rather, motivates a constant renegotiation of the meaning of location and community. Thus, Gunew highlights the importance of literary community constructions where community is conceived not in the sense of the nostalgic return to the past and a lost place but as the impulse forward, the potential carried by the seeding of diaspora in hybridity, the reality of a process more easily recognized here and now as hegemonic groups within the nation are forced to accommodate the third and fourth generation descendants of major migrations.7

4

Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 1997): 176. 5

Smaro Kamboureli, “(Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies,” in Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada, ed. Eva Darias–Beautell (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2012): 46. 6 Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimension of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004): 109. 7 Gunew, Haunted Nations, 109.

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In the Canadian context, this analysis applies not only to particular texts but to Canadian literature, ‘Can.Lit.’, as an institution of nation and community-constitution. As Smaro Kamboureli points out, Can.Lit. [...] is not a term to be taken at face value. It resonates with the same ambiguities characterizing literature at large, but also with the complexities – even nervousness – associated with its own history and location. The specific trajectories of Can.Lit. bespeak a continuing anxiety over intent and purpose, its ends always threatening to dissolve.8

Therefore, like the Canadian nation, Canadian literature can also be read as being ‘haunted’ by its colonial history,9 a return of repressed memory that constantly threatens to dissolve a seemingly stable sense of national identity. 10 Novels like those mentioned above are marked by a highly ambivalent relationship to the nation. In their use of a limited number of focalizers, they critically investigate the relationship between individual, community/communities, and national, regional, and transnational contexts. More strongly so than with regard to the other novels, though, I want to argue that Soucouyant makes use of analogies between individual and collective memories and processes of forgetting, and explores the relationship between these processes and the attempts of community building. In the novel, the nameless I-narrator returns to his mother’s house in Toronto after having left two years previously in order to avoid facing her dementia and ensuing mental and bodily deterioration. His parents, as the text reveals, had both migrated from Trinidad, while the narrator and his brother were born in Canada. Through the perspective of the perplexed son, the novel investigates and grapples with, as one critic has put it, “the dynamic between forgetting, official history, and personal memory.”11 This dynamic has its roots in the experiences of the parents’ migration history, which in itself is already marked by their respective families’ histories of slavery and indenture; since the traumatic effects of this history and the dislocation and discrimination 8

Kamboureli, “(Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies,” viii. Gunew, Haunted Nations, 107. 10 Indeed, numerous critics have identified an obsession with spectres, ghosts, and haunting in Canadian artistic production, a topical prominence that not only manifested itself very differently in a broad range of texts but that also served a variety of cultural functions. See, for instance, Marlene Goldman & Joanne Saul, “Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (2006): 645, and Eva Darias–Beautell, “Introduction: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada,” in Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada, ed. Eva Darias–Beautell (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2012): 8. 11 Kit Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant,” Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 812. 9

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experienced by the migrating generation are passed on to their children, this dynamic also reflects the fundamental generational and cultural dilemma of second-generation black women and men in Canada. In an essay on black writing in Canada, published around the same time as the novel, Chariandy takes, as a starting point for his argument, poll findings that seek to pinpoint the level of identification immigrants have with Canada; the findings indicate that immigrants belonging to visible minorities have an identification rate that is higher than that of other immigrant groups; in the second generation, however, the identification rate falls below that of any other group. Thus, despite the existence, in Canada, of seemingly robust policies, institutions, and discourses whose concerted purpose it is to instil a sense of cultural citizenship in all ethnic groups, the Canadian-born children of visible-minority immigrants were progressively identifying less with Canada.12

Chariandy then reads black writing, particularly second-generation literature in Canada, as offering a perspective on the complex identity-negotiations and ambivalences of second-generation black Canadians, and this is also the context in which he places his own novel.13 Given these ambivalences with regard to belonging in a national context, Rinaldo Walcott has argued, “it is useful to read black Canadian works within the context of black diasporic discourses”;14 while this is indeed helpful, even indispensable, for black publications of the 1990s and earlier, I suggest that more recent texts, such as Brand’s What We All Long For or Chariandy’s Soucouyant, also engage in a critical investigation of the limits of diasporic discourses and on explorations of alternative and localized community-building, whether successful (within limits in Brand’s novel) or not (in Chariandy’s). In Soucouyant, these ambivalences and anxieties – about belonging, dislocation, community, family, and history – are powerfully captured in two recurring themes and images: dementia and the soucouyant, a female Caribbean vampire figure. Both are directly linked to the narrator’s mother: it is she who is suffering from dementia, and in her youth in Trinidad she supposedly encountered a soucouyant. Throughout the novel, the question turns out to be less one of the ‘real existence’ of this creature or the actual event of the encounter; as the story 12

David Chariandy “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada,” Callaloo 30.1 (2007): 818–29. 13 Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant,” 810. 14 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing. Black. Canada (Toronto: Insomniac, 2003): 25.

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develops the soucouyant emerges as a “symbol of constantly shifting meanings, ambiguous truths, and identities.”15 One of its functions, I argue, is to signify unspeakable and repeated terror, and comes to stand as a manifestation of trauma, as both “an effect of destruction” and “an enigma of survival.”16 This trauma, as will be discussed in more detail below, is passed on from one generation to the next, finding its own manifestations in the lives of the narrator and his brother. But both dementia and the soucouyant ‘haunt’ not only the narrator but also the novel as such, providing a striking image for the elusiveness, unspeakability, and incommunicability of individual, as well as collective, pain and memory. This pain is in part the result of a failed attempt to create and continue community as a bulwark against the experiences of dislocation and unbelonging; ‘community’ is always contested, and in the novel mainly fails. Soucouyant negotiates the attempted construction of various communities that turn out to be connected more closely to one another than at first appears to be the case. The narrator’s attempt to re-construct and re-member his dispersed family – the dead father, the disappeared brother, the mother suffering from dementia – depends crucially on remembering the family’s history of migration to Canada, but it goes back further in time to incorporate the history of the first, forced migration to the Caribbean as well. As Winfried Siemerling has argued, Soucouyant shows a process of self-articulation that works as a relational mediation of the self through cultural and historical contexts, as well as through the presence and perceived past of others.17

The family’s past that forms the backdrop of the protagonist’s struggle for selfarticulation is inscribed by experiences of slavery, indenture, forced and voluntary migration, of exclusion and discrimination, and as such it is bound up with the histories of other communities and the history of diaspora that have been ‘forgotten’ or repressed. In this context, ‘dementia’ becomes a – somewhat problematic – metaphor for collective amnesia;18 it seems to analogize an individual

15

Giselle Liza Anatol, Things That Fly In the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the CircumCaribbean and African Diaspora (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2015): 196. 16 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1996): 58. 17 Winfried Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2015): 275. 18 Susan Sontag has severely criticized the cultural tendency to metaphorize illness: see Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and A I D S and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001). For a discussion of dementia as a way of exploring the fragility of immigrant memory in Chariandy’s novel, see also

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forgetting and mental deterioration characterized by unpredictable and spontaneous instances of remembrance, on the one hand, and collective omissions of events and experiences from memory, on the other. This analogy suggests that in both cases that which is forgotten – by the individual and by the collective – has not disappeared. Rather, as critics have pointed out, with reference to the psychoanalytic concept of ‘repression’, this process of forgetting depends on repetition – like the ghost, what is to be forgotten has the capacity to return and haunt.19 Thus, it is the soucouyant that functions to signify the haunting of individual and collective histories of violence and exclusion; it becomes a metaphor for what cannot be entirely forgotten but returns to haunt.

Conflictual Histories: Forgetting, (Post-)Memory, and the Self Memory and the act of remembering are central to the constitution of selfhood,20 and, as this chapter’s epigraph from the novel indicates, so is forgetting,21 albeit in different ways – some destructively so, while others can also be regarded as necessary and productive. In fact, the act of remembering is intimately bound up with forgetting: remembering is necessarily selective; the power of what is being remembered depends on what is being forgotten or repressed. This equally applies to the sense of identity, as experienced by individuals and collectives. Anderson clearly draws the analogy between individual and collective identities when he states: as with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of Kelly Baker Joseph, Disturbers of the Peace: Representation of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013). 19 Peter Buse & Andrew Stott. “Introduction” to Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse & Andrew Stott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999): 8; Ken Gelder & Jane M. Jacobs, “The Postcolonial Ghost Story,” in Ghosts (1999), ed. Buse & Stott, 188. 20 W. James Booth, Communities of Memory, 12–13, 31–32. 21 With respect to life writing, John Eakin writes about the importance of memory and the devastation of what forgetting means for personhood: “We inhabit systems of social intercourse in which the ability to articulate an identity narrative – whether written, related orally, or simply dropped piece by piece into the social discourse of daily life – confirms the possession of a working identity. Accordingly, when brain disorders of various kinds impair or prevent our saying to others who we are, our claims to recognition as persons may suffer irreparable harm”; Paul John Eakin, “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing,” in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Eakin (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2004): 6. This, as Soucouyant illustrates, also applies to fiction that addresses forgetting and its consequences.

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‘forgetting’ this experience of continuity [...] engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity’.22

Soucouyant sets individual and collective processes of narrative identity in relation to one another and investigates the trajectory of collective identity through individual stories; in the attempt to recover a collective (familial) sense of identity by exploring his mother’s history, the narrative voice clearly fails, for, as I will show below, remembrance brings forth mostly a volatile sense of community that inexorably falls apart, first and foremost the family. The only community that seemingly functions is one of exclusion, the racist community of the fictional Port Junction, part of the neighbourhood of Scarborough in Toronto. ‘Forgetting’ is crucial here, not only as a disruption of continuity but also as a potential foundation for it: as in the case of Port Junction, a sense of (white) self relies on the erasure of difference, the institutionalized ‘forgetting’ of people and communities that are seen as threateningly different. The kind of forgetting that the novel is centrally concerned with finds a powerful image in an individual sickness, dementia. Dementia is a personal and family tragedy; it is a painful narrative of the undoing of self, the dismantling of a life, in which no routine works and the mind constantly slips between different versions and manifestations – physically, mentally – of present and past. These shifts can occur from one moment to the other, without being triggered, as when the narrator's mother at one point moves within moments from lucidity to deep forgetfulness and eventually back in time: She reaches out and hesitates. She cannot decide which dial to turn and it won't matter anyway because the gas has been turned off again. Mother pulls her hand away and turns to me. She opens her mouth and at first I only hear soft coughing noises from her throat. I hear it then, or I think I hear it, a soft, soft whisper. Old skin, 'kin, 'kin / You na know me / You na know me... 23

The very next paragraph, unconnected to this episode but through the fragmented memory of the narrator, then begins with “You saw a soucouyant, mother” (135), a reference to the vampire that haunts not only Adele's life but also that of her two sons; just as, one is tempted to say, the past haunts the present in its elusiveness and incalculability of appearance and disappearance. Recognition of the present – a form of temporary memory – is brought about by the son’s ‘body trick’:

22 23

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 205. Chariandy, Soucouyant, 134. Further page references are in the main text.

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Here. Press your fingers against the walnut-shaped lump of bone at the side of my knee. Hold them there until my knee bends and some rogue tendon bunches against that lump and against your fingers before suddenly snapping over. With a click. My body’s trick. Her smile. ‘He have strange bones,’ she says. ‘Quarrels deep in he flesh.’ ‘Your son...’ ‘He grandmother too [...].’ (8)

At first glance, this episode seems to be primarily about a pragmatic trick by a desperate family member of a woman suffering from dementia. However, this ‘trick’ establishes the body as inscribed by transgenerational memory: as it turns out, the narrator has inherited this anomaly from his grandmother. It provides a genetic link that he constructs as bodily genealogy and corporeal connection to the Caribbean and a family history lost in his mother’s (and his own) gaps of memory. Here, she said, cupping her hand over mine. That same walnut shell of bone on the inside of her knee. That same rogue tendon, bunching against my touch and suddenly snapping over. With a click. Our body’s trick. ‘My mother too,’ she explained to me. ‘And hers before, and hers before that. Strange bones, quarrels deep in we flesh’.24

It is thus a constant reminder of what is threatened by forgetfulness, the sense of ‘I’ and ‘we’; it is also, indirectly at least, a defiant objection to an understanding of self and memory that relies exclusively on the memory of the mind and disregards the body. ‘Memory’, this seems to imply, works on many levels and is literally embodied; and it is memories in the flesh that create a sense of ‘weness’ across generations and across space. However, the novel's other characters also, if to different degrees and for different reasons, experience memory as fragmented; in a passage in which the narrator imagines a dialogue between his parents that revolves around the (absent) memory, not so much of their shared home place as of their respective ethnic histories, he has his father hum a lullaby: 'You see?' she says, interrupting him. 'you do know a different language. You singing that lullaby all the time.' 'Is nothing,' he says, shaking his head. I don't know nothing, Adele. Is just a scrap of something gone'. 25

So, even beyond Adele’s suffering of dementia, ‘forgetting’ in a very encompassing sense permeates the novel, for all the characters have ‘forgotten’ something vital of their own or their family’s past. Given the perspective of the novel’s I24 25

Chariandy, Soucouyant, 117. Soucouyant, 79.

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narration, this first and foremost concerns the narrator himself. As a secondgeneration descendant of African and Indian Caribbean immigrants, he is heir to historical and familial legacies that only slowly unfold in the course of the novel. In the already cited interview with Kit Dobson, Chariandy points out: The second generation stands to inherit, consciously or not, the cultural legacies of their parents, legacies that ultimately stem from geographic spaces and contexts that the second generation may never have directly experienced to any real extent.26

Both, the nameless narrator and his brother, the reader can assume, have lived with the told as well as the untold stories of their parents; the past is in part ‘forgotten’, revealing itself only in snatches and fragments, a process repeated by the narrative structure of the novel. The limited accessibility or even inaccessibility of his parents’ past in its silences nevertheless provides a space for the narrator’s own construction of the past. In part, these gaps are due to inter-group animosities that precede not only the sons’ generation but also that of the parents. The narrator describes the first meeting between his parents as he imagines it: they didn't know each other, but there was a history between them all the same. There were mildewed explanations for why they shouldn't get along. An African and South Asian, both born in the Caribbean and the descendents of slaves and indentured workers, they had each been raised to believe that only the other had ruined the great fortune that they should have enjoyed in the New World.27

Here, as elsewhere in the text, the narrator points to the history of his parents (and thus, to some extent, his own) as being shaped by inter-group conflicts that are firmly rooted in colonial policies. But, more fundamentally, the family silences that turn on the parents' ethnic legacies also point to individual and collective trauma. Part of Adele’s sketchily and randomly remembered past is the legacy of a history of slavery in the Caribbean and of the destructive presence of American troops in Trinidad during World War II. Like her husband Roger, Adele and, by extension, her son are marked by the history of Empire and its contemporary effects: The migration happened a long time ago, and it didn’t involve circumstances that anyone had thought important to remember and pass on. Origins of caste and wealth that had no business being remembered. 26 27

Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant,” 811. Chariandy, Soucouyant, 70.

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Hushed stories of desperate flights, of cutlass and sweat. Bodies broken in the canefield. Some surviving rituals of belief, though. Firecoal walking by his grandfather and men of his generation on certain obscure days. Songs that continued to be sung with sincere feeling even though the meaning of the words had long been forgotten.28

So, what emerges here are the complex layers of generational or, rather, transgenerational memory: it is not only the narrator (as well as his brother) who is haunted by the told and untold history of his parents and by his own ambivalent position as a second-generation black Canadian in a racist local community; the parents, too, are haunted by distant memories that both are and are not their own. Thus, this process of the son’s narrative reconstruction of his parents’ lives and his familial past can be captured by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’: the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.29

Hirsch's concept was developed in the specific context of Holocaust photographs; hence, it originally refers to memories mediated by images, the visual documentation of Nazi crimes, and is therefore only applicable within narrow limits here.30 Nevertheless, 'postmemory' resonates with some of the issues raised by a novel like Chariandy's. Hirsch continues:

28

Chariandy, Soucouyant, 79. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (Spring 2001): 9. 30 Hirsch herself has argued that the concept has been developed out of this specific context, but that its use is not restricted to it. She writes: “Nor do I want to restrict the notion of postmemory to the remembrance of the Holocaust, or to privilege the Holocaust as a unique or limit experience beyond all others: the Holocaust is the space where I am drawn into the discussion. Although it might be generalizable to other contexts, however, the specificity of the Holocaust as an exemplary site of postmemory deserves notice and comment; it is due to more than my own autobiographical connection to it. I am speaking of a historical, generational moment – hence postmemory’s connection to the postmodern with its many posts – a cultural and intellectual moment that is shaped by the traumas of the first half of the twentieth century and that understands its own fundamentally mediated relationship to this painful history, even while considering it as absolutely determinative” (“Surviving Images,” 11–12). 29

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Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation – often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible.31

This focus on the modification and adoption of memory by the younger generation makes ‘postmemory’ a helpful term for the discussion of Soucouyant: the narrator is dependent on his mother's narrative to create his own, and this narrative is increasingly fragmented and, from the beginning, shaped by silences that are intensified by her own loss of memory, but also by silences that seem to characterize the parents’ attempts to come to terms with their own past. At the same time, some of his mother’s memories, most clearly of the soucouyant, become part of his own, up to the point when he tells her story of the encounter, a re-imagining and appropriation of memory.32 Hirsch sees postmemory, very broadly, in the following terms: an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma. It is defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by the unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after.33

Postmemory is thus the inscription of somebody else's memory on one's life story, as part of that story. Accordingly, I apply the term here in a modified form; postmemory in this context of second-generation black writing in Canada becomes the adaptation of images that replace painful memories and that are adopted to signify the unspeakable by the children’s generation. In Chariandy's novel, the soucouyant comes to represent this memory across generations; while, as an image, it certainly haunts Adele, the text is structured around the recovery of the soucouyant, around the son’s attempts to capture what it stands for. Not only does the soucouyant frequently appear, both in the narrator’s memory of earlier conversations with his mother and in the narrative present, but each chapter also begins with the attempt of an insecure hand to write the very word ‘soucouyant’, a feature that in the course of the novel proves to be more than an editorial illustration. This becomes clear when the narrator recovers his brother's notebooks and his graphic, as well as verbal, attempts to come to terms with his mother's illness and degrading experiences of Canadian racism.34 The narrator’s 31 32 33 34

Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 9. Chariandy, Soucouyant, 173. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10. Chariandy, Soucouyant, 171.

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epiphany is his discovery of his brother's unsuccessful attempt to write the word ‘soucouyant’, and there is little indication that the narrator’s brother wrote anything beyond what he produced in the narrator’s daydreams. The soucouyant becomes a code for what the poet-brother wants to - but cannot - narrate. And the brother’s failed attempts structure the narrator’s own narration. The figure of the vampire, therefore, provides a focal point (hence an attempt to create a kind of structural order) for both text and the memory of the narrator; at the same time, it has become an object of memory and is claimed as such by the second generation from the ‘remote legacy of their parents’. As Chariandy says about the soucouyant, it “functioned for [him] as a means to explore the language and ‘ghosts’ of precisely such a ‘remote’ cultural legacy.”35 Hence, the narrator, as will be further elaborated below, is literally ‘haunted’ by the soucouyant as a figure that leaves its traces – even graphically – throughout the novel, but also by the process of forgetting itself as manifested in his mother’s dementia. Dementia causes forgetting of both the present and of the past: the past appears as the present, and present sensations overlap, often absurdly and tragically, with different layers of memories; a process that strongly affects the narrator and, as he relates, his entire family – all of whom eventually leave, the father ultimately in death.36 While the narrator and his brother struggle with the inaccessibility of memories that nevertheless prove to be an important reference point for their lives and self-understanding as children of immigrants, Adele is clearly haunted by these distant memories in a different way. What haunts her, as it turns out, is an image of her mother, badly burnt in an accident that Adele caused as a young girl, her mother the healer, who knew so many things. But she had limits. She couldn’t do much against the ancient moods of terror and sorrow. And she couldn’t do all things, really, against the spectres of history.37

Adele’s mother’s accident is embedded in the conflictual relationship, characterized by massive asymmetries of power, between the local population and American soldiers in Trinidad during World War II. Adele’s experience of this war as a context for personal catastrophe is recounted in the language of and relation to the soucouyant; in turn, the ‘encounter’ is imagined by the son who frames it in images of war: 35

Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past,” 811. Kit Dobson, Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier U P , 2009): 25. 37 Chariandy, Soucouyant, 183. 36

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Something brilliant passed overhead and afterwards a silence like glass. This was when she noticed the creature. [...] In Carenage, a young girl watches as a fighter plane crashes into the sea. A solitary seaplane circles the wreckage once before returning to the military base at Chaguaramas, only a kilometre away. Time is short and accidents can only be expected. The world is at war.38

The accident caused by Adele can only be understood in the context of the oppressive presence of American soldiers in Trinidad, wartime dislocations, an economy that often leaves women like Adele’s mother no other choice to make a living than by prostitution. But even the burning, a catastrophic event in itself, points to other catastrophes and traumata, to Adele’s own ‘postmemory’. Her own spectre of history is not the infamous legacy of indenture, as in Roger’s family history, but the history of slavery: when young Adele asks her mother about the cargo of the Spanish ships from Africa after which their village Carenage – French for ‘keelhaul’ – is named, she replies “Ghosts.”39 Calling the enslaved women, men, and children on these ships ‘ghosts’ not only refers to the high death rates on slave ships and to the social death (Orlando Patterson) that slavery entails; it also highlights the afterlife of the horror of the slave ships, and of the present’s being haunted by the violent past.

Haunting Images, Images of Haunting: Limits of Memory and Knowledge Whether ghosts, spectres, or the soucouyant – the notion of ‘haunting’ requires further analysis of the ways in which this novel addresses questions of forgetting and remembering, and their connection to community-construction and negotiation. The question I therefore wish to explore, in closing, is that of the function and effect this pervasive imagery of ghosts and haunting have in the novel; it points to the central question of how far history – both individual and collective – can be known and what the consequences of inaccessible memory and of forgetting might be. A turn to ‘hauntology’ might thus prove instructive. While the imagery of ghosts, spectres, and haunting in literature is a well-established trope, the serious attention to ‘ghosts’ in literary studies and the concept of ‘hauntology’ are more recent; the term itself was introduced by Jacques Derrida

38 39

Chariandy, Soucouyant, 173, 174–75. Soucouyant, 182.

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in his Spectres of Marx.40 In the context of this contribution, I am less interested in Derrida’s engagement with Marxism, even though, as Kit Dobson has argued, the text opens up possibilities for “theorizing transnational studies.” 41 Rather, I take Derrida’s notion of the phantom and ‘hauntology’, as well as Colin Davis’s reading of Derrida’s ‘ghost’, as a framework to highlight crucial elements of Chariandy’s novel. As Davis has put it, Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.42

The ghost, he continues, Derrida’s “altogether other,” is a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual framework, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving.43

While intellectually incomprehensible, the ‘ghost’s’ resonance is strongly emotional; the ‘responsibility’ Davis identifies is not to be taken for granted, but as the volatile result of intense personal struggle, as Chariandy’s and other novels illustrate, and while this struggle is new and equally painful for each generation, it is part of what is passed on transgenerationally. This transgenerationality of pain and responsibility is crucial, too, for Davis’s conceptualization of ‘hauntology’, for he draws a fundamental distinction between Derrida’s concept of the spectre and the psychoanalytic approach to transgenerational trauma that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have captured as the ‘phantom’.44 The crucial difference, so Davis, is whether the spectre or the phantom can be ‘known’. This issue is reflected in many of the questions posed by Chariandy’s narrator to his mother about the ‘reality’ of her encounter with the soucouyant. Given the status of the soucouyant as a code for traumatic memory, these questions point to an altogether broader set of issues that make Davis’ juxtaposition productive for the analysis of the novel. For Derrida, argues 40

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994): 10. 41 Dobson, Transnational Canadas, 11. 42 Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms,” French Studies 59.3 (July 2005): 373. 43 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10, and Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms,” 373. For Derrida, this – in the context of his own argument with regard to Marxism’s legacy – is directly linked to the question of responsibility for the future (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 91). 44 Specifically in the two essays “Notes du séminaire sur l’unité duelle et le fantôme” and “Notules sur le fantôme,” both in the collection L’Écorce et le noyau; see also Abraham and Torok’s analysis of the ghost in Hamlet in the same collection.

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Davis, the spectre “does not belong to the order of knowledge”;45 it will not reveal anything but “may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know” (377). Derrida’s spectre thereby fundamentally questions what can be known; it challenges the notion of the knowable. The phantom in Abraham and Torok’s model, in contrast, is unspeakable in a quite different sense of being a subject of shame and prohibition. It is not at all that they cannot be spoken; on the contrary, they can and should be put into words so that the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcized. (378)

In proper psychoanalytic fashion, Abraham and Torok seek to return the phantom to the realm of knowledge, to dismantle its power through revelation and the restoration of order. In Chariandy’s novel, I would argue, the soucouyant takes up both of these aspects: as an image, it has replaced a painful memory, directly connected to “shame and prohibition,” and as such it can be recuperated and potentially ‘exorcized’. But this is its function in Adele’s inner landscape as mediated by her son; the image shifts when it is passed on to the next generation. For him, the soucouyant comes to stand for the key to a much broader set of questions he has about his mother’s and his family’s past, and as such it promises but constantly defers revelation; his question before he first leaves his mother, unable to cope with her illness, is symptomatic: “Did you really see a soucouyant?” 46 The story of Adele’s encounter is, throughout the novel, told in snatches and fragments; this sense of fragmentation is heightened by the already mentioned attempts to spell the very word ‘soucouyant’. Not only does the soucouyant haunt Adele; in conjunction with her dementia, it denies the narrator any certainty about her – and, by extension, his own – past. Adele herself replies to the narrator’s question with a denial of story, a denial of affirmation or confirmation when she says “Oh dear [...] Whatever you think you want with some old nigger-story?”47 Thus, the soucouyant is not merely the demon of folklore; it comes to stand for both the unsayable and the memory that seeks its way to the surface – a desire for knowledge and certainty, constantly deferred and disappointed but nevertheless retained in the realm of the

45

Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms,” 376. Further page references are in the main

text. 46 47

Chariandy, Soucouyant, 194. Soucouyant, 194.

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at least potentially knowable. Chariandy relates that the novel “uses the word and legend of the soucouyant” to explore a particular generational condition, a particular state of sensing but not really knowing one’s origins, and, consequently, a particular process of exploring one’s origins without easy recourse to official meanings or narratives.48

Therefore, in addition to the soucouyant’s being a sign for traumatic experiences, frequently returning to haunt the protagonists in manifold ways, it also embodies (if this is the right word) the existential insecurity about origins. The official narrative referred to here is ‘History’, a narrative that per se is built upon systematic omission, however successful; and with regard to the American military presence in Trinidad during World War II, the novel takes great pains to counter the official history of this presence as a process of modernization that was unfortunately accompanied by some collateral damage, such as displacement. It is here that the novel, like its narrator, struggles with ‘history’ as being potentially retrievable, and where it assigns to this ‘unearthing’ a sense of potential empowerment. The narrator remembers being introduced to both Caribbean history and the history of Port Junction by the local librarian, Miss Cameron.49 It is a history narrated in books, in part a notion juxtaposed by the text to different forms of narrating and remembering history; when the narrator tries to talk about Caribbean colonial history to his mother, the two notions collide: ’Did you know that, Mother? Did they teach you that in the late thirties, that your birthplace was a major producer of oil for the entire British Empire...?’ ‘How old you is, child?’ ‘Seventeen, Mother.’ ‘And what some boy who have seventeen year think he know about oil and Empire?’ ‘I told you, Mother. I learned. I read it in books.’ ‘They does always tell the biggest stories in books.’ (175)

The mother’s reply points to different forms of memory and knowledge; it also emphasizes different ways of passing on history, orally or in writing. But it is the notion of books as forms of cultural memory, however ambivalent, that helps the narrator negotiate a fragile sense of belonging. While the way in which he addresses Caribbean history wavers between book-learning and family memory (including his own of a trip to the Caribbean), using the former to fill in the gaps and explain (and in some instances contradict) the latter, learning about local 48 49

Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past,” 811. Chariandy, Soucouyant, 103. Further page references are in the main text.

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history provides him with a sense of ‘place’: “Things had happened here. It wasn’t just another suburb. It was a place with a past” (103). ‘Belonging’, in turn, is created through literature, through a poem entitled ‘The Scarborough Settler’s Lament’; whereas the poem itself projects longing and a fundamental sense of dislocation, the passing-on of the poem from the librarian to the narrator is the act that offers him a different sense of history and place. “History is about relations,” as Miss Cameron points out (106), and it is her insistence on relation in word and deed that prompts the narrator to spell out the metaphor for his life and history, ‘Your history is a living book,’ Miss Cameron once told me. ‘Your history is your blood and flesh. Your history is your grammar for life...’ My history is a travel guidebook. My history is a creature nobody really believes in. My history is a foreign word. (137)

The narrator shifts the list of history as a living, embodied process to the realm of language, linking history with personal memories and metaphors; one might call this juxtaposition, in Jan Assmann’s terms, ‘cultural’ and ‘communicative’ memory, two forms of memory that operate on different levels but are equally important for the constitution of identity.50 The ‘particular generational condition’ here is the cultural dilemma of the second, an “intimately Canadian” generation, as Chariandy has put it, but a generation highly sceptical of the nation. This points once again to the construction, the contestation, and the location of community. Even though the novel constantly creates and reconstructs links to the Caribbean and to the family’s past, it is set in Canada; in its explorations of ‘community’ it illustrates the complex relationship of the protagonists to a country which for neither of them is one of identification. At one point, the narrator tells Adele: “Don’t be silly, Mother. There are no ghosts here.”51 According to Dobson, 50

Assmann distinguishes between communicative memory, as based exclusively on everyday communication (unspecialized, without hierarchies, uninstitutionalized, changing, restricted to a generation), and cultural memory, which “is characterized by its distance from the everyday. Distance from the everyday (transcendence) marks its temporal horizon. Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)” (“Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 129). Both forms of memory are closely linked to individual and collective identity constitution. Since Assmann’s understanding of ‘cultural memory’ goes much further back than the kind of history implied here, the terms are only applicable within limits. What is helpful, though, is the juxtaposition of ‘codified’ memory and ‘oral’ memory implied by his and Aleida Assmann’s terminology. 51 Chariandy, Soucouyant, 113.

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In a sense, he is right: there have not been any ghosts in that mostly white society that they can recognize for themselves. The ghosts there are those of the white families and the Indigenous people who came before them. At the same time, the protagonist’s mother [...] is letting ghosts form her past in both Canada and Trinidad take on a life of their own.52

Ironically, it is therefore the image of the demon, the ghost in particular, that creates the – however ambivalent – link to the Canadian nation; for in his reply, the narrator cites both Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush53 and Earle Birney’s poem “CanLit” – “It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted.” This is a highly self-ironic reference, not only to ‘Canada’ and national myths, but even more so to Canadian literature, as critics have pointed out.54 Canadian literature is certainly haunted – by individual and collective memories, by processes of forced as well as blissful forgetting, by the terrors of history, “the heaviness of a history that couldn't leave,”55 and not only history within but also beyond its borders. The narrative construction of community is thus enacted on different levels: the local level of Scarborough, an uneasy telling of community built on mechanisms of exclusion; ‘Canada’, an equally uneasy and only partly successful construction of ‘nation’, reflecting Chariandy’s exploration of second-generation dilemmas and the complexities of diaspora; and, in direct conjunction, a reconstruction of the mother’s village in the Caribbean, creating a vague sense of connection that is largely irretrievable but, like the soucouyant, continues to haunt. As Lily Cho has argued, diasporic communities are formed through the processes of memory, which bind vertically through generations and horizontally across individuals. Diasporic subjectivities emerge not simply from the fact of geographical displacement, but also from the ways in which forgotten or suppressed pasts continue to shape the present.56

Despite the emphasis on both memory and the power of its suppression, the different processes at work in the constitution of these diasporic communities do not easily map upon each other; the levels indicated above, as Cho argues, are

52

Dobson, Transnational Canadas, ix. See also: Dobson, “Spirits of Elsewhere Past,” 815. 54 See footnote 10 above. 55 Chariandy, Soucouyant, 115. 56 Lily Cho, “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature,” in Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kamboureli & Roy Miki (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2007): 106. 53

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characterized by unstable relations and reaffirm the notion of diaspora as a highly dynamic and unpredictable construct. At the same time, these different levels are connected through the most immediate community the narrator seeks to reconstruct: the family. Of all the contested communities in the novel, it is the most tangible, constantly falling apart, partly lost in memory, but partly saved by it, too. The novel thus closes with a memory of a blessing the narrator’s grandmother had performed when he visited as a child, “an old gesture,” as the narrator’s lover Meera says, “older than anything like religion or history.”57 The blessing confirms relation and provides recognition of community membership; consequently, this gesture can be read as recognizing the narrator’s being part of a family and, by extension, of the complex diasporic webs created by the dispersal of this family and the simultaneous upholding of memory. Hence, the final memory of the narrator is one of connection: My grandmother stumbling and reaching, without thinking, for Mother’s hand. Each reaching for the other and then holding hands the rest of the way. I remember being awed by this. It was all so incredibly ordinary. They were just a mother and a daughter.58

The novel’s closure, Meera touching the narrator, echoes this ordinariness and fragile beauty of human relation and affirms a fundamental connection; it is, last but not least, the body that remembers relation. Significantly, both the “ordinary” gesture between mother and daughter, and the touch between lovers, refocuses on the interpersonal dimension rather than being an emphasis on larger community. It is in individual connection that the narrator appears to find the irreducible basis of any possibility for community. This ending thus offers both the affirmation of and scepticism towards the construction of any community.

W OR K S C I T E D Abraham, Nicolas, & Maria Torok. L’Écorce et le noyau, preface by Nicolas Rand (2009; Paris: Flammarion, rev. ed. 2001). Anatol, Giselle Liza. Things That Fly In the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (New Brunswick NJ : Rutgers U P , 2015). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 57 58

Chariandy, Soucouyant, 196. Soucouyant, 196.

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Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33. Booth, W. James. Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2006). Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For (New York: Thomas Dunn, 2005). Buse, Peter, & Andrew Stott. “Introduction” to Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse & Andrew Stott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999): 1–20. Caruthry (Baltimore MD : Johns Hopkins U P , 1996). Chariandy, David. “ ‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada,” Callaloo 30.1 (2007): 818–29. Chariandy, David. Soucouyant (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007). Cho, Lily. “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature,” in Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kamboureli & Roy Miki (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2007): 93–110. Darias–Beautell, Eva. “Introduction: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada,” in Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada, ed. Eva Darias–Beautell (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2012): 1–18. Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms,” French Studies 59.3 (July 2005): 373–79. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). Dobson, Kit. “Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant,” Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 808–17. Dobson, Kit. Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier U P , 2009). Eakin, Paul John. “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing,” in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. P.J. Eakin (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2004): 1–16. Gelder, Ken, & Jane M. Jacobs. “The Postcolonial Ghost Story,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse & Andrew Stott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999): 179–99. Goldman, Marlene, & Joanne Saul. “Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (2006), 645–55. Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimension of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004). Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007). Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (Spring 2001): 5–37. Joseph, Kelly Baker. Disturbers of the Peace: Representation of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P , 2013). Kamboureli, Smaro. “Preface,” in Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kamboureli & Roy Miki (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier P , 2007): vii–xv.

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Kamboureli, Smaro. “(Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies,” in Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada, ed. Eva Darias–Beautell (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U P , 2012): 43–76. Lachmann, Renate. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997). Mootoo, Shani. He Drown She in the Sea (New York: Grove, 2005). Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1985). Siemerling, Winfried. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2015). Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and A I D S and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001). Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing. Black. Canada (Toronto: Insomniac, 2003).

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Whose Hillbrow? Xenophobia and the Urban Space in the ‘New’ South Africa

J OCHEN P E TZ OL D

A

C C O R D I N G T O J O B E A L L E T A L . , Johannesburg is a mirror of South Africa’s broader urban future;1 hence, it is an ideal location for examining the contested community of the ‘New’ South Africa, a community that still has to deal with the multiple legacies of the apartheid years and in which, in the analysis of Michael Green, the issue of “delivery [...] be it in terms of services, employment, health, housing, land, water, education or any number of other issues” has become the focal point of “contestation between and even within all levels of party politics.”2 Thus it is perhaps no surprise that two South African novels, both published in 2001, should be set in Hillbrow and explore its urban space: Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.3 The setting is fitting, because if Johannesburg is to be seen as “the crucible of a new national culture,” as Meg Samuelson suggests,4 then Hillbrow, a residential area located about half a mile to the north of Johannesburg’s Central Business

1

See Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw & Susan Parnell, “Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg,” Environment and Urbanization 12.1 (2000): 107–22. 2 Michael Green, “The Future in the Post: Utopia and the Fiction of the New South Africa,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55.1 (2007): 69. 3 Ivan Vladislaviǰ, born in 1957, is among South Africa’s more prominent writers and commentators; he has published a number of short stories and novels since the 1980s. Phaswane Mpe, born in 1970, was one of the most critically acclaimed ‘new voices’ of post-apartheid South Africa, a voice silenced by his premature death in 2004. See Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper & Craig MacKenzie, The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945 (New York: Columbia U P , 2010): 141, 196–97; Ivan Vladislaviǰ, The Restless Supermarket (2001; Cape Town: David Philip, 2006); Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2001). Further page references to both novels are in the main text. 4 Meg Samuelson, “The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera,” African Identities 5.2 (2007): 247.

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District, can be described as a steam-cooker version of South Africa’s cities in which the sheer population density and the mixture of ethnic backgrounds fuels and accelerates developments. Consisting almost exclusively of high-rise buildings, Hillbrow is said to be the most densely populated area in the Southern Hemisphere:5 it is estimated that around the turn of the millennium more than 80,000 people lived in Hillbrow – an area of less than one square kilometre.6 But Hillbrow is more than just an extremely densely populated area. As Alan Morris points out, historically the “predominance of young people, many of them single, meant that it has always been a lively neighbourhood with a bustling night-life”; furthermore, it “was one of the first neighbourhoods to become racially diverse in spite of the Group Areas Act of 1950.”7 But what may have been seen as exciting in the 1980s is now frequently described as a menace: according to Michael Green, by “the 1990s Hillbrow was considered either a sophisticated melting pot of culture, class, and ethnicity or a decaying cityscape of violent crime, drugs, prostitution, and AIDS ,” suggesting two possible extremes for future developments in the ‘Rainbow Nation’.8 Hence, it is not surprising that both Vladislaviǰ and Mpe should choose Hillbrow as the setting for novels concerned with the issue of belonging, and in fact the two novels share an interesting number of features inviting comparative discussion: both were published in 2001 and are set roughly at the same time, during or shortly after the transition period to the ‘New’ South Africa: i.e. the period between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the first democratic elections, held in 1994; both novels feature main characters who write a fictional text that can, to some extent, be read as an instance of mise-en-abîme, in that these inner-fictional texts repeat and comment on major topics of the novels themselves; and, finally, in both novels the concept of xenophobia plays an important role – although its targets are different. In the following, I will argue that in both novels the setting is foregrounded as an urban space and that this urban space is marked by xenophobia. I will show that while xenophobia influences – or even determines – the lives of the main characters in both novels, it is on the level of the characters that the politics of the two novels can

5

Keith Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 2004): 156. 6 See Ted Legget, “A Den of Iniquity? Inside Hillbrow’s Residential Hotels,” S A Crime Quarterly 2.4 (2002), http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/CrimeQ/No.2/4Leggett.html (accessed 3 January 2011). 7 Alan Morris, “Race Relation and Racism in a Racially Diverse Inner City Neighbourhood: A Case Study of Hillbrow, Johannesburg,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25.4 (1999): 671, 667. 8 Michael Green, “Translating the Nation: Phaswane Mpe and the Fiction of Post-Apartheid,” Scrutiny 2 10.1 (2005): 5.

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be clearly distinguished, since the one – The Restless Supermarket – ultimately denies its central character change and agency, whereas the other – Welcome to Our Hillbrow – creates a potential space for agency and change. Furthermore, it will become apparent that in the latter novel agency is not limited to characters but is also self-reflexively ascribed to the novel as a whole.

Presenting the Urban Space Before I commence the discussion, let me briefly characterize both novels: Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket is the first-person narrative of Aubrey Tearle, a proofreader of telephone directories who moved to Hillbrow on retiring in the late-1980s. At the beginning of the novel Tearle learns that the “Cafe Europa,” where he spends most of his time, is due to close at the end of the month: i.e. December 1993. The novel then tells of the events leading up to the “goodbye bash” (which will end in the cafe’s being wrecked), interspersed with Tearle’s memories of how a growing circle of regular visitors to the cafe had formed, expanded, and broken up. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow focuses on the life of Refentše – and, to a lesser extent, on that of his former girlfriend Refilwe – who both come from Tiragalong, a fictional village in the Limpopo Province, and independently go to Johannesburg to study and work. The novel is unusual in that most of it is narrated in the second person, directly addressed to one of those two characters – both of whom are dead at the time of narration: the first four of six chapters are addressed to Refentše, the last eight pages to Refilwe. This narrative strategy gives the novel a distinctly oral quality – one may be reminded of the village-gossips as narrators in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), a book explicitly mentioned in the text (cf. 107) – in which the reader, although not directly addressed, becomes involved like the accidental witness to a conversation. While their central characters (white Tearle and black Refentše), plots, and narrative techniques are very different, the ways of describing the city are remarkably similar in The Restless Supermarket and Welcome to Our Hillbrow: Both novels emphasize a very concrete sense of place through numerous references to street names, parks, shops or important buildings – this is particularly striking in the first chapter of Mpe’s novel, fittingly entitled “Hillbrow: The Map,” which provides a detailed description of the walk from the Central Business District to Refentše’s cousin, and from his apartment to the university: If you are coming from the city centre, the best way to get to Cousin’s place is by driving or walking through Twist Street, a one-way street that takes you to the north of the city. You cross Wolmarans and three rather

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obscure streets, Kapteijn, Ockerse and Pieterse, before you drive or walk past Esselen, Kotze and Pretoria Streets. [...] On your left-hand side is Christ Church, the Bible Centred Church of Christ, as the big red letters announce to you. (6)

Timothy Johns comments on the “Baedeker quality” of this chapter,9 and the description is certainly realistic in the sense that it represents the street-names of the actual Hillbrow – although, when walking north, the order of the “three rather obscure streets” is reversed – and a Christ Church is indeed located at the corner of Twist Street and Caroline Street. The Restless Supermarket, while not as detailed, is also very clearly set in a ‘realistic’ version of Johannesburg, identified with recognizable street-names. In addition to their detailed settings, it is also striking that both novels describe the city from a pedestrian’s point of view: neither Tearle nor Refentše owns a car; hence, they walk the streets of their city. Particularly in the case of Tearle, who is retired and has the time for recreational walking, this emphasis on walking might bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘flâneur’.10 However, neither his nor Refentše’s wanderings are aimless and both are rather wary of crowds. Furthermore, their experiences of Hillbrow are not disinterested like those of Benjamin’s flâneur, quite the contrary: both characters are emotionally engaged with their city. Again, this is particularly true of Tearle, who is constantly on the lookout for things to criticize and correct. While walking thus becomes a means of interacting with the city, by emphasizing the physical activity itself, space is experienced through the body. Significantly, both novels also emphasize that the urban space is a potential threat to the human body – a threat that underscores the three-dimensionality of space, since it comprises both the horizontal and the vertical. Traffic is a lethal danger on the horizontal plane: Welcome to Our Hillbrow starts with the description of a fatal traffic accident (2), and near the beginning of The Restless Supermarket, Tearle is almost hit by a van (26). The vertical becomes particularly dangerous in times of celebration, when, “in their jubilation, people in Hillbrow hurl [...] bottles of all sorts from their flat balconies” (1), as we are told in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, or when “flat-dwellers of colour [use] the occasion to heave unwanted furniture from their windows into the streets below” (25), as Tearle states in The

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Timothy Johns, “The Novel Architecture of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst N Y : Cambria, 2010): 193. 10 See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983).

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Restless Supermarket. The vertical can also be dangerous in a different sense: it is by jumping from a high-rise building that Refentše commits suicide (41). Thus, the city-space is presented as a potential danger; significantly, both Refentše and Tearle feel threatened by other city-dwellers, a fact that characterizes Hillbrow as a place of widespread criminality and potential violence. This sense of danger becomes particularly clear in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, where the city is initially described as a “menacing monster” that had “swallowed a number of the children of Tiragalong” (3). However, these descriptions are Refentše’s ‘knowledge’ before he comes to Hillbrow; they are clearly based on the villagers’ prejudices. Nonetheless, the image of the city as a ‘monster’ has led to some critical readings of Welcome to Our Hillbrow that make the city responsible for Refentše’s sad fate. However, it is hardly convincing to see the city as exclusively negative, as Irikidzayi Manase does: basing his analysis on EuroAmerican theories of the postmodern city, Manase claims that in the texts he examines, prominently including Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the “southern African city is portrayed within the background of global socio-economic influences, whose impact dislocates and fragments the inhabitants.”11 This assessment quite clearly misses the point that in Mpe’s novel the main character is not dislocated and alienated from his rural roots – quite the contrary. The narrator tells Refentše: You always took Tiragalong with you in your consciousness whenever you came to Hillbrow or any other place. In the same way, you carried Hillbrow with you always. (49)

This is hardly the description of a ‘fragmented identity’ or of ‘dislocation,’ it depicts an individual who is at home both in the rural space he came from and in the urban space he now inhabits. However, the impression that Refentše has to be seen as somehow damaged by the city is repeated by other critics. Even Carrol Clarkson’s much more convincing analysis insists that Refentše’s arrival in Hillbrow is “an event which interrupts social continuities,”12 disregarding the fact that Refentše spends four of his five years in Hillbrow living with his cousin and that he frequently returns to his native Tiragalong, so that he remains physically and emotionally connected to his extended family. There are no indications in the novel that he finds his move to Hillbrow extremely troubling or alienating: Refentše is afraid of potential violence, but he seems to have accepted this facet of the city. His initial response to Hillbrow is a case in point: 11

Irikidzayi Manase, “Mapping the City Space in Current Zimbabwean and South African Fiction,” Transformations 57 (2005): 94. 12 Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 452.

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his fear that burglars might enter his cousin’s flat during the first night he spends there proves unfounded and is counterbalanced by the pleasure of having hot water on tap in the morning (9–10). The decisive blow that shatters his sense of identity, leading to his depression and ultimately his suicide, is only indirectly connected to the urban space, and the connecting link is his mother’s xenophobia. She disapproves of his lover Lerato simply because she was born in Johannesburg: The first sign of your growing loss of control occurred after you went home one weekend to Tiragalong. You soon returned, having been told by your mother that you must leave Lerato – leave her, or you were no longer her son. The shocking precision of her words and the determination in her voice had drawn your heart away from Tiragalong. You discovered, on arriving in Hillbrow, that to be drawn away from Tiragalong also went hand-in-hand with a loss of interest in Hillbrow. Because Tiragalong was in Hillbrow. (48–49)

As this passage makes clear, it is neither the postmodern city that unsettles Refentše, as Manase claims, nor the severance of family ties, as Clarkson maintains. The reason for his dislocation is his mother’s ultimatum that places him in the position of having to choose between her and Refilwe, between his genealogical roots and the potentiality of future generations. It is a choice that breaks him, and that is inflicted upon him because of his mother’s xenophobia – her fear of the unknown Other, in this case the unknown city-dweller. Compared to Welcome to Our Hillbrow, The Restless Supermarket has seen much fewer critical responses, and none suggests that Tearle’s life is broken by the city. Tearle himself is preoccupied with the concept of decline – which, as a former proofreader, he sees exemplified in the deterioration of linguistic standards: Standards of proofreading have been declining steadily since the nineteen-sixties, when the permissive attitude to life first gained ground, and so have standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene and medical care, the standard of living, and so on. All these are symptoms of a more general malaise. Decline with a capital D. (90)

I will look into the racial implications of Tearle’s nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of the apartheid system in the next section, but his general world-view clearly influences his perception of the city; hence, he emphasizes its decay: The public spaces in my neighbourhood were uninviting. [...] Where once there had been benches for whites only, now there were no benches at all to discourage loitering. The loiterers were quite happy to lie on the grass, but, needless to say, I was not. (17)

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For Tearle, the city space is the most blatant symbol of all-pervasive decline – a perception of the outside world which is clearly coloured by his racism. In fact, in both novels the cityspace is the location of and the reason for xenophobia.

Different Versions of Xenophobia While Tearle’s insistence that linguistic standards are an indication of “standards of morality, [...], standards of living, and so on” (90) is clearly satirical (at best it could be dismissed as a rather quirky outlook on life), it gains a political dimension when Tearle links the deterioration he perceives to race. Thus, he disapproves of a new addition to their circle both in linguistic and in racial terms: he describes her as “barely literate,” adding, “I didn’t like her colour either [...] Great-grandfather on the mother’s side came from Madras, I discovered later, and it showed in her features” (182). Not surprisingly, then, the release of Nelson Mandela elicits the comment that “the standards plumbed new depths” (185), and the imminent election and its likely outcome are a source of constant anxiety for Tearle. Thus, when a German sausage-vendor closes shop, he confides: “I can’t say I blame you. Who would want to live under a black government?” (59) In Tearl, Vladislaviǰ creates a bitter parody of the white racist, his positions undercut by his ludicrous insistence on linguistic parallels to sociopolitical developments. Most interestingly in the present context of xenophobia, Tearle connects the decline of Hillbrow to what he perceives as the ‘greying’ of the area, a development he claims to have discovered long before anybody else saw it coming: In the twilight of my career, some intriguing trends became apparent in the Book [the telephone directory], signs of the momentous changes that lay in store for the city and the country [...]. Silently, while we slept, the tide was darkening. [...] It was not my imagination: there were more and more people of colour in Hillbrow. And it was obvious to me that they were living in our midst. [...] It took years before this situation became public knowledge [...] but by then, it was too late. (144–45)

The Group Areas Act of 1950, one of the most notorious and influential of apartheid laws, had made it illegal for people to live in areas not officially assigned to their ‘race’. Hillbrow was defined as a ‘white’ residential area, and the 1970 census showed it to be an almost exclusively white area.13 Thus, the process

13

For a compact introduction to the population changes in Johannesburg, see Claire Pickard– Cambridge, The Greying of Johannesburg: Residential Desegregation in the Johannesburg Area (Braamfontein: South African Institute of Race Relations, 2001); see also Beavon, Johannesburg.

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observed by Tearle was illegal under apartheid laws, and Tearle clearly describes it in purely negative terms, in almost apocalyptic language: as a ‘darkening tide’ that can no longer be stopped, as a stealthy usurpation that is reminiscent of the repertoire of horror-stories like the vampire or the zombie. While this is a clear indication of Tearle’s xenophobia, it also shows how far out of touch with reality he is – if, that is, we follow the text’s invitation to assume that the fictional Hillbrow he inhabits bears a close resemblance to the historical Hillbrow of South African reality. Tearle places his observations “in the twilight” of his career and the time after retirement in 1987. However, as Beavon points out, the silent process of cross-colour-bar migration had already become public knowledge in the late 1970s, when two newspapers ran stories on the fact.14 In 1983, the civil-rights group ACTSTOP “reported that between 8,000 and 12,000 blacks were living in white inner-city areas,” and in 1984, the Conservative Party “called for the formation of ‘action groups’ to force the eviction of illegal tenants in the Hillborw/Berea area.”15 Despite these attempts to reverse the ‘greying’ process, according to Olusola Olufemi, “by the end of the 1980s, blacks had claimed the central city.”16 Thus, what Tearle describes as a silently rising tide in the late-1980s had in fact already become a very noticeable flood in the real South Africa – and there is no indication that we are supposed to read Vladislaviǰ’s fictional South Africa as markedly different from the nonfictional one in this respect. It is one indication among many of how out of touch with reality Tearle is – a condition which arguably undermines his reliability as a narrator and the validity of his opinions. In terms of his general world-view, Tearle has remained a creature of the 1950s – an assessment strengthened by his reliance on the Concise Oxford Dictionary in the “beloved fourth edition of 1951” (55). Tearle’s blindness to contemporary reality not only undermines his credibility, it is significant because, by compressing developments that went on over almost three decades into just a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it creates a very specific chronotope, to adapt Bakhtin’s term,17 that combines, in a single narrative moment, the demise of the apartheid regime with cross-colour-bar-migration and the deterioration of public morality, safety, and living conditions. This 14

Beavon, Johannesburg, 217. Pickard–Cambridge, The Greying of Johannesburg, 7, 9. 16 Olusola Olufemi, “Street Homelessness in Johannesburg Inner-City: A Preliminary Survey,” Environment and Urbanization 10.2 (1998): 225. 17 See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotpe in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 84–258. 15

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chronotope provides a political interpretation of the past, and it defines Tearle’s specific brand of xenophobia: as an unthinking beneficiary of the system, he internalized its racist doctrines, equating a non-white skin colour with immoral behaviour and general degeneration. Hence, Tearle clearly sees the past as “the golden days” (145) – when told that “you have to change with the times or you get left behind,” he wonders if being left behind is such a bad idea, asking “is the past such a terrible place to be?” (147). In Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, this type of ‘traditional’, racist xenophobia – the white fear of the unknown black Other – plays hardly any role at all; it surfaces only when Refilwe travels to Oxford. This is not to say that racism does not exist in this novel, but it is not the only source of xenophobia: the fear of the Other is expressed in both spatial and racial terms. We have already seen that Refentše’s mother disapproves of her potential daughter-inlaw because she (supposedly) comes from the big city, and this is a version of xenophobia that is apparently shared by almost all the people in Tiragalong. However, the novel also makes it clear that xenophobia is not an exclusively rural phenomenon. It is shared by those living in Hillbrow, only the target changes. People in Hillbrow despise immigrants from other African countries, a form of xenophobia in which spatial distance is also racialized in the sense that these people (primarily Nigerians) are of different ethnicity and, owing to differences in dress and skin colour, tend to be instantly recognizable as ‘other’. These immigrants are then said to be responsible for the physical and moral decay of the city (which in turn is taken for granted by the villagers in their mistrust of city people). Both versions of xenophobia are cruelly combined in the rumours that jealous Refilwe spreads about Refentše’s girlfriend Lerato – that she is the child of a woman from Durban and a Nigerian (44). The rumours are fraught with bitter irony, since Lerato is, in fact, the illegitimate child of a man from Tiragalong, thus Refentše’s mother ostracized her son for his love to another ‘child of Tiragalong’. And Refilwe’s insinuations about a Nigerian father turn on her when she falls in love with a Nigerian and is herself ostracized.

The Story-Within-the-Story: Escapism vs. Empowerment As we have seen, both novels use the concept of xenophobia as a central force, but while it is a white man’s fear of the change brought about by the new dispensation in The Restless Supermarket, it is a more complex approach to the issue in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, an approach that insists on the universal prevalence of xenophobia when the same patterns that appear in Tiragalong and Hillbrow resurface, in their ‘traditional’ form of white racism, in the different treatment of arrivals at Heathrow Airport, where Refilwe is “strongly reminded

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[...] of our Hillbrow and the xenophobia it engendered” (102). The universalism of hatred and the multiple deaths that occur in Welcome to Our Hillbrow might at first sight seem to make Mpe’s the bleaker novel of the two. However, on closer analysis this is not the case. On the contrary, Mpe’s novel inscribes a kind of empowerment. whereas Vladislaviǰ’s offers an escapism which ultimately fails. This become most apparent when we look at the story-within-the-story that features in both novels. Tearle produces a text that is ostensibly a test for proofreaders, but this “Proofreader’s Derby” is also a postmodernist fantasy in which the decay of proofreading standards is said to lead to the actual, physical disintegration of the city (i.e. whole areas of the city simply disappear). The connections to Tearle’s absolute trust in standards and his fear of change are easily recognizable. Instead of the ‘real’ Hillbrow (i.e. the fictional setting of the novel), which he cannot control and which he sees as being on the road to moral and physical disintegration, Tearle imagines a cityspace in which his alter ego can be the hero restoring order, turning back the clock to the ‘good old days’ of apartheid, as it were. However, this is pure escapism; in his ‘real’ life, Tearle is anything but in control – as the events of the goodbye-bash teach him again and again. In Mpe’s novel, by contrast, Refentše writes a short story in the realist mode, a story “about an HI V -positive woman from Tiragalong, who was ostracized by her fellow villagers when they learnt about her health status” (54). Like the novel as a whole, the story is about “Euphemism. Xenophobia. Prejudice. AIDS ” (60), and also about death – the exact reversal of an escapist fantasy of restoring order. And yet it is empowering in a way Tearl’s “Proofreader’s Derby” is not. It is empowering because the novel suggests that human beings have agency to challenge perceived notions and possibly to effect changes in the social fabric that surrounds them: Among those who read your story were some who said that your heroine should not be condemned since she was just a worker in the kitchens, whose poverty caused her to take advantage of the care that potential lovers could bring. These sympathetic ones went further and pointed out that there was no actual evidence to say that she was in love with a Lekwerekwere. Anyway, if she was, what was wrong with that? Who said that the people of Tiragalong were cleaner than everyone else? (54–55)

This is, of course, the reaction any writer engaging with topics of prejudice would hope for, but it does at least envisage that literature can change people. And while this may be criticized as somewhat naive, it remains valid that Welcome to Our Hillbrow inscribes human agency and a potential for change in

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humans and society in the text, whereas The Restless Supermarket does the opposite, since Tearle never manages to distribute his test and the copies he makes are lost. Furthermore, the political implications of Refentše’s short story are geared towards what Sarah Nuttall – presumably in conscious if unacknowledged reference to Jacques Derrida’s response to Emmanuel Levinas – has termed “an ethics of hospitality,”18 whereas Tearle’s fantasy implicitly links the loss of standards to the dismantling of apartheid – metaphorically calling for the reinstatement of the repressive system. In a similar vein, the final outlook of both novels is fundamentally different. Both Sarah Nuttall and Kudzayi Ngara suggest that Tearle’s interaction with a ‘coloured’ girl near the end of the novel can be seen as a positive sign of his growing ability to accept the changes around him, but I would agree with Helene Strauss that Tearle fails to engage with the Other, “fails entirely to undergo creolisation.”19 This becomes clear at the very end of The Restless Supermarket, when Tearle looks out of his window during the last night of 1993: Movements were afoot in those dark spaces that would never be reflected in the telephone directories. Languages were spoken there that I would never put to the proof. As if they were aware of it themselves, the lights were not twinkling, as lights are supposed to do, they were squirming and wriggling and writhing, like maggots battening on the foul proof of the world. (338–39)

It is a night fraught with symbolic importance: New Year’s Eve, the transition to a year that would bring the ‘Rainbow Nation’ – and Tearle’s imagery is decidedly negative, even disgusting. In contrast, Mpe’s novel, despite all the deaths, ends on a small note of hope. Refilwe is just about to enter heaven, described as a place where the dead can meet and talk as in real life. It is in this heaven that Refentše’s mother and Lerato meet for the first time. Nuttall suggests that Levinas’s thoughts on ‘facing’ the radical otherness of the Other might be an appropriate concept to apply to how Refentše treats black immigrants.20 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas states that “the face in its nakedness as a face 18

Sarah Nuttall, “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 203. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1999). 19 See Sarah Nuttall, “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 746–48; Kudzayi Ngara, “Unstable Orders: Dislocations as Metaphor and Allegory of Post-Apartheid Transition in Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket,” Études Littéraires Africaines 38 (2014): 67; Helene Strauss, “Squirming White Bodies: Interracial Encounters in Anton Kannemeyer’s ‘True Love’ and Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket,” Journal of Literary Studies 24.2 (2008): 39. 20 Nuttall, “Literary City,” 204.

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presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger,” and he claims that “the poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal.”21 Refentše is indeed willing to accept this equality; similarly, it is in their face-to-face encounter in heaven that Lerato finds the approval of Refentše’s mother: Together, the two of you had then gone to meet your mother in the courtyard of Heaven. You introduced her to this former Johannesburger. Your mother had examined her looks carefully, the way old people in Tiragalong are wont to. [...] And a gentle smile announced itself. (69–70)

As Rob Gaylard reminds us, Mpe’s novel also evokes – ex negativo – the African concept of ubuntu (its term in Nguni languages like Zulu and Xhosa, botho in Mpe’s Sepedi),22 a multidimensional concept which represents the core values of African ontologies: respect for any human being, for human dignitiy and for human life, collective sharedness, obedience, humility, solidarity, caring, hospitality, interdependence, communalism.23

While ubuntu supposedly represents ‘traditional’ African values, these values are ignored by both city-dwellers and villagers in Mpe’s novel: “the traditional rural village of Tiragalong is as riven by suspicion, fear, prejudice and intolerance as is its urban counterpart (Hillbrow).”24 However, the novel suggests that ubuntu can be re-established in heaven. Thus, Mpe’s novel sketches two trajectories for change. Refentše’s short story is said to have the potential to make people question prejudices, and heaven can have the same effect – and, significantly, the text insists on connections between the world of the ancestors and that of the living, so that a trickle-downeffect does not seem inconceivable.

Conclusion To conclude, let us look in more detail at the question in my title, “Whose Hillbrow?” The question, of course, alludes to the use of the possessive pronoun ‘our’ in Mpe’s title, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, but questions of ‘ownership’ of the 21

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979): 213. 22 See Rob Gaylard, “‘ Welcome to the world of our humanity’: (African) Humanism, Ubuntu and Black South African Writing,” Journal of Literary Studies 20.3–4 (December 2004): 265–82. 23 Nkonko Kamwangamalu, “Ubuntu in South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Perspective to a PanAfrican Concept,” Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies 13.2 (1999): 25–26. 24 Gaylard, “‘ Welcome to the world of our humanity’.”

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city also come up in Vladislavic’s novel. The phrase “Welcome to our Hillbrow” is repeated at various stages of Mpe’s book, addressed to different people, but the ‘welcome’ is always somewhat ironic. It is first introduced after the description of the fatal traffic accident referred to above: “Shosholoza [...] drowned the choking sobs of the deceased child’s mother. Welcome to our Hillbrow! you heard one man say to his female companion” (2). Spoken in this context, the phrase suggests that these kinds of accidents happen frequently in Hillbrow, and yet it is not purely negative. Rather, it invites the addressee to accept all of Hillbrow, the good and the bad. Interestingly, both the referent of ‘our’ and the object of the phrase change and become more inclusive over the course of the novel. This is particularly striking in the fifth chapter – the one not addressed to either Refentše or Refilwe – when ‘Welcome to our Hillbrow’ changes to “Welcome to our All” (104) and “Welcome to the World of our Humanity” (113). The last formulation appears in the context of violence and Refilwe’s imminent death of AIDS and thus the context initially seems to suggest a negative reading. However, this would ignore the fact that Refilwe has come to terms with her disease and with her “xenophobic prejudices” and has reached a state of “expanding consciousness” (113). Hence, the phrase invites the addressee not to generalize the negative or to dwell on negative experiences, and the phrases clearly include all humans as (potential) referents of “our” – also the reader him/herself. Furthermore, the issue of ownership is significant beyond Mpe’s title: in both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and The Restless Supermarket some of those living in Hillbrow display a xenophobia that tries to deny certain people residence and hence symbolic ownership of the city – as Green points out, the “threatened and marginal status of many living in Hillbrow makes the area a perfect breeding ground for xenophobia of the worst sort.”25 In The Restless Supermarket, Tearle – who clearly sees himself as threatened and increasingly marginalized – tries to lay exclusive claim to Hillbrow, but it is really the Hillbrow of a past epoch; he is unable and/or unwilling to change with the times, wishing instead to turn back the clock. Although there are hints that he might overcome his xenophobia with regard to individuals, the final image of the novel makes it clear that he no longer sees a future for himself in a Hillbrow overrun by darkness. In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Refentše not only presents a flexible and changing Hillbrow in which he is happy himself (at least initially), he is also willing to grant other migrants the chance to search for “green pastures” in the city (18), while the xenophobic reaction to newcomers is delegated to minor characters, like Refentše’s cousin, who “insisted that people should remain in 25

Green, “Translating the Nation,” 5.

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their own countries” (20). Much more than in The Restless Supermarket, the urban space in Welcome to Our Hillbrow becomes a site of multiple opportunities. And while these opportunities entail the possibility of failure, the text initially depicts stories of success: both Refentše and Refilwe are successful in their careers – and in this respect, the novel is not a version of the Jim Comes to Jo’burg genre, “a young man from the countryside is destroyed by the evils of city life and city women,” as Neville Hoad suggests.26 While the description of Hillbrow as a ‘monster’ (see above) might suggest such a reading, this is contradicted by Refentše’s conviction “that the moral decay of Hillbrow, so often talked about, was in fact no worse than that of Tiragalong” (17). The failures of Refentše and Refilwe are not due to the moral seduction of the big city, they are due to personal flaws such as prejudice, xenophobia, and jealousy, and to medical conditions like depression or H I V . Significantly, the novel envisions a space for reconciliation – if only in heaven – and it projects potential agency onto itself through Refentše’s short story and the effect it is said to have on some readers. As Green argues in “The Future in the Post,” Welcome to Our Hillbrow presents no easy utopian vision,27 but while The Restless Supermarket satirizes the mental and physical wanderings of a white racist and ends on a note of despair, Mpe’s novel can be read as an attempt to address social ills and maybe change reality for the better, and despite the multiple deaths it ends on a note of hope.

W OR K S C I T E D Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: Uof Texas P , 1981): 84–258. Beall, Jo, Owen Crankshaw & Susan Parnell. “Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg,” Environment and Urbanization 12.1 (2000): 107–22. Beavon, Keith. Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria: U of South Africa P , 2004). Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). Clarkson, Carrol. “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome To Our Hilbrow,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 451–59.

26

See Neville Hoad, “Welcome to Our Hillbrow: An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism,” in Urbanization and African Cultures, ed. Toyin Falola & Steven J. Salm (Durham N C : Carolina Academic, 2005): 270. 27 See Green, “The Future in the Post.”

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Cornwell, Garth, Dirk Klopper & Craig MacKenzie. The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945 (New York: Columbia U P , 2010). Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1999). Gaylard, Rob. “ ‘Welcome to the world of our humanity’: (African) Humanism, Ubuntu and Black South African Writing,” Journal of Literary Studies 20.3–4 (December 2004): 265–82.

Green, Michael. “The Future in the Post: Utopia and the Fiction of the New South Africa,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55.1 (2007): 69–85. Green, Michael. “Translating the Nation: Phaswane Mpe and the Fiction of Post-Apartheid,” Scrutiny 2 10.1 (2005): 3–16. Hoad, Neville. “Welcome to Our Hillbrow: An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism,” in Urbanization and African Cultures, ed. Toyin Falola & Steven J. Salm (Durham N C : Carolina Academic, 2005): 267–77. Johns, Timothy. “The Novel Architecture of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature, ed. Walter P. Collins, III (Amherst NY : Cambria, 2010): 177–216. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko. “Ubuntu in South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Perspective to a Pan-African Concept,” Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies 13.2 (1999): 24–41. Legget, Ted. “A Den of Iniquity? Inside Hillbrow’s Residential Hotels,” S A Crime Quarterly 2.4 (2002), http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/CrimeQ/No.2/4Leggett.html (accessed 3 January 2011). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). Manase, Irikidzayi. “Mapping the City Space in Current Zimbabwean and South African Fiction,” Transformations 57 (2005): 88–105. Mda, Zakes. Ways of Dying (Cape Town: Oxford U P , 1995). Morris, Alan. “Race Relations and Racism in a Racially Diverse Inner City Neighbourhood: A Case Study of Hillbrow, Johannesburg,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25.4 (1999): 667–94. Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 2001). Ngara, Kudzayi. “Unstable Orders: Dislocations as Metaphor and Allegory of Post-Apartheid Transition in Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket,” Études Littéraires Africaines 38 (2014): 55–67. Nuttall, Sarah. “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 731–48. Nuttall, Sarah. “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham NC & London: Duke U P , 2008): 195–218. Olufemi, Olusola. “Street Homelessness in Johannesburg Inner-City: A Preliminary Survey,” Environment and Urbanization 10.2 (1998): 223–34. Pickard–Cambridge, Claire. The Greying of Johannesburg: Residential Desegregation in the Johannesburg Area (Braamfontein: South African Institute of Race Relations, 2001).

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Samuelson, Meg. “The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera,” African Identities 5.2 (2007): 247–60. Strauss, Helene. “Squirming White Bodies: Interracial Encounters in Anton Kannemeyer’s ‘True Love’ and Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket,” Journal of Literary Studies 24.2 (2008): 21–43. Vladislaviǰ, Ivan. The Restless Supermarket (2001; Cape Town: David Philip, 2006).

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Orientation and Narration Aboriginal Identity in Nugi Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence

S TEPHAN L AQUÉ

Saying Sorry

I

N A U S T R A L I A , 26 M A Y I S “ N A T I O N A L S O R R Y D A Y . ” This somewhat awkward name refers to an important day in the Australian national calendar, a day which marks a crucial turn in Australia's attitude towards its Indigenous population. Sorry Day commemorates the completion in 1997 of a report entitled Bringing Them Home which was commissioned by the Australian government to document and assess the abduction of Aboriginal children from the 1880s to 1970. During this period, children of mixed Aboriginal and white descent were taken away from their families and moved to institutions that would see to their education, an education that sought to assimilate the children, to eliminate all native language and knowledge so as to render the children culturally compatible with any prospective colonial employer. The Bringing Them Home report not only found that “in that time not one family has escaped the effects of forcible removal”1 but states that the policies of this removal amounted to genocide:

When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.2

1

Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 1997), “National Overview,” http://www.hreoc.gov.au/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_home _report.pdf (accessed 20 August 2010). 2 Bringing them Home, “The Effects on Family and Community.”

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The term ‘genocide’ is particularly remarkable in this context in that it runs directly counter to the purported aim of the removal, which had been that of protecting the Aboriginal population. The main reason given for the abduction of children is a dramatic drop in the numbers of the Indigenous population around the turn of the century, a drop which caused the Australian government to think of ways to protect what was perceived to be an ‘endangered’ species. But beneath the tenuous surface of the official aim to protect the children lay the material aim of exploiting them as cheap labour and – more problematic still – a racist ideal of eliminating the native population through cross-breeding. These objectives made children of mixed Aboriginal and white descent a particular target for relocation, since they were (a) regarded as more intelligent and amenable to white influence and (b) if married to white or half-caste partners they would produce quadroon and eventually octoroon children who could then be assimilated into white society.

The above is a much-reproduced picture from A.O. Neville's book Australia's Coloured Minority of 1947 showing a half-caste woman, her quadroon daughter, and her octoroon grandson.3 The light skin of the octoroon grandson in the image represents the ideal which the authorities had in mind. The policy of abducting children of mixed parentage which Neville emphatically advocated in

3

A.O. Neville, Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong, 1947): 73.

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his book thus followed an objective to render Aboriginality invisible – and quite literally so. As Neville explains, both colour and culture were targets: The fact that the full-blood people are apparently dying out, while the coloured people are increasing and all the time slowly approaching us in culture and colour, lessens our problem of assimilation.4

Official Australian policies were thus moving between purported protection, manifest segregation, and projected assimilation as strategies shifted and were re-labelled – always with a view to ‘solving’ what was perceived as the ‘problem’ of ethnic diversity in Australia. It did not take Australia long to become aware of the injustice done to its Indigenous population, but it was not until 2008 that, at long last, a formal and comprehensive apology was offered. In February 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued such an apology – a move his conservative predecessor John Howard had insistently rejected. The apology centrally addresses the abduction of aboriginal children, the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’: We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Street Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.5

What in this text appears to be a relatively straightforward description of the colonial injustice inflicted on the Stolen Generations in fact contains astute insight into the specific effects which the removal had on Indigenous communities. In Australia's Aboriginal culture, kinship and country stand in unusually close interrelation. As Darlene Oxenham, a researcher into Aboriginal culture at Curtin University, has explained: “certain factors are enshrined in the concept of community [...] location or ‘country’ is identified along with particular family groups.”6 Over the past decade, researchers such as Brian Bishop, Claire Smith, 4

Neville, Australia's Coloured Minority: 58. Kevin Rudd, quoted in Dylan Welch, “Rudd Says Sorry,” Sydney Morning Herald (13 February 2008). 6 Pat Dudgeon, John Mallard, Darlene Oxenham & John Fiedler, “Contemporary Aboriginal Perceptions of Community,” in Psychological Sense of Community: Research, Application, Implications, ed. Adrian T. Fisher, Christopher C. Sonn & Brian J. Bishop (Dordrecht: Kluwer & New York: Plenum, 2002): 261. Citing and evaluating the seminal study on Aboriginal identity A Certain 5

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and Pat Dudgeon have come to agree that “a sense of connectedness based on family and geographical ties”7 is indeed a common characteristic of traditional cultures in Australia – a characteristic which links kinship and country via the rites and narratives of the ancestral Dreamtime: “From these spiritual links with the land flow relationships between members of the group.”8 It is essential to note – and this claim will form the core of my argument – that this identification, this connectedness between kinship and country, is produced and maintained in narrative form. Danièle Klapproth has made an emphatic claim for the role of narrative in Aboriginal culture: “The Australian Aboriginal worldview is deeply rooted in what might be called a fundamentally narrative understanding of the universe.”9 In this chapter, I will be focusing on three central and closely interconnected components of Aboriginal culture: land, kinship, and narrative. I will be considering a relatively recent novel by an Indigenous author: Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence of 1996, the action of which is set in the 1930s before a backdrop of the colonial assimilation of the Stolen Generations. I will be arguing that the narrative strategies employed in the novel abet and reflect the resilience of Aboriginal culture which continues to fascinate readers of the novel and audiences of the 2002 feature film Rabbit-Proof Fence which is based on Garimara’s book.

Land Between Tradition and Ownership Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the fictionalized biography of her mother, is easily the best-known and most influential novel to address the subject of the Stolen Generations. As I want to argue, the strength and relevance of the novel reside less in its undeniable power to move, to elicit an emotional response, than in its subtle evocation and indeed performative demonstration of Heritage: Program for and by Aboriginal Families in Australia by Herbert Cole Coombs, Maria Brandl & Warren Snowdon (Canberra: National U P , 1983), Myrna Ewart Tonkinson has offered a description of Aboriginality which can with due care lay claim to applicability to all of Australia. According to Tonkinson, an “intimate familial relationship with the land and with the natural world” is one of the key characteristics common to all Australian Aborigines; Tonkinson, “Is it in the Blood? Australian Aboriginal Identity,” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, ed. Jocelyn Linnekin & Lon Poyer (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1990): 201. 7 Brian Bishop, Simon Colquhoun & Gemma Johnson, “Psychological Sense of Community: An Australian Aboriginal Experience.” Journal of Community Psychology 34.1 (2006): 5. 8 Bishop, Colquhoun, Johnson, “Psychological Sense of Community,” 5. 9 Danièle Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004): 66.

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the strength of Aboriginal identity and culture. In her introduction, the author explains her project as a challenging attempt to communicate the story of her mother to both Indigenous and non-Aboriginal readerships: “[I have] worked to synthesise these different forms of knowledge to give readers the fullest insight into this historic journey.”10 European and Aboriginal culture are separated by the knowledge which governs them, by the ways in which the world is ordered and made sense of. As I’d like to argue, this knowledge does not have an external reality as its object – which would imply that one form of knowing might be more precise than the other – but both forms of knowledge (white and Aboriginal) produce the object they purport to know in the first place. More important than the difference in knowledge content, then, is the difference between the diverse “forms of knowledge,” a difference which centrally resides in the forms and strategies which narratives take in order to convey, preserve, and – centrally – to produce that knowledge. Nugi Garimara is therefore setting herself the task of communicating between Western European and Aboriginal Australian forms of narrative. Garimara’s novel begins with a caustic look back at the colonial past of Australia and at the taking of the land by the British colonizers. The first white emissaries arrive on the coast of Western Australia and perform unintelligible rites: “My government has advised me to meet with you and discuss this matter with you and seek your approval before giving your country an English name.” Dayup glanced at his kinsmen then stared back at the white man who was speaking. He knew by his manner and the way that the other men kept saluting him that he must be an important man, but what was he saying? [...] “I take it that we are all agreed and that I have your consent,” said Captain Fremantle, nodding to the Nyungar men who stood motionless, staring blankly at him. “Thank you gentlemen.” He stood back, looking resplendent in his naval uniform, and announced in a loud voice, “I name this land Western Australia.” (10)

The incomprehension is mutual. While the Nyungar look on in amazement at the rites performed before their eyes, the British general follows the Western tradition of dealing with land (which belongs to others) and takes possession. Unaware of the fact that the Nyungar respect far older and mythical authorities when it comes to ordering the land, Fremantle chooses to misinterpret their silence as a sign of assent. His ceremonial and ostentatious naming of the land 10

Nugi Garimara (Doris Pilkington Garimara), Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996; St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002): xiv. Further page references are in the main text.

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forms a striking contrast to the ancestral narratives which are only implied in the silence of the natives. The doctrine on which the British occupation of Australia was built is that of terra nullius, of land that belongs to no-one. To European eyes, the natives did not appear to use or in any way ‘own’ the land. They were using the land, though as nomads they did not practise agriculture. They were owners of the land, but their sense of property did not involve the processes of delimitation which are central to European notions of land-ownership. Unlike Western culture, native Australian culture does not grant possession over land as a result of force, exchange or financial transactions in a process of division, of a drawingup borders and erecting of fences. In Under the Wintamarra Tree, the sequel to her novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Nugi Garimara describes the difference between the Aboriginal population and the European settlers in terms of their respective concepts of land ownership: For the first time in their lives they [a group of desert nomads; S.L.] were confronted by fences, a barrier that marked the boundary of a new owner and method of control. For them, ancestral land was handed down by the Spirit Beings of the Dreamtime [...]11

To the native cultures of Australia, land rights – i.e. guardianship over land – are an inalienable privilege whose roots reach into a mythical past. These rights are regulated by the ancestral narratives of what anthropologists commonly refer to as the ‘Dreamtime’, a period that is at once far removed in time and acutely present, its traces everywhere visible in the landscape, plants, and, most saliently, in the ancestral paths or ‘songlines’ which connect and order the terrain. In a seminal essay on “The Dreaming” of 1956, William Stanner described this central concept of Aboriginal culture: Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for aboriginal man.12

The mythological creatures and characters of the Dreamtime travelled the land and acted within it: they rested, met, fought, and hunted in the land and these activities were inscribed on the landscape in the form of lakes, rivers, rocks, ridges, and accessible passages through harsh terrain, thus shaping the world 11

Nugi Garimara, Under the Wintamarra Tree (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002): 6. W.E.H. Stanner, “The Dreaming” (1953), in Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009): 58. 12

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which the Indigenous population of Australia has inhabited for over 40,000 years and still inhabits today. The landscape therefore narrates these stories which tell of origins, of values, and of the laws which regulate native life. They grant orientation in space and in all aspects of social and spiritual life. By taking the land, European settlers were thus taking more than a commodity. They were taking the textual archive away from an entire culture and thereby threatening the narrative tradition upon which that culture rests. Far from being a paradisiacal society without rules, Aboriginal culture is regulated by one of the oldest and most intricate of legal systems. Like the rules governing narratives and the use of land, the rules and principles which govern Aboriginal communities are markedly different from those found in European societies, though they are no less efficient in providing orientation to the individual. Driven off their land, the Nyungar move to the small government outpost of Jigalong, where, rather than forming a community according to Western economic notions such as property and the pragmatics of employment, they form what they refer to as the “Jigalong mob”: a loose coexistence between different groups who follow their respective traditions. They therefore refuse to give up what Ferdinand Tönnies in the 1880s would have described as their Gemeinschaften (communities) and to adopt a Western, impersonal and purely instrumental concept of Gesellschaft (society).13 Instead, once they have arrived, they set about re-creating and reasserting their traditional community structures. They appropriate the government depot and turn it into a ritual “sitting down place”: The elders decided that Jigalong would be their basecamp for holding their sacred and secret ceremonies. [...]. As they came and settled, the people did not abandon their nomadic lifestyle entirely but adapted to one that was semi-nomadic. (35)

This place, where the Indigenous groups reframe their traditional lives, is semantically determined by its position within their rituals – in de Certeau's terms, they are turning a place into a space by introducing vectors of tradition and ritual by which sites are introduced into their narratives. Jigalong thus becomes another spot on their maps, in their art, and in their narratives, whence it finds its way onto the map which opens Garimara’s novel – and which I return to presently.

13

See the definitions in Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, tr. Charles P. Loomis (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen, 1887; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001): 15–92.

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The land, then, is organized by narratives and by the laws they convey. At the same time, however, the land is itself a narrative voice, part of the text which the narratives of the community have to take into account and integrate. A culture which is ordered through narratives can thus profit from the flexibility such narratives offer, and this flexibility and resilience have allowed Indigenous Australian culture to survive in the face of one of the most sustained genocidal onslaughts in the history of imperialism. Though firmly tied to the land, the structure of Aboriginal communities is flexible in ways which the British colonial administration was for a long time reluctant to appreciate or incapable of doing so.

Narrating Communities In Nugi Garimara’s novel, children of mixed descent, the half-castes, are abducted or ‘stolen’. The initiative for their removal comes from the Superintendent of the depot, who observes the half-caste girl Molly at play: “he noticed that the attitude of the Mardu children towards the two girls was unfair” (39). As a consequence of this observation, a report goes out to the Department of Native Affairs which states that it would be in the best interest of the girls if they were removed from Jigalong, since they “were not getting a fair chance as the blacks consider the H/Cs [half-castes] inferior to them” (39). This is common colonial reasoning, which regards the native population as infantile and incapable of maturing. But children at Jigalong do what children the world over are given to doing: they play, they quarrel, and they are both curious about and sceptical of anything that is out of the ordinary and – much like children everywhere – the children at Jigalong soon realize that strangeness just wears off and that life goes on: “Once the other children accepted their differences, their lives became quite normal” (41). However, once the immature taunts of children have been reported as inveterate racism among the Aborigines, there is nothing that can protect the girls from their removal. But contrary to the Superintendent’s assessment, the culture into which Molly is born as the daughter of a white European father and an Indigenous mother is fully and even emphatically prepared to welcome her mixed ancestry. Far from being an irritation, her racially mixed parentage in fact comes as a relief to Molly’s grandparents. Aboriginal communities are strictly exogamous: i.e. their rules demand that only partners from different moieties are allowed to intermarry. Of course, choosing a European partner is very much sanctioned by these rules:

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[Molly's grandparents] were both relieved to find that Maude [Molly's mother] had not broken any kinship laws by having a boyfriend from the wrong group. The child's father was none other than the boss himself. (36)

While the families of the children do not object to their mixed ethnicity and the Aboriginal children can accept the strangeness of mixed parentage, the British colonial machinery is set in motion. When the novel concedes that “the trio stood out from the main community at the depot” (41), the stress is on the mixed-blood children standing out “from the main community at the depot” i.e. they stand out from the Gesellschaft of the “Jigalong mob” which the Supervisors falsely assume to be the community of the natives. In other words: the girls stand out from the European construct of a homogeneous society of native Australians, but not from their Aboriginal communities. While they do not fit into the instrumental concept of Gesellschaft, which the colonial authorities falsely brings to bear on the native community, the girls of mixed parentage can happily be integrated into their native communities, which are defined and regulated by ties to the land, by their birthplace, and by the narratives of the Dreaming. Aboriginal narratives which recount the Dreaming are plurimedial, combining orally transmitted stories with songs, dances, and paintings on rock, treebark, or sand. Penny van Toorn of Sydney University has stressed the scope of this tradition: oral stories and songs are comparable with interactive multi-media. Information is transmitted through dialogic transactions in which an array of signifying systems operates simultaneously.14

These signifying systems are both verbal and non-verbal and often pertain to the central link between land and kinship which I mentioned above. Indigenous rock paintings typically depict the tracks taken by Dreamtime personages with animals – the rainbow snake or Barramundi fish and tortoises – often referring to the Dreamtime creatures involved in these narratives. These drawings are therefore at once maps, compressed accounts of Dreamtime narratives, and usually also legal texts defining rules of kinship or guardianship over land. Modern versions of these maps have found their way into and onto contemporary Aboriginal writing. The best-known instance may be the image on the cover of Sally Morgan’s novel My Place.15 The Rainbow Serpent (Kunapipi) encircles a 14

Penny van Toorn, “Indigenous Texts and Narratives,” in The Cambridge Guide to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 20. 15 Sally Morgan, My Place (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Press, 1987).

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map of development – a bildungsroman of gradual self-discovery – from birth through various important personal totemic sites to the creation of the protagonist’s own family and in a circle back to the maternal and mythic origin of the all-important birthplace. As in Sally Morgan’s novel and in the image she painted to accompany the first edition, Aboriginal narratives typically superimpose circularity upon linear developments and stories. Even narratives of coming-of-age and initiation, which in Western literature tend to trace a linear and often teleological trajectory of a person’s life, are in Aboriginal narratives invariably resolved into the circularity of return wherein is shown the uncontested prominence of a person’s rootedness in her or his kinship group and in its geographical environment. Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is a narrative in which circularity overcomes linearity. Molly, the protagonist of the novel and the mother of the author Nugi Garimara, is abducted along with her sister and cousin from their home at Jigalong and taken to Moore River Native Settlement outside Perth, from where the three girls escape and walk back to Jigalong – a staggering distance of 1,600 kilometres. The novel also starts with a map, a map of Western Australia in which a linear structure is superseded by a circular movement. Running the length of the continent is the linear landmark of the rabbit-proof fences and the outward sea-journey of the girls. This journey is then linked back to its start, to the totemic birthplace. Upon their return to Jigalong it is the birthplaces that first receive the protagonist’s attention: “It was a quick trip down memory’s landscape. They passed close to the claypan where Molly was born” (122). This map works perfectly as a helpful illustration for Western readers, as an offer of topographical reference. For Aboriginal readers, however, this map assumes a different relevance. It becomes an integral part of the narrative written in the characters of the ancient rock paintings whose language has survived in contemporary Aboriginal art and, indeed, literature. The land thus becomes a part of the narrative and assumes something like its own narrative voice. The topography of the landscape tells the story of a journey, of meetings and fights and of the law which holds communities together. The verbal part of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence repeats the overlaying of linearity by a circular structure, which one can see at work in the opening map, through a pattern of narrative repetitions. In fact, the novel starts over no fewer than four times before Molly is introduced: the first chapter recounts the raising of the British flag in Western Australia in 1826; chapter two looks at the first settlers arriving in 1829; chapter three deals with their violent move upriver and inland during the first half of the nineteenth century; and chapter four looks at the eventual settling of Indigenous nomads in and around the British government depots after 1900. Each of these chapters is narrated from the point of

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view of a different Nyungar chief and his warriors, with each chief being named, introduced in a scene of direct speech, and then going on to become the focalizer in a figural narrative situation. This development whereby the authorial voice cedes authority to a different character corresponds to the inherently fragmentary character of Aboriginal oral Dreamtime narratives in which individual speakers are granted guardianship over only parts of the narrative and have no authority when it comes to the preceding or the following section of the circular Dreaming track. These speakers thus have a limited point of view – with regard both to the narrative and to topography, since each fragment of the journey is clearly located in space. Garimara’s use of figural narration therefore maintains this Aboriginal tradition of breaking up and sharing narratives while still producing a coherent work of literature which can be appreciated by readers unfamiliar with the rules governing Indigenous storytelling. Added to the respect for these Aboriginal rules is an effect of circularity. While the Western narrative proceeds in a linear progression from first occupation to early settlement to the spread of settlements and to the eventual submission of the native population, the Aboriginal story is re-set every time, coming back to its origins and starting out anew. The repetitive pattern of the Nyungar chief and his men encountering the whites who are busily transforming the land towards some colonial goal is repeated in the first four chapters of the novel and this repetition serves to superimpose a sense of Aboriginal circularity upon the linear narrative which re-enacts the grand narrative of the Enlightenment – that epitome of teleological linearity: from a supposedly chaotic and uncultured wilderness to an orderly and rationally hierarchical society. While the first four chapters use narrative voice in order to produce a cyclical sense of repetition which opposes colonial linearity, from the fifth chapter onwards the three girls on their long walk back home become focalizers. As Garimara explains in her introduction: In my mind I walked the same paths and called on my skills as a writer to describe the scenery and how it looked through their eyes. [... ] In my mind I actually walked beside them. (xii)

This part of the narrative, set in the early 1930s, is their story, and it is therefore they who have the authority to recount it. While Western readers will appreciate the handling of figural narration as offering access to the mental processes and development of the girls, the strategy here serves to maintain the rules of Aboriginal storytelling: a person has exclusive authority over her or his own narrative, dreaming, and even name, which must not be pronounced after the death of that person. This part of the novel is once again circular, in that any Western expectation of a teleological maturing of the girls on their trip through

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Australia is defeated by their return to their families. This is not a heroic story of a daring departure, but a story of return, one that enlists narrative strategies to convey a sense of the Aboriginal strength of affiliations of kinship and of the land.

Fences and Tracks Taken from her family, Molly refuses to stay at Moore River for more than twenty-four hours. Together with her sister and cousin she escapes and walks the long distance back to Jigalong. However, she is not lost out in the bush but surrounded by the traces of her ancestry in the landscape and in nature as a whole: “Molly, this fourteen-year-old girl, had no fear because the wilderness was her kin” (82). The wilderness is her kin – but not according to some Rousseauvian notion of innocent romantic communion with nature that a fourteenyear-old might be expected to have. To Molly, nature is kin because it bears the traces of her ancestors, traces and signs that give her direction. The Dreamtime personages are not a thing of the past, but are always acutely present in the landscape. As James Cowan, a poet, novelist, and cultural mediator well versed in Aboriginal folkways has put it: an Aborigine cannot be alone in a desert place [...] he will always find himself in close proximity to his ancestors, to his Dreaming cult-heroes [...]. An Aborigine, even when he is physically alone, lives in, and is sustained by, a metaphysical community.16

However, the most salient feature in nature which guides her way is strikingly unnatural: she is famously following the Rabbit Proof Fence north to Jigalong, a fence which runs the entire length of Western Australia from the northern coast all the way down to the Indian Ocean. The fence was designed to keep the uncontrollable population of rabbits which the British colonizers had introduced to Australia from destroying fertile agricultural land. In the words of Garimara's narrator: “It was a typical response by white people to a problem of their own making” (109). Beyond the settlers’ ecological blunder, Jigalong and the fence are powerful symbols of European concepts of land, of its delimitation and ownership – concepts which are strikingly at odds with the notions of its Indigenous inhabitants. The fence thus comes to take on multiple meanings: it is a sign of colonial failure and a symbol of a European form of treating the land. Apart from this aspect of incongruity, in 16

James Cowan, Mysteries of the Dream-Time: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines (Birdport, Dorset: Prism & Lindfield, N S W : Unity, 1989): 118.

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the novel it is also a symbol of kinship and belonging. As Garimara’s narrator explains: “For the three runaways, the fence was a symbol of love, home and security” (109). The novel stresses at some length the way in which the fence is integrated into the tradition of the new communities at Jigalong: From when she was young, Molly had learned that the fence was an important landmark for the Mardudjara people of the Western Desert who migrated south from the remote regions. (109, cf. also 32)

The fence is an intrusive European element, but the Aborigines accept it as part of their land and integrate it into their narratives. Here, the fence works much like one of the Dreaming-tracks which they have inherited from their ancestors. As I indicated above, these Dreaming-tracks are structured like narratives of journeys and are represented in Aboriginal art and literature. Established by ancestral beings during the Dreamtime, these tracks were and are woven through the landscape and some of them span the entire Australian continent. Claire Smith draws attention to one of these Dreaming tracks, which stretches from the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territory to the South Australian coast17 – some way to the east, but still roughly parallel topographically and, as I want to argue, culturally analogous to the Rabbit-Proof Fence. The fence is, of course, handed down to Molly by her paternal European ancestors, who built it, but it serves to direct her life and her homecoming according to the structures and traditions by which the Indigenous community to which she belongs is formed. Just as the native community can integrate her half-European background, she can assimilate the European culture of her father to her traditional way of regarding the land and reading the landscape. It is only natural, then, that the Rabbit-Proof fence should function like a Dreaming track, a narrative that gives Molly orientation for her return home. Philip Noyce's film Rabbit-Proof Fence18 evokes this very close association of the fence with love in a sequence of two shots which show Molly’s mother and then the three children clutching the barbed wire of the fence while they are more than 1,000 kilometres apart (00:45:50). These images convey a crude notion of native communication which manages to make use of the fence – which is here reduced to a telegraph wire. As I have shown, the communicative potential of this landmark resides in the readiness of the Indigenous population 17

Claire Smith, Country, Kin and Culture: Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community (Adelaide, S A : Wakefield, 2004): 3. 18 Philip Noyce, dir. Rabbit-Proof Fence (from book by Doris Pilkington; screenplay by Christine Olsen; Rumbalara Films | Australian Film Commission | Australian Film Finance Corporation, Australia 2002; 94 min.).

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to accept it as part of the land, a part that is strikingly reminiscent of their ancient Dreaming-tracks and that can enter their narratives – most signally, of course, in the form of Nugi Garimara’s novel. The film, however, is not merely insensitive to this dimension of the fence, but appears to be eager to deny it. After the girls have escaped from Moore River, the film shows an encounter between the fugitives and a white farmer’s wife who casually mentions the Rabbit-Fence which runs nearby her house (00:43:09). In the film it is only at this point of contact with the white settlers that Molly realizes that the fence will guide her home. She is thus shown as being in need of European guidance, of information which she can then cleverly put to use. The film thus omits or at least obscures the strong link between ancestral narratives (whether native Australian or white European) and the landscape which gives Aboriginal communities orientation on many levels including the literal level of finding one’s way. What is more, this scene in the film casts Molly as a child prodigy, a childdetective of sorts. It is bitterly ironical that she is thus portrayed as conforming to a markedly European ideal of education – the very kind of education for which she was torn from her family. While it is the great merit of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence to have brought the history of the Stolen Generations to the attention of audiences throughout Australia and the world, the film therefore falls short by missing the specificity of the different concepts of land and of narrative that are involved in the Indigenous culture of Australia and in Nugi Garimara's novel. While in her novel Nugi Garimara’s effort “to synthesise these different forms of knowledge to give readers the fullest insight into this historic journey” (xiv) succeeds brilliantly on the level of imagery, plot, and narrative form, it signally fails in the film, which ultimately stands as evidence of an inflexibly linear narrative of education, enterprise, and adventure. The subject of the novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, then, is not what the blurb on the DVD cover describes as “the undying strength of the human spirit,” but the undying strength and resilience of an Indigenous sense of community.

W OR K S C I T E D Bishop, Brian, Simon Colquhoun & Gemma Johnson. “Psychological Sense of Community: An Australian Aboriginal Experience,” Journal of Community Psychology 34.1 (2006): 1–7. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 1997), http://www.hreoc.gov.au/pdf/social_justice/bringing _them_home_report.pdf (accessed 20 August 2010).

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Coombs, Herbert Cole, Maria Brandl & Warren Snowdon. A Certain Heritage: Program for and by Aboriginal Families in Australia (Canberra: National U P , 1983). Cowan, James. Mysteries of the Dream-Time: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines (Birdport, Dorset: Prism & Lindfield, N S W : Unity, 1989). D’haen, Tony Hughes. “Which Rabbit-Proof Fence? Empathy, Assimilation, Hollywood,” Australian Humanities Review 27 (September 2002), http://www.australian humanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2002/hughesdaeth.html (accessed 5 May 2011). Dudgeon, Pat, John Mallard, Darlene Oxenham & John Fiedler. “Contemporary Aboriginal Perceptions of Community” in Psychological Sense of Community: Research, Application, Implications, ed. Adrian T. Fisher, Christopher C. Sonn & Brian J. Bishop (Dordrecht: Kluwer & New York: Plenum, 2002): 247–67. Garimara, Nugi (Doris Pilkington Garimara). Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996; St. Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2002). Garimara, Nugi (Doris Pilkington Garimara). Under the Wintamarra Tree (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2002). Klapproth, Danièle. Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). Leitner, Gerhard. Die Aborigines Australiens (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006). Morgan, Sally. My Place (Fremantle, WA : Fremantle Arts Press, 1987). Neville, A.O. Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong, 1947). Noyce, Philip, dir. Rabbit-Proof Fence (from book by Doris Garimara Pilkington; screenplay by Christine Olsen; Rumbalara Films | Australian Film Commission | Australian Film Finance Corporation, Australia 2002; 94 min.). Secomb, Linnell. “Fractured Community,” Hypatia 15.2 (Spring 2000): 133–50. Smith, Claire. Country, Kin and Culture: Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community (Adelaide, S A : Wakefield, 2004). Stanner, W.E.H. “The Dreaming” (1953), in W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009): 57–72. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen, 1887; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001). Tonkinson, Myrna Ewart. “Is it in the Blood? Australian Aboriginal Identity,” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, ed. Jocelyn Linnekin & Lon Poyer (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 1990): 191–218. van Toorn, Penny. “Indigenous Texts and Narratives,” in The Cambridge Guide to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2000): 19–49. Welch, Dylan. “Rudd Says Sorry,” Sydney Morning Herald (13 February 2008).

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A “furry subjunctive case” of Empathy Human–Animal Communities in Life of Pi and the Question of Literary Anthropomorphism1

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U M A N S A R E A N I M A L S . Humans are radically different from animals. Subscribing to either one or the other statement is not only a matter of ontology or biology: it has, more importantly, ethical and political implications. Including animals in the community of beings worthy of moral consideration is an important objective of anti-speciesism, while refuting the racist assumption that (some) humans are (mere) beasts has informed postcolonial studies and criticism.2 Recent research in human–animal studies and posthumanism therefore now grapples with the idea that both statements might be true at the same time.3 But attempts at overcoming the human– animal divide, either by anthropomorphizing animals or zoomorphizing humans, are undertaken at some intellectual risk. In fact, as Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman maintain, the anthropomorphizing of the animal ‘Other’ is usually connotated “as a term of reproach, both intellectual and moral.”4 In

1

Substantial parts of this chapter are taken from my book EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013), where I discuss the relevance of literary form for ethical and ecocritical readings of fiction. They are reproduced here in order to contextualize some of the arguments of the book with regard to the notion of imaged/imaginative communities that informs this volume. 2 See, for instance, Philip Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” Society and Animals 10.4 (December 2002): 414–19; John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2012); and, of course, Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror, 1996). 3 Roman Bartosch, “Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalisation,” in Beyond the Human–Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature, Culture, and History, ed. Dominik Ohrem & Roman Bartosch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2017). 4 Lorraine Daston & Gregg Mitman, “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Loraine Daston & Gregg Mitman (New

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most scientific frameworks today, anthropomorphizing animals is regarded as a logical fallacy, but even in the humanities, in literary studies in particular, one has to tread the ground carefully. Fictional means of anthropomorphism and narratives that seek to ‘give voice’ to the animal have been repeatedly refuted as being sentimental. John Ruskin, writing in 1856, formulated his critique in terms of accusing writers and readers alike of the ‘pathetic fallacy’,5 which ascribes human traits and objectives to the material world, plants, or animals. Despite such objections to sentiment and pathos that seem to be inevitably connected with the fictional engagement with understanding the animal in terms of human empathy, numerous narratives, from beast fable to contemporary econovels, encompass ideas of a community of humans and animals. Imagining such a community presupposes an understanding of the animal – often by virtue of anthropomorphism. It is therefore my objective in this chapter to explore narrative ways of engaging with literary anthropomorphism in a way that contests facile appropriations of animal otherness by self-reflexively engaging with imagined human–animal communities. In this regard, I will be looking at the literary means of staging such communities in terms of irresolvable ambivalence and with regard to what Lori Gruen terms “entangled empathy.” 6 It is ambivalence that enables us to cultivate an imaginative space between pathetic fallacy and the downright rejection of communal ideas, and it is fictional writing that allows us to explore ethical entanglements experimentally and experientially. It is therefore not my intention here to show that fiction helps us understand the animal vis-à-vis the human – both ‘the’ animal and ‘the’ human are politically and ethically problematic generalizations. Rather, my argument will be that fiction can point to ways to genuinely “think beyond ourselves.”7 In order to locate means and practices of such ‘thinking beyond ourselves’ in literary narratives, I will first briefly outline some of the notions of human– animal studies and postcolonial ecocriticism, as both academic branches engage in analysis of the places animals inhabit in our narrated worlds. From there, I want to explore some of the problems that trying to ‘think with’ animals inevitably poses, and to suggest a reassessment of existing philosophical stances towards human–animal kinship. This reassessment will stress the importance of fiction in engendering a sense of community, especially in the light of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the role of the imagination for any community, an York: Columbia U P , 2005): 2. 5 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1856; New York: Adamant, 2005), vol. 33, ch. 12–13 and 17. 6 Lori Gruen, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals (New York: Lantern, 2015). 7 Erika Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002): 22.

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idea that I think can be fruitfully brought into conjunction with literary readings of fictional human–animal communities. Imagining such communities can eventually be seen as a form of resistance to essentialist notions of difference, on the one hand, and optimistic concepts such as ‘becoming animal’, on the other.8 Stemming from the humanist tradition, the original sense of anthropomorphization – the ascription of human traits to God – has been kept alive with its negative connotation. Historically, Daston claims, “anthropomorphism was a theological sin long before it became a scientific one”;9 but its dismissal as hubris or sophomoric sentiment takes effect across disciplinary borders. Even contemporary animal philosophy cautions against what is seen as unwarranted attempts to ‘colonize’ the ‘wholly other’, as Jacques Derrida has described the animal.10 If we cannot know the animal, giving voice to it will tend to become strongly ideological, if not fail entirely. At best, such attempts must be regarded as “a virtuoso but doomed act of complete empathy.”11 This unhealthy entanglement of attribution and interpretation is particularly problematic in the context of “the postcolonial animal”: while it is true that animals also had to bear the cost of colonial expansion and the natural degradation that often destabilized the pre-colonial ecosystems, the notion of the animal has also served as a distinct ideological concept of colonization. It has provided modernity, and colonial regimes in particular, as Philip Armstrong puts it, “with a term against which to define its most crucial categories: ‘humanity’, ‘culture’, ‘reason’, and so on.”12 One might therefore object that, owing to the ideological and symbolic burden borne by the animal, the animal ‘as such’ becomes un-representable: imaginative ways of seeing the animal ‘as it is’, or the appropriation of notions of human–animal kinship in literary texts will inevitably lead to effete symbolism. Any attempt to make sense of the animal in fiction relies on subtle ways of dismissing its marginal status: i.e. its elusive character as the ‘wholly other’. .

8

I am invoking Deleuze and Guattari here although I am perfectly aware that this is not how they conceive of ‘becoming animal’. However, many critical readings seem to understand the concept in such a way that appropriates animal Dasein in ways I find troubling and problematic. 9 Lorraine Daston, “Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human,” in Thinking with Animals (2005), ed. Daston & Mitman, 39. 10 Jaques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie–Louise Mallet, tr. David Wills (New York: Fordham U P , 2008): 11 & passim. 11 Daston & Mitman, “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” 7. 12 Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York & London: Routledge, 2008): 1. For a more detailed account of the role of animal discourses in the context of colonialism, see Philip Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal.”

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By looking at the literary emplotment of the human–animal-community in Yann Martel's Life of Pi, I propose to focus on the textual potential for staging instances of community beyond any of the borders, either essentialist or speciesist, that the human–animal divide and its scientific naturalizations have induced. If we embrace the idea of irreducible otherness and accept the futility of any attempt to represent the animal as such, we can concentrate on the means of establishing a sense of community via the very devices of literary narrative. Instead of looking for traces of the ‘real’ animal in fiction, I want to locate the merits of literary anthropomorphism in the tensions it produces and negotiates as fictional, aesthetic discourse. In Life of Pi, readers are confronted with the overtly fictionalized idea of a joint shipwreck of humans and animals rather than a form of ‘othering’ that seeks to trace the ‘real’ animal. Ultimately, I will endeavour to show, the novel thus answers a central postcolonialist purpose by turning back the “imperial gaze [...] upon the colonizer.”13 I will try to account for this effect by describing the textual spaces, but also the gaps and tensions, that inform the process of understanding this particular human–animal community as well as the very means and effects of narrating it. Life of Pi negotiates the question of animal silence and human anthropomorphism first by means of several literary devices, such as intertextual references that situate the novel clearly in a cultural rather than a natural context, and, in the end, by virtue of its status as metafiction. Interestingly, Ruskin’s notion of the pathetic fallacy can also be read as a comment on the question of the gaps produced by anthropomorphic texts: namely, nature’s silence: the modern writer, by his admission of the tinge of fallacy, has given an idea of something in the action of the wave [which Keats describes in his Endymion] which Homer could not [...] there appears to be a degree of sympathy and feeling in the one writer, which there is not in the other; and as it has been received for the first principle that writers are great in proportion to the intensity of their feelings, and Homer seems to have no feelings about the sea but that it is black and deep, surely in this respect also the modern writer is the greater? Stay a moment. Homer had some feeling about the sea; a faith in the animation of it much stronger than Keats’s. But all this sense of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves

13

Cf. Peter Childs, Jean Jacques Weber & Patrick Williams, “Turning the Colonial Gaze Back Upon the Colonizer,” in Childs, Weber & Williams, Post-Colonial Theory and Literatures: African, Caribbean and South Asian (Trier: W V T , 2006): 227.

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rage, or the waves are idle. But he says there is something in, and greater than, the waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.14

Ruskin’s observations about the literary engagement with nature’s elusiveness can easily be harnessed to examine the question of animal silence, too. Ruskin dismisses the Romantic ideal of literary value as related to a surplus of emotive response and instead maintains the importance of silence: Homer has to refer to God, who represents the unspeakable, in order to express his conviction that he cannot ascribe rage or idleness to nature. With that idea in mind, along with the refutation of any attempt of simply ‘thinking with’ or ‘becoming’ the real animal, I understand Life of Pi as a fictional account of silence, the animal gaze, the unspeakability of both, and the power of fiction to narrate these things despite all. Life of Pi tells the story of a young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel, son of a zoo-keeper. Pi, as he is called, and his family are about to leave India for political reasons, but their migration to Canada ends in disaster when their ship sinks, leaving Pi in the desolate and somewhat grotesque situation of being stranded on a lifeboat for 227 days along with a full-grown Bengal tiger. At the beginning, the two are accompanied by a wounded zebra, a hyena, and an orang-utan, all of which die, one after the other. The sinking of the ship casts Pi into a surreal situation that blurs the boundary between truth and belief, fact and fiction. In this context, numerous critics have commented on the fact that the situation Pi and the tiger find themselves in literally stages the idea of being ‘in the same boat’. At the same time as the novel illuminates Darwinistic notions of a struggle for survival (the tiger subsequently kills the other, weaker animals) and comments on convictions from the side of ethology and animal behaviour studies (Pi has to learn how to train the tiger in order to prevent it from killing him), it describes an interesting human–animal community. Its setting plays with the idea of human–animal boundaries because “in negotiating the actual and metaphorical complexities of the species boundary, Pi performs a common transfer across it.”15 This fictional move is important with regard to the idea of human–animal communities as discussed above, since it broadens the concept of subalternity to include animals, as both human and animal characters have undergone forced migration. Neither Pi nor the animals had a say, but it is they who have to bear the consequences of the decision, together. Engendering a human–animal community in this way relies heavily on the reader’s responses, and the ways in which such responses are elicited deserve a 14

Ruskin, Modern Painters, 179. Italics in the original. Graham Huggan & Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York & London: Routledge, 2010): 172. 15

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closer look. Shortly after the ship sinks and Pi saves his life by getting on the lifeboat, he is overwhelmed by the turbulent sea and the danger he is in: Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart. From the lifeboat I saw something in the water. I cried, ‘Richard Parker, is that you? It’s so hard to see. Oh, that this rain would stop! Richard Parker? Richard Parker? Yes, it is you!’ [...] He had seen me. He looked panic-stricken. He started swimming my way. The water about him was shifting wildly. He looked small and helpless. [...] His nose and mouth kept dipping underwater. Only his eyes were steadily on me.16

At that point, readers are completely unaware that the Richard Parker Pi is calling to is in fact the tiger that will later pose a lethal threat to him; and instead of disclosing this information to the reader, the focalizing Pi uses vocabulary that suggests a human being (‘nose’ and ‘mouth’ instead of ‘snout’ or ‘muzzle’) and by virtue of short and emphatic sentences invokes a passionate sense of empathy with a fellow creature struggling for survival.17 Only after he has saved Richard Parker does Pi realize how he has endangered himself by his action – and he realizes this together with the reader: “Truly I was to be the next goat. I had a wet, trembling, half-drowned, heaving and coughing three-year-old Bengal tiger in my lifeboat.”18 This insight, however, comes too late in several ways: not only is the tiger on board already but Pi’s initial emotional response has also created a sense of community with the anthropomorphized animal that is unignorable. As Stewart Cole puts it, by the time [Richard Parker’s] biological status is clarified, he has already been sufficiently humanized for the reader to have placed him on a continuum with the novel’s human characters.19

“The subaltern,” Dina Georgis concludes her postcolonial reading of Life of Pi, “is excluded from cultural production and therefore has no ‘imagined community’.”20 This is true for both human and nonhuman subalterns. Or is it? By 16

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001): 127–28. This scene is thus a paradigmatic moment of what has been discussed recently in literary and cultural studies as the ‘creaturely’. See Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia U P , 2011); Creatural Fictions: Human–Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature, ed. David Herman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Pieter Vermeulen & Virginia Richter, “Introduction: Creaturely Constellations,” European Journal of English Studies 19.1 (March 2015): 1–9. 18 Martel, Life of Pi, 130. 19 Stewart Cole, “Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi,” Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2 (January 2004): 29. 20 Dina Georgis, “Hearing the Better Story: Learning and the Aesthetics of Loss and Expulsion,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 28.2 (June 2006): 173. 17

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deliberately creating a sense of community by virtue of anthropomorphization and links to literary history, a (cultural) human–animal community is engendered. Thus, at the same time as it operates as a community-by-proxy, this literary community remains clearly fictional. The novel’s precarious state as an imagined and fictional narrative is stressed by various intertextual references, for instance; and it therefore invites interpretation and a hermeneutic awareness of the distinctness of such fictional representations. Anthropomorphism, once it becomes a self-conscious strategy of narration, provides avenues for rethinking the very idea of human–animal communities. Intertextually, the narrative of Life of Pi can be situated in the context of shipwreck narratives, among them most notably Robinson Crusoe. That the novel successfully incorporates and reassesses particular writing traditions has been noted by June Dwyer, who argues that while, in the times of the New Criticism, “shipwreck was a metaphor” for the life-journey of man, “this view still has validity, but [...] it is almost impossible to consider shipwrecks without also taking into consideration ecological concerns.”21 Hailing Life of Pi as the novel that addresses such an ecologically concerned shift in writing but also considering shipwreck narratives in general, she therefore claims that in the novel, “the domination paradigm is replaced with a more ecologically acceptable one of respect.”22 However, this view is countered by Philip Armstrong’s conclusion that, when examined “more closely, the environmentalist veneer of Life of Pi proves rather thin.”23 Yet, in a novel that so vehemently dismisses “dry and yeastless factuality,”24 the focus on its textual and literary potential might be more rewarding than tracing the realist or moralistic merits of the narrative. From the perspective of aesthetic, intertextual discourse, the parallels with Robinson Crusoe are particularly remarkable in a scene in which Pi and Richard Parker reach a deserted island. This island appears as a terra nullius to Pi, and Pi functions as colonial discoverer in the form of a juvenile Crusoe: ‘My God! My God!’ I whimpered. I fell overboard. The combined shock of solid land and cool water gave me the strength to pull myself forward onto the island. I babbled incoherent thanks to God and collapsed. (346)

21

June Dwyer, “Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative,” Modern Language Studies 35.2 (Fall 2005): 9. 22 Dwyer, “Shipwreck Narrative,” 10. 23 Armstrong, Animals, 177. 24 See, for instance, Martel, Life of Pi, 84, 406. Further references to the novel are in the main text.

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However, although it initially resembles a Robinsonade, Pi and Richard Parker’s stay on the island soon turns into an account of man’s fall from grace in Paradise: Pi tastes of the fruit of one of the trees that cover the island and a “pleasant breeze ran through the trees”: I was keenly curious. I examined the fruit. Ah, how I wish that moment had never been! But for it I might have lived for years–why, for the rest of my life–on that island. [...] What reason could I have to leave the island? Were my physical needs not met here? Was there not more fresh water than I could drink in all my lifetime? More algae than I could eat? (375–76)

As the text thus invokes narratives of colonialism and conquest, then incorporates pastoral imagery and Genesis, the literary archetype of loss and expulsion, Life of Pi eventually establishes another intertextual reference that changes the focus from man’s original sin to the idea of a threat to both (subaltern) human and animal. The fruit turns out to be a mass of leaves that he has to unwrap, and at the core of the fruit, Pi finds a human tooth. At the very core of the forbidden fruit, as it were, are the remains of a human being who had been devoured by the gigantic island itself, which turns out to be a living carnivorous organism made of algae. The island is therefore not so much the “allegory of biodiversity”25 claimed by Armstrong as a place that Pi realizes is thoroughly hostile to humans and animals alike. He thereupon tries to escape from the island – together with Richard Parker. The island appears as an anti-Edenic place where the serpent is “nothing other than the voracity of human consumption itself.” 26 Yet this voracity endangers both Pi and Richard Parker – ultimately, they embark on their lifeboat together, and opt once again for their human–animal community. The most remarkable intertextuality in the novel is surely the name ‘Richard Parker’. Richard Parker is a character from Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym – and in this story, Parker is a human being, of course. Poe’s novel is a shipwreck narrative as well, and in this text, Parker is the one who, after a long and exhausting journey without food and drink, suggests eating one of the mariners instead. Ironically, it is his idea to draw straws and, ultimately, it is his lot to be eaten. The text thus incorporates elements of cannibalism that can be re-assessed in the postcolonial context, as Huggan and Tiffin note:

25 26

Armstrong, Animals, 165. Huggan & Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 174.

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If colonialism can be said to have its own origin myth [...] none is more powerful than the suppression of the threatening ‘other’–the disavowed animal, the cannibal gnawing at the human heart.27

By intertextually complicating the cultural code of cannibalism – ascribing the connotation to a carnivorous animal, that is – Life of Pi comments on the fact that as a self-authorizing myth, “the real significance of cannibalism [...] is discursive.”28 The focus on the rhetorical aspects of discursive othering is echoed in the main character, Pi. While his name reflects the colonial heritage of Indian society – his full name derives from a French swimming pool in the town where he was born, so that the name can be said to be “metonymically marked by colonialism”29 – it later becomes shortened to ‘Pi’. This, in turn, opens a space for association that his schoolmates are happy to fill – they call him ‘Lemon Pie’, for instance, which Pi sensibly prefers to his former moniker, ‘Pissing Patel’ (26; 32, italics in the original). The most important association his name evokes, however, is introduced by Pi himself, and it leaves even more space for signification: “My name is Piscine Molitor Patel,” he writes on the blackboard of his home school one day, known to all as – I double underlined the first two letters of my given name – Pi Patel. For good measure I added ஡ = 3.14 and I drew a large circle, which I then sliced in two with a diameter, to evoke that basic lesson of geometry. (30)

Although it is Pi himself who establishes this connection of name and mathematical term, apparently to prevent other associations from being cemented, he takes refuge in “that elusive, irrational number” (32), which for him opens up what Roland Barthes has called the ‘shudder of meaning’. A first glimpse of the fluid and continuous possibilities of ascribing meaning to this name can be seen in the changing pronunciation of ‘Pi’, as the puns ‘Pissing’ and ‘Pi’ (as in ஡) require different vowel sounds. Moreover, Pi’s symbolic name assumes further significance in connection with the animal character Richard Parker, who has a ‘proper’ (first and last) name, and a Western name at that. While ‘Pi’ is linked to mathematics, it is Richard Parker, the mute animal, whose name alludes to literature. Reading this opposition between Pi and Richard Parker, Huggan and 27

Huggan & Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 168. Huggan & Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 170 (their emphasis). Note also that before Pi and Richard Parker reach the island, they encounter a whale and an albatross, thus linking their oceanic journey even more tightly to literary sea journeys (as described by Herman Melville and Coleridge, respectively). 29 Georgis, “Aesthetics of Loss,” 167. 28

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Tiffin conclude that, in an “inversion of readerly expectation, it is Piscine Patel (Pi), who is denoted by a symbol – something standing for something else – while the tiger has first and family names.”30 Yet Richard Parker’s name stands for something else, too, of course: namely, for the man who found him. Due to a bureaucratic error, the tiger who was supposed to be called ‘Thirst’ is given a human name. Thus, the associations and the questioning of names and naming that the text evokes create a certain blurred space where dividing lines between human and animal become hard to see while a sense of community is repeatedly engendered. Once it is understood as a metafictional device, anthropomorphism productively facilitates ambivalence instead of forfeiting it. These observations situate the narrative in a literary and intertextual context which to overlook may well mean missing out crucial layers of meaning. Reading it as a realistic description of human–animal relations, for instance, can thus only lead to misreading the text altogether. Instead, I argue here that reading it in the very opposite way – namely, in terms of a deliberately literary staging of human–animal-communities as ambiguous and dynamic – makes more sense. Armstrong makes the following suggestion: Pi’s conviction that he stands a better chance of survival if he can keep the tiger alive – surely a counter-intuitive one – is accepted by the reader because it encapsulates a dominant environmentalist structure of feeling, according to which the crucial factor in safeguarding the continuation of life in general is the preservation of inter-relationships between species.31

But this is only part of the truth. This assumption ignores the numerous comments on apartness and species differences that Pi recounts; more importantly, it misreads the novel as a pamphlet commenting on environmentalist thought, instead of seeing it first and foremost as a fictional discourse and also a meditation on fiction. Accordingly, Armstrong’s conclusion seems rather odd: as stated above, he rejects the “thin environmentalist veneer of Life of Pi.” He then scrutinizes Pi’s explanations about zoos, animal keeping, and animal training, and concludes: although it poses as the simple story of a simple Indian boy, Martel’s novel refuses the particularities of location and floats free of historical, geopolitical context, and in so doing offers a rhapsody to the power of the (touristic, all-consuming, privileged, globalized, Western) human spirit.32 30 31 32

Huggan & Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 171. Armstrong, Animals, 165. Armstrong, Animals, 179.

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Armstrong mixes his assessment of Martel as the author with a misreading of Pi as a moral voice: he mentions that Martel’s “perception of global mobility as fundamental to human nature” leads him to conclude that Pi’s “sensibility is, more than anything else, that of the tourist,”33 and he reads the whole novel as expressing this sensibility. By conflating author, character, and text, Armstrong ignores the important point that Pi, as a fictional character, cannot be taken to be reliable in any realistic (or environmentalist) sense, or with regard to the postcolonial problem of locutionary power. Pi is not only metonymically marked by colonial culture, he is first and foremost a child who has been instructed by his father, a zoo-keeper, about animal behaviour. His voyage on the lifeboat can also be read as a coming-of-age narrative in the course of which he grows up and at the same time realizes the affinity between and interdependence of human and animal being. All of these issues suggest that eventually, the question of unreliability constitutes a gap to be filled by the reader. This gap is distinctly highlighted by the novel’s ending, where, in a surprising twist of readerly expectation and by means of metafictional comment, the novel’s status as imaginative play is explicitly performed and confirmed. This focus on fictional discourse is demonstrably not a mere by-product of the text but an element that is maintained by the very construction of the narrative itself, which can be divided into three main sections: while the first section tells Pi’s life before the voyage and his struggle towards religious belief, the second section deals with his stay on the lifeboat. It is in the remarkably brief third section, when Pi has been saved, that the story is retold to two Japanese investigators who interrogate Pi for insurance purposes. They do not believe Pi’s account. This leads Pi to first defend it – “tigers exist, lifeboats exist, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow experience, you refuse to believe that they might” (299) – and then to rephrase the story completely. Pi now recounts in a few sentences how the lifeboat became occupied by his mother, the ship’s cook, and an injured sailor. After arguments and fights, it is the cook who kills Pi’s mother and the sailor, while Pi, in turn, kills the cook. After this account of the narrative, the Japanese investigators have to admit that they liked the story with the animals better. Their reaction adds to the impression that the novel is concerned with the importance of “the ability to recognize the better story [...] for a broader understanding of truth as encompassing more than mere facts,”34 as Laura Wright concludes. Moreover, it problematizes our own readerly expectations as they are shaped and reshaped 33

Animals, 179. Laura Wright, Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens & London: U of Georgia P, 2010): 65. 34

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by the narrative: since, in the fictional world, the two versions contradict each other, we too have to decide which one to ‘believe’. Of course, we tend to take the second version as being more ‘realistic’. And although it is indeed an “immobile story,” as Pi says, we tend to understand that it is more reliable than the first narrative, which seems like a fable made up for the sake of psychological displacement. Our own reluctance to accept Pi’s first story thus makes us aware of our closeness to the interrogators, who, just as we have done, fail to grasp the ‘better story’ (understood as both subaltern narrative and human–animal story). The experience of a human–animal community established in fictional discourse thus poses a force resistant to this desire for ‘realism’ and ‘facts’, and it comments on the power of the literary imagination. The emergence of an imaginary community marks a decisive point for the reader: either we agree to partake in this experience of transformation in Pi’s and our own mind, or we deliberately acknowledge our inability to understand the truth of fiction – which will make us complicit with the unsympathetic interrogators and turn the colonial gaze back onto us. Moreover, reframing the story in ‘realist’ terms produces another gap: the vanishing of Richard Parker. To believe the second story also means to re-assess the animal characters as symbolic stand-ins for the human ones, because the detestable murders and cannibalistic deeds which originally “[mark] the outer limits of the human [are] metaphorically re-applied to humans, but only after [their] ‘real’ basis has been exiled to the animal.” 35 It is thus the human characters who show bestial behaviour while the animal characters have been madeup and utilized discursively in the fictional context of Pi's first story. Richard Parker, however, resists this inverse anthropomorphization and quietly vanishes from the narrative: he has no human counterpart. Without Richard Parker, the text tells us, Pi would not have been able to survive his 227 days on the lifeboat – the gap therefore leaves us in want of an answer to how to read this animal. Was it a kind of zoomorphic spiritual guidance, an element of the ‘true account’ of the story that cannot be translated into “dry, yeastless factuality,” or can we understand it as Pi’s realization of his own animal self that had been evoked in the narrative journey on the lifeboat? However understood, by this twist the animal ultimately vanishes from sight, unspeakable again in the context of the familiar realm of reliability. Yet it is still a vivid memory on the part of the narrative that features animals, which is granted much more space in the novel. Pi’s last words for him, when Richard Parker rushes off into the jungle, are 35

Huggan & Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 173.

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I wish you all the best with [your freedom]. Watch out for Man. He is not your friend. But I hope that you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. (384)

This deeply emotional connection between Pi and Richard Parker, the entangled empathy so crucial to the novel’s emplotment of a human–animal community, relies on and is bound to the question of fiction and what can count as truth. However, the text also demonstrates how animals can be used and abused in the process of storytelling. If any case is made, then, it is the case for imagination and the power of narrative to establish a literary human–animal community whose effects outlast the event of invoking it. Laura Wright summarizes the novel thus: Pi represents, at least in theory, one side of various binary pairs that shape the focus of the novel: he is Indian as opposed to Canadian, vegetarian as opposed to carnivorous, Hindu (by history) as opposed to Christian, religious as opposed to secular. Furthermore, his story is oral as opposed to written.36

These are the very binaries that are deconstructed by means of the narrative devices I outlined above, in particular by pointing out Pi’s unreliability and the intertextual allusions. In the end, Pi is cosmopolitan rather than nationally bound – that is, he has overcome the imagined community of a nation-state for the sake of an imaginary community of shared, creaturely life. In the course of the narrative, he eats meat and even rejects the distinction between (animal) carnivory and (human/bestial) cannibalism; he develops from a pantheistic eclecticism towards a global spirituality that includes animals (and his scientific interest is surely secular), and eventually, his oral narrative is not oral at all but narratively staged as being an oral account within a novel. Through the various binary constructions that it disrupts, Life of Pi allows us to experience the fictional space between fable and creatural story. This semantic space stresses the importance of human–animal relationships in postcolonial narratives just as much as the importance (and inescapability) of literary emplotment. While the actual animal’s silence is thus acknowledged, the silence it leaves us with is narratively filled with the fictionalization of literary anthropomorphism; the ‘belief in God’ promised by the narrator at the beginning of his story thus becomes Pi’s ‘belief in form’, “that we must give things a meaningful shape” (383). And it situated anthropomorphism in the history of thought that Daston outlines, as mentioned above. This allows us to offer the animal a place in our 36

Wright, Reading the Postcolonial Environment, 70.

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‘translated world’, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls it. It is important to note that positioning the animal there does not mean understanding it at all. Instead, it means a negotiation of the value of anthropomorphism as opposed to the pathetic fallacy (without, of course, bringing it to closure). In place of complaints about the animal that in fiction is “little more than a human-sculpted object in which the animal’s glass eye merely reflects our own projections,” we discover the imaginative space opened up by the fictional mode as a “furry subjunctive case”37 – a literary ‘what if’ that deliberately blurs the species boundary. At the same time, however, we remain aware of the fictional nature of our ways of thinking beyond the human. In stressing the aesthetic and imaginative potential of literature, I have distanced my reading from those that seek to counter representational othering. By making productive use of the ambivalence inscribed in anthropomorphic narratives, I have described a communal sense between humans and animals that fiction alone is able to create. If we take fiction as a place to test and imagine the value of human–animal communities as a form of resistance to the essentialist discourses of colonialism and speciesism alike, we see that it is this faith in imagination that Life of Pi fruitfully negotiates. Cole’s description of Martel’s novel as an unjust equation of religious belief and the ‘belief’ in fictional animal narratives is therefore misleading. The “belief in God” that Pi promises to induce is in fact belief in the evocative potential of anthropomorphism. Interpreting the fictionality of anthropomorphic narratives provides us with the necessary distance from the idea of grasping ‘the’ animal. Moreover, it offers us a rewarding surplus of semantic echoes which all claim the animal as a vital cohabitant of our cultural environments.

W OR K S C I T E D Armstrong, Philip. “The Postcolonial Animal,” Society and Animals 10.4 (December 2002): 414–19. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London & New York: Routledge, 2008). Bartosch, Roman. EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013). Bartosch, Roman. “Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalisation,” in Beyond the Human–Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature, Culture, and History, ed. Dominik Ohrem & Roman Bartosch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2017).

37

Daston & Mitman, “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,“ 5, 9.

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Childs, Peter, Jean Jacques Weber & Patrick Williams. “Turning the Colonial Gaze Back Upon the Colonizer,” in Childs, Weber & Williams, Post-Colonial Theory and Literatures: African, Caribbean and South Asian (Trier: W V T , 2006): 227–36. Cole, Stewart. “Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi,” Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2 (January 2004): 22–36. Daston, Lorraine. “Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human,” in Thinking with Animals (2005), ed. Daston & Mitman, 37–58. Daston, Lorraine, & Gregg Mitman. “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Thinking with Animals (2005), ed. Daston & Mitman, 1–14. Daston, Lorraine, & Gregg Mitman, ed. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia U P , 2005). Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie–Louise Mallet, tr. David Wills (New York: Fordham U P , 2008). Dwyer, June. “Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative,” Modern Language Studies 35.2 (Fall 2005): 9–21. Fudge, Erika. Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002). Georgis, Dina. “Hearing the Better Story: Learning and the Aesthetics of Loss and Expulsion,” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 28.2 (June 2006): 165–78. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for our Relationships with Animals (New York: Lantern, 2015). Herman, David, ed. Creatural Fictions: Human–Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Huggan, Graham, & Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London & New York: Routledge, 2010). Martel, Yann. Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001). Miller, John. Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2012). Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia U P , 2011). Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, vol. 3 (1856; New York: Adamant, 2005). Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror, 1996). Vermeulen, Pieter, & Virginia Richter, “Introduction: Creaturely Constellations,” European Journal of English Studies 19.1 (March 2015), 1–9. Wright, Laura. Wilderness Into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens & London: U of Georgia P , 2010).

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Migration, Rhizomic Identities, and the Black Atlantic in Postcolonial Literary Studies The Trans-Space as Home in Pauline Melville’s Short Story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water”

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H A R L E S M A I E R H A S S U G G E S T E D reading colonialism as a new supranational master-narrative, thereby enabling a resituation of perspectives on history/the past, the present, and the future. Most decisive in this respect is to understand colonialism as a global player that has created transatlantic, transnational, and transracial entanglements and hierarchies on both local and global stages. Part and parcel of these hierarchical entanglements is the complex history of forced and voluntary migration and the rhizomic identities thus created. These processes are addressed by Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic and two postcolonial paradigms: critical Occidentalism and critical whiteness studies. The exploration of the theoretical framework and epistemological gain offered by these approaches is the purpose of this chapter. After discussing their theoretical grammar, I will demonstrate in how these postcolonial theories offer a means of approaching aesthetic processes. To make this point, I will examine the short story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” by the British-Guyanese writer Pauline Melville. In conclusion, I will elaborate on the consequences that emerge from these considerations for the study of literature and suggest a framework for Transcultural Anglophone Studies (henceforth TAS ).

Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Occidentalism: Ways of Rereading Europe To put the epistemological question of postcolonial studies most bluntly: how did colonialism affect the world – discursively and structurally – with respect to past, present, and future? It is true that, in its very beginnings, postcolonial

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studies have been applied predominantly as black studies: i.e. as studies of the experiences and cultural identities of black people and people of colour, both in the colonial space and in related processes of racism, dispersal, and migration – and the white gaze on this. Yet theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said have always also focused on the fact that colonialism has affected both the colonizer and the colonized, the Occident and the Orient, Europe and beyond, whites and people of colour. In the early 1990s, with the emergence of critical whiteness studies and critical Occidentalism, this approach evolved as a new paradigm. One of its most central objectives is to resituate the Occident/Europe as an identity construct. In the late-sixteenth century, Europe invented the concept of ‘human races’, thus fabricating racial and religious ‘Others’, in order to position itself as a superior white and Christian entity.1 This ideology involved, to apply Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of “provincializing Europe,” a rhetoric that translated cultural differences into historical time gaps, meaning that while encountering cultures that were different from their own, Europe simply reduced them to cultures that were allegedly lagging far behind European ‘normalities’. In other words, Europe invented a “waiting room of history,” where colonized societies were placed as “not-yet societies,” said to be longing to become like white Christian Europe. Part and parcel of this process of ‘othering’ was the myth of the ‘white man’s burden’, which defined the white man as being capable, legitimized, and even obliged to help those ‘Others’ – allegedly in need of developmental latitude in helping them towards progress and ‘civilization’. Thereby, due to the Others' inborn inferiority, the condition of the white male subject could never be achieved by the ‘Others’. It was this rhetoric that was to legitimate and disguise the violence of slavery and colonialism which, in fact, contradicted everything that Europe claimed to have stood for ever since Antiquity and, more specifically, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: freedom, democracy, ethics, ‘civilization’, and the primacy of human dignity. Against the background of these findings, critical Occidentalism and critical whiteness studies in general, and the stratagems of the Black Atlantic and of provincializing Europe as proposed by Paul Gilroy and Dipesh Chakrabarty in particular, demand a rereading of Antiquity, the Renaissance, Christianity, and the Enlightenment that repositions them in their ambivalences and emphasizes their responsibilities for both colonialism and National Socialism. What is more, conventional notions of ‘race’ as a matter of black and white as being ‘unraced’, ‘neutral’, and ‘universal’ are being challenged as well. When reading whiteness 1

See Susan Arndt, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Rassismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012).

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as the ‘unmarked marker’ and ‘invisible normality’ of processes of racialization, whiteness is acknowledged as the subject, norm, and engine of the history of ‘race’ and as a “currency of power”2 that guarantees privilege. After all, whiteness is a position framed by collective patterns of perception, knowledge, and action that have a discursive and structural impact on societal processes. 3 Moreover, these postcolonial theories emphasize the following: It may be true that Europe exported to its colonies cultural, religious, political and economic models that had developed over the course of centuries on European territory. Yet Europe did not conquer a vacuum, but culturally, politically, and religiously structured societies. Consequently, Europe never managed to form the world into the mirror image of itself. Modernity did not simply emerge and expand; rather, processes of globalization caused the generation of polyphonic and entangled “modernities.”4 The respective processes of abrogation and appropration include, as Paul Gilroy claims, the impact of the intellectual heritage of the West on black “writing and speaking in pursuit of freedom, citizenship, and social and political autonomy.”5 These processes, in turn, also had a retroactive effect on Europe itself – on intellectual debate as well as on cultural, religious, political, and social structures. An evident central manifestation of the emergence of Europe as provincialized trans-space is the migratory movement that brought people, along with their cultural and religious identity and knowledge-systems, from former European colonies to Europe. As a result, new diasporas emerged. In defining and classifying these diasporas, Robert Cohen has identified two significant factors: the notion of their rootedness in their countries of origin; and their struggle to be accepted as belonging to the mainstream society of their adopted countries. 6 By thus interweaving the countries of origin and residence and, moreover, creating diasporic identities that transcend Europe’s national borders, the diasporas act, as Étienne Balibar has proposed, as precursors of a transnational European house and challenge the primacy of current European citizenship

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Arndt, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Rassismus. See Susan Arndt, “Whiteness as Category of Literary Analysis: Racializing Markers and RaceEvasiveness in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” in Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Michael Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009): 167–89. 4 Shalina Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb & Norbert Jegelka (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999): 87–96. 5 Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” 2. 6 See Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997). 3

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models in determining what is ‘European’.7 Moreover, conventional white notions are challenged, which assume both European and white to be synonymous and see European and black identities as “mutually exclusive.”8 Additionally, Paul Gilroy questions the belief that any act of “occupying the space between” Europe and blackness is “a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination” (1). In his view, any notion of a “double-consciousness” that claims that people of colour in Europe and the U SA are both – for example, British and Nigerian – would not exhaust “the subjective resources of any particular individual” (1). After all, processes of colonialism and globalization have had a catalytic effect on the formation of the world and its subjects as a “socio-cultural continuum,” to adopt Kamau Brathwaite’s formula for creolization.9 As for Édouard Glissant, this “unceasing process” of cultural interweaving and errant cultures which continues to occur in Great Britain just as much as in Martinique and South Africa, is most pertinently expressed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome.10 The root extends linearly, genealogically, isolately, and predictably into the depths of the earth. Accordingly, Glissant reads this as a metaphor for long-established cultures and territories. The rhizome, by contrast, “maintains [...] the idea of rootedness, but challenges that of a totalitarian root.”11 It expands horizontally, encountering others and cross-linking with them.12 In this manner, the rhizome presents itself in an unpredictable and dynamic way, hence is better suited to serve as a metaphor for complex and polyphonic cultures – and for overcoming conventional binarisms. Moreover, the rhizome proves to be the most appropriate way “of naming the processes of cultural mutuation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse.”13 It is this “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” that Gilroy calls “the black Atlantic” (4). 7

See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, tr. James Swenson (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004). 8 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993; London & New York: Verso, 1995): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 9 Edward L. Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971): 310. 10 As acknowledged by Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel. & tr. J. Michael Dash (sel. from Le discours antillais, 1981; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia 1989): 142. 11 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997): 11. 12 “le rhizome est la racine qui s’étend à la rencontre d’autres racines”; Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996): 44. 13 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, 2. Further page references are in the main text.

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Referring to transcultural and transracial dialogicity between Western and non-Western cultures as well as black diasporic cultures and their countries of residence constitutes an abrogation and appropriation of white cultural and social ‘normalities’ – even if (in willing ignorance) largely unnoticed by white mainstream society. What is more, Gilroy’s stratagem of the Black Atlantic lays emphasis on historical processes that entangle Europe, “the Africans they enslaved,” and the First Nations “they slaughtered and the Asians they indentured” (2). In so doing, Gilroy insists on complementing the notion of diasporas as being ‘rooted’ in their countries of origin and longing to become ‘rooted’ in their adopted countries with the idea of ‘routes’ as a strategic means to focus on the historical becoming of global positions and encounters.

The Trans-Space as Home in Pauline Melville’s Short Story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” This idea of rhizomic belonging as ‘routed’ in history, exceeding the ‘either–or’ as well as the ‘both’, is explored by Pauline Melville in her short story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” (1990). Melville directs her protagonist’s search for belonging at her two countries of origin, Britain and Guyana, making her realize that ultimately neither one alone nor both of them together qualify as home. This is presented metaphorically. It is the ocean that symbolizes the gap between Britain and Guyana, and it is the same ocean that bridges the gap between them. In her dreams of being a high-wire artist or tumbleweed, the protagonist crosses the ocean, which ultimately turns out to be her haven and home. Thus, it is the trans-space of the Black Atlantic – and the very history of colonialism as ‘route’ which lends it its symbolic meaning – that makes Melville’s protagonist belong. Thus, Melville joins in a celebration of multifaceted Creole identity, but not without negotiating its pitfalls as well. While George Lamming maintains in this respect that the “pleasure and the paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am,”14 Melville’s first-person narrator, who corresponds to the firstperson narrator’s namelessness and makes her an anonymous representative of a collective experience, claims: We do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side.15 14

George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992): ix. Pauline Melville, “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water,” in Melville, Shape-Shifter: Stories (London: Women’s Press, 1990): 149. Further page references are in the main text. 15

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The fact that Melville’s protagonist speaks here in the name of a “we” corresponds to the fact that she remains nameless in the short story, hence may be read as an anonymous representative of the migrant’s voice with a collective agenda. This belonging to the transatlantic trans-space of migratory, national inbetweenness is interwoven in the story with the phenomenon known as racial passing. Melville’s first-person narrator is the daughter of white-and-black parentage. While growing up in Guyana, she is admonished – for being “fairskinned” (156) and with obvious reference to ‘racial’ climate theories – by her black Aunt Rosa to “come in out of the sun,” because otherwise she will be “gettin' all burnt up.” Because the neighbours and even her black father call her “ice-cream face” (157–58), she feels robbed of her family roots. After her migration to England, the narrator responds to this experience of exclusion by now denying her blackness herself. In so doing, she goes so far as to adopt and cast the white gaze on black people. She even agrees – virtually unchallenged by her white mother – with a white English friend’s opinion that her father – who is identified on his British colonial birth certificate as “Coloured, Native, Creole” (153), “looks like a monkey”(157). Despite this attempt at lactification, to use Frantz Fanon’s term, Melville’s protagonist experiences racism. When, as an adult, she wants her exclusion from white British society to be acknowledged, she chooses to re-affirm her blackness. However, once again she comes up against the opposition of her Aunt Rosa – though this time in a reversed fashion. Rosa now reproaches the protagonist for having renounced her family roots and black identity. In substantiating her argument, Rosa once again invokes theorems of ‘race’. She implies that ‘race’ manifests itself in the blood and that Englishness is tied to whiteness: Just because you’ve got white skin and blue eyes you think you haven’t got coloured blood in you. But you have … It’s in your veins. You can’t escape from it [...]. You sent your father’s ashes back here because he had mixed blood. You were too ashamed to let him stay in England … Your father’s skin was whiter than mine. If he’d been my colour your mother never would have married him. (162)

Rosa is countered by her sister Avril, who claims that “nobody cares about ‘skincolour’ “any more” (162). The first-person narrator embraces Avril in gratitude. Moreover, in a retrospective description, she portrays her friend Gail’s family as a spectrum of hues, ranging from “yellow-skinned” to “honey coloured” to a “crème de cacao complexion” (158). This implies that she seeks to confirm

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Avril’s fantasy that ‘skin colours’ are devoid of meaning and are thus easily abolished. The composition of the story, however, presents this matter in a more complex way. While it confirms the first-person narrator’s belonging to an inbetweenness, it transgresses the mere realization of the fact that the complexion of human beings is characterized by dynamic fluidity. The gradual unfolding of the story of three generations of migrants, moreover, unveils the fact that history has taught people to rely on an ideologically produced abstraction that has taught them to pay heed to ‘skin colours’ and apply them as portentous denotations of ‘race’. This biologistic invention has, in turn, equipped humanity with a construct that has irreversibly produced a symbolic order which, until now, has assigned people racialized social positions in a politically potent way. The knowledge-system thus produced cannot be overcome easily. Rather, it needs to be re-examined by acknowledging and historicizing it. It is this point that Melville attempts to make in her story, in direct opposition to her protagonist’s claim of the end of ‘skin colours’. In an attempt to historicize the meaning of ‘skin colour’ as a consequence of colonialism and thereby to position it as a major reason for the migrant’s inbetweenness in terms of nation, Melville returns to the very origins of the European colonial conquest of Guyana and thus to her protagonist’s roots and ‘routes’. In so doing, she simultaneously explores its consequences for the present and sounds out the prospects for a different future. In this way, Melville “manipulates history as a discourse to be perverted and also imaginatively recycled,”16 thereby demonstrating that a subversive process of remembering history that overcomes processes of forgetting and denial can enable new postcolonial identities to grow out of the remnants of the colonial past. In terms of narrative technique, she marks this approach by conflating time periods through the use of verbs in the present tense to describe both present and past experiences, and verbs in the future tense to recount her late grandfather’s experiences in early-twentieth-century Britain. In addition, the narrative voice moves back and forth between various time levels in sequences that resemble film scenes.17 Thus framed, the story of her protagonist’s Guyanese family, descended from enslaved Africans, is thoughtfully balanced with the Raleigh family, which personifies the English colonial conquest. Melville hereby responds intertextually to Sir Walter Raleigh’s canonical text of European travel 16

Jordan Stouck, “‘Return and Leave and Return Again’: Pauline Melville’s Historical Entanglements,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3.1 (1005): 3. 17 See Mervyn Morris, “Cross-Cultural Impersonations: Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (January 1993): 81.

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literature, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596). Like Raleigh, Melville’s English leader of the expedition has a son called Wat who dies during the journey. Four centuries later, children from the creeks where Wat vainly searched for El Dorado go to England to look for its riches as symbolized by their myth of London as the ‘city of gold’. This narrative structure also contextualizes the proverb around which the title of the short story is based. “Eat labba and drink creek water and you will always return” (148) invokes the fact that these people migrate as a reciprocal consequence of Wat’s tasting of colonial waters in symbolic consequence of the English invasion of Guyana. After all, the WAT er in the proverb, which the migrants are encouraged to drink, is the very water in which WAT has drowned, living on as the “spirit of a pale boy” (149–50). Creolité being in its best form, the white infant colonizer has become famous as an aged indigenous legend which embodies continuity between colonial and present periods and bridges opposite shores of the ocean. Moreover, the ‘always’ of the proverb refers to the permanency of the processes of departure and arrival, already discussed. Within this structure, Melville, for example, takes and challenges colonial fantasies about the riches of the so-called ‘New World’, such as those bundled together in the myth of El Dorado, and combines them satirically with notions of the West held by people from (former) colonies as well as twentieth-century hierarchies informing processes of globalization. In this vein, London is positioned as a “great and golden city,” “where they set the Gold Standard for the world” (154). Ultimately, the story demonstrates that the migrant’s struggle to belong to both the British adopted culture and the cultures of his/her country of origin is heavily influenced by textures of colonialism and inventions of ‘race’. They, in turn, are responsible for rhizomic identities and belongings in the transatlantic space. Thus, Melville’s short story is representative of the way in which literature functions as an important medium for coming to terms with the entangled histories arising from colonialism and affecting processes of migration. It also exemplifies the way in which the long-term migratory movements of people, languages, and literatures polyphonically influence literary processes on the level of both content and aesthetic verbalization. To conclude, I wish now to briefly explore the implications of this phenomenon for research in literary studies.

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Framing Postcolonial Literary Studies: Literatures in Motion and the Poetics of Relation In 1946, Erich Auerbach predicted that the “Europeanization of the world” (as his quest for origins might be summarized in Wolfgang Reinhard’s more recent formulation) would lead to unification and simplification – indeed, to a standardization of cultures, which would also affect narrative structure and bring an end to cultural diversity.18 Glissant also assumes that the literatures of the world are undergoing interactive dynamic exchange. However, in contrast to Auerbach, he speaks of a global network of literature that is transculturally and rhizomically formed and influenced by historically grown and discursively based hegemonies. Indeed, authors – equipped with the latest technological developments, online communication, and the world wide web – are at home in the libraries of the world. Literary creations are interlinked polydirectionally by entangled histories, thus intertwining nations and languages, discourses and knowledge, imagination and aesthetics. Thus framed, a global and multilayered net of literatures emerges which performs as a ‘poetics of (global) relation’,19 without, however, executing exclusions or disregarding historically grown and discursively and structurally anchored hegemonies and hierarchies. Rhizomically, literature spreads out, encountering and cross-linking with others, presenting itself in an unpredictable, fluid, and polyphonic manner. Hence, as Glissant argues, any attempt to simplify and tame this complexity of literature through the imposition of Western categories – as a mode of standardization – amounts to a kind of ‘barbarism’. To accept that one is incapable of completely understanding the ‘Other’ is, however, a manifestation of ‘civilization’ that helps one to recognize the “unity of liberating diversity.”20 Literary studies have to adjust to these dynamic complexities of and within literature and approach literary expression in a transcultural way that crosses boundaries of nations and languages. The diversity, polyphony, and composite nature of a “literature on the move,” which aims at conceptualizing humanity in its hybridity and at inviting discussion of cultural experiences against a background of universal patterns, is best met by what Ottmar Ette calls transdisciplinary, transcultural literary studies “without permanent residence” which are

18

See Wolfgang Reinhard, “Die Europäisierung der Erde und deren Folgen,” in Europa – aber was ist es? Aspekte seiner Identität in interdisziplinärer Sicht, ed. Jörg A. Schlumberger & Peter Segl (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna: Böhlau, 1994): 76–93. 19 Glissant, Poetics of Relation. 20 Glissant, “Interview.”

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methodologically informed by cultural studies.21 It intertwines single, isolated literary studies, thereby crossing related geopolitical borderlines (e.g., those between nation-states) and resituating familiar analytical tools and approaches, subjects and margins, concepts and terminologies. Consequently, the conceptual and structural processes of philological transformation should not be satisfied with broadening the scope of possible objects of research within individual philologies alone. Rather, the tried and tested tradition of focusing on presentations of word and image within single national and language systems needs to be complemented by comparatively informed philological structures and categories which cut through and criss-cross conventional structures of literary studies, challenging them in a creative process of academic dialogicity and subverting the practice of delineating single philologies from one another along the lines of language and their branches. Thus framed, epistemological necessities (merely tamed by linguistic competences), rather than narrow and outmoded nation- or language-bound philological pigeonholes, are to set the agenda. It is true that general and comparative literary studies seem in fact to be best suited in terms of subject, structure, and methodology to accommodate this approach. Yet, in its current implementation it has only sporadically and parsimoniously granted consideration to the rhizomic complexity and globality of literature. To accede unreflexively to a focus on the canon of white Western literature is easy enough – it is the hegemon that has always been there, its authority unquestioned. Recent debates that have stressed the need for philological transformations have, however, also set in motion regionally focused literary studies such as African or Latin American literary studies and languagebased philologies such as English and American studies that open up the canon to interconnectivities. Indeed, English and American studies have, even more radically than most other literary studies, broadened their research agendas. Initial selective attention to anglophone literatures (and cultures) from outside of the U K and the U SA has led to the disciplinary establishment of a field that is widely known as the New English Literatures (NEL ) or New English Literatures and Cultures (NE LK ). Despite its merits, this term is inhabited by a home-made aporia. New English Literatures have largely focused, in a comparative perspective, on non-British and non-American authors and texts written in English, making up for the ignoring by the ‘home’ nations of the paper-trail of their respective 21

See Ottmar Ette, Literature on the Move, tr. Katharina Vester (Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika, 2001; Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003).

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empires. Moreover, its conceptual self-understanding has grown to include the subject of black British literature, Asian British literature, and other British literatures of colour. Thus, although regionally focused agendas are to be found, this branch of literary studies works transnationally, through language, yet observing a restricting criterion of inclusion and exclusion. As long as this language-focused approach ultimately makes scholars – along with regional expertise – stick to their trade, there is nothing wrong with NEL . What causes me discomfort, however, is the home-made aporia, most obvious when one examines more closely both the term NEL and its categories. Semantically, ‘new’ marks the assumption that ‘something has recently come into existence’. Given the fact that Sol T. Plaatje’s novel Mhudi, written around 1919 and published in 1930, would belong to the New Literatures in English, while J.K. Rowling’s contemporary beststeller Harry Potter would not suggests, however, that the ‘new’ does not refer to the date of publication of individual texts. Rather, it is to be understood generically. Obviously, the ‘new’ in NEL refers connotatively to something that is “other than the former or old” or, even better, “different from one of the same category that has existed previously.”22 Hence, the ‘new’ in ‘New English Literatures’ seems to be suggesting a diachronic reading which lays emphasis on a generic distinction between literature which “has always been there/has been there earlier” and a literature which “emerged much later.” This seems to be suggestive insofar as written literature in English started in Great Britain much earlier than in other parts of the world. This temptation to read era in a generic sense collapses, however, given the fact that U S -American literature would not belong to NEL , whereas Canadian literature does. Obviously, the ‘New’ in NEL does not simply mean ‘younger’ or ‘written later than’. Rather than denoting time, the category ‘new literatures in English’ – just as much as Wlad Godzich’s “emergent literatures”– refers to space.23 In doing so, it endorse connotations of outdated (because bluntly colonialist) terminology such as “Commonwealth literature.” Ultimately, NEL evokes a rhetoric of homogenizing ‘othering’ and its home-made Manichaeism of literary norm(ality) and its ‘Other’, the centre and its periphery, the canon and the unbelonging, the white West and the Rest of Colour. While this Rest of Colour is read transnationally and transculturally, the idea of a monolithic (and monoracial) ‘nation’ gets mired down when one talks about the white centre of normality: England. In other words, the ‘new’ in NEL focuses on the absence of

22 23

See Merriam Webster Dictionary Online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary /new). See Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1994).

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tradition rather than the presence of a “unity in liberating diversity.” 24 Ultimately, just as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia first-person narrator Karim Amir is “an Englishman born and bred, almost,” being often considered “a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories,”25 NEL authors and texts belongs to English literature, almost, because of old colonial histories. The term ‘postcolonial literature’ seems to be working analogously. What might be read as a temporal reference (i.e. post-colonialism meaning ‘after colonialism’) has been employed in academia as a reference to space and belonging. In fact, in general the term ‘postcolonial literature’ is tantamount to acknowledging the recent increased valency of ‘literatures of colour’ and the concomitant lessening of interest in ‘white settler literatures’. Moreover, terms being used in NEL and postcolonial studies, such as black British literature, Indian writers in Britain, and ‘migrant literature’, confront us with an aporia, so characteristic of intellectual attempts at deconstruction: any attempt to identify and name the power of difference always also risks a linguistic revitalization of the very structures, dichotomies, and asymmetries that are being challenged. National literatures are no longer constituted by one’s being culturally, nationally or racially ‘rooted’ (i.e. born or patriated) in one’s respective country (if this ever was the case), but work according to a “new, mobile and migratory logic.”26 Thus, on the one hand, literature of migration cannot “just be added to national literature, but rather transforms it fundamentally” (242). On the other, living in trans-spaces has an effect on writers’ creative output,in terms both of discourse and of poetics, and needs, then, to be named. Thus, however inadvisable it is to place migration literature in binary opposition to national literature, since this would mean sticking to the asymmetrical contrasting of an ‘unmarked hegemonial norm’ and its ‘marked Other’, it thus seems equally unwise merely to add it tacitly to national literature, arguing that Pauline Melville and Zadie Smith are British writers – period. After all, racism positions both the authors and their poetics/texts structurally and discursively, a fact on which black British writers lay emphasis. Ultimately, it is not problematic to mark positions in the symbolic order of race and nation; what is problematic, though, is the fact that this happens to be done asymmetrically. Just as ‘migrant literature’ is, as a rule, not contrasted with 24

Glissant, “Interview.” Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): 3. 26 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2004): 234. Further page references are in the main text. 25

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‘native English literature’, terms such as ‘black British writing’ are, as a rule, not explicitly paired with the implied counterpart ‘white British’ writing, but simply with what is in fact its hypernym: ‘British writing’. As a result, this onomastic policy implies and re-emphasizes the fact that an English/British literature exists which is not new, migrant, or black but, rather, as must be concluded almost tautologically (and made invisible within the concept of ‘nation’), rooted, white, and ‘indigenous’. Adopting Toni Morrison freely, it thus becomes evident that this literature is British and “white, and we know [... it...] because nobody says so.”27 In this process of un-naming whiteness, it performs as an “unmarked marker”28 and “invisible normality,”29 a racial binarism that privileges whiteness; more generally, conventional asymmetries of thinking and labelling are resurrected. In wishing to escape this aporia, it would seem necessary to reconceptualize terms such as ‘national literature’, ‘British literature’, and ‘African literature’ and to apply symmetrical terminology that speaks, for example, of both black British writing and white British writing. In doing so, it is helpful to rely on complex and flexible categories that are interdependent, context-oriented, and dynamic. Following this approach, Buchi Emecheta would then be, depending on the context, a British author from the Igbo/Nigerian/African/black diaspora, belonging equally to the British, black, and Nigerian literary arenas. In a symmetrical perspective, Joseph Conrad could be categorized, again depending on the context, as a white British author coming from the Polish diaspora with a French (language) socialization, a globetrotter biography, and a colonialist experience and poetics. With respect to the subjects and margins of literary studies, to pursue this idea onto another level, complementary and comparatively informed philological structures and categories are needed. They have the potential to cut through and criss-cross conventional structures of literary studies, challenging them in a creative process of academic dialogicity and transgressing the practice of demarcating individual philologies from one another along the lines of language and language branches.30 Thus framed, epistemological necessities (merely 27

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992): 72. 28 Ruth Frankenberg, “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1997): 1. 29 See Ursula Wachendorfer, “Weiß-Sein in Deutschland: Zur Unsichtbarkeit einer herrschenden Normalität, ” in Afrika Bilder: Studien zu Rassismus in Deutschland, ed. Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2001): 87–101. 30 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie, 88–92.

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tamed by linguistic competences), rather than narrow and outmoded nation- or language-bound philological pigeonholes, should set the agenda. Ultimately, these changes in categories will only work when the subjects of and margins within literary studies (and their respective vocabulary) are reconceptualized accordingly. NEL(K) , I am afraid to say, is a dead-end term rather than one suitable for naming the dynamic complexity of the global trans-space literature. ‘Postcolonial literature’ might qualify to translate the idea of literary studies in motion which are structured in a transcultural and translinguistic fashion and that draw on transcultural and translinguistic concepts. However, if we acknowledge the theoretical core of postcolonialism, postcolonial literary studies need to be read as a philological project that has chosen colonialism and its aftermath as its master-narrative. Hence, postcolonial literary studies pursue a transcultural perspective well aware of structures of difference and power and of the meaning of migration and globalization. And yet: the term ‘postcolonial literature’ does not allow literatures an independent existence beyond colonialism as constitutive moment in space and time. Of course, colonialism has changed the world for good, hence performs as a lasting master-narrative. And yet: there are (con)texts that transgress this scope. As a result, I end up by opting for ‘transcultural anglophone studies’ (TAS ). TAS gets rid of ‘new’ and ‘post’, hence of any notion of coming after (or second, at that). Moreover, by replacing English with ‘anglophone’, nationality is left behind, thus overcoming any binary logic which contrasts English with the Rest. Although sticking to the one-language-only-pattern, it manages to speak of English and beyond. The prefix ‘trans-’ intensifies this insistence on multidirectional and rhizomic cultural relationships which are based on entangled histories, the presence of power, and the future of difference. What is more, the concept TAS manages to host the idea of ‘poetics in Relation’ meeting transcultural literary studies in motion, with full awareness of diversity, migration, and globalization – yet contextualizing colonialism by intersecting it with other constellations of power and diversity. As a result, literature is rearranged in rhizomic (dis)order. Literatures from the margins emerge as new centres. Analogously, English/British literatures are provincialized and their whiteness is decentred. What is more, notions of ‘world literature’ as proposed by Goethe, Auerbach, and, more recently, Pascale Casanova – which assume the existence of a centre and operate with structures of binarism are challenged as well.31 31

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Zeitschrift über Kunst und Altertum (1827) and in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedmar Apel et al. (Frankfurt am Main), vol. 12 (1981): 361 (conversation with Eckermann, 1 January 1827); Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern &

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To put it in a nutshell: transcultural anglophone studies are dedicated to literatures in the English language from all around the globe, opening up to transcultural approaches capable of pursuing comparative and intertwining approaches to the polyphony of literature. This framework enables literature to be rearranged in rhizomic (dis)order. This again enables literatures from the margins to emerge as new centres and national literatures to be approached in their given polyphonic and transnational guise in terms of language, culture, and racialized positions. Analogously, European and American literatures are provincialized and white archives of knowledge are re-archived. Ultimately, TAS offers the most appropriate analytical tools for identifying the dialogicity of the literatures of the world and both their narratives of global entanglement and the corresponding ‘poetics of Relation’.

W OR K S C I T E D Arndt, Susan. Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Rassismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2013). Arndt, Susan. “Whiteness as Category of Literary Analysis: Racializing Markers and RaceEvasiveness in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” in Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Michael Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009): 167–89. Auerbach, Erich. “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern & Munich: A.B. Francke, 1967): 301–10. Balibar, Étienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, tr. James Swenson (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004). Brathwaite, Edward L. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997). Coronil, Fernando. “Occidentalism: Towards Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11.1 (1996): 51–87. Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; New York: Viking, 1987). Ette, Ottmar. Literature on the Move, tr. Katharina Vester (Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika, 2001; Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003).

Munich: A.B. Francke, 1967): 301–10; Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

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Ette, Ottmar. ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2004). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Richard Philcox (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; New York: Grove, 2008). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993; London & New York: Verso, 1995). Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel. & tr. J. Michael Dash (sel. from Le discours antillais, 1981; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1989). Glissant, Édouard. “Interview,” Les périphériques vous parlent 14 (2005). Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997). Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1994) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. [Concept of ‘Weltliteratur’], in Zeitschrift über Kunst und Altertum (1827) and in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedmar Apel et al. (Frankfurt am Main), vol. 12 (1981): 361–64 (conversation with Eckermann, 1 January 1827). Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992). Maier, Charles. “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105.3 (June 2000): 807–31. Melville, Pauline. “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water,” in Melville, Shape-Shifter: Stories (London: Women’s Press, 1990): 148–64. Memmi, Albert. Le racisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Merriam Webster Dictionary Online. (http://www.merriam-webster.com (accessed 30 September 2015). Morris, Mervyn. “Cross-Cultural Impersonations: Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter,” A RI E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (January 1993): 79–89. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1992). Randeria, Shalina. “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb & Norbert Jegelka (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999): 87–96. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Die Europäisierung der Erde und deren Folgen,” in Europa – aber was ist es? Aspekte seiner Identität in interdisziplinärer Sicht, ed. Jörg A. Schlumberger & Peter Segl (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna: Böhlau, 1994): 76–93. Raleigh, Sir Walter. The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire, With a Relation of The Great and Golden City of Manoa (Which the Spaniards call El Dorado), etc. performed in the year 1595, by Sir W. Ralegh. Reprinted from the edition of 1596. With some Unpublished Documents Relative to that Country, edited with copious notes and a biographical memoir by Sir R.H. Schomburgk (1596; Hakluyt Society, 1848; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

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Stouck, Jordan. “ ‘Return and Leave and Return Again’: Pauline Melville’s Historical Entanglements,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3.1 (2005), http://anthurium .miami.edu/volume_3/issue_1/stouck-return.htm (accessed 16 April 2011). Wachendorfer, Ursula. “Weiß-Sein in Deutschland: Zur Unsichtbarkeit einer herrschenden Normalität,” in AfrikaBilder: Studien zu Rassismus in Deutschland, ed. Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2001): 87–101.

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IV L AN GUA GE , S TYLE , AND B ELONGING  IN M USIC C ULTURES

Community and Language in Transnational Music Styles Symbolic Meanings of Spanish in Salsa and Reggaetón

B RI TTA S CHNEI DER

Introduction

T

is a central, yet not easily defined concept in linguistics. Considering ways of talking as a basis for defining a group is problematic – it is wellnigh impossible to define the boundaries of the group. A typical example of this is dialect continua, such as the Germanic dialect continuum, where dialect speakers of, for example, the Netherlands and Germany on both sides of the border can easily communicate, although they ‘officially’ speak different ‘languages’. The borders that are here in place are political, rather than linguistic. “The assumption that speech communities, defined as functionally integrated social systems with shared norms of evaluation, can actually be isolated [has to be] subject to serious question.” 1 In the past, it was often assumed that a central aspect of the development of shared language norms is “enduring social relationships.”2 However, today, social relationships are not necessarily enduring and there is an abundance of examples of interactions that take place in social networks that are fragmented and individualized (think, for example, of Facebook). According to contemporary social-science theory, this does not necessarily question the idea of the community, as communities can be based not only on de-facto communication between people who have an “enduring social relationship” but can also be “imagined.”3 They are, then, a “semiotic sign” rather than a “functionally

1

HE IDEA OF TH E SPEECH COMMUNITY

John J. Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982): 26. Dell Hymes, “Linguistic Problems in Defining the Concept of ‘Tribe’,” in Essays on the Problem of the Tribe: Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. June Helm (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968): 23. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1985). 2

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integrated social system with shared norms of evaluation.”4 As traditional communities are put into question through processes of globalization, and as the development of communities as “semiotic signs” becomes more complex, the study of language in relation to such communities is an important area of research. In contemporary cultural contexts, in contrast to Benedict Anderson’s example of the national imagined community, communities are not necessarily imagined on the basis of a common ethnic or national background. They may be produced as objects of desire, fashion accoutrements and/or marketised life-style options, with ‘authenticity’ becoming as much an issue of commodity branding as a matter of ethnic roots.5

An example of such communities, produced as semiotic sign and linked to marketized life-style options, is the social networks based on different music styles. Not only are these usually not based on common ethnic descent but they are often also transnational in nature. Many music products are targeted at transnational audiences; popular music culture is, mainly due to the capitalist motivation of music producers, actually characterized by transnational cooperation and production, transcending national imagined communities. Like other forms of contemporary mass communication, popular music simultaneously undermines and reinforces our sense of place. Music that originally emerged from concrete historical experiences in places with clearly identifiable geographic boundaries now circulates as an interchangeable commodity marketed to consumers all over the globe.6

Anglo-American pop productions are central in this context. These usually do not engage in a discourse that presents ‘ethnic roots’ as central. If ‘authenticity’ here becomes an issue, it is, typically, authenticity with reference to particular positions that are concerned with politics or class.7 Language choice in these products is usually English, which here has the symbolic meaning of the global lingua franca, expressing success and ‘up-to-date’ attitudes.

4

Ben Rampton, Speech Community (Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 15; London: King’s College, 2000): 10. 5 Ben Rampton, Speech Community, 10. 6 George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994): 4. 7 See, for example, Alastair Pennycook, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (London: Routledge, 2007).

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The production of, or negotiation with, ethnic authenticity is vital in many other music productions, often commodified as ‘world music’, where ethnic originality is a central instrument of marketing. If, in music styles, the production of ethnic authenticity comes into play, the study of language choice is an interesting case for investigating the symbolic meaning of languages in contemporary transnational contexts. Languages remain vitally linked to discourses of ethnicity and are commonly understood as indicators of belonging to a particular ethnic community. While a link is traditionally assumed between language and ethnic identity, in transnational music productions, it is not only the targeted audience that is often not of the same language background as the musicians – musicians themselves increasingly produce music that is associated with ‘other’ cultures and languages. So, what does language use in transnational music styles tell us about negotiations of belonging and the creation of imagined communities through language? What is the meaning of the use of a particular language? And what happens to the normalized ‘language and ethnic identity’ link? The present chapter discusses contemporary transnational music styles and takes examples from two styles – salsa and reggaetón – to study the language choice in lyrics. In both, the symbolic meaning of the language Spanish is investigated. Along with English, Spanish has become one of the languages associated with transnational music culture, but in contrast to English, Spanish remains more closely tied to ethnic Hispanic cultures. Several music styles that are related to Spanish have their origins in transnational but ‘Latin’ spaces8 and, although they are not expressions of a single ethnicity or nation, they remain connected to ethnic Latin culture. The assumption that the language Spanish is primarily related to Spanish-speaking countries, including cultural stereotypes that are associated with these, counteracts the intended anti-essentialist argument of this chapter. Yet, it is undisputable that the cultural construct of ‘a language’ is traditionally associated with ‘a culture’ and that this idea is central to discourses concerned with language, culture, and identity. Choosing Spanish and its ties to Hispanic cultures of Latin America as a starting point is a way of illustrating the possible global trajectories of a complex that so far has been often constructed within the traditional ‘one language–one culture’ framework. The relationship between Spanish and the cultures with which it is traditionally associated, therefore, is here understood as discursively constructed and not ‘given’ but is nevertheless seen as an important point of reference. In the following, examples of language choice from salsa and reggaetón will be discussed. Each section starts with a brief introduction to the history of the 8

Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Salsa and its Transnational Moves (Lanham M D : Lexington, 2006): 108.

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respective music style. Obviously, today, both styles are practised and listened to in very different environments, so that what will be said is not universally valid but only true for the particular examples of the particular bands discussed. Nevertheless, the sample illustrates how the same ‘language’ (traditionally associated with a particular ‘culture’) can bear very different connotations in different musical contexts. In analysing language choice in song lyrics of transnational music styles, it is of particular interest to study code-switching, the alternation of two codes in one conversation,9 but also “language crossing,” the “use of a language or variety that, in one way or another, feels anomalously ‘other’,”10 especially a language of an ethnic ‘Other’. Fundamentally, this perspective on language in transnational contexts questions the traditional nexus of language and ethnic identity and illustrates possible indexicalities11 of language in transnational culture.

Symbolic Meanings of Spanish in Salsa Lyrics from Orquestra de la Luz In contemporary Western urban contexts, salsa is a music and dance style enjoyed by people from many different backgrounds, in many different fashions. Images associated with salsa can be quite different; very common, however, are connections with touristy images of fun, sunshine, liveliness, and holiday. Salsa is usually seen as related to the Spanish-speaking world, even in contexts where salsa is not danced as part of the heritage culture. Yet, many salsa ‘aficionados’, even professional dancers, have no accurate knowledge of the origins of salsa.12 The dance is sometimes related to Spain (where it does not originate) or to Cuba (where most of its predecessors stem from, but this is only half the story), while some simply call it a ‘Latin’ dance. Salsa is based on a number of African and European dances that, since the eighteenth century, have been fused in colonial Caribbean contexts, particularly in Cuba. Without the slave trade and colonial exploitation of Africans in the Americas, salsa as it exists today would not have developed. The fusion of AfroCuban culture with European practices is a defining element of salsa and also of

9

Miriam Meyerhoff, Introducing Sociolinguistics (London: Routledge, 2006): 116. Ben Rampton, “Crossing,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (2000): 55. 11 Jan Blommaert, “Sociolinguistic Scales,” Intercultural Pragmatics 4.1 (March 2007): 2. 12 See also Britta Schneider, “Multilingual Cosmopolitanism and Monolingual Commodification. Language Ideologies in Transnational Salsa Communities,” Language in Society 39.5 (November 2010): 647–68. 10

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its ancestors. This fusion has been going on for over two hundred years.13 In the second half of the twentieth century, the isolation of communist Cuba and the Puerto Rican population in the U SA “would eventually provide a creative space for Latinos [sic] within the United States to develop U.S.-based dance.”14 It is in this space that contemporary salsa has been developed. Salsa appeared in the mid-1960s in New York and not only fused European and African elements but blended Cuban dance/music with jazz styles, as Hispanics and African Americans came together in New York music clubs and dance halls.15 The appearance of salsa in the 1960s and 1970s is also linked to a political movement. Hispanics in the U SA , inspired by the Black Panthers,16 were engaged in advocating Latino/a pride in order to fight racism in the U SA and to foster cultural consciousness of Latin Americans.17 “Born as an expression of Puerto Rican selfawareness and New York Latino pride,”18 salsa had a strong political message at the beginning. Violence on the streets, ghetto life, experiences of inequality, American imperialism, and memories of a lost home are thus topics of early salsa tracks.19 Today, the political background of salsa and also salsa’s African roots are almost completely invisible in the commercialized varieties of salsa music, also called Salsa Romántica, that have become popular since the 1990s. The loss of political connotations of salsa has mainly to do with its commercialization. The growing number of U S Latinas and Latinos led to a marked increase in advertising in Spanish; thus, the number of radio channels in Spanish grew – and, with this, the opportunity to produce and sell Latin-based music in Spanish.20 Despite its political history, 1990s productions moved away from Latin culture signifying barrio life; salsa was now promoted as romantic but lively dance music for a mainly Latin audience.

13

Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Lanham M D : Lexington, 2006):

ch.1. 14

Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Salsa and Its Transnational Moves, 49. Lise Waxer, “Situating Salsa: Latin Music at the Crossroads,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. 16 Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2004). 17 Peter Manuel, Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1995): 73. 18 Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Salsa and its Transnational Moves (Lanham M D : Lexington, 2006): 54. 19 Lise Waxer, “Situating Salsa: Latin Music at the Crossroads,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. 20 Lise Waxer, “Situating Salsa: Latin Music at the Crossroads,” 9. 15

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Since the 1990s, salsa has become popular among the U S American white middle classes and its success here has influenced the distribution of salsa to a worldwide audience. In these global contexts, salsa often symbolizes (panLatin) ethnic identity, while in many Latin American countries, it has class connotations and is considered to be of working class origin.21 In many places all around the world, salsa is now understood to be a Latin-derived music and dance whose audience is either Latin Americans, their descendants, or white people with an interest in Latin music. In Western countries, salsa, in comparison with hip-hop, rock or pop, has not completely melted into the mainstream music market. In this respect, many salsa productions are strongly reminiscent of constructions of ‘world music’ that are directed at mainly the white Western middle class. It is still linked to an ‘ethnic’ (Latin) background but has found a niche within Western white mainstream music culture. The language Spanish remains the medium of communication in most salsa songs, irrespective of the ethnic origin of the musicians and their audience. Thus, as the music style has become part of local nightlife cultures all around the world, there are salsa contexts where no native Spanish-speakers are found. Nevertheless, salsa songs are listened to and produced predominantly in Spanish. One of the most famous non-Hispanic salsa bands is Orquestra de la Luz, a Japan-based salsa band (http://laluz.jp/). The group was founded in the early 1990s, disbanding in 1999. Although the group became popular throughout the world, including in Latin America, its salsa productions are not directed primarily at a Latin audience. The use of Spanish thus cannot be understood in ethnic terms; it is not a matter of Spanish-speakers expressing their ethnic identity through the language. Interestingly, the Orquesta is “composed of Japanese musicians who do not speak Spanish but sing in Spanish.”.22 Spanish here does link up with ethnic authenticity in Latin American music but not in the traditional framework where language relates to ethnic identity. All in all, this “is a group that, by its very presence, has destabilized the value of salsa music as nationalist marker and as product of cultural essentialism.”23 While, during the 1990s, the Orquesta destabilized cultural essentialism through its non-Latin origin, it is noticeable that reference to ethnic authenticity is central to the group’s stage performance. Constructions of authenticity can be inferred from the dance, the clothing, the gestures24 or the names that 21

Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover N H : Wesleyan U P , 1998): 65. 22 Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 74. 23 Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 74. 24 Consult, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvF5amY3Wc4&feature=related.

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some band members give themselves (e.g., Carlos). The desire to be as ‘Latin’ as possible is also reflected in language-use. Spanish, in the songs of the Orquesta, is used in a standardized form and there is no code-switching (e.g., with Japanese). This language choice has to be interpreted as a particular form of language crossing, as, indeed, it is the “use of a language or variety that, in one way or another, feels anomalously ‘other’.”25 From the language-use of the group alone, it is impossible to detect that the members of the band are Japanese (again, note that national identity is understood as discursively constructed). It is only in some instances of the lyrics that the native identity of the musicians comes into play, as in the song “Salsa es mi energía”: Oigan los salseros: Aunque yo sea japonés, siento esta música sabrosa en mi sangre. Para gozar. [Listen, Salseros, although I am Japanese I feel this delicious music in my blood. To enjoy.]

While the whole text is in standard Latin-American Spanish, only the last phrase, “Para gozar,” is the use of a colloquial expression that is often found in salsa music, but is not exclusive to it. Japanese singers sing in standard LatinAmerican Spanish; they do not produce a hybrid form of language, and on stage it is only their phenotype that marks them as ‘other’, as non-Latin. Thus, the language-use here seems to be part of mimicry of what is imagined to be ‘authentic’ Latin culture. The term ‘mimicry’ is customarily used in postcolonial discourse to refer to “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”.26 In postcolonial contexts, the term denotes, often pejoratively, subordinated, colonized subjects who mimic their colonizers, whereas in the present instance Japanese singers mimic a music style, including the language, that is associated with an ‘other’ and ‘exotic’ culture. The social hierarchies of postcolonial contexts are, in a way, inverted, as Japanese singers performing mimicry of Latin American culture cannot be understood as endorsing a form of appropriation ‘from below’. The cultural essentialism that is questioned through the existence of the group is simultaneously reconstructed through linguistic purism as well as on the level of content, where the mentioning of “sangre” (blood) represents a reference to discourses of cultural essentialism. As pointed out above, salsa originally had a working-class background and was related to a discourse of resistance, while, in Japan, but also other ‘white’ contexts, it appeals to a middle-class audience. Accordingly, the lyrics of salsa 25

Ben Rampton, “Crossing,” 55. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 126. 26

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songs of the Orquesta typically do not deal with a ghetto life-style or experiences of exclusion but relate to peace, love, ecological awareness, and global fraternity.27 The ‘clean’ character of the text is reflected in the ‘clean’ character of the language, which complies with standard Spanish. Discourses of resistance and of musical hybridity, originally interwoven with salsa, become invisible in the context of salsa production and consumption by a global (‘white’?) middle class. While the language use in all songs of the Orquesta is limited to standardized Spanish, there are several examples of song lyrics that problematize the cultural origin of the singers. The song “Somos diferentes” (‘We are different’, from the album Somos diferentes), for example, is ostensibly about a couple who cannot overcome their differences and thus cannot maintain their love: Tenemos que olvidarnos de este amor Porque un amor así no puede ser. Somos diferentes ya lo ves Esta verdad destroza el corazón. [We must forget this love because such a love cannot be. We are different, as you can see, This truth destroys the heart.]

According to Aparicio, however, the text has a double meaning and can also be interpreted as a reference to the cultural origin of the group, which is different from what is expected of salsa musicians. The song is directed at an audience that is critical of non-native performers of salsa. This is confirmed by a text passage in the second half of the song: Aunque nos critiquen somos diferentes cantamos con amor al publico que nos quiere. [Despite criticism, we are different we sing with love to those who love us.]28

27

Shuhei Hosokawa, “Salsa no tiene fronteras: Orquesta de la Luz and the Globalization of Popular Music,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 289–312. 28 Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 74–76.

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The passage functions like a response to essentialist critique that might be directed at the group; at the same time, it is fascinating to observe the adherence to what is constructed as ‘true’ Latin norms, which is again indicated by the use of standard Spanish exclusively. The appropriation of exoticism through the employment of standard (LatinAmerican) Spanish can be interpreted as part of the performance of a particular class identity. As has been observed by the cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, access to ‘other’ cultural norms can function as a marker of social superiority.29 Hannerz calls this knowledge of ‘other’ semiotic systems ‘cosmopolitanism’. In this understanding, cosmopolitanism is defined as an interest in the ‘Other’ that enables access to a cultural meta-discourse. The construction of a transnational middle class here is related to the ability to show expertise in ‘other’ cultures, which, paradoxically, are constructed as ‘pure’, static entities. The construction of such cosmopolitan values thus partly relies on the construction of essentialism. Performers from the Orquesta aim to be as ‘Latin’ as possible; and although they deconstruct ethnic essentialism through their very presence, they simultaneously reconstruct ethnic boundaries by mimicking ethnic authenticity. The purism in such exocentricist cultural productions, however, has not been discussed solely in terms of being rooted in the desire to construct transnational cosmopolitan values. As Shuhei Hosokawa points out,30 the purism that is found in the performance of Orquesta de la Luz can also be interpreted as an effect of Japanese modernization. Contemporary Japanese mainstream culture is characterized by syncretism, as the capitalist order that has dominated the outer fabric of the country’s social structure since the second half of the twentieth century at the latest (as a result of the U S military occupation – though the ‘westernization’ of the Japanese military and educational system dates from the nation’s respect for Bismarckian Germany from the 1880s onwards). This has produced a mixing of traditional Japanese culture with elements of Western culture. According to Hosokawa, the ability to keep Japanese and non-Japanese cultural elements apart expresses ties to a social middle class. It is very likely that the national discourse that fosters cultural purism in certain social strata is here interlocked with a transnational discourse of cosmopolitanism, so that a ‘pure’ performance – linguistic and otherwise – is reinforced through discourses on both the national and the transnational “scale.” 31 29

Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” in Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, ed. Ulf Hannerz (London: Routledge, 1996): 102–11. 30 Shuhei Hosokawa, “Salsa no tiene fronteras,” 302. 31 See Jan Blommaert, “Sociolinguistic Scales,” Intercultural Pragmatics 4.1 (March 2007): 1–19.

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To summarize: the symbolic functions of Spanish in the song lyrics of the Orquesta de la Luz can be described as a performance of ethnic authenticity that is appropriated by non-Spanish speakers. This appropriation, next to the fun that it brings with it, expresses a particular social position. Middle-class values are constructed through the performers’ ability to mimic ‘other’ cultures, which shows their ability to create a distance from their culture and language of origin – fundamentally, the ability to construct a meta-discourse on cultural semiotic systems and to free the performers from the constraints of traditional Japanese rectitude. Simultaneously, in the Japanese national context, expressions of cultural purism relate to social superiority, too, as cultural syncretism has become part of everyday national culture. Thus, the language Spanish here functions as a class marker that links the language to national and transnational upper-middle classes. This function of Spanish can also be found in other transnational salsa contexts.32 Yet, Spanish as an expression of social superiority contrasts strongly with the functions of Spanish in the second music style that is analysed in this chapter – reggaetón.

Symbolic Meanings of Reggaetón Lyrics from Daddy Yankee and N.O.R.E. Reggaetón music is based on reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, and several Latin styles and represents the more recent hybrid forms of Latin music, where Latin and U S -American sounds and styles are intermingled. It has its roots in the transnational Latin-American space, and its most famous predecessors are found in Panama and Puerto Rico. Similar to salsa, reggaetón is transnational in origin, without “any single specifiable place of origin, with no cuna (cradle) in the sense of a ‘hood’ or even national setting from which it sprang.”33 One source is Panama, where, in the early-twentieth century, a high number of Jamaicans were recruited as workers building the Canal.34 In the 1970s, through family ties, reggae music was brought to Panama and reggae in Spanish was produced, which counts as one of the predecessors of reggaetón. In its socio-political

32

For similar observations relating to Germany and Australia, see Britta Schneider, Salsa, Language and Transnationalism (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2014). 33 Juan Flores, “Foreword,” in Reggaeton, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall & Deborah Pacini Hernández (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2009): x. 34 Wayne Marshall, “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and Transnation in Reggaeton,” Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008): 133.

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grounding, reggaetón shares the central concerns of reggae: namely, critique of social inequality and the problematization of race-based conflict.35 The problematization of racial issues is a topic also shared with hip-hop music; however, reggaetón is, at the same time, defined through rivalry with U S hip-hop. This rivalry indicates the tensions between people of Latin descent and African Americans in the U SA , which, due to demographic change, have become more obvious in recent years.36 Reggaetón as such emerged in the late1990s and is thus a relatively new genre (and related set of cultural practices) strongly marked both by a particular approach to musical style (e.g., dancehall’s boom-ch-boom-chick as reshaped by urban Puerto Rican sensibilities and informed by a fusion with hip-hop) and a relation to market (i.e., explicitly commercial, courting a wide audience).37

One central element of reggaetón music is a particular beat or ‘riddim’.38 This riddim is called dembow and is based on a 1991 recording by Shabba Ranks. It appears in the majority of reggaetón songs and is constitutive of the music style.39 Another significant element of reggaetón culture is a particular dance style, perreo (doggy-style), which, as many of the lyrics show, stands out for its sexually explicit character. The performance of gender identity is, as in salsa, an important element of the music style and is here also sexually explicit, and forms of ‘hyper-masculinity’ and ‘hyper-femininity’ are produced.40 While reggaetón used to be sub-cultural and was grounded in a racial community, it is, 35

Wayne Marshall, “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and Transnation in Reggaeton,” Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008): 133. 36 Wayne Marshall, Raquel Z. Rivera & Deborah Pacini Hernandez, “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” in Reggaeton, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall & Deborah Pacini Hernández (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2009): 9. 37 Marshall, Rivera & Pacini Hernandez, “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” 8. 38 A ‘riddim’ is “an autonomous accompanimental track, typically based on an ostinato (which often includes melodic instrumentation as well as percussion)”; Peter Manuel & Wayne Marshall, “The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, and Ownership in Jamaican Dancehall,” Popular Music 25.3 (October 2006): 447. 39 Wayne Marshall, “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and Transnation in Reggaeton,” Lied und populäre Kultur Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008): 133. 40 See, for example, music videos on YouTube. An analysis of the reason for these sexually explicit gendered identities has to be made elsewhere; resistance to U S middle class norms, commercialization (also of human bodies) and an ‘overdoing’ of gender identity in the context of racial discrimination may be among the causes, see also Frances R. Aparicio, “La Lupe, La India, and Celia: Towards a Feminist Genealogy of Salsa Music,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 135–60.

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today, “one of the most popular youth musics across the Americas.41 Songs like “Oye mi canto” (‘hear my song’, N.O.R.E., 2004) or “Gasolina” (Daddy Yankee, 2005) (see also below), furthermore, have become popular worldwide and enjoyed success in the pop charts of many countries. Despite its transnational character and its global success, most songs are sung in Spanish and not in English (or, as we will see presently, in a mix of Spanish and English). This linguistic reference to reggaetón’s cultural background – as based in the Hispanic part of the Americas – has to be regarded as central to the style’s political message as ‘sub-cultural’ or ‘underground’, but instead of being an instance of language conveying ethnicity, it expresses the intersections of ethnicity and class in the American context. In contrast to salsa’s 1970s message, which demanded a pan-Latin consciousness, reggaetón’s ‘Latin’ character should not be overemphasized. Although the lyrics are sung in Spanish, with regard to cultural politics (race and class and transnational linkages), reggaetón’s connections to hip-hop and reggae are more relevant than national or pan-Latin identities.42 It has been argued that the rise of reggaetón is also related to public debates on immigration issues in the U SA , which have given Latin people in the U SA , but also in the rest of the Americas, a particular (lower) social status.43 That the use of Spanish here cannot be interpreted as expressing national sentiment is also indicated by the fact that it is the first time since the 1950s ‘mambo craze’ that “a music whose lyrics are in Spanish and whose aesthetics are Latin Caribbean has been embraced not only by a panLatino but mainstream audience as well – both African American and AngloAmerican.”44 Reggaetón has not been commodified as ‘world music’, thus “lacks much of an exotic veneer,”45 as it is not a ‘white’, ‘culturally interested’ middle class to whom the music is marketed and it has more of a commercial character – it is more aligned with U S styles. The style has thus been described as a “cosmopolitan musical hybrid”; obviously, the definition of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is here different from Hannerz’s, where it denotes the construction of static cultural entities to which social elites may have access. Here, cosmopolitanism means, rather, a

41

Wayne Marshall, “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo,” 132. Marshall, Rivera & Pacini Hernandez, “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” 8. 43 Leila Cobo, “What the Number Tell Us: Latin Retail. Not as Rosy, or Maybe Not as Dire, as You Think,” Billboard 12 (20 January 2007), http://www.billboard.com/#/archive (accessed 4 May 2011). 44 Marshall, Rivera & Pacini Hernandez, “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” 3. 45 Wayne Marshall, “The Rise of Reggaeton,” The Boston Phoenix (19 January 2006): http: //thephoenix.com/boston/music/1595-rise-of-reggaeton/ (accessed 4 May 2011). 42

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mixing of cultural elements from different geographical origins and thus a deconstructing of cultural essentialism. The deconstruction of essentialism can also be found in reggaetón’s song lyrics. Symbolic meanings of the Spanish language contrast with the Spanishlanguage discourse in salsa environments, as Spanish here does not express ethnic ‘authenticity’ or folklore. Although the majority of songs are in Spanish, discourses of linguistic purism are not adhered to. I will illustrate the contrasting symbolic meanings of Spanish in the following by adducing two of the most popular reggaetón songs, “Gasolina” and “Oye mi canto,” mentioned earlier. In both songs, vernacular forms of Spanish and effects of language contact between Spanish and English are frequently found. Through vernacular forms, the mixing of Spanish and English and the adaptation of hip-hop style (rap singing, movements, clothing, etc.), Spanish is here not related to constructions of traditional ethnic identity but, rather, to the ethnic-class intersection of Latin people in the Americas. To a European audience, “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee is probably the bestknown song, as it was a big summer hit in 2005, in many European countries as well.46 The first section and the chorus read: (Duro!) Mami, ya yo se que tu no te me vas a quitar (Duro!) Lo que me gusta es que tu te dejas llevar (Duro!) Todos los weekend’es ella sale a vacilar (Duro!) Mi gata no para de janguear, porque A ella le gusta la gasolina (Da me mas gasolina!) Como le encanta la gasolina (Da me mas gasolina!) [(Hard!) Mummy, I know that you will not leave me (Hard!) What I like is that you let yourself go (Hard!) Every weekend she goes out to have fun (Hard!) My cat doesn’t stop hanging out because She likes gasoline (Give me more gasoline) How she loves gasoline (Give me more gasoline)]

The song starts with a call to ‘play it hard’ (“Duro!”), which is repeated at the beginning of the following three lines and demonstrates the above-mentioned 46

For a visual impression, see videos on YouTube.

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connection between reggaetón to hip-hop music. The first reference is then made to “Mami,” which is a Latin-American colloquial pet name (used mainly in Central America) for female individuals.47 While this is unusual in other cultural contexts, the use of the term “Mami,” which originally relates to mothers, refers in the context of this song to a female lover. A feminist interpretation of this use of “Mami” would certainly be interesting; in any case, next to the female partner who is related to it, a secondary reference is also made to a particular cultural background in which this term is normally used (a transnational space that links the Caribbean with particular cultural contexts in the U SA ). It is not standardized forms of Spanish that employ “Mami” to refer to a female lover. Non-standard mixing of Spanish and English is found in the third line, where it says “todos los weekend’es.” “Weekend” is obviously a loan-word from English; the Spanish term is ‘fin de semana’. This loan-word here conforms to Spanish plural formation (-es), as a vowel is integrated. Another particularly interesting mix of English and Spanish is found in the word “janguear” in the fourth line. The word is pronounced [xaΓgear] and is a creation based on an English loanword.48 As in its English equivalent, it denotes “to hang out,” to spend time with friends and relax. The English word “hang” is here pronounced according to Spanish conventions [xaΓg], which is also indicated through the spelling ( is pronounced [x] in Spanish), and a Spanish verb ending is added [-ar], preceded by a linking vowel. This word is not part of standard Spanish and is expressive of youth subculture in the U SA . The expression of sub-cultural anti-hegemonic identity is also found in the song’s chorus. While the morphology of the words found in the chorus adheres to Spanish-language standards, the meaning of the word “gasolina” indicates the non-mainstream identity that is here expressed. The word denotes ‘gasoline’ in Spanish but in a metaphorical sense it can also denote ‘sperm’. The song thus has highly sexualized connotations, something that is, on the one hand, typical of reggaetón lyrics in general; on the other hand, it also expresses a refusal of taboos that exist in U S cultural norms (and indeed, it is a breach of the norms of many other cultures). The use of the Spanish language in this song does not express alignment with ‘authentic’ Hispanic cultures but is expressive of vernacular sub-culture, as it has developed in a transnational American space. As a second example of symbolic meanings of Spanish in reggaetón, I would like to introduce “Oye mi canto,”49 a song by N.O.R.E.,50 a New Yorker of Puerto 47

See also Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/ (accessed 4 May 2011). See, for example, Asihablamos.com., “Janguear,” http://www.asihablamos.com/word/palabra /Janguear.php (accessed 4 May 2011). 49 For a visual impression, see videos on YouTube. 48

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Rican and African-American descent, in cooperation with several other singers. As in “Gasolina,” the transcultural nature of the music does not take place only on the sonic level (melodies, rhythms, sounds) and in the outward appearance and movements of the singers and dancers, but also on the level of language. Here is the beginning of the song: If you Latino right now stand the fuck up! SBK (SBK )

Alive (alive we comin’ up!) With Nina Sky (Nina Sky wassup girls?) N.O.R.E and Tego (N.O.R.E., Tego) Gem Star (Gem Star) Big Nato (Big Nato) C’mon, C’mon…

Interestingly, the song starts with an English sentence, in which, however, the Latin community is exhorted to “stand up.” To “stand up” may be interpreted as a political message in the sense of ‘staying true’ to one’s own cultural background and proudly presenting oneself as “Latino.” The male-only form “Latino” indicates the ‘macho’ attitude of reggaetón culture, as female singers and dancers are not only frequently found in reggaetón but also play a vital part in this particular song. Sub-cultural norms show up in the use of the phrase “fuck up”; a marker of intensification that is also common in hip-hop and a taboo locution (or, by now, perhaps erstwhile-taboo verb) in standard American English. Each of the following lines is in a ‘call-and-response’ fashion (the response is here in round brackets) and they are all in English. “ SBK ” is a record label, while the other names all refer to reggaetón musicians who are co-actors in this song. Only the names “Tego” and “Nato” relate to the Hispanic background that all of the musicians mentioned have. All in all, the first section is an invitation to take part in the song and it is noticeable that this invitation is in English, partly in vernacular American English (“wassup?”). This shows that the musicians understand themselves as U S -based rather than as of Latin American nationality. Nevertheless, the next section brings Latin American nationality into play: Whoa…Whoa...Whoa...Whoa… What you say? Boriqua, Morena, Dominicano, Colombiano, 50

Apparently an acronym for ‘Niggers on the run eating’; see M T V ,“N.O.R.E. Full Biography,” http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/nore/artist.jhtml (accessed 4 May 2011). Note the reference to U S hip-hop culture through the term ‘nigger’.

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Boriqua, Morena, Dominicano, Colombiano, Oye mi canto.

After four words that do not have a clear content-related reference but are, rather, onomatopoeic sounds that fit into the rhythms of the song and introduce the following interrogative, this section starts with a question that is typical of hip-hop discourse (“What you say?”) as well as of gospel and soul before it. As we will see later, however, the question “What you say?” is, in the context of this song, not only a reference to hip-hop culture but also relates to issues of intercultural communication that reggaetón brings to the fore. The question is followed by references to Latin-American peoples. These are all in Spanish and sung by a group of female singers. “Boriqua” is a female of Puerto Rican descent, “Morena” is a reference to a ‘black’ Hispanic girl, “Dominicano” is a male of Dominican descent, and “Colombiano” a male of Columbian descent. Clearly, Latin-American heritage is here at the centre of attention and a form of pan-Latin consciousness is created by listing different Spanish terms that relate to Latin American nationalities and, in “Morena,” also to Latin Americans of a particular skin colour (possibly Afro-Latin). By listening to this song, speakers of Spanish are made to members of an ‘in-group’, as particularly the terms “Boriqua” and “Morena” cannot be understood by English-only speakers. The last line of this section, “Oye mi canto,” shows that the whole song is devoted to a panLatin community, as it is “Boriquas,” “Morenas,” Dominicans, and Colombians who are asked to listen. Yet, although it is Latin Americans who are here addressed, the first section of the song, which is in English, has made it clear that it is also, or maybe even primarily, Latin people in the U SA who are related to. The section thereafter seems, rather, to be directed at a non-Latin U S American audience and is delivered by N.O.R.E., the lead singer: You see, this is what they want, They want reggaeton, What? What? They want reggaeton!

The “You” that is here spoken to is an audience that does not know much about reggaetón and thus does not belong to the ‘in-group’. The sentence “You see, this is what they want” explains to this ‘out-group’ audience that “they” want reggaetón. Presumably, “they” are the ones who have been mentioned in the section preceding (Latin Americans of different origins, or Latinos/as in the U SA ) but this “they” may also include the singers who have sung the above section. The two questions afterwards “What? What?” take up the hip-hop style

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reference mentioned above, which is often accompanied by a particular arm movement, where both arms are moved upwards in an abrupt manner. However, it is here simultaneously a form of ‘double-voicing’,51 as the singer seems to speak with the voice of an outsider unfamiliar with reggaetón. The question “What?” is then answered by “They want reggaeton,” so that a mini-dialogue develops between the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’. It is certainly no accident that this section is in English rather than Spanish, as it is non-Hispanic newcomers to reggaetón who seem to be addressed. Yet, the following passage shows that the borders between reggaetón affiliates and ‘outsiders’ do not function according to the old ‘language and nation’ logic but by way of crossing ethnic borders. The following section is in Spanish, delivered by another male singer: Esta lo que quieren, Toma reggaetón. ¿Qué? Qué? Toma reggaetón. [This is what they want, Take reggaetón. What? What? Take reggaetón.]

The first line takes up the content of the English section above, “Esta lo que quieren” (“This is what they want”). It is a confirmation of the statement “They want reggaetón” from the section before. In the second line of this section – “Toma reggaetón” – the audience is invited to ‘take’ reggaetón or to listen to it. At this point, the borders between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, between English speakers and speakers of Spanish, become blurred. The question words “What? What?” are repeated in Spanish; obviously, there are also Spanish speakers who do not know what reggaetón is and who are enjoined to listen to it (“Toma reggaetón”). The discourse of reggaetón is not a discourse that runs along ethnic lines, as it has to be introduced to listeners of both Anglo and Hispanic descent (“What? What?,” “¿Qué? Qué?”). As reggaetón has become one of the most popular music styles in the U SA (see above), it can be assumed that many of its listeners are not of Hispanic descent. The question of who are “they” in the statement “They want reggaetón” in the section above becomes more difficult to answer. Maybe this “they” relates to a particular cultural sub-group instead of a group that is defined through ethnicity or language background? Maybe Span51

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: Uof Texas P, 1981): 324.

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ish is part of this sub-culture and expresses affiliation with it and not with Latin ethnicity? After it has been explained to the audience, whether of anglophone or hispanophone background, that reggaetón is what “they” (?) want, the main male singer, N.O.R.E., starts to sing about himself and, as in the two sections above, in a rap-like fashion: You see, I’m N.O.R.E. Keep my story, My story, I always kick it. ¿Qué? When I bone shorty I slap culo and listen. ¿Qué?

Again, there is a mix of English and Spanish; yet, English here dominates. N.O.R.E. asks the listener to remember his story, he declares that he will always “kick” it. As the content of this utterance is unclear, he himself produces a ‘double-voiced’ question “¿Qué?”(“What?”) and then produces a sentence that is even more difficult to understand for someone who is not acquainted with reggaetón culture. To “bone” is a vernacular term (via penile erection) for having sexual intercourse, while “shorty” is a term for an attractive female person.52 The second ‘double-voiced’ ”¿Qué?” is preceded by a mix of English with Spanish, as the term “culo” is a vernacular Spanish term for the buttocks. The sexualized content of the line constitutes a breach of taboos and the language-mixing here indicates that this particular use of Spanish symbolizes membership to American urban youth sub-culture, in which people of Latin descent have become central actors. In the rest of the song, there are various examples of sexual content and of language-mixing that express sub-cultural norms in a U S -American space with transnational ties. Obviously, the Spanish language in reggaetón does not represent ethnic folklore. Rather, the ethnic background of Latin Americans and of U S Latinos is referred to through the use of Spanish but, as it is mixed with English, this language-use here can be interpreted as a form of resistance to ethnic ascriptions by mainstream U S discourse, while U S hip-hop culture is appropriated in the performance of a hybrid Hurban (Hispanic Urban), innovative rather than traditional identity. Musicians in the U S context use Spanish and its references to the ‘Other’ in constructing an ‘underdog’ identity, parallelling the ghetto lifestyle as it is known from hip-hop discourse. The use of Spanish is here, rather, 52

For both terms, see Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/ (accessed 4 May 2011).

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the instrumentalization of ethnic traits in order to construct a specific identity that relates to U S discourse, while ‘authentic’ ethnic identity is of little importance. Nevertheless, it should be noted that all singers of the songs that have been analysed above do have family ties to Latin-American countries. As the community that is constructed through reggaetón is not a community that is based on ethnicity, it is difficult to employ the term ‘languagecrossing’ in this context. The singers of reggaetón songs do not use “a language or variety that, in one way or another, feels anomalously “other’.”53 They use languages and varieties of languages to which they have access in their U S American environment. And, as young people with a mainstream background are also part of the reggaetón movement, “we might also ask whether reggaeton’s moment in the mainstream suggests a more profound reordering of mainstream, margin, center and periphery.”54 To come back to the questions that were posed in the beginning of this chapter: what does such a re-ordering mean for the construction of language boundaries and linguistic communities in transnational culture?

Conclusion Language-use in transnational music styles is an aesthetic, social, and political practice that challenges and reconstructs paradigms of ethnic identity. Language is used to index diverse ways of belonging that are not confined to ethnic communities but take place at the intersections of ethnicity and class and play with local, national, and global discourses simultaneously. The construction of community on the basis of particular ‘languages’ has become precarious if using a ‘language’ indexes class membership rather than ethnicity – in Japanese salsa, Spanish represents social superiority, while it expresses lower-class status in U S -based reggaetón music. Furthermore, while the expression of class status through linguistic variation is not a new phenomenon, both examples show that multilingualism in transnational contexts leads to a multiplication of the possible meanings of using particular languages, as languages remain tied to the ethnic communities in which they originated but gain new meanings if used across traditional ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It is important to remark that, in both cases, Japanese salsa and reggaetón, the construction of difference through language-crossing but also through the mixing of languages is dependent on the existence of fixed categories. The deconstruction of essentialism is based on the existence of ethnicity and of lan53 54

Ben Rampton, “Crossing,” 55. Marshall, Rivera & Pacini Hernandez, “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” 3.

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guages that remain linked to ethnic identity. This apparent contradiction shows the following: What often seems to be overlooked in discussions of local, global and hybrid relations is the way in which the local may involve not only the take up of the global, or a localised form of cosmopolitanism, but also may equally be about the take up of local forms of static and monolithic identity and culture.55

In trying to understand the role of language in the construction of community and of cultural boundaries, it does not make sense to search for ‘authentic’ use of language or to construct a dichotomy of ‘local versus global’ forms of language-use. Rather, the sociolinguistic spaces that are constructed through the simultaneous presence of various languages and varieties in one locality, and the meanings that are transported through these, have to be analysed. The relationship between essentialism and deconstruction, between fixity and fluidity, needs to be considered in such contexts, as “one of the driving forces to be different and multiple and dynamic is the interaction between fixed and fluid cultural identities.”56 And, finally, it has to be acknowledged that the boundaries constructed through language today often transcend traditional communities – which can lead to a multiplication of possible symbolic meanings of languages.

W OR K S C I T E D Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Aparicio, Frances R. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover N H : Wesleyan U P , 1998). Aparicio, Frances R. “La Lupe, La India, and Celia: Towards a Feminist Genealogy of Salsa Music,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 135–60. Asihablamos.com. “Janguear,” http://www.asihablamos.com/word/palabra/Janguear .php (accessed 4 May 2011). Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: Uof Texas P , 1981). Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33. Blommaert, Jan. “Sociolinguistic Scales,” Intercultural Pragmatics 4.1 (March 2007): 1–19. 55

Emi Otsuji & Alastair Pennycook, “Metrolingualism: Fixity, Fluidity and Language in Flux,” International Journal of Multilingualism 7.3 (August 2009): 243–44. 56 Otsuji & Pennycook, “Metrolingualism,” 243.

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Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010). Cobo, Leila. “What the Number Tell Us: Latin Retail: Not as Rosy, or Maybe Not as Dire, as You Think,” Billboard 12 (20 January 2007), http://www.billboard.com/#/archive (accessed 4 May 2011). Flores, Juan. “Foreword,” in Reggaeton, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall & Deborah Pacini Hernández (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2009): ix–xiii. Gumperz, John J. Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982). Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” in Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, ed. Ulf Hannerz (London: Routledge, 1996): 102–11. Hosokawa, Shuhei. “Salsa no tiene fronteras: Orquesta De La Luz and the Globalization of Popular Music,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 289–312. Hymes, Dell. “Linguistic Problems in Defining the Concept of ‘Tribe’,” in Essays on the Problem of the Tribe: Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. June Helm (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1968): 23–48. Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994). Manuel, Peter. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Philadelphia PA : Temple U P , 1995). Manuel, Peter, & Wayne Marshall. “The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, and Ownership in Jamaican Dancehall,” Popular Music 25.3 (October 2006): 447–70. Marshall, Wayne. “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and Transnation in Reggaeton,” Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008): 131–51. Marshall, Wayne. “The Rise of Reggaeton,” The Boston Phoenix (19 January 2006): http: //thephoenix.com/boston/music/1595-rise-of-reggaeton/ (accessed 4 May 2011). Marshall, Wayne, Raquel Z. Rivera & Deborah Pacini Hernández. “Introduction: Reggaeton’s Socio-Sonic Circuitry,” in Reggaeton, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall & Deborah Pacini Hernández (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2009): 1–16. Meyerhoff, Miriam. Introducing Sociolinguistics (London: Routledge, 2006). M T V . “N.O.R.E Full Biography,” http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/nore/artist.jhtml (accessed 4 May 2011). Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore MD : Johns Hopkins U P , 2004). Otsuji, Emi, & Alastair Pennycook. “Metrolingualism: Fixity, Fluidity and Language in Flux,” International Journal of Multilingualism 7.3 (August 2009): 240–54. Pennycook, Alastair. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (London: Routledge, 2007). Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Lanham MD : Lexington, 2006). Rampton, Ben. “Crossing,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (2000): 54–56. Rampton, Ben. Speech Community (Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 15; London: King’s College, 2000).

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Schneider, Britta. “Multilingual Cosmopolitanism and Monolingual Commodification: Language Ideologies in Transnational Salsa Communities,” Language in Society 39.5 (November 2010): 647–68. Schneider, Britta. Salsa, Language and Transnationalism (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2014). Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/ (accessed 4 May 2011). Waxer, Lise. “Situating Salsa: Latin Music at the Crossroads,” in Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 3–22.

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Language Crossings in Transnational Music Cultures Bottom-Up Promotion of Kiswahili Through the Music Industry in Uganda

J UDE S SE MPU UMA

Introduction

A

K I S W A H I L I I S A L I N G U A F R A N C A in East Africa, its spread in Uganda is limited. Right from the colonial era to the present day, there have been efforts to promote its wider use in Uganda by different governments. The top-down enforcement of Kiswahili through government policies failed to consider the needs of the social groups that determine the promotion of any language in the country. This chapter illustrates the various attempts by various governments to promote Kiswahili and factors that have hindered its spread. It emphasizes the bottom-up promotion of the language due to the socio-economic rewards it offers to its users. In Uganda, it is the music-industry community that is pioneering the boosting of Kiswahili in the country. LTHOUGH

Kiswahili in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Uganda Kiswahili was first used in pre-colonial Ugandan societies as a contact language by the Arab traders, who exchanged firearms for slaves and ivory with the indigenous Ugandan kings and chiefs. Southall and Gutkind point out that Ahmed bin Ibrahim El Amen was the first Arab to reach the capital of the Buganda kingdom during the reign of Kabaka (king) Ssuna in about 1844.1 In Buganda, the king and his chiefs were those involved in trade and thus developed high proficiency in Kiswahili. The general public, however, had no need to learn the language. Moreover, they discredited it as a language of slave 1

A.D. Southall & P.C. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and Its Suburbs (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1957): 2.

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traders who disorganized their social and economic welfare. Although the Arabs were mainly interested in trade, they also used Kiswahili to spread the Islamic religion. Since Kiswahili was a well-established lingua franca on the east coast, it was used by the first Europeans to enter the interior of East Africa. These included explorers, missionaries, businesspeople, and colonial administrators. Between 1862 and 1888,2 Kiswahili was the contact language used by Europeans in their dealings with Kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda. Missionaries first used Kiswahili to teach the Gospel to the king and his chiefs in Buganda. However, after the religious wars in the kingdom (between Christians and Muslims in 1889) missionaries discouraged the use of Kiswahili , associating it with Islam. They started using local languages, beginning with Luganda, to spread the Gospel.3 In 1897, George Pilkington (a member of the Church Missionary Society) had produced a Luganda grammar and translated part of the Bible into Luganda.4 At the same time, the Reverends Roscoe and Rowlings had produced a number of works in this language as well. Catholic missionaries also played a major role in discouraging the spread of Kiswahili in Buganda. For instance, John Waliggo points out that the basic books for catholic teaching: Catechism, Prayer-book, Lives of the Saints, Words of Meditation, etc. were fully revised to remove the many Latin, Arabic and Swahili words and expressions which had been included from the earliest days of Christianity in the country. The significant move from Isa Masiya to Yezu Kristu indicated a transition from the old to the new generation of Catholics.5

He goes on to note that “when new areas were opened up outside Buganda, Bishop Streicher used Ganda catechists and Luganda as the official Church

2

John Speke was the first European and explorer to meet the king Mutesa I of Buganda kingdom at Banda in 1862. He was followed by Sir Henry Stanley, who met him at Rubaga in 1875. These were followed by missionaries – the Rev. Alexander Mackay (Anglican) in 1877 and Fr Simeon Lourdel and Br Amans Delmas (Catholics) in 1879. Business and imperial representatives from Britain and Germany, Captain Frederick Lugard and Carl Peters, arrived in Buganda in 1888. 3 Cf. Yves Tourigny, So Abundant a Harvest: The Catholic Church in Uganda 1879–1979 (London: Longman & Todd, 1978): 68. 4 Anthony Low, The Mind of Buganda: Documents of the Modern History of an African Kingdom (London: Heinemann, 1971): 114; A.B. Kasozi, “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda: A Historical Survey,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 26. 5 John Mary Waliggo, A History of African Priests: Katigondo Major Seminary 1911–1986 (Nairobi: Matianum Press Consultants, 1988): 23.

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language.”6 Bishop Streicher further discouraged the teaching of Kiswahili in both the minor seminary at Bukalasa and the major seminary at Katigondo when major seminarians who had acquired English and Kiswahili language skills began to desert the seminary to find employment in the social and administrative sectors. His directive stated that “English and Swahili were no longer to be taught in both minor and major seminary until a candidate had received major orders.”7 Further chances of elevating Kiswahili to the status of a lingua franca in the Uganda protectorate were reduced because the colonial system supported the eminence of the Baganda and their language at the expense of other ethnic groups. Carol Scotton, for instance, points out that “the protectorate officials found the missionary educated Baganda useful as administrative agents and sent them to positions of authority throughout the country.”8 The Baganda were referred to by both early missionaries and colonial administrators of the protectorate as the most valuable servants of the church, state, and commerce [..., hence,] adopting Kiswahili would reduce the dominance of the Baganda in Uganda whereas the adoption of their language would enhance their prestige.9

By the end of the 1920s, British administrators tried to promote Kiswahili in Uganda. As the need to federate British East African colonies into one political entity arose, they wanted to have a common language that could be used throughout the entire British territory. The most drastic move to promote Kiswahili in the protectorate was made by Governor William Gowers in 1927 when he issued a directive to that effect: In non-Bantu areas, Kiswahili was to be used in all elementary and normal schools; in all Bantu areas, Kiswahili was to be introduced at higher levels in position of English; the government would withhold grants in aid to all schools that did not comply with the Kiswahili policy; the government promised to pay teachers of Kiswahili; colonial officers who mastered Kiswahili would be paid a bonus; and the government

6

Waliggo, A History of African Priests, 104. A History of African Priests, 21. 8 Carol Myers Scotton, “Language in East Africa: Linguistic Patterns and Political Ideologies,” in Advances in the Study of Multilingualism, ed. Joshua A Fishman (New York, Mouton, 1978): 725. 9 Kasozi. “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda,” 27. 7

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would announce its intention of discouraging Luganda in favour of Kiswahili.10

The directives by Governor Gowers were opposed by both missionaries11 and the Baganda. The Baganda in particular resisted the inclusion of the Buganda and Uganda protectorate in the federation of East Africa, since they feared that the merging of the Uganda protectorate and Kenyan colony would eventually lead to the domination of the protectorate by colonists from Kenya. Both missionaries and the Baganda rejected the teaching of Kiswahili in Buganda. Instead, they continued to use Luganda in elementary schools and English at higher levels of education.12 For instance, Ali Mazrui points out that in Uganda “education was increasingly equated with the ability to speak English.”13 He goes on to observe that the promotion of English as a language and medium of instruction in Uganda was encouraged not by the British administration but by the missionaries and the Baganda. For example, “some of the earliest students of the English language and the British culture were Bantu princes and sons of aristocrats in southern Uganda.”14 The promotion of Kiswahili by Governor Gowers was not intended to benefit the people in the Uganda protectorate but the British colonial authorities in all of East Africa. From the organizational point of view, elevating Kiswahili as a lingua franca would enable colonial officials to learn only one African language that could be used throughout the entire British East African territory. In addition, locally recruited officials could more easily be appointed in any part of the region. With Kiswahili as lingua franca, an Acholi could command an army consisting of Akamba, Baganda, and Wadigo [thus] both boundaries between tribes and boundaries between colonies within the same region would no longer need to be constraining factors in recruitment.15

10

“Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda,” 25. The resistance to the directive of the governor by the missionaries was due to the fact that Western education in Uganda was essentially the initiative of Christian missionaries. They were therefore not ready to follow colonial administrative directives without being consulted, because of the implications that such directives could have for their missionary activities. 12 Low. The Mind of Buganda, 89; Scotton, “Language in East Africa,” 726. 13 Ali Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975): 55. 14 Ali Mazrui & Alamini Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Kampala: Fountain, 1998): 141. 15 Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language, 130. 11

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After World War II, there was a change in British colonial language policy. From 1948 up to independence in 1962, the pro-Kiswahili policy was abandoned. The focus shifted to promoting English in the education system. In 1952, Kiswahili was eliminated from the few schools where it had been used as a medium of instruction. Furthermore, the 1953–55 Royal Commission recommended that Kiswahili should not be taught as a second language to children whose early education had been in the vernacular. Hence, by the time Uganda gained her independence, in 1962, Kiswahili had been completely removed from the education system and more emphasis was put on the teaching of English, which many people in the country saw as a language of modern skills, new technologies, better opportunities, and wide communication. For example, Sserwaniko Kkulubya, in defending the use of English rather than Kiswahili in Uganda before the British parliament in May 1931, emphasized that English is “the key to everything.”16 Although Kiswahili early found use as a contact language by Arab and European traders, explorers, missionaries, colonial administrators, and the kings and chiefs of Uganda, its development as a lingua franca was, as indicated above, hindered by missionaries, who saw it as a language that was promoting Islam rather than Christianity. Luganda, a language of the prominent ethnic community in the protectorate, was therefore encouraged as the language of evangelization and colonial control of other parts of Uganda through the indirect-rule policy. Efforts by the British administrators to promote Kiswahili were thus resisted by missionaries and the Baganda. Furthermore, after World War II, British language policies changed from promoting Kiswahili to promoting English. With no native speakers in the country, Kiswahili was left with no lobby to fight for its use in the multilingual Ugandan society on the eve of independence. Moreover, as Mazrui observes, Kiswahili was associated with a proletariat who used it as a lingua franca in their dealings with other ethnic groups. It was thus not a language Ugandans would be proud to acquire.17

Postcolonial Ugandan Governments and the Promotion of Kiswahili In independent Uganda, there were efforts to promote Kiswahili at an early stage. In 1962, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC ) passed a resolution urging greater use of Kiswahili. The move to boost Kiswahili in independent Uganda was not limited to politicians. It involved people from other sectors of society. For instance, the Uganda Language Society, at a conference organized at Kyam16 17

Low, The Mind of Buganda, 90. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language, 61.

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bogo in 1970, recommended that Kiswahili be introduced as the national language. In the same year, President Obote announced his government’s intention to introduce Kiswahili as one of the compulsory languages to be taught in Ugandan schools.18 However, his government was overthrown by the military led by General Idi Amin Dada in 1971. Although the UPC and its leader Milton Obote had promised to boost the use of Kiswahili in the country, they never honoured their promise. As Mazrui observes, Obote even failed to fulfil his promise “to introduce Swahili on Radio Uganda which he had considered doing for many years.”19 Obote’s government continued to promote English by making it a compulsory language in the school environment. Pupils and students were discouraged to use their mother tongues at school. During the military regime of Idi Amin Dada from 1971 to 1979, there was a remarkable promotion of Kiswahili, especially among the army and police. Mazrui remarks that “on taking over power in Uganda, the soldiers decided that one of their first policies was indeed to introduce Swahili in the mass media of the country.”20 Kiswahili was used on Radio Uganda and Uganda Television and became the only African language used to broadcast news bulletins. In 1973, twenty district representatives convened at the International Conference Centre, Kampala, to decide on which of the two languages (Kiswahili and Luganda) should be declared a national language. Twelve districts voted in favour of Kiswahili and eight for Luganda. Basing his decision on the results of the vote, Idi Amin, on 7 August 1973, declared Kiswahili a national language21. Whereas the majority of district representatives preferred Kiswahili to Luganda as a national language, a study by Ladefoged et al.22 revealed that 39% of Ugandans could hold a conversation in Luganda in 1972. This percentage was higher than that for Kiswahili (35%). In Uganda, Luganda is a native language of a powerful ethnic group (Baganda) which has been historically widespread and used as a trade and lingua franca throughout southern Uganda. Furthermore, the Amin government did not allocate resources to teach the language in schools. In addition, the limited use of Kiswahili in Uganda in 1970s can also be attributed to its association with the brutal military regime that terrorized the general public. For example, Mazrui reveals that proficiency in Kiswahili be-

18

Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language, 142. The Political Sociology of the English Language, 142. 20 The Political Sociology of the English Language, 143. 21 Kasozi, “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda,” 26. 22 Peter Ladefoged, Ruth Glick & Clive Criper, “Introduction” to Language in Uganda, ed. Ladefoged, Glick & Criper (London: Oxford U P , 1972): 25. 19

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came a standard test to determine the level of humiliation to be inflicted by the army and police: I heard one soldier say to another that we were to have our Swahili tested. We suspected that if we failed the test the treatment given us might have been different. [...] A linguistic test had begun to be used as a way of determining the degree of humiliation to which a captured person was to be subjected. Several years later, a Jamaican colleague of mine was subjected to severe manhandling by soldiers. [...] Again one of the factors behind the severity of the treatment he got was that he failed to pass the test of Swahili.23

In the 1970s, the Ugandan military force was predominately manned by people from northern Uganda who continued to use Kiswahili as the lingua franca of the military from the colonial legacy. The southern ethnic groups, especially the Baganda, refused to use Kiswahili during the colonial era. Idi Amin’s military government was overthrown in 1979 with the help of the African Union, led by Tanzanian forces. Even though the forces that removed Amin from power were backed by Tanzania and used Kiswahili, Ugandans, particularly those in the southern and central regions, did not acknowledge Kiswahili as a language of the liberators. Moreover, these forces supported the return of Obote to participate in the presidential elections held in 1980. In addition, the military from Tanzania destroyed property in areas of the Masaka, Mbarara, and Rakai districts in southern Uganda. After the disputed 1980 general elections, different rebel groups such as the National Resistance Movement (NRM ) headed by Yoweri Museveni and the Uganda Freedom Movement (UF M ) headed by Andrew Kayira organized themselves to fight Obote’s second government. These two groups recruited their members from southern and central Uganda and the fighting took place mainly in Buganda, in what is referred to as the Luwero Triangle. Most of the young people recruited by the National Resistance Army/Movement ( NRA /M ) were Baganda and Banyarwanda who had immigrated to Buganda and assimilated to Kiganda culture and the Luganda language. The then crown prince of Buganda, Ronald Mutebi, is also believed to have visited the rebel camps to boost the morale of the fighters. For the first time, Luganda became the language of the military (in the form of rebel groups). On coming to power, these military forces continued to use Luganda. The use of Luganda by the NRA was also a strategy to gain acceptance by the general public in Buganda and Kampala, who had grown mistrustful of the military forces after their bad experience under the 23

Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language, 37.

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Amin and Obote regimes. At present, most of the officials in the police and army are from the western and central regions, which explains the increasing use of English and Luganda as the languages of the military forces in the country. The National Resistance Movement (NRM ) government, however, has shown signs of promoting Kiswahili in the education system. Since Kiswahili is viewed as the most-widely spoken regional language of East Africa, its promoters in Uganda argue that if Ugandans acquire communicative competence in it, they will benefit in the common market and other activities in the region. After Makerere University started teaching Kiswahili in 1974, other institutions followed suit. The language began to be taught as a subject at Kakoba Teacher Training College in 1986, Mbale Islamic University in 1998, and Kyambogo University in 2004. In addition, in the White Paper on Education of 1992, the National Educational Commission led by Prof. William Ssenteza Kajubi recommended the use of Kiswahili in education: In all primary schools English and Kiswahili to be compulsory subjects, with gradually increasing emphasis on Kiswahili. In secondary schools English to be the medium from S1 and both English and Kiswahili to be compulsory subjects. Secondary Kiswahili teaching to be strengthened to assist the spread of teacher training in it.24

Following the recommendation of the National Education Commission, in 2002, the Uganda government endorsed Kiswahili in Uganda’s education system as one of the compulsory subjects in the primary education curriculum, from primary four to secondary level. The bid to promote Kiswahili in Uganda by the National Resistance Movement government is mainly politically motivated. It is intended to support the rebirth of the East African Community and Kiswahili is expected to be the lingua franca in the region. So far, it is widely used in the two main countries that make up this community, Tanzania and Kenya. The language is believed to have regional cultural aspects cutting across the East African countries, hence fostering regional development. Those who lobby for its promotion in Uganda seem to believe that it is the language of trade and commerce within the East African market. They accordingly argue that there is a need to incorporate it in the education system in all the five east African states (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi). 24

G.P. McGregor. “National Policy and Practice in Language and Literature Education: Some Reflections from Africa,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 7.

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However, notwithstanding the fact that Kiswahili is recognized as the language that will encourage East African regional integration, its promotion in Uganda continues to face challenges. The next section discusses the main challenges involved in promoting Kiswahili in the country.

Challenges of Kiswahili in Uganda Today Despite the fact that Kiswahili is promoted by the NRM government, as mentioned above, its wider use is still challenged by various factors. The first challenge comes from Uganda’s indigenous languages, most of which are spoken as first languages by a large percentage of the population. These include: 2,062,920 Basoga, 1,568,763 Iteso, 2,330,212 Banyankole, 1,679,519 Bakiga, 1,485,437 Langi, and 1,145,357 Acholi who speak Lusoga, Atesot, Runyankole, Rukiga, and Luo respectively as their mother tongue or first language.25 However, the main indigenous language challenging the spread and use of Kiswahili in Uganda is Luganda. First, it is the native language of the Baganda, the largest ethnic group, which makes up almost 16% of Uganda’s population.26 According to Langlands et al., the census of 12 September 2002 estimated their population to be 4,126,370.27 Secondly, Luganda occupies a central socio-economic position in the country as the language of the general public, spoken as first and second language in the capital, Kampala. Thanks to Kampala’s functions as the seat of the Buganda kingdom and of the central government administration, as a centre of trade, transport, commerce, and media, as a medical centre, as the site of eighteen religious headquarters, and as the principal centre of higher education in the country, the city attracts Ugandans from various corners of the country to study and work in the central region, thus accounting for the rapid spread of Luganda throughout the country. Respected writers on the language situation in Uganda have argued that it is the country’s most widely spoken language.28 As Henry Kyabukasa reports, 25

Cf. “Uganda,” ed. B.W. Langlands, Alan Rake & Linda Van Buren, in Africa South of the Sahara (London & New York: Routledge, 2008): 1232–59. 26 David Crystal, An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Languages (London: Penguin, 1992): 402. 27 Langlands et al., “Uganda,” 1247. 28 Allison Bulter Herrick et al., Area Handbook for Uganda (Washington DC: Foreign Area Studies, American University, 1969); Audrey Richards, The Multicultural States of East Africa (Montreal, Kingston, Ontario & London: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1969); Ladefoged et al., Language in Uganda; Ruth G. Mukama, “Getting Ugandans to Speak a Common Language: Recent Developments in the Language Situation and Prospects for the Future,” in Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment and Revolutionary Change, eds. Hansen Holger Bernt and Twaddle Michael (Kampala: Fountain, 1991): 334–50; Kasozi, “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda.”

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President Amin Dada [who was not a native Muganda] often addressed his audiences and talked with friends in Luganda [...] he also addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations Organisation in Luganda.29

Luganda takes the lion’s share as the language of mass communication, especially through radio broadcasting. For instance, the Buganda kingdom radio station, Central Broadcasting Service F M , broadcasts in Luganda and promotes Kiganda cultural activities such as Ekisaakaate (Enclosure) which is spearheaded by the office of the Nnabagereka to socialize the young generation in expected cultural roles and behaviour. In addition, the central government has opened Bukedde F M radio and Bukedde Television, which likewise broadcast entirely in Luganda. Thirdly, Luganda is a modern cultural medium in Uganda with a developed literature in the form of books, teaching materials, drama, daily newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. The development of literature in the Luganda language is clearly emphasized by Livingstone Walusimbi: “Luganda by the year 1966 had far more books, newspapers and other printed documents than any language in East and Central Africa, Kiswahili inclusive.” 30 Since the installation of Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II in 1993, there has been increasing awareness among the Baganda of the need to develop their culture and language. Today, the two Luganda language committees in the country – the Luganda Language Society and the Luganda Academy – are doing very well in encouraging publication and research in and on this language. For example, a major dictionary of Luganda, Enkuluze y’Oluganda olw’Ennono, was published in 2010.31 Kiswahili is regarded as a foreign language in Uganda, originating in coastal East Africa. It therefore has no native speakers and is spoken in the country only as a second language. At present, Ugandans are striving to boost and encourage the teaching and learning of their respective indigenous languages. Apart from Luganda, Kiswahili also faces stiff competition from English, which is the official language of Uganda. It is the language of administration and the only language of parliamentary debates and procedures. In addition, English is the medium of instruction at almost all levels of education in Uganda. 29

Henry Kyabukasa, “The Dilemma of Choosing a Language,” Weekly Munno English Edition (28 February 1991). 30 Livingstone Walusimbi, “Multilingual Literacy in Uganda: A State of the Art and Challenges for the Future,” in Exploring Multilingual Community Literacies: Workshop at the Uganda German Cultural Society, Kampala, September 2001, ed. Christine Glanz & Benge Okot (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2002): 9. 31 Arthur M.K. Bagunywa & Ekibiina Ky'olulimi Oluganda, ed. Enkuluze y’Oluganda olw’Ennono (Kampala: Wavah, 2010).

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Furthermore, English teaching in Ugandan schools is supported by anglophone countries such as the U K and the U SA . Since English is a language of science, arts, and diplomacy, many parents in the country prefer that their children learn English at school rather than Kiswahili. In fact, Uganda’s social system still rewards speakers of English more than those of Kiswahili. The benefit of English as a language of instruction is also appreciated by parents in other East African countries such as Tanzania and Rwanda. They send their children to study in Uganda in order to acquire fluency in the English language. In Uganda, there are limited resources to support the teaching and learning of Kiswahili. There are not enough Kiswahili teachers and teaching materials. In 2007, due to lack of resources, there was a change in the education policy to have Kiswahili as an elective rather than compulsory subject. For example, out of forty teacher’s colleges, only two (Ggaba and Kabale Primary) train Kiswahili teachers for primary education. As Baguma and Abimanya32 point out, only about a hundred Kiswahili teachers graduate from both Makerere University and other primary teacher’s colleges, a number that is too small to cater for the almost 7.5 million pupils in 11,000 government-aided primary schools and the 954,000 students in 911 secondary schools. Most parents discourage their children from learning Kiswahili because they still associate it with the brutal military regimes and with robbers. As a result, only a few students choose Kiswahili as an elective subject, thus making it expensive to pay teachers of the language. Peter Kagaba has shown that only 680 candidates registered for Kiswahili for the Uganda Certificate Examination (UCE ) between 1993 and 1997 in comparison to 1,181 and 36,196 candidates for Arabic and Luganda respectively. 33 These figures illustrate how expensive and unrealistic it is to teach Kiswahili in Ugandan schools. The above challenges to Kiswahili in Uganda indicate that mere government policies to support the language without providing resources to support it will bear no fruit. However, there are signs of greater use of Kiswahili in the music industry. The following section discusses the bottom-up promotion of Kiswahili through that industry.

The Ugandan Music Industry and the Promotion of Kiswahili The music industry in Uganda is pioneered by the Baganda. Almost all the music recording studios are located in Kampala. The types of music produced 32

Arthur Baguma & Hope Abimanya, “Why isn’t Swahili compulsory in schools,” The New Vision (28 April 2008). 33 Peter Kagaba, “Promoting Kiswahili in Uganda Schools: A Report on Progress,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 33.

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range from traditional to modern. Whereas traditional music uses mainly traditional indigenous instruments and rhythms, modern music combines both traditional and Western instruments and styles. For example, Kadongo Kamu (single guitar) groups such as the Kulabako and Matendo Singers are accompanied by Western musical instruments such as guitar and piano. Other types of music that use Western instruments include, of course, gospel, hip-hop, rap, and reggae. Because the music industry in Uganda was pioneered by the Baganda, it is the Luganda language that is mainly used. In fact, even non native Luganda speakers such as Juliana Kanyomozi (a Mutooro) have produced various popular songs, e.g., “Kibaluma” and “Nnabikoowa,” in the Luganda language. Although Luganda is the main language used in the Ugandan music industry, there is a developing tendency to mix or code-switch different languages in one song. In most cases, the mixing involves Luganda, English, and Kiswahili. Joseph Mayanja (commonly referred to as Chameleon by his fans) is the most prominent artist presenting popular songs in Kiswahili. His albums include Bageya (2000), Mama Mia (2001), Njo Karibu (2002), The Golden Voice (2003), and Mambo Bado (2004). His biggest hits are “Jamila,” “Mama Rhoda,” “Shida za Dunia,” “Kipepeo,” “Bei Kali,” “Fitina Yako,” “Haraka Haraka,” “Mambo Bado,” and “Ndivyo Sivyo.” Although a Muganda, Mayanja melds his Kiswahili-language songs with Luganda and English. It is assumed that Mayanja uses Kiswahili because he started his music career in Kenya, hence his adherence to Kenya’s lingua franca. In addition, Tanzania and other countries where Kiswahili is spoken have assured him of a large audience and market for his music. The regional market of Kiswahili speakers has encouraged other Ugandan artists to start using Kiswahili; some of these are Fr. Musaala (gospel), David Lutalo, and Juliana Kanyomozi. By using Kiswahili, Ugandan artists are targeting the overall East African audience as a market for their music. Using Luganda would limit their market mainly to Luganda speakers in Uganda. Moreover, according to Viera Pawlikova–Vilhanova, in addition to Tanzania and Kenya, Swahili is spoken now in varying degrees in Uganda, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, in parts of Ethiopia, Somalia, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar.34

It is this big market that has encouraged Ugandan (Baganda) to produce their songs in Kiswahili. As far as the regional market is concerned, Kiswahili seems

34

Viera Pawlikova–Vilhanova. “Swahili and the Dilemma of Uganda Language Policy,” Asian and African Studies 5 (1996): 161.

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to be the appropriate language other than Luganda and English for promoting Ugandan music. Globalization and information technology are other factors that have led to the spread of Ugandan music beyond the country’s geographical boundaries. Many Ugandans in the diaspora organize events and invite Ugandan artists to perform on such occasions. Such performances attract not only Ugandans but also other people from East African countries. The Internet is another factor that has boosted the Ugandan music industry. Internet websites such as www .musicuganda.com and www.museke.com provide a variety of Ugandan music on both audio and video. Furthermore, Internet radio outlets such as www .radiougandausa.com and www.radioconnect.com play Ugandan music. Since the Internet is accessible worldwide, Ugandan music in Kiswahili reaches audiences well beyond East African territory. There are more chances of promoting Kiswahili through the music industry other than government policies in Uganda. This is because music and entertainment play a major role in the daily lives of Ugandans. The various F M radio stations throughout the country are the main promoters of music in Uganda. The different Kiswahili songs of popular Ugandan artists are played daily on radio stations in the country: Butebo Radio, Capital Radio, Central Broadcasting Service F M , East African Radio, Greater African Radio, Green Channel, Impact F M , Power F M , Radio, Radio Sapientia, Radio Simba, Radio West, Sanyu F M , Star Radio, and Top Radio. The business sector has also embarked on using artists to advertise and promote their products. Most prominent are such telecommunication companies as Uganda Telecom, Celtel, MTN Uganda, and Warid Telecom. These organize public rallies where artists perform before large audiences. Recently, politicians have also started inviting artists to produce songs promoting their political platforms and campaigns. For example, at the start of his presidential campaign in Luwero district on 28 October 2010, President Yoweri Museveni was accompanied by artists who performed songs that praised him and asked people to vote for him, using Luganda slogans such as ‘Museveni Amalako’, ‘Abeewo’, and ‘Tajjagenda’ (Museveini is strong, let him stay, he will not go). Joseph Mayanja’s song “Basiima Ogenze” (They appreciate after you have gone) has been the biggest hit for the National Resistance Movement (NRM ) party campaign. In Uganda, music appeals to the people and the language of music is most likely to be easily acquired and used by the general public. It is from this perspective that one observes the bottom-up promotion of Kiswahili through the Ugandan music industry.

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Conclusion In Uganda, the promotion of Kiswahili has been undertaken as government policy but without considering people’s attitudes and the socio-economic rewards of the language to Ugandan society. Although Kiswahili is identified with East African identity, this argument has not helped its wider use in Uganda. Before thinking of East African identity, Ugandans are still struggling to develop a spirit of nationalism. Instead of promoting a foreign language, Ugandans are now considering developing their indigenous languages. For instance, Luganda is taught from primary up to college level. Those who argue that Kiswahili is the trading language of East Africa are limiting their perception of the region to Tanzania and Kenya. In Uganda, it is Luganda that is used in almost all the main towns in Uganda, as both first and second language. The Ugandan experience has proved that merely making a language a compulsory subject does not ensure its use by the general public. In fact, even English, the official language of the country and medium of instruction, is spoken fluently by only a small percentage of Ugandans. This indicates that it is very difficult for a foreign language to develop at the expense of indigenous languages. Indeed, before encouraging the teaching of any foreign language, children should be taught their respective mother tongues effectively, which would thus form the basis for learning other languages. The Baganda and their language (Luganda), it has been often pointed out, are the main factors discouraging Kiswahili in Uganda. However, like any other community, the Baganda have a right to promote their own language. It must be noted that no other ethnic community in the country has so far come up with strategies to foster the use of Kiswahili. In fact, it is the Baganda, through their dominance of the music industry. who are promoting the language in Uganda. This indicates that Kiswahili is not resented or resisted by the Baganda as has been reported by various writers.35 People do not learn a language just for the sake of learning it but for the benefits that language offers. It is the material reward of a large audience and market that is encouraging Uganda artists to use Kiswahili in their songs. As the style of music illustrates the mixing of Luganda, Kiswahili, and English, the question of raising the status of Kiswahili should not mean choosing between Kiswahili and indigenous Ugandan languages but embracing all vehicles of communication – indigenous Ugandan languages, 35

Viera Pawlikova–Vilhanova, “Swahili and the Dilemma of Uganda Language Policy,” Asian and African Studies 5 (1996): 158–70; Mwenda Mukuthuria, “Kiswahili and Its Expanding Roles of Development in East African Cooperation: A Case of Uganda,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 15.2 (2006): 154–65; John Habwe, “The Role of Kiswahili in the Integration of East Africa,” Journal of Pan African Studies 2.8 (March 2009): online.

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Kiswahili, and English. Any further enforcement of Kiswahili at the expense of indigenous Ugandan languages will continue to exacerbate negative attitudes towards it among the general public. Ugandans will easily accept Kiswahili, depending on their individual interests. The music industry is one aspect that has demonstrated how individuals can pioneer the promotion of a language from the grassroots. The Ugandan government should therefore encourage such initiatives by investing in the training of Kiswahili teachers and supporting the export of Ugandan services and goods to countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, where it is spoken as a lingua franca. Ugandans who conduct their business and offer services in these countries will automatically learn Kiswahili. It is therefore the socio-economic benefits of Kiswahili rather than the political integration of the East African community as a whole that will boost Kiswahili in Uganda.

W OR K S C I T E D Baguma, Arthur, & Hope Abimanya. “Why isn’t Swahili compulsory in schools,” The New Vision (28 April 2008), http://www.newvision.co.ug (accessed 15 February 2010). Bagunywa, Arthur M.K., & Ekibiina Ky’olulimi Oluganda, ed. Enkuluze y’Oluganda olw’Ennono (Kampala: Wavah, 2010). Crystal, David. An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Languages (London: Penguin, 1992). Habwe, John. “The Role of Kiswahili in the Integration of East Africa,” Journal of Pan African Studies 2.8 (March 2009), http://www.j.nanafrican.com/docs/vo/2no8/2.8 _Roleofkiswahiliintheitegration.pdf (accessed 15 January 2011). Herrick, Allison Bulter et al. Area Handbook for Uganda (Washington DC : Foreign Area Studies, American University, 1969). Kagaba, Peter. “Promoting Kiswahili in Uganda Schools: A Report on Progress,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 30–40. Kasozi, A.B. “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda: A Historical Survey,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 23–29. Kyabukasa, Henry. “The Dilemma of Choosing a Language,” Weekly Munno English Edition (28 February 1991). Ladefoged, Peter, Ruth Glick & Clive Criper, ed. Language in Uganda (London: Oxford U P , 1972). Langlands, B.W., Alan Rake & Linda Van Buren, ed. “Uganda,” in Africa South of the Sahara (London & New York: Routledge, 2008): 1232–59. Low, Anthony. The Mind of Buganda: Documents of the Modern History of an African Kingdom (London: Heinemann, 1971). Mazrui, Ali. The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).

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Mazrui, Ali, & Alamini Mazrui. The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Kampala: Fountain, 1998). McGregor, G.P. “National Policy and Practice in Language and Literature Education: Some Reflections from Africa,” in Language and Literacy in Uganda, ed. Kate Parry (Kampala: Fountain, 2000): 6–13. Mukama, Ruth G. “Getting Ugandans to Speak a Common Language: Recent Developments in the Language Situation and Prospects for the Future,” in Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment and Revolutionary Change, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen & Michael Twaddle (Kampala: Fountain, 1991): 334–50. Mukuthuria, Mwenda. “Kiswahili and Its Expanding Roles of Development in East African Cooperation: A Case of Uganda,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 15.2 (2006): 154–65. Richards, Audrey. The Multicultural States of East Africa (Montreal, Kingston, Ontario & London: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1969). Pawlikova–Vilhanova, Viera. “Swahili and the Dilemma of Uganda Language Policy,” Asian and African Studies 5 (1996): 158–70. Scotton, Carol Myers. “Language in East Africa: Linguistic Patterns and Political Ideologies,” in Advances in the Study of Societal Multilingualism, ed. Joshua Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1978): 719–59. Southall, A.D., & P.C. Gutkind. Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and Its Suburbs (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1957). Tourigny, Yves. So Abundant a Harvest: The Catholic Church in Uganda 1879–1979 (London: Longman & Todd, 1978). Walusimbi, Livingstone. “Multilingual Literacy in Uganda: A State of the Art and Challenges for the Future,” in Exploring Multilingual Community Literacies: Workshop at the Uganda German Cultural Society, Kampala, September 2001, ed. Christine Glanz & Benge Okot (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2002): 8–12. Waliggo, John Mary. A History of African Priests: Katigondo Major Seminary 1911–1986 (Nairobi: Matianum Press Consultants, 1988).

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Cross Talk Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation

C AROLYN C OOPER

I

D E P L O Y T H E T E L E P H O N I C T R O P E ‘cross talk’ to signify a politics of translation – or, more precisely, mistranslation – that engenders distortion in trans-cultural communication. The English idiomatic expression ‘talking at cross purposes’ clearly articulates the alienating process of speaking at, rather than to, an interlocutor. Destabilizing the subject, the attendant crisscrossing of meanings provokes misunderstandings. Our conference theme, ‘Contested Communities: Communication, Narration, Imagination’, foregrounded the intersection of identity-politics and narrative as communities imaginatively write or sing themselves into global consciousness. It also acknowledged the contestations of meaning that can arise in the complex process of disclosing the self – whether individual or communal – to the ‘Other’. The common Latin etymology of ‘community’ and ‘communication’, as evidenced in the identical prefix ‘co/m’, meaning ‘with’, underscores the principle of reciprocal disclosure that is central to the process of creating community. In a shared language of ritualized engagement, speakers affirm cultural commonalities. In the absence of this mutuality of meanings, the loop of communication is broken. Language, both literal and metaphoric, thus functions to either distort or enhance communication and to define or abrogate community. Several years ago, at an academic conference at another German university, I discovered, much to my amusement, that some reggae fans in Europe thought that the refrain, “no[,] woman, no cry,” meant that if you didn’t have a woman then you wouldn’t cry, ‘woman’ becoming synonymous with grief.1 This interpretation was certainly not what the songwriter intended. The song evokes domestic intimacy and the everyday pleasures of home, despite material

1

Though performed and popularized by Bob Marley, “No[,] Woman, No Cry” is attributed to Vincent Ford. Bob Marley & The Wailers, Natty Dread (1974), Side One, Track 2.

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poverty: “I remember when we used to sit inna government yard in Trench Town.”2 Misunderstood, this comfortingly nostalgic song is reduced to a seemingly misogynist, homosocial rejection of the company of demonized woman. All the words of the line – ‘no’, ‘woman’, ‘cry’ – appear to be transparently English. The largely English-derived lexicon of Jamaican Creole can disguise meaning if the grammar and syntax of the sentence are not also taken into account. In the case of “no[,] woman, no cry,” the grammar, syntax, and, in particular, the context confirm that the language is not English but Jamaican. Indeed, the grammatical function of the two negatives is not at all identical. The first ‘no’ is an interjection; the second is a command. In English: “no, woman, don’t cry.” The problem of mistranslation is compounded by faulty transcription of the lyrics. On the record jacket of the original Island Records release, the comma is omitted after the first ‘no’, creating a simplistic parallelism of structure that seemed to support the assumption that “woman” equalled “cry[ing].” This collision of meanings confirms the importance of accurate transcription of lyrics and, more broadly, the value of liner notes as cultural cues that can facilitate comprehension of unfamiliar languages, both literal and metaphoric. Another anecdote illustrates the problematic politics of not so much mistranslation as mishearing. Soon after the publication of my first book, Noises in the Blood,3 I got a congratulatory letter from a well-intentioned North American academic. He found the book illuminating but he did wonder if I had made an error in the transcription of the following line from Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”: “We forward in this generation triumphantly.”4 The ‘correction’ he proposed was what he had heard: “We flowered in this generation.” That flowery misreading, eliding all of the culture-specific Rastafari resonances of Marley’s “forward,” transposes the song’s politically charged message into another, less threatening key. Although the horticultural trope, like the militaristic “forward,” does denote potency, the connotations are decidedly not the same. The meaning is in the metaphor. As I vigorously argue in Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large5 and rehearse here for emphasis, the problem of the relative authority of in/outsider perspectives is not limited to the domain of the popular or academia. 2

“No[,] Woman, No Cry.” Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1995). 4 Bob Marley, “Redemption Song,” Uprising (Tuff Gong/Island, 1980), Side Two, Track 5. 5 Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 3

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Foreign experts of all kinds routinely tell us in the ‘Third World’ how best to understand and ‘develop’ our societies. Our insider’s perspectives (and they are plural) are constantly invalidated as the outsider positions him/herself as the ‘real’ authority in these matters. My critique of the presumptuousness of some of these foreign experts should not itself be misinterpreted as evidence of a mere fit of pique, an attempt to jealously protect territorial borders from recolonizing invaders, armed this time around with laptops. I certainly welcome all those non-Caribbean academics who do engage seriously with our culture, adding to the ample body of scholarship that we are consolidating locally and in the Caribbean diaspora. What I must contest is the hubris of some foreign ‘experts’ who deliberately set out to undermine ‘local’ scholarship in order to aggrandize their own reputations, as illustrated in the following example. The April 2010 issue of DevISSues (12.1), published by the Institute of Social Studies at the Hague, carries an instructive essay, “Diving into Context: Using metaphor as an analytical lens for researching Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” written by Melanie Newell, a 2009 graduate.6 Without conscious irony, it would appear, Newell deploys the trope of the golden egg, derived from the Harry Potter series, to substantiate her main claim: Empirical research must begin with a lens that carries the researcher away from frameworks of analysis and understanding that speak for dancehall, into a framework that allows dancehall culture to speak for itself.7

In this largely derivative essay, which is indebted to the scholarship of the very insiders whose perspectives she disdains, Newell allows dancehall culture to speak for itself in the fantastical language of J.K. Rowling’s The Goblet of Fire.8 Dancehall music becomes the ‘petrified scream’ that explodes from the golden egg. When the egg is submerged in water, the scream becomes ‘audible and beautiful song.’ Newell’s ‘corrective’ reading of dancehall scholarship from Jamaica makes explicit the subliminal message she deduces from her own deployment of Rowling’s image: The golden egg metaphor made me conscious of the possibility that Jamaican cultural critics Carolyn Cooper and Donna Hope, cultural ambassadors and defenders of dancehall, could be too far under the 6

Melanie Newell, “Diving into Context: Using metaphor as an analytical lens for researching Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” DevISSues 12.1 (2010). 7 Newell, “Diving into Context,” 11. 8 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).

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water to be able to develop a synthesized and critical understanding of dancehall. They may have blind spots that critics outside Jamaica are more likely to notice upon entering the water (Bakare-Yusuf, 2006: 164).9 This made me aware of the necessity to synthesize discourse exchanged between critics located above water and underwater in order to achieve my objective of a synthesis.10

Submerged in synthetic ‘scholarship’ and blinded by the evidence of our own senses, Donna Hope and I ought to sink quietly into oblivion so that Newell’s petrified scream can become audible. It is precisely this kind of casual arrogance that provokes border clashes between insiders and outsiders in dancehall scholarship.11 In “Border Clash: Sites of Contestation,” the first chapter of Sound Clash, I appropriate the metaphor of the sound-system clash to demarcate contestations for power both within Jamaican society and across national borders.12 In its narrowest sense, the dancehall clash denotes the onstage competition between rival DJ s and sound systems for mastery before a discriminating audience. More broadly, the clash is not only the performance event but also a trenchant trope for the hostile interfacing of warring zones in Jamaica and beyond. Contested borders are located across language barriers (English versus Jamaican); Jamaican Creole is the language of the popular, especially that of the dancehall DJ s. It defines itself against and clashes with English – still the singular language of elitist national identity in Jamaica and, thus, of all official discourse. I propose that there is an organic relationship between language and ideology. The Jamaican language is the primary vehicle of expression of the values of Jamaican culture. But it is not only the Jamaican language that must be translated for international consumption. The whole body of local cultural assumptions and understandings must be transposed into a different key. Thus, simplistic readings of dancehall lyrics that do not take into account the nuances of the Jamaican language and the particularities of meaning in the Jamaican context often engender ideological dissonance. Since the publication of my first article on dancehall lyrics, “Slackness Hiding From Culture: Erotic Play in Dancehall,” it oftentimes seems as if I have

9

Bibi Bakare–Yusuf, “Clashing Interpretations in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” Small Axe 10.3 (2006): 161–73. 10 Newell, “Diving into Context,” 11. 11 I reproduce here the arguments I ‘forward’ in Sound Clash. 12 This chapter is co-authored with the historian Cecil Gutzmore.

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been rehearsing the same arguments.13 From deep under the water, I have tried to contest problematic representations of Jamaican cultural identity that circulate both within Jamaica and internationally. For example, I have consistently challenged the perverse way in which Jamaican society is currently constituted as irredeemably homophobic. Jamaica has been demonized in G LBT discourses as the most homophobic place on earth. It is true that a fundamentalist Christian reading of Leviticus 18:22 is the basis on which many Jamaicans – including dancehall DJ s – assert that homosexuality is sinful: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Thus, a large body of dancehall lyrics that routinely vilify homosexuality in violent language has been produced in Jamaica and exported over the last two decades. The verbal violence of these lyrics is usually interpreted literally, making no allowance for rhetorical devices such as hyperbole and metaphor. Conversely, I argue in “‘Lyrical gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Culture,”14 that DJ Shabba Ranks’s trope of the ‘lyrical gun’ is a quintessential dancehall term belonging to the domain of subversion, subterfuge, and verbal play that helps elucidate the function of metaphor in dancehall culture. As deployed by Shabba Ranks in this poetic context, ‘lyrical’ signifies ‘metaphoric’, thus enabling readings of dancehall lyrics that may make much more complex what initially appears to be completely transparent meanings. The Jamaican educator and creative writer Velma Pollard eloquently argues that “the suggestion is too often made that certain literary devices are beyond the understanding of individuals whose control of standard English is limited.”15 Undermining this arrogant presumption, Pollard acknowledges “the ability of the folk to manipulate language not only effectively but with a certain distinctive style that is part of a tradition of verbal art forms available within or outside of a performance context.”16 Shabba Ranks’s firing of his lyrical gun explosively echoes the identical use of the gun metaphor by old-school reggae artists – for example, the Ethiopians in their 1970 hit “Gun Man”:

13

First published as a two-part article “Slackness Hiding from Culture: Erotic Play in the Dancehall” in Jamaica Journal 22.4 (1989): 12–31, and 23.1 (1990): 44–52, and republished as the penultimate chapter of Noises In the Blood, 136–73. 14 Carolyn Cooper, “‘ Lyrical gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” Massachusetts Review 35.3–4 (Fall 1994), 429–47. 15 Velma Pollard, “Figurative Language in Jamaican Creole,” Carib 3 (1983): 31. 16 Pollard, “Figurative Language in Jamaican Creole,” 32.

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I’m gonna get you down I’m gonna gun you down I’ve got a loaded 45 It’s sweet music I’ve got a loaded 45 It’s soul music Gun, gun, gun, gunman talk.17

This conception of music as a “loaded 45” – a lyrical gun – is useful in decoding the rhetoric of gun violence in Jamaican popular music. Understood in its indigenous context, the meaning of the gun lyrics of the reggae singers and dancehall DJ s is much less transparent than might initially appear. Thus, for example, an infamous song like Buju Banton’s “Boom Bye-Bye,”18 which seems on the surface to advocate the literal extermination of homosexuals, may be loaded with multiple meanings – once read in the light of Shabba Ranks’s “lyrical gun.” 19 This I attempted to demonstrate at a November 1992 seminar entitled ‘Reggae Music as a Business’, convened at the Jamaica Conference by SpecsShang Muzik, Inc. and Sandosa Ltd. in collaboration with the Eagle Merchant Bank, the National Commercial Bank, and the Trafalgar Development Bank. My talk, entitled “Cultural Implications of Marketing Reggae Internationally,” focused on the controversial reception of Buju Banton’s infamous anti-homosexuality song, whose resonant boom has echoed across continents, generating much public debate.20 In my deliberately provocative presentation, I attempted to analyse and, to some degree, ‘rationalize’ popular Jamaican cultural values that have increasingly come under attack in the international community. I argued that the fate of Buju’s song in the ‘outernational’ market, particularly in the U SA and the U K where highly politicized G LBT activists wield substantial power, is a test case of the degree to which local Jamaican cultural values can be exported without censure into a foreign market. I raised the issue of language in DJ culture and the separation of aesthetic and ideological issues that can arise in the exporting of Jamaican music. Non-Jamaicans can appreciate the aesthetically appealing noises of the music without understanding the words. Once they understand

17

The Ethiopians, “What A Fire”/“Gun Man” (JJ Records, 45 rpm F J J 7631/7630, 1969); “Gun Man” on The Ethiopians (Trojan Records C D T R L 228, 1988), Side Two, Track 12. 18 Buju Banton, “Boom Bye-Bye” (Gargamel 1993). 19 Shabba Ranks, “Gun Pon Me,” As Raw as Ever (Epic, 1991). 20 Conspiracy theorists assert that Buju Banton was framed and falsely convicted in the US legal system largely because of his unrepentant anti-homosexual ideology.

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the words they may be unable to accept the cultural message in the music – indeed, may reject the latter altogether. I asked a number of questions: How, then, should the reggae artist respond to this marketing problem? Adapt the message to suit the export market, sacrificing authenticity for airplay? Should the artist do one kind of song for the local market and another for export? Or should the reggae artist risk censure in order to maintain the cultural integrity of the Jamaican way of seeing the world? Almost two decades ago, the distinction between the local and export markets seemed tenable. In the age of the World Wide Web when every local act is endlessly replicated on YouTube for global consumption, the local and the global become one and the same: glocal. In my role as cultural critic, I assumed the burden of communal responsibility for the youthful DJ who had put himself at risk by running up his mouth. There are well-defined Caribbean cultural codes that justify this acceptance of communal responsibility. Consider the cultural rules that are at work when the man with mouth is confronted by the man with muscle. The man with mouth bawls out to the community, “Unu hold mi yaa, hold mi yaa, or mi a go kill him” (Hold me back, hold me back, or I’m going to kill him). The man with mouth is depending on the community to protect him because he knows that he dare not attack this formidable enemy he has verbally challenged. So the man with mouth gets to save face. It is the community, not his cowardice, that has restrained him. I concluded my presentation at the seminar with a clear injunction: the DJ must learn to censure herself or himself, otherwise somebody else will do the censuring. Nevertheless, I ended up in a hostile sound-clash with the Village Voice. The seminar was reviewed by Robert Christgau in his ‘Rockbeat’ column on 19 January 1993, under the inflammatory headline “Africanist Abomination: Homophobia as a Business.”21 My presentation was scathingly indicted: By all reports Cooper’s speech was the most enthusiastically received of the conference. A room full of 300 lawyers, bankers, and music businesspeople greeted references to “buttocks” and a Jamaican proverb that goes “Two pot cover can’t shut” by whistling and banging on tables and gave the professor a standing ovation when she concluded. [...] According to Payday Records’ Patricia Moxey, the Americans stood around afterward saying, “Jeez, these people are pretty out there,” but saw no way to convey their reaction to their hosts. “I don’t agree with her views,” Moxey 21

Robert Christgau, “Africanist Abomination: Homophobia as a Business” Village Voice (19 January 1993), http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/rbjaho-93.php (accessed 10 September 2015).

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told us, “but I think she was right about what she was saying about Jamaica – that everyone is completely homophobic.”22

My attempt to explicate the cultural context and fundamentalist Christian genesis of Buju Banton’s anti-homosexuality ideology was deliberately misinterpreted as clear evidence of my own advocacy of hate speech. Despite my unequivocal contestation of the DJ ’s homophobia, my scholarly account of the problematic politics of transcultural communication was inaccurately decoded as endorsement: “There must be people who deliver speeches about hatred against blacks or any other group who are just as slick,” commented Jive Records’ Sophia Chang, who was also dismayed by how avidly the women at the conference seemed to support homophobic sexism. “She was so wellspoken and so articulate. What really scared me was how much she believed in it as part of her culture.”23

As I document at painful length in my contentious introductory chapter in Sound Clash, a Jamaican scholar who attempts to speak authoritatively about her or his own culture runs the risk of border clashes with non-Jamaican academics and journalists who consider themselves entirely at liberty to unilaterally declare what they think you ought to mean. Patricia Moxey’s marginalization of Jamaican cultural perspectives as being “pretty out there” is analogous to what I consider to be the xenophobia of the Village Voice, which had previously refused to publish as a side bar my own account of the culture-specific politics embedded in both the local and the international reception of Buju Banton’s juvenile song. I was not allowed to speak for myself. The preferred mode of ‘communication’ was that an interviewer would mediate and ‘represent’ my perspective. My own voice was thus silenced in the regulatory discourses of the urban village masquerading as journalism. Furthermore, Jamaican society is much more complex than the singularly ‘homophobic’ reputation would suggest. There is now a powerful gay rights lobby group in the country – the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J- F LAG ) – which, on occasion, has been forced to distance itself from the incendiary rhetoric of non-Jamaican G LBT activists who often unilaterally propose the boycotting of Jamaican goods and services. For example, an article on the International Federation of Black Prides website, entitled “Jamaican G LBT group opposes boycott,” reports the following:

22 23

Christgau, “Africanist Abomination.” “Africanist Abomination.”

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The Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All Sexuals and Gays issued a letter April 12 opposing the U.S. based boycott of Red Stripe beer, Myers’s Rum and tourism to the island nation. The boycott was launched by GLBT grassroots activists in San Francisco on March 28 and spread to New York City on April 15. The U.S. activists were responding to a new U.S. State Department report detailing the island’s gravely homophobic atmosphere, which includes, among much else, music by several internationally known dancehall artists that promotes anti gay violence and murder.24

But the organizers of the ‘Boycott Jamaica’ campaign were so far above the water they did not even begin to understand the local politics in which they sought to intervene: J FLAG Programs Manager Jason McFarlane took particular exception to the boycott of Red Stripe beer, saying the brewer has “unequivocally distanced itself from the hostility and violence typical of Jamaican music towards members of the LGBT community.” “In April 2008, Red Stripe took the brave and principled stance to cease sponsorship of music festivals that promoted hate and intolerance, including that against members of the LGBT community,” McFarlane said. “The naming of Red Stripe, therefore, as a target of this boycott is extremely damaging to the cause of LGBT activists in Jamaica. [...] The boycott call has now left us not only with our persistent day to day challenges but with a need to engage Red Stripe and attempt damage control as a result of actions that we did not take.”25

McFarlane deploys the identical argument I have consistently advanced about the need to take context into account if one is to fully understand supposedly exceptional Jamaican homophobia and its particular manifestations and contestations in a fundamentalist Christian society: “We believe that any overseas entity or organisation seeking to agitate for change in a context with which it has only passing familiarity should first do its homework to ensure that it does not do harm [...] to the cause of the local community whose interest it seeks to defend,” he said.26

McFarlane does not deny that homophobia exists in Jamaica. What he affirms is the need for well-intentioned outsiders to acknowledge the sophisticated 24

Rex Wockner, “Jamaican G L B T group opposes boycott,” Between the Lines News 1717 (23 April 2009), http://ifbprides.org/ifbp_news_may_09_boycott.php (accessed 13 July 2011). 25 Wockner, “Jamaican G L B T group opposes boycott.” 26 “Jamaican G L B T group opposes boycott.”

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nature of transformative sexual politics in Jamaica that would enable Red Stripe to take the principled decision to distance its products from dancehall homophobia. This subtlety is completely lost on the ‘global’ experts. The response of the unrepentant U S activists to McFarlane’s chastisement is identical to Melanie Newell’s dismissal of the academic work of Jamaican scholars who are “too far under the water” to accurately represent cultural politics in their own society: Boycott organizers responded that J- F L A G doesn’t speak for ordinary gay Jamaicans, and accused the group of being aligned with elements in the U.S. that sometimes have criticized the work of grassroots and street activists.27 J- F LAG ’s credentials as a legitimate representative of ‘local’ G LBT interest

groups are thus cavalierly revoked. This north/south border clash between J-F LAG and G LBT activists in the U SA on the contentious matter of Jamaican homophobia and its contestation within the society itself is a classic example of cross-talk that inhibits communication. For, although both J- F LAG and global G LBT activists share a common goal to eradicate discrimination on grounds of sexual preference, the languages of engagement are not always mutually intelligible. Outsiders, speaking the singular language of universal human rights, frequently misunderstand local dialects that both literally and metaphorically inflect particular cultural meanings in nuanced ways. In order to ‘forward’ ideological engagement in this generation, imaginative new narratives of identity must be continuously crafted that both acknowledge and attempt to close the gaps in communication between interlocutors across ever-widening cultural divides.

W OR K S C I T E D Bakare–Yusuf, Bibi. “Clashing Interpretations in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” Small Axe 10.3 (2006): 161–73. Cooper, Carolyn. “ ‘Lyrical Gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” Massachusetts Review 35.3–4 (Fall 1994): 429–47. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1995). Cooper, Carolyn. “Slackness Hiding from Culture: Erotic Play in the Dancehall, Part 1,” Jamaica Journal 22.4 (1989): 12–31.

27

“Jamaican G L B T group opposes boycott.”

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Cooper, Carolyn. “Slackness Hiding from Culture: Erotic Play in the Dancehall, Part 2,” Jamaica Journal 23.1 (1990): 44–52. Cooper, Carolyn. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Newell, Melanie. “Diving into Context: Using metaphor as an analytical lens for researching Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” DevISSues 12.1 (April 2010). Pollard, Velma. “Figurative Language in Jamaican Creole,” Carib 3 (1983): 24–36. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Discography Buju Banton. “Boom Bye-Bye” (Gargamel 1993). The Ethiopians. “What A Fire”/“Gun Man” (JJ Records, 45 rpm F J J 7631/7630, 1969); “Gun Man” on The Ethiopians (Trojan Records C D T R L 228, 1988), Side Two, Track 12. Bob Marley & The Wailers. “No[,] Woman, No Cry,” Natty Dread (Island/Tuff Gong, 1974). Bob Marley & The Wailers. “Redemption Song,” Uprising (Tuff Gong/Island, 1980). Shabba Ranks. “Gun Pon Me,” As Raw as Ever (Epic, 1991).

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At Whose Cost? A Critical Reading of Carolyn Cooper’s Keynote Lecture “Cross Talk: Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation”

C AROLINE K OEGL ER

T

I

H I S C H A P T E R I S A R E S P O N S E to Carolyn Cooper’s keynote lecture “Cross Talk: Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation,” presented at the 2010 annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (G APS ; formerly GNEL /ASNEL ) in Bayreuth, and printed in revised form as the immediately foregoing chapter. By a series of complex (self-)positionings and transactions, Cooper mounted a controversial defence of anti-gay lyrics in Jamaican dancehall culture, simultaneously carving out an allegedly non-homophobic standpoint. In addition, by claiming cultural authenticity, Cooper effected a delegitimization of criticism from ‘cultural outsiders’. To reflect on such positionings and transactions remains a paramount aim in the field of postcolonial studies, where the concerns of anti-colonial cultural empowerment and queer resistance are anything but reconciled. Is it legitimate to intervene in homophobic discourses of cultural belonging and authenticity? If so, for whom is it legitimate? When the accusation of homophobia is rejected, does such a rejection need to be accepted? In the symbolic economy that is contemporary academia, how does symbolic capital1 – and how

1

Pierre Bourdieu suggests that symbolic capital is at first glance non-monetary, whereas it produces, through a process of “transsubstantiation,” structures, practices of exchange, and forms of valuation that are analogous to those produced in the economy. See Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John E. Richardson, tr. Richard Nice (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1986): 246–47. See also Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia U P , 1993): ch. 1. Symbolic capital comes in different flavours, such as cultural capital (things learned; number of ratified educational certificates; books read; etc.), linguistic capital (speaking the language/register appropriate to a specific context); social capital (network of relationships) etc. (“The Forms of Capital,” 250–52). Following these distinc-

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do the face-to-face parameters of a keynote session – facilitate or inhibit (potential) interventions in culturally ‘authenticated’ arguments? Guided by these questions, all of which point to the contestation of both cultural and academic communities, I analyse, first, Cooper’s keynote lecture, before contextualizing my analysis with observations on the Q&A session that followed Cooper’s presentation. Throughout, I use the lens of symbolic capital accumulation and symbolic transactions to elucidate my observations. In her keynote, Cooper sets out to engage with the frequent mistranslations of Jamaican dancehall lyrics in international contexts. A popular example is “No woman, no cry,” which non-Jamaicans have conventionally misunderstood as aligning woman “with grief,”2 while the lyrics really mean ‘No, woman, don’t cry’. For Cooper, the reasons for such mistranslations are rooted in the inextricable relationship of language and power-relations: Jamaican Creole, in which dancehall songs are often written, “defines itself against and clashes with English – still the singular language of elitist national identity in Jamaica and, thus, of all official discourse” (300). The hegemonic status of English is a direct result of colonialism, which privileged European descent, culture, and languages. English continues to be associated with the upper- and upper-middle classes, while Jamaican Creole is associated with the working class. Amidst these complex power-relations, Cooper asserts that provoking irritation may be part of a DJ ’s political agenda (“defines itself against and clashes with English”). Replicating this strategy, she takes up the position of an anti-hegemonic Jamaican speaker, which allows her to reject, throughout her lecture, the “hubris of some foreign ‘experts’ who deliberately set out to undermine ‘local’ scholarship in order to aggrandize their own reputations” (299). While rebuffing these “foreign ‘experts’,” Cooper extends an invitation to “all those non-Caribbean academics who do engage seriously with our culture, adding to the ample body of scholarship that we are consolidating locally and in the Caribbean diaspora” (299). Cooper thus situates her topic in a (neo-)colonial context in which language-use is regulated by colonial remains and where the right to cultural self-definition is contested. At this point in Cooper’s talk, the significance of symbolic capital is already manifold. Most notable is the cultural ownership to which Cooper lays claim

tions very broadly, symbolic capital will be understood in this chapter as a form of recognition and prestige that can be variously constituted (e.g., through cultural capital or social capital), and that can be accumulated, reduced, and traded in exchange for (other forms of) symbolic and/or monetary capital. 2 Carolyn Cooper, “Cross Talk: Jamaican Popular Music and the Politics of Translation,” 297 above. Further page references are in the main text.

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(“our culture”). Cooper’s talk is strongly rooted in the notions of cultural authenticity and cultural integrity, which are probably among the most powerful sources of symbolic capital. They legitimate Cooper in either “welcom[ing]” or dismissing “non-Caribbean academics,” depending on how “seriously” (300) they engage with Jamaican culture; and it is Cooper who defines what is serious. ‘Not serious’, for Cooper, is “Melanie Newell,” who had earlier suggested the following: Jamaican cultural critics Carolyn Cooper and Donna Hope, cultural ambassadors and defenders of the dancehall, could be too far under the water to be able to develop a synthesized and critical understanding of dancehall. (quoted in Cooper, 299–300)

Cooper reprimands Newell for “casual arrogance” (282), emphasizes her junior status (a “2009 graduate,” 282), and thus valorizes her own stance on two fronts: not only is the content of Newell’s critique ridiculous in Cooper’s eyes; Newell is also positioned as ‘unserious’/‘arrogant’ in her capacity as both outsider and junior. Cooper was clearly leveraging her cultural capital in publicly denouncing Newell before a keynote audience in such a way. Capital also gains relevance as part of the language debate: Cooper indicates that Jamaican DJ s and other musicians might not be ‘heard’ in the way they intend to be heard because their language register is not as ‘prized’ as standard English. In other words, the relatively higher symbolic capital of standard English means that, particularly internationally, authoritative interpretations can be launched that are based on (strategic) misreadings of these DJ s’ Creole lyrics. Further, it is not only the West’s quasi-monopoly on interpretation but also the overbearing monetary capital of non-Jamaicans in international music markets that puts individual Jamaican DJ s at risk of censorship and misrepresentation. Cooper makes a case for coming to the rescue of these DJ s who are threatened by neo-colonial regimes of meaning-making. There is one ‘mistranslation’ which Cooper contests in particular and on which I will focus in the following: the “perverse way in which Jamaican society is currently constituted as irredeemably homophobic” (301). She discusses this ‘perversity’ by using as an example Buju Banton’s song “Boom Bye Bye,” which literally advocates the killing of gay men (‘batty men’). Jamaica being a very Christian society, Cooper begins by contextualizing such lyrics with a reference to the bible: It is true that a fundamentalist Christian reading of Leviticus 18:22 is the basis on which many Jamaicans – including dancehall DJs – assert that homosexuality is sinful: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.’ (301)

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‘Reading’ homosexuality through the bible is the reason, for Cooper, why “a large body of dancehall lyrics that routinely vilify homosexuality in violent language has been produced in Jamaica and exported over the last two decades” (301). Cooper seems to suggest that such condemnations of homosexuality are rooted in religion, and that – situated in this landscape of cultural specificity – such condemnation is plausible. She adds another aspect when she alleges that non-Jamaicans often misunderstand seemingly homophobic lyrics, which may actually have a metaphorical dimension. This brings her back to the problem of linguistic mistranslation: “The verbal violence of these lyrics is usually interpreted literally, making no allowance for rhetorical devices such as hyperbole and metaphor” (301). She also puts this argument in the context of class when she rejects the “arrogant presumption” that Jamaica’s working-class people – who predominantly dance to these lyrics – would not have a sense of abstraction: i.e. the capacity to understand these lyrics metaphorically and not literally. (In other words, a lack of cultural capital does not foreclose the possibility of understanding metaphor.) Cooper’s chain of reasoning is, then, that (a) professions of anti-gay sentiment are rooted in religious perceptions; that (b) this makes cultural sense; and (c) that these lyrics are not necessarily meant literally in any case. Paradoxically, then, homophobia is contextualized and thus presented as making cultural sense (a & b), while this cultural argument is also refuted and ostensibly exchanged through a linguistic argument (c): nobody means those lyrics literally anyway. A cultural mistranslation (Jamaica as homophobic) is presented as rooted in a linguistic misunderstanding (metaphorical capacity of the lyrics). The paradoxical relation in Cooper’s argument (cultural vs. linguistic) becomes more and more apparent as the keynote unfolds. Cooper writes: Non-Jamaicans can appreciate the aesthetically appealing noises of the music without understanding the words. Once they understand the words, they may be unable to accept the cultural message of the music. They may reject it all together. (302–303; my emphases)

What is the “cultural message” of the music that needs to be either ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’? What has happened to the metaphorical dimension of the language? Cooper is referring here to the “message” of violent marginalization of gay people. Suddenly, this is no longer a linguistic issue (one where words might be understood in the wrong way) but a cultural issue (one where an unmistakable cultural message needs to be ‘accepted’). Cooper is blurring the lines between the two. This becomes still more evident when Cooper continues to discuss the

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relevant marketing issues. These issues arise for Jamaican artists when they sing about anti-gay violence, yet wish to market their songs internationally: How, then, should the reggae artist respond to this marketing problem? Adapt the message to suit the export market, sacrificing authenticity for airplay? Should the artist do one kind of song for the local market and another for export? Or should the reggae artist risk censorship in order to maintain the cultural integrity of the Jamaican way of seeing the world? (303; my emphases)

Again, this is no linguistic issue. This is about the DJ ’s dilemma of either delivering a culturally authentic “message” about “the Jamaican way of seeing the world” or giving up on “authenticity for airplay.” This is no longer about a metaphorical level that ‘foreign experts’ do not understand. This is about whether they and other ‘foreigners’ will accept Jamaican culture for what it is. This is about whether a DJ who in principle endorses Jamaican cultural norms (here: anti-gay sentiments) will be willing to give up these norms so as not to damage, reduce, or impede his symbolic capital with non-Jamaicans – who do not understand these norms. At this point, Cooper’s argument begins to reveal the extent to which it is itself based on homophobia. In considering how Jamaican artists can adapt ‘the message’ of their lyrics for ‘the export market’, Cooper skips entirely the question of whether the DJ ’s lyrics might exacerbate – however unintentionally – the situation of gay people in Jamaica. Cultural authenticity aside, we are talking about a country where male same-sex relations are punishable by law and where everyday violence against LGBTQ s means that, in 2010 (the year of Cooper’s lecture), a third of all LGBTQ s seeking asylum in the U SA came from Jamaica, which otherwise ranks 138th on the world population index.3 Hate crimes against LGBTQ s in Jamaica, including killings, continue.4 Given these conditions, should it not at least be considered that the profession of anti-gay violence by someone with high symbolic capital (a popular DJ ) may have rather drastic consequences for a

3

Shankar Vedantam, “Jamaica’s gays finding refuge by applying for U.S. asylum,” Washington Post (11 February 2011), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/11 /AR2011 021106013.html (accessed 14 May 2015). 4 A recent example is the murder of two gay men in MoBay (May 2016), commented on with satisfaction by the people interviewed by the Jamaican Gleaner. Adrian Frater, “Another Double Murder In MoBay – Resident Says Male Victims Were Gays,” The Gleaner (May 2016): http: //jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20160527/another-double-murder-mobay-residentsays-male-victims-were-gays (accessed 24 August 2016).

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minority group that is already at risk?5 Cooper chooses to ignore these internal power dynamics when she turns, instead, to the international context. Here, her problem is that “highly politicized G LBT activists wield substantial power” (302), which, together with the persisting hegemony of the U SA and Europe in music markets, causes her to draw on the following metaphor: she sees the DJ in the position of someone who has “put himself at risk by running up his mouth” (303). With the formulation “running up his mouth,” Cooper describes a scenario in which “a man with mouth” is confronted by “the man with muscle” (303). According to “well-defined Caribbean cultural codes” (303), Cooper explains, the weaker man of mouth will call on his community to stop him trying to kill the man of muscle. The community holds him back – and he “gets to save face,” as he would never have withstood the stronger man’s retaliation: “It is the community, not his cowardice, that has restrained him” (303). Putting herself in the role of ‘the community’ who saves the weaker man of mouth from losing face, Cooper “assumes the burden of communal responsibility for the youthful DJ ” (303). She thus locates both patriotic and ethical responsibility in the act of defending him against the overpowering mass of non-Jamaican consumers who wish to censure him for not “sacrificing authenticity for airplay.” In the logic of Cooper’s argument, then, on the international stage at least, DJ s who condemn homosexuality are in need of protection for voicing authentic – if controversial

5

Amnesty International and many others have lamented the verbal and physical violence against L G B T Q s in Jamaica. See Amnesty International, “Activists Worldwide Target Homophobia in Jamaica, Ukraine and South Africa” (16 May 2013), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest /news/2013/05/activists-worldwide-target-homophobia-jamaica-ukraine-and-south-africa/ (accessed 12 September 2015). See also, for example, Saddique Elliott, “Leaving Hell,” Huffington Post (February 2016), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saddique-elliott/leaving-hell_b_3201443.html (accessed 24 August 2016), Reggie Cameron, “Diana King on Jamaican Homophobia and Coming Out,” Huffington Post (February 2016), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reggie-cameron/dianaking_b_2827726.html (accessed 24 August 2016), Keon West, “Why do so many Jamaicans hate gay people?” The Guardian (June 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06 /jamaica-music-anti-gay-dancehall-homophobia (accessed 10 January 2015), and Noel M. Cowell, “Public Discourse, Popular Culture and Attitudes Towards Homosexuals in Jamaica,” Social and Economic Studies 60.1 (2011): 31–60. The relevant sections in the Jamaican legislative text are paragraphs 76 to 80 of “The Offences Against The Person Act,” which suggest a ten-year prison sentence for sexual relations between men (40–41). For a broader perspective on homophobia in the Caribbean and a representation of queer claims to Caribbean culture in and through literature, see Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing in the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008), Zonan Pecic, Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), and Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell, The Queer Caribbean Speaks. Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

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– cultural values, a protection which Cooper readily provides. She puts her own symbolic capital in the service of another Jamaican who may, for whatever reason, be unable to defend his culturally legitimated anti-gay lyrics against the hegemonic symbolic and monetary capital of the West, where these lyrics are criticized as ‘homophobic’. That her stance excludes LGBTQ s from Jamaica’s imagined community – indeed, that it marginalizes any queer claim to cultural citizenship – is not something that Cooper seems overly concerned about. If anything, she constructs such a claim as a neo-colonial threat (“highly politicized G LBT activists wield substantial power”). In her lecture, Cooper makes repeated reference to previous contexts6 when she spoke about similar matters and was, in her own view, wrongly branded7 as a homophobe. The keynote lecture at the GNEL /ASNEL conference was an attempt to rebrand both herself in this respect and Jamaica as a whole. However, her lecture and, more specifically, her discussion of Buju Banton’s song raise questions about her own homophobia. While Cooper calls the song “infamous” and registers her “unequivocal contestation of the DJ ’s homophobia” (304), she provides astonishingly little space in her presentation to refute homophobia. Instead, she quotes Leviticus 18:22 in full (above) without any criticism, thus letting it speak for itself and giving it – and the kind of statements it inspires in dancehall culture – cultural authenticity and legitimacy. She does something similar during the Q&A section of her well-known lecture “Sweet & Sour Sauce: Sexual Politics in Jamaican Dancehall Culture” (2005). While she acknowledges a “contradiction” in the treatment of different types of sexuality in Jamaica, explaining it as “people’s fear of difference from what is seen as the norm,” she repeats this “contradiction” when she says: “I must admit, I was amazed when I heard about fisting and the idea of it just seemed so... But my attitude is it’s people’s bottom and if they want to stretch it out, it is their business.”8 By re6

Her most prominent contribution to the debate is her monograph Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Chapter 5, “ ‘ Lyrical gun’: Metaphor and Role-Play in Dancehall Culture,” contains several of the arguments that Cooper made – and defended – in Bayreuth. 7 In my study Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, forthcoming), I define ‘branding’ as a politicized practice of meaning-making, individual and/or collective, which intervenes in and/or reproduces social regimes of valuation. With her chapter, Cooper can be seen as countering brand narratives of herself and Jamaican culture as homophobic, while seeking to valorize and (re-)brand homophobia in dancehall culture as culturally authentic. 8 Carolyn Cooper, “Sweet and Sour Sauce: Sexual Politics in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” paper, York University, U K (22 October 2005), http://www.yorku.C A /cerlac/documents/cooper .pdf (accessed 13 May 2015).

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gistering her own revulsion at what is allegedly ‘homosexuality’ (broadly: anal penetration), a revulsion that makes that which it denotes unspeakable (“so...”), she legitimizes homophobia: it may be a contradictory reaction, but it is also ‘natural’ (i.e. based on truly felt fear and/or revulsion) as well as culturally authentic (legitimized by the bible, where homosexuality is “abomination”).

II I have so far engaged only with the content of Cooper’s presentation. I would now like to turn to its reception at the 2010 conference in Bayreuth, which requires that I take a more personal approach, as I was a member of the audience. When Cooper finished her lecture, the discussion evaded for about half an hour what seemed to me the obvious question: Can homophobia be excused by playing the card of cultural authenticity? Can criticism of homophobia in another culture plausibly be rejected as an ‘unserious’ contribution to the work of cultural ‘insiders’? Was my own sense of outrage illegitimate, considering that I was neither from that culture nor in possession of Cooper’s cultural capital (both facts for which Melanie Newell had got into trouble)? In other words, could Cooper legitimately be criticized, and should she be, by people like myself? Having only just finished my university degree, I had come to the conference for guidance. When Cooper started her talk, I had eagerly picked up pen and paper to take notes – thinking that her various forms of capital made her a trustworthy presenter. However, there came a point at which I began to wonder what I was actually writing down. During the Q&A session, my sense of confusion grew, as nobody else seemed to object to Cooper’s argument, or did not consider it necessary or appropriate to intervene. I myself reacted strongly to Cooper’s stance because I felt I was among the group that Cooper was sidelining in her presentation. When the chair of the discussion was about to close the session, I raised my hand to ask for the microphone and identified myself to Cooper and the audience ‘as a gay person’, in order to make it clear that, despite my shortcomings of various forms of capital, I had a right to defend those whom Cooper was marginalizing. Put differently, I thought it necessary to use my sexuality as an authenticator and as symbolic capital to leverage my position, which was otherwise so much inferior to Cooper’s. After pointing not very coherently to the homophobia that prevailed even in ‘my own society’ (which does not, like Jamaica, punish male same-sex relations by law), I asked Cooper, in an attempt at irony: “So are heterosexuals ever killed for adultery in Jamaica?” I was taking up one of her earlier comments on adul-

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tery, trying to underline the fact that – since queer people do get killed in Jamaica – homophobic lyrics and the bible are obviously taken seriously by at least some Jamaicans. In response, Cooper joked that if heterosexuals were killed for adultery in Jamaica, there would be nobody left. She laughed and others joined in. My point might never have been made if the TrinidadianCanadian and queer writer Shani Mootoo, who had previously remained silent, had not joined the discussion, which then took a very different turn. She reproached Cooper for neglecting the fact that the group of people she was talking about was ‘vulnerable’. While certain biblical slogans will not be understood literally where heterosexuals are concerned, they might indeed be taken literally when they relate to queers. Mootoo also rejected Cooper’s comment that “Boom Bye Bye” must be an okay song ‘because gay people dance to it’ (one of Cooper’s arguments). Mootoo remarked rightly that gay people were probably dancing in order to ‘appropriate’ the song: i.e. to make the best of what is really quite a frightening situation, rather than celebrating their own murder. (Who would?) In other words, Cooper’s seemingly culturally legitimized stance lost considerable power when somebody who was remotely of her own cultural background criticized her. Members of the predominantly white and German (or: German-speaking) audience might initially have been impressed that the conference they attended was featuring someone so ‘authentic’. Yet it was clear that at least some listeners felt increasingly awkward when they realized that Cooper could be understood as making excuses for homophobia, while at the same time leveraging her symbolic capital to foreclose any ‘unserious’ criticism from cultural outsiders. Criticizing Cooper would have meant replicating precisely the neo-colonial Western stance that she had contested in her lecture. It makes perfect sense, then, that Cooper’s firmly pronounced cultural standpoint could only be challenged effectively by the combined symbolic capital of both lesbianism and cultural authenticity (Mootoo for both, and myself for the former), which in the situation that Cooper had created were the only identity-markers powerful enough to put Cooper’s arguments seriously into question. While Cooper’s stance probably did make some members of the audience feel empowered (because they shared some aspects of her cultural insider’s persona), it must be clear that this empowerment came at the cost of others whom Cooper was willing neither to empower nor to defend.

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II In recent years, postcolonial studies have come under repeated attacks from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.9 They have challenged, in various ways, the view that “the state of the field” can meaningfully grasp “the state of the world.”10 To accommodate what are indeed multifarious ‘states of the world’, we need to remain vigilant in the face of threats to those minority groups who do not instantly conform to postcolonial studies’ (heterosexual) core clientele. Socially and culturally relevant postcolonial critique should not shy away from intervening when narratives of cultural empowerment and claims to cultural authenticity incorporate homophobia, regardless of the forum (whether face-toface or not) or one’s cultural background. Although the initial hesitation of the audience in this matter was perhaps surprising, the discussion that followed was ultimately facilitated by the spirit of constructive and open debate that characterizes the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (G APS , formerly GNEL /ASNEL ). It is these kinds of open and constructive debate that reveal the continuing relevance of negotiating what postcolonial critique might mean today.

W OR K S C I T E D Amnesty International. “Activists Worldwide Target Homophobia in Jamaica, Ukraine and South Africa” (16 May 2013), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/05 /activists-worldwide-target-homophobia-jamaica-ukraine-and-south-africa/ (accessed 12 September 2015). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia U P , 1993). Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John E. Richardson, tr. Richard Nice (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1986): 241–58. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 14– 25.

9

Like the P M L A debate “The End of Postcolonial Theory” (2007), the New Literary History debate “The Future of Postcolonial Studies” (2012) was organized as a forum for negotiating failures of postcolonialism, as well as for discussing new and potentially relevant areas of engagement. Robert JC Young’s essay “Postcolonial Remains” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change” were followed in successive issues by contributions by Simon During, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Ato Quayson, Benita Parry, and Bill Bell. 10 Jennifer Wenzel, in Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” P M L A 122.3 (May 2007): 633.

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Cameron, Reggie. “Diana King on Jamaican Homophobia and Coming Out,” Huffington Post (February 2016): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reggie-cameron/diana-king_b_ 2827726.html (accessed 24 August 2016). Campbell, Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus. The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists (New York: Palgrave, 2014). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 1–18. Cooper, Carolyn. “Sweet and Sour Sauce: Sexual Politics in Jamaican Dancehall Culture,” paper, York University, U K (22 October 2005), http://www.yorku.C A /cerlac/docu ments/cooper.pdf (accessed 13 May 2015). Cowell, Noel M. “Public Discourse, Popular Culture and Attitudes Towards Homosexuals in Jamaica,” Social and Economic Studies 60.1 (March 2011): 31–60. Elliott, Saddique. “Leaving Hell,” Huffington Post (February 2016), http://www .huffingtonpost.com/saddique-elliott/leaving-hell_b_3201443.html (accessed 24 August 2016). Frater, Adrian. “Another Double Murder In MoBay - Resident Says Male Victims Were Gays,” The Gleaner (May 2016), http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/2016 0527/another-double-murder-mobay-resident-says-male-victims-were-gays (accessed 24 August 2016). Glave, Thomas, ed. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing in the Antilles (Durham NC & London: Duke U P , 2008). Koegler, Caroline. Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Pecic, Zonan. Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PM L A 122.3 (May 2007): 633–51. Young, Robert. “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 19–42. Vedantam, Shankar. “Jamaica’s gays finding refuge by applying for U.S. asylum,” Washington Post (11 February 2011), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content /article/2011/02/11/AR2011021106013.html (accessed 14 May 2015). West, Keon. “Why do so many Jamaicans hate gay people?” The Guardian (June 2014): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/jamaica-music-anti-gaydancehall-homophobia (accessed 10 January 2015).

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Notes on Contributors

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E (PhD University of Munich 2005) teaches English linguistics

at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is author of Language Policy and Identity Construction (2013) and editor of a number of volumes including Postcolonial Linguistic Voices (with Stephen A. Mforteh, 2011) and Postcolonial Pragmatics (with Dick Janney, 2011). His current research focuses on postcolonial pragmatics, linguistic identity construction and political discourse from below. S U S A N A R N D T is Professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at Bayreuth University. She has worked and taught at Humboldt University, Berlin; St. Antony’s College, Oxford; the University of Frankfurt/Main; and the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. Trained as a scholar of English, German, and African literatures, she embraces a theoretical framework covering transcultural literary studies, gender studies, and postcolonial and diaspora Studies. She has published on whiteness, racism and British writing; gender and feminism in Nigerian literature; intertextuality; and futurity. Currently, she is working on a book on conceptualizations of whiteness in British fiction with a focus on Shakespeare’s Othello, The Tempest, and the sonnets. She is, further, the author of Weißsein – zur Geschichte eines Mythos: Postkoloniale Begegnungen mit der britischen Literaturgeschichte (2017), Rassismus: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen (2012; 3rd edition 2016), The Dynamics of African Feminism (2002; in German 2000), and African Women’s Literature, Orature and Intertextuality (1998). She is the spokesperson for the research cluster Future Migration: Network for Cultural Diversity. R O M A N B A R T O S C H is an assistant professor at the University of Cologne, where he teaches anglophone literatures and cultures and E F L methodologies. He has

published on posthumanism, education for sustainability and inclusion, and is the author of EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (2013). He has recently edited a special issue of Anglistik – International Journal of English Studies, entitled Animal Poetics (2016), and is, together with Dominik Ohrem, currently editing the forthcoming volume Beyond the Human-Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature, History, and Culture.

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C A R O L Y N C O O P E R is a recently retired professor of literary and cultural studies

who taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica for thirty-six years. She is the author of two influential books – Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004). She is the editor of the award-winning Global Reggae (2012). Professor Cooper writes a weekly column for the Sunday Gleaner that she posts on her bilingual blog, “Jamaica Woman Tongue.” She has appeared in numerous documentaries on Caribbean culture produced by a wide range of local and international media houses such as Television Jamaica, Al Jazeera TV , National Public Radio (U SA ), the BBC , ARD TV (Germany), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and B. World Connection (Guadeloupe). Professor Cooper is committed to broadening debate on cultural politics beyond the walls of the university. D A R I A D A Y T E R obtained her MA and PhD from the University of Bayreuth and

is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research interests include diachronic development of the speech act of insult in varieties of English, computer-mediated communication in-group discourse, and corpus-based translation studies. Her book Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-praise appeared in 2016. D A G M A R D E U B E R studied and did her doctoral and postdoctoral work at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Stays abroad have included field research periods in Nigeria and Trinidad. She currently holds the chair of Variation Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Münster, Germany. Postcolonial varieties of English are among her major research areas. T O B I A S D Ö R I N G teaches literature in the English Department of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where he takes special interest in early-modern and postcolonial studies. His books include Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (2002) and Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (2008); he has edited A History of Postcolonial Literature in 12½ Books (2007) and co-edited (with Mark Stein) Edward Said’s Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism (2012). S T E P H A NI E H A C K E R T holds a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and has

taught at the universities of Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Regensburg, and Augsburg. She is now Full Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her research interests centre on pidgins and creoles, varieties of English, language variation and change, and historical discourse analysis; her publications include various articles in peer-reviewed

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journals as well as a monograph on urban Bahamian Creole English (2004) and one on the history of the concept of the English native speaker (2012). C A R O L I N E K O E G L E R is an assistant professor at the University of Münster, Germany, in the British Studies section. Her research interests include postcolonial studies; queer studies; (neo-)Victorianism; nature and post-humanism; crossovers between marketing/branding and literature/criticism; performance and urbanity; and emotion in the eighteenth century. Her monograph Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market is forthcoming (2018.) S T E P H A N L A Q U É is Professor of English Literature at the Freie Universität Ber-

lin. He is the author of Hermetik und Dekonstruktion: Die Erfahrung von Transzendenz in Shakespeares “Hamlet” (2005) and of a book on isolation in literature. He also co-edited Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies (2011) and Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe (2008). A N D R E A M O L L studied and did her doctoral work at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In 2008, she was granted the first Graduate Award from G APS for her MA thesis on “Linguistic Surface and Deep Level Structures in Aboriginal Eng-

lish: A Case Study of New South Wales Aboriginal English.” Her PhD on Jamaican Creole Goes Web: Sociolinguistic styling and authenticity in a digital ‘Yaad’ was published in 2015. S U S A N N E M Ü H L E I S E N teaches English linguistics at Bayreuth University. Her

research interests include contact varieties in Africa and in the Caribbean, linguistic anthropology, postcolonial pragmatics, and varieties of English/Creole in translation. She is the author of Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change in Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (2002) and co-editor of Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles (2005) and of Selling the Caribbean: Questions of Value in a Globalized World (special issue of ZAA , 2015). J O C H E N P E T Z O L D received both his Dr. phil. (2001) and his postdoc (Habilita-

tion) (2008) from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (I ASH ) at the University of Edinburgh from 2009 until he was appointed Professor of British Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany, in 2010. He has published a monograph, Reexamining White Identity by Exploring the Past (2002), and numerous articles on South African fiction. K A T J A S A R K O W S K Y is professor of American Studies at the Westfälische Wil-

helms-Universität, Münster, Germany. She has published widely on Canadian and U S -American ‘ethnic’ literatures; her current research interests include literary citizenship studies, theories of diaspora, and life writing. Her

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monograph Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature is forthcoming (2018). B R I T T A S C H N E I D E R currently leads a project on language ideologies in Belize at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her general research interests are multilingualism and diversity, the sociolinguistics of globalization, language ideology, transnationalism, language policy, and the epistemology of language. She has worked in the field since 2004 and obtained a PhD from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and from Frankfurt University, Germany, in 2011/2012. Among her publications are Linguistic Human Rights and Migrant Languages: A Comparative Analysis of Migrant Language Education in Britain and Germany (2005) and Salsa, Language and Transnationalism (2014). A N N E S C H R Ö D E R is Professor of English Linguistics at Bielefeld University, Ger-

many. She studied English and French at the universities of Caen (France), Bristol (U K ), and Freiburg (Germany), where she received her PhD in English Linguistics. She previously worked at Martin Luther University, Halle, and at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her publications include Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon (2003), On the Productivity of Verbal Prefixation in English (2011), the edition of several volumes, and the publication of various articles on similar topics. More recently, she has also researched and published on the dynamics of English in Namibia. J U D E S S E M P U U M A is a lecturer in English Linguistics at Bayreuth University, Germany. He obtained his BA in Philosophy at Makerere University, Uganda, an MA in English Linguistics from Bayreuth University, and his PhD, in English

Linguistics, from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Recent publications include The Emergence of an Indigenous Language as Lingua Franca: The Case of Luganda in Uganda (2011), Ugandan English (2012), and The Use of the Progressive in Ugandan English (2016). His research interests are related to world Englishes, contact linguistics, and multilingualism. R O B E R T J C Y O U N G is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, and currently Dean of Arts and Humanities at NY U Abu Dhabi. Before joining NYU in 2005 he was Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University. His books include White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015), and, with Jean Khalfa, Frantz Fanon: Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, Œuvres II (2015). His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He is a corresponding

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Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academia Europaea, and an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, & Maria Torok 163 Abrahams, Roger 27, 30, 31, 34, 40, 41, 42 Acevedo Butcher, Carmen 7 Achebe, Chinua 146 Adekunle, Mobolaji 62 Afendras, Evangelos A., Sharon Millar et al. 7 African studies xix African-American Vernacular English 27, 35, 46, 56, 75 Africans, displaced in the Americas xiii, 26 Agamben, Giorgio xix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii, xxxix Agha, Asif 71, 77 Algeria xxxv Allsopp, Richard 74 American, African, and oral culture 27–47 Amin, Idi 266 amnesia, collective 154 Anatol, Giselle Liza 154 Anderson, Benedict xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, 10, 58, 77, 90, 97, 102, 113, 134, 135, 143, 150, 155, 156, 204, 239, 240 Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 69, 70, 71 Anglo-Saxonism 13, 16 anthropomorphism xxii, 203, 208, 209 —See also: Life of Pi (Martel) Aparicio, Frances R. 244, 246, 249 Appel, René, & Pieter Muysken 54

Armstrong, Philip 203, 205, 209, 210, 212, 213 Arndt, Susan 220, 221 Arnold, Thomas 13 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne) 133 Asian identity xxviii Assmann, Jan 150, 166 Auerbach, Erich 227, 232 Australian Aboriginal culture and identity 187–200 Ayoub, Millicent, & Stephen Barnett 31, 34 Baganda people 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274 Baguma, Arthur, & Hope Abimanya 271 Bagunywa, Arthur M.K., & Ekibiina Ky'olulimi Oluganda 270 Bakare–Yusuf, Bibi 282 Bakhtin, Mikhail 178, 255 Balasubramanian, Chandrika 117, 118, 124, 126 Balibar, Étienne 221, 222 bandits, in colonial India xxi —See also: Philip Meadows Taylor; thug/thuggee Banton, Buju 284, 286, 293, 297; “Boom Bye Bye" 293, 299 Banyarwanda people 267 Bartosch, Roman 203

310 Bataille, Georges xxxi Bauman, Richard 79, 80 Bauman, Zygmunt xv, 79 Baumann, Gerd xii, xv Bayly, Christopher Alan 144, 145 Beal, John C. 70 Bealle, Jo, Owen Crankshaw & Susan Parnell 171 Beavon, Keith 172, 177, 178 belonging xii, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxviii, xxxii, xxxiii, 15, 17, 24, 51, 54, 61, 97, 101, 102, 109, 135, 150, 153, 165, 172, 199, 221, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 241, 257, 283, 291 Benjamin, Walter 174 Bennett, Louise 82 Bhabha, Homi K. xxvii, 245 Bhatt, Rakesh M. 117 Bickerton, Derek 73 Birney, Earle 167 Bishop, Brian, Simon Colquhoun & Gemma Johnson 190 Black Atlantic xxii, 219, 220, 222, 223 Black Panthers 243 Blanchot, Maurice xix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxvii Blommaert, Jan xvi, 8, 69, 71, 73, 77, 242, 247 Book of Negroes, The (Hill) 150 “Boom Bye Bye" (Banton) 293, 299 Booth, W. James 150, 155 Borg, Erik 25 Bourdieu, Pierre 291, 300 ‘Boycott Jamaica’ campaign 287 Brand, Dionne, What We All Long For 150, 153 Brantlinger, Patrick 142 Brathwaite, Edward L. 222 Bringing Them Home report 187 Bronner, Simon 28, 31, 40 Brown, Rap. H. 30, 31, 42 Brydon, Diana, & William D. Coleman xii Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall 76, 77, 78, 88 Buddha of Suburbia, The (Kureishi) 230 Buganda 261, 262, 264, 267, 269, 270

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES



Buschfeld, Sarah 4, 5 Buse, Peter, & Andrew Stott 155 Cameron, Reggie 296, 300 Cameroon, and linguistic communities vii, xx, 62, 63, 64, 65, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 109, 111 Cameroon English 52, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 Cameroon Pidgin English 61–65 Campbell, Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus 296, 300 Canadian literature xxi, xxii —See: Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Yann Martel, Shani Mootoo Canagarajah, A. Suresh 5 “CanLit" (Birney) 167 Cape Verdean Creole 52, 55 Caribbean colonial history 165 Caribbean Creole identity 223 Caribbean English vii, xx, xxi, xxviii, 26, 27, 28, 31, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 64, 72, 74, 153, 165, 167, 222, 242, 243, 250, 252, 281, 285, 292, 293, 300, 301 Caribbean immigrants, in Canada 158 Caribbean, and slavery 154, 158, 162 Caruth, Cathy 154 Casanova, Pascale 232, 233 Cassidy, Frederic G. 81; & Robert B. Le Page 74 “Ceo Draiochta (Magic Mist)" (O'Donoghue) xxxix, xl Chakrabarty, Dipesh 220, 300, 301 Chamberlain, Joseph 14 Chambers, Ian 92 Chameleon (Joseph Mayanja) 272 Chand, Vineeta 114 Chariandy, David, “The Fiction of Belonging” 153; Soucouyant xxi, 149–68 Childs, Peter, Jean Jacques Weber & Patrick Williams 206 Cho, Lily 167



Index

Chomsky, Noam 3 Church Missionary Society 262 Clarkson, Carrol 175 Clifford, James 52 CMC —see: computer-mediated communication Cobo, Leila 250 code-switching 58, 64, 73, 272 Cohen, Robin 26, 221 Cole, Stewart 208 colonialism xxii, xxxiv, 96, 98, 104, 105, 106, 110, 205, 210, 211, 216, 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 230, 232, 292 colonialism, British, in India 133–46 colonizers/colonized binary 98, 104, 191, 198, 245 common, the, and the commons xxxvi– xxxvii commune, meaning of xxix communism xxix, xxxi, xxxvi, xxxvii community, meanings of xxv–xli, 47 community of practice (Eckert & McConnell–Ginet) xvi, 96, 100, 101, 111 community of practice (Wenger) 25, 26, 90, 91, 101, 110 computer-mediated communication xx, 69–74, 78, 79, 89, 304 Conboy, Martin 113, 114, 116, 120 “Concordiam in Populo” (O'Donoghue) xl Confessions of a Thug (Meadows Taylor) 131–46 Conrad, Joseph 231 contact varieties xvii, 7, 51, 52, 53, 56, 65, 66, 72, 305 Coombs, Herbert Cole, Maria Brandl & Warren Snowdon 190 Cooper, Carolyn 280, 282, 283, 286, 291– 99, 301 Cornwell, Garth, Dirk Klopper & Craig MacKenzie 171 Coronil, Fernando 300, 301 Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican vii, 70, 73, 83, 84

311 Coulmas, Florian 3, 7, 51 Coupland, Nikolas 69, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 82, 87 Cowan, James 198 Cowell, Noel M. 296, 301 Craik, George L. 11 creole languages vii, xiv, xx, 26, 28, 31, 48– 61, 65, 69, 72–76, 81, 88, 91, 224, 280, 282, 283, 292, 293 —See also: Jamaican Creole Crystal, David 70, 269 Cutting, Joan 35 cyber communities vii, xx, 61, 69, 70, 73, 83 Daddy Yankee 248, 250, 251 dancehall culture 281, 283, 291, 297 dancehall lyrics 282, 283, 292, 294 Darias–Beautell, Eva 152 Dasgupta, Probal 7, 8 Daston, Lorraine 205 Daston, Lorraine, & Gregg Mitman 203, 205, 216 Davies, Bronwyn, & Rom Harré xviii Davis, Colin 163, 164 De Fina, Anna, & Alexandra Georgakopoulou xviii Deceivers, The (Masters) 133 Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari xxii dementia xxi, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 161, 164 Derrida, Jacques 162, 163, 164, 181, 205 Deuber, Dagmar 74 deviance, in language-use 36, 76 Devitt, Amy 29 diaspora vii, xiii, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, xxxvii, 26, 28, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 72, 73, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 108, 109, 151, 153, 154, 167, 168, 221, 223, 231, 273, 281, 292 Diop, Alioune xxxiv discourse communities xix, xx, 24, 25, 26, 96, 97, 110

312 dislocation xxxv, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 166, 175, 176 Dobson, Kit 152, 153, 158, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167 Dollard, John 27, 30, 31, 33, 36, 43 Donaldson, J.W. 11 Donne, John xi, xiii dozens, the 27–37, 39–47 Dudgeon, Pat, John Mallard, Darlene Oxenham & John Fiedler 189, 190 duelling, verbal xx, 27, 30, 35, 39 Dundes, Alan, Jerry Leach & Bora Özkök 27 Dwyer, June 209 Eakin, Paul John 155 East Africa xxii, 261, 262, 263, 264, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275 East African Community 268 East India Company 132, 135, 140 “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water" (Melville) xxii, 219, 223–26 Eckert, Penelope 71, 90, 91, 96; & Sally McConnell–Ginet xvi, 25, 101 Edwards, Alison 5 Edwards, Viv, & Thomas Sienkewicz 39, 40 Elias, Norbert xv Elliott, Saddique 296 Emecheta, Buchi 231 emergent literatures (Dodzich) 229 enregisterment, of dialect 69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80, 88, 91 Ethiopians, The 283, 284 ethnicity xii, xv, xxii, xxv, xxx, 5, 61, 63, 69, 72, 73, 172, 179, 195, 241, 242, 244, 250, 251, 255, 257, 258 Ette, Ottmar 227, 228, 230, 231 Facebook communities xvi, xxxi, 239 Fanon, Frantz xxvi, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, 220, 224

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES



Faraclas, Nicholas, Lourdes Gonzales et al. 27, 28 Farrington, Constance xxxv Féral, Carol de 63, 65 Fhlathúin, Máire ní 134, 136 “Fiction of Belonging, The” (Chariandy) 153 Fifield, Anna xxviii Finnegan, Ruth 38 Flores, Juan 248 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (Garimara) 187–200 Following the Equator (Twain) 133 forgetting xviii, xxi, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 161, 162, 167, 225 Foucault, Michel 141, 142, 143 Frankenberg, Ronald 23, 231 Frater, Adrian 295, 301 Freeman, Edward A. 11, 12 Fudge, Erika 204 Gandhi, Mahatma xxix, xl Garimara, Nugi (Doris Pilkington Garimara) xxi, xxii; Follow the RabbitProof Fence 187–200; Under the Wintamarra Tree 192 Garner Thurmon 28, 31, 41 Garraty, John A., & Mark C. Carnes 8 Gaylard, Rob 182 Gelder, Ken, & Jane M. Jacobs 155 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction (Tönnies) xiv, xv, 23, 193 Georgis, Dina 208, 211 ghetto culture 243, 246, 256 ghettoization xv, xvi ghosts, as trope xxxiv, 103, 152, 161, 162, 166, 167 —See also: hauntology Gilroy, Paul 219, 220, 221, 222, 223 Glave, Thomas 296, 301 GLBT communities 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 296, 297



Index

Glissant, Édouard 222, 227, 230 globalization xv, xvi, 5, 24, 39, 43, 54, 66, 71, 72, 73, 77, 212, 221, 222, 226, 232, 240 Godzich, Wlad 229 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 232 Goffman, Erving 32, 45 Goldman, Marlene, & Joanne Saul 152 Gowers, Governer William (Uganda) 263, 264 Green, Michael 171, 172, 183, 184 Gruen, Lori 204 Gumperz, John J. 239 Gunew, Sneja 150, 151, 152 “Gunpowder” (O'Donoghue) xl Guyana 27, 223, 224, 225; and slavery 225 Guyanese literature xxii —See: Pauline Melville Habwe, John 274 Haitian creole 52, 55, 56 Hall, Stuart 52, 54, 61 Hannerz, Ulf 30, 247, 250 Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxvii hauntology 163, 164 He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo) 150 Heller, Monica xvi Herman, David 208 Herrick, Allison Bulter et al. 269 Herring, Susan C. 89, 90 Hill, Laurence, The Book of Negroes 150 Hillbrow —see: Johannesburg Hinrichs, Lars 76 hip-hop/rap 34, 55, 56, 75, 244, 248–54, 256, 272 Hirsch, Marianne 159, 160 Hoad, Neville 184 Hoggett, Paul 24 homophobia, in Jamaica xxii, 283, 286– 88, 291, 294–301 homosexuality 36, 41, 107, 109, 283, 284, 286, 293, 294, 296, 298 Horsman, Reginald 13

313 Hosokawa, Shuhei 246, 247 Howard, John 189 Huddart, David 143 Huggan, Graham, & Helen Tiffin 207, 210, 211, 212, 214 human–animal communities xxii Humboldt, Wilhelm von 11 Hutton, Christopher 9, 12, 13 hybridity 26, 54, 61, 63, 88, 117, 151, 227, 246 Hymes, Dell 24, 239 identity-formation xxi, xxxii, 66 ideograph 17 Iliad (Homer) 37, 38 illiteracy 37 imagined community (Anderson) xi, xix, xxvi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, 58, 90, 97, 113, 150, 151, 208, 215, 240, 297 immigration xv, 59, 63, 107, 153, 158, 161, 179, 181 indenture 56, 152, 154, 158, 162, 223 India, tabloid newspaper culture in 113– 26 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (dir. Spielberg) 133 insults xx, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 42, 45, 46, 105, 108, 110 interdisciplinarity xviii, xix, xxv, 47, 66 International Federation of Black Prides 286 invective 38, 39 Ireland —see Bernard O'Donoghue Islam xvii, 138, 262, 265 Jaffe, Alexandra 82 Jakobson, Roman xxxiii Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All Sexuals and Gays (J -F L A G ) 287 Jamaica, and linguistic performance vii, xx, xxii, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 249, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287,

314 288, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 300, 301 Jamaican Creole 5, xix, xxi, xxv, 55, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 300, 306 Jamaicans, as workers on Panama Canal 248 Japan, and salsa —see: Orquestra de la Luz Jespersen, Otto 9 Jews, in London xiii J - F L A G (Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All Sexuals and Gays) 286, 288 Johannesburg, as setting for new South African fiction xxi, 171–84 Johns, Timothy 174 Johnstone, Barbara 70, 77, 87; & Dan Baumgardt 79, 80, 81, 91 Jørgensen, J. Normann 77 Joseph, Carole M. Berotte 52, 55 Joseph, Kelly Baker 155 Kachru, Braj B. 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 117 Kagaba, Peter 271 Kajubi, William Ssenteza 268 Kamboureli, Smaro 151, 152 Kamwangamalu, Nkonko 182 Kandiah, Thiru 8, 16, 17 Kanyomozi, Juliana 272 Kasozi, A.B. 262, 263, 266, 269 Kayira, Andrew 267 Kenya 264, 268, 272, 274, 275 Kerswill, Paul et al. 72, 83 kinship xiii, xv, 39, 189, 190, 195, 196, 198, 199, 204, 205 Kiswahili (language) xxii, 261–75 Kkulubya, Sserwaniko 265 Klapproth, Danièle 190 Klein, Joe 146 Koch, Peter, & Wulf Oesterreicher 74, 75 Koegler, Caroline 297, 301 Konings, Piet, & Francis B. Nyamnjoh 103

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES



Kramer, Paul A. 13, 14 Kramsch, Claire 8 Krefeld, Thomas 54 Kuiper, Koenraad 27 Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia 230 Kyabukasa, Henry 269, 270 Labov, William xxix, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 69 Lachmann, Renate 150, 151 Ladefoged et al. 269 Ladefoged, Peter, Ruth Glick & Clive Criper 266 Lamming, George 223 Lange, Claudia 123 Langlands, B.W., Alan Rake & Linda Van Buren 269 Lave, Jean, & Étienne Wenger 110 Le Page, Robert, & Andrée Tabouret– Keller 59, 60, 91 Leerssen, Joep 12 Lefever, Harry J. 39 Legget, Ted 172 Levinas, Emmanuel 181, 182 LG BT Q s 295, 296, 297 Life of Pi (Martel) xxii, 206–16 Lipsitz, George 240 literacy 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 177 Liu, Lydia H. 146 London, and Caribbean diaspora 52, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65; and immigrant communities xv; Jewish community in xiii London Jamaican 72 Low, Anthony 262, 264, 265 Luganda (language) xxii, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274 Luria, A.R. 37 Lutalo, David 272



Index

MacAdams, Dan P. xviii MacDougall, Hugh 13 Maclean, Ruth, & Rachel Rickard Straus 114, 115 Mai, Mbong Magdaline 63, 64, 65 Maine, Henry xxix Mair, Christian 56, 70, 72, 73, 83 Majeed, Javed 133, 141 Manase, Irikidzayi 175, 176 Manuel, Peter 243; & Wayne Marshall 249 Marley, Bob, & The Wailers 279, 280; “Redemption Song” 280 maroon populations xiv Marsh, George P. 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16 Marshall, Wayne 248, 249, 250; Raquel Z. Rivera & Deborah Pacini Hernández 249, 250, 257 Martel, Yann, Life of Pi xxii, 206–16 Marx, Karl 144, 163 Märzhäuser, Christina 52, 55 Masters, John, The Deceivers 133 Mayanja, Joseph (aka Chameleon) 272, 273 Mazrui, Ali 264, 265, 266, 267; & Alamini Mazrui 264 McChrystal, General Stanley 146 McClintock, Anne xi McFarlane, Jason 287, 288 McGee, Michael Calvin 17 McGregor, G.P. 268 McKay, Sandra Lee 5 McLachlan, Shelley, & Peter Golding 113, 116 Mda, Zakes, Ways of Dying 173 Meadows Taylor, Philip 131–46; Confessions of a Thug 131–46; Story of My Life 133 media xix, xxi, xxv, xxvi, 29, 52, 78, 107, 113, 115, 195, 266, 269; in Uganda 270, 273 —See also: online forums, newspapers, tabloid newspapers

315 media studies xix Meiklejohn, J.M.D. 15 Melchers, Gunnel, & Philip Shaw 4 Melville, Pauline xxii, 223–26, 230; “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” xxii, 223–26; Shape Shifter 223 Memmi, Albert 220 Mesthrie, Rajend 53 Mesthrie, Rajend, & Rakesh B. Bhatt 7 metadiscourse 80, 84 metaphor/metonymy axis (Jakobson) xxxiii metonymy xxxiii, 82 Meyerhoff, Miriam 242 migrancy xv, 54, 224, 225, 226, 230, 231 migration xii, xiii, 38, 54, 56, 57, 72, 150, 152, 154, 158, 178, 207, 219, 220, 224, 226, 230, 232 Miller, John 203 Mintz, Sidney, & Richard Price xiii, xiv modernity xv, xvi, xvii, xxii, 144, 205 Moll, Andrea 75, 80, 82 monolingualism 54 Moodie, Susanna, Roughing It in the Bush 167 Mootoo, Shani 299; He Drown She in the Sea 150, Morgan, Marcyliena M. xvii, 33, 34 Morgan, Sally, My Place 195, 196 Morris, Mervyn 225 Morrison, Toni 231 Mpe, Phaswane, Welcome to Our Hillbrow xxi, 171–76, 179–84 Mufwene, Salikoko 8, 18 Mühleisen, Susanne 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 61, 72 Mukama, Ruth G. 269 Mukherjee, Joybrato 7, 16; & Sebastian Hoffmann 117 Mukuthuria, Mwenda 274 “Mule Duignan, The" (O'Donoghue) xl Müller, Max 10 multilingualism xvi, xix, 6, 55, 265

316 Murray, Stephen 29 Musaala, Fr. 272 Museveni, Yoweri 267, 273 music industry, and commodification of Jamaican Creole 72 music, African-American 258 —See: hip-hop/rap music, Caribbean xxii, 258 —See: dancehall, reggae, reggaetón, salsa 258 music, in Jamaica 279–87, 297, 299 music, in Uganda 271–74 Muslim communities xxx, xxxii, 97, 138 Muslims 139, 262 Mutebi, Ronald 267 My Place (Morgan) 195 N.O.R.E. 248, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256 Nancy, Jean–Luc xix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii National Resistance Movement (N R M ) (Uganda) 267, 268, 273 nationalism xxvi, xxxiv, xxxvii, 10, 12, 14, 16, 274 native speaker xx, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18 Ndjuka, Surinamese maroons xiv négritude xxxiv Neville, A.O. 188, 189 New Englishes 4–18, 62, 117 new varieties (linguistics) xvii New Zealand, locker-room badinage in 27 Newell, Melanie 281, 282, 288, 293, 298 newspapers, and community xxvii; Indian, and readership communities vii, xxi, 96, 102, 113–26, 128, 178; online 97 Ngara, Kudzayi 181 nostalgia xxxvii, 176 novel, the, and community xxvii Noyce, Philip, dir. Rabbit-Proof Fence 199 Nuttall, Sarah 181

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES



O’Donoghue, Bernard xx, xxxviii–xli; “Ceo Draiochta (Magic Mist)” xxxix, xl; “Concordiam in Populo” xl; “Gunpowder” xl; “The Mule Duignan” xl; “O’Regan the Amateur Anatomist” xl; “Ter Conatus” xli; “Unknownst to the People“ xl Obote, Milton 266, 267 Ocracoke English 79 Odyssey (Homer) 38 Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G. 243 Olivo, Warren 75 Olufemi, Olusola 178 Ong, Walter J. 37, 38 online communities vii, xvi, xx, 69, 71, 75, 80, 88–90, 91, 96–99, 101–103, 117, 125, 227, 274 online forums 95–111 oral cultures 37, 40 orality 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 74 Orquestra de la Luz (Japanese salsa group) 242, 244 orthography 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 252 Otsuji, Emi, & Alastair Pennycook 258 Panama, and reggaetón 248 Patois contest 84, 86 Patrick, Peter L. 3 Pawlikova–Vilhanova, Viera 272, 274 Pecic, Zonan 296, 301 Pendennis (Thackeray) xxxvi, xxxvii Pennycook, Alastair 240 Percelay, James 44 performance xx, 6, 42, 44, 45, 59, 64, 73, 78, 79, 80, 84, 86, 87, 91, 124, 244, 247, 248, 249, 256, 282, 283 Pick, Anat 208 Pickard–Cambridge, Claire 177, 178 pidgins 18, 51 —See also: Cameroon Pidgin English Pietrobruno, Sheenagh 241, 243 Pilkington, Doris —see Nugi Garimara



Index

Pilkington, George 262 Piller, Ingrid 7 Pittsburghese 79, 80, 81, 86, 91 poetics of Relation (Glissant) 233 Pogner, Karl–Heinz 97 Pollard, Velma 283 Poovey, Mary 133, 136, 140 positioning (Davies & Harré) xviii postcolonialism xi, xii, xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 3, 4, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 46, 98, 104, 111, 146, 203, 204, 205, 208, 210, 213, 215, 219, 221, 225, 230, 232, 245, 291, 299, 300 post-identitarian community xix, xxxii postmemory 159, 160 postmodern condition xv, xix, xxxi, xxxvii, 159, 175, 176 Price, Richard xiv Pride, John B. 6 print culture xxvii Puerto Ricans in USA 243, 244, 249, 253, 254 Rabbit-Proof Fence (dir. Noyce) 199, 200 Radio Uganda 266 Raleigh, Sir Walter 225, 226 Rampton, Ben 5, 6, 7, 53, 57, 72, 240, 242, 245, 257 Randeria, Shalina 221 Ranks, Shabba 249, 283, 284 Red Stripe 287, 288 “Redemption Song" (Marley) 280 reggae 248, 250, 272, 279, 283, 284, 285, 295 reggaetón xxii, 239, 248, 249, 250 Reinhard, Wolfgang 227 Reiter Márquez, Rosina, & Luisa Martín Rojo xvi religious communities xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxix, xxx, 53, 109, 135, 138, 139, 140, 144, 151, 213, 215, 216, 220, 221, 262, 269, 294

317 remembering xviii, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 162, 165, 225 Renan, Ernest xxxiv Restless Supermarket, The (Vladislavic) xxi, 171, 173–76, 179, 181, 183, 184 rhizome xxii, 219, 222, 223, 226, 228, 232, 233 Richards, Audrey 269 Rickford, John 51 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 132 Rosenberg, Göran xv Rosser, Colin, & Christopher Harris 23 Rossi–Landi, Ferruccio 24 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie) 167 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 143 Rowling, J.K. 229, 281 Rudd, Kevin 189 Ruskin, John 204, 206, 207 Safran, William 52, 53, 54 Said, Edward W. 220 salsa xxii, 239, 241–49 Samuelson, Meg 171 Sarkar, Mela, & Lise Winer 55 Sayeed, Syed A. 18 Scarborough (Toronto), setting of Soucouyant (Chariandy) 156, 167 Schilling–Estes, Natalie 79, 84 Schneider, Britta 242, 248 Schröder, Anne 52, 62, 63, 64 Scotton, Carol Myers 263, 264 Sebba, Mark 52, 57, 72 Sedlatschek, Andreas 113, 114, 117, 118, 123, 124 Seeley, J.R. 14, 15 sexuality xii, xiii, xxv, xxix, xxx, 29, 36, 41, 44, 249, 252, 256, 288, 296, 297, 298 Shahzad, Faisal xxviii Shape-Shifter (Melville) 223 Sharma, Devyani 117 shipmate relationship (Price & Mintz) xiii

318 Siebenhaar, Beat 80 Siemerling, Winfried 154 signifyin(g) 39 Simmons, Donald 27 Simpson, John 89 Singh, Rajendra, Jean D'Souza, K.P. Mohanan & N.S. Prabhu 15 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, & Robert Phillipson 3 slavery xiii, 26, 27, 36, 56, 152, 154, 158, 162, 220, 223, 225, 242, 261 Smith, Anthony D. xxvi Smith, Claire 199 Smith, F.C. 145 Smith, Zadie 230 Snow, Peter 31 social death (Patterson) 162 social sciences xix Sontag, Susan 150, 154 Soucouyant (Chariandy) xxi, 149–68 South African fiction xxi, 171–84 —See also: Phaswane Mpe, Zakes Mda, Ivan Vladislavic Southall (London) xv Southall, A.D., & P.C. Gutkind 261 sovereignty xxxi Spanish, and contact with English 251, 252 Sparks, Colin 116 specieism xxii speech community xvi, xvii, xxviii, xxix, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 51, 54, 60, 61, 69, 91, 239 speech event xx, 26, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 42, 43, 45 Spiegel, Marjorie 203 Spielberg, Steven, dir. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 133 St Augustine 51, 67, 143 Stacey, Margaret 24 Stalin, Joseph xxvi Standard English 73, 75, 76, 82, 84, 88 Stanner, W.E.H. 192

CON TE STE D CO M MU NIT IES



Stolen Generations xxi, 189, 190, 200 stories xvii, xviii, xix, 89, 92, 98, 115, 122, 131, 149, 156, 159, 165, 171, 178, 184, 193, 195, 196, 301; family 158 Story of My Life (Meadows Taylor) 133 Stouck, Jordan 225 Strauss, Helene 181 Streicher, Bishop (active in Uganda) 262 styling/stylization, of Jamaican Creole 74, 75, 78 Suss reports 84, 88, 89 Swales, John 24, 25, 29, 97 tabloid newspapers xxi; Indian 113–26 taboos 107, 252, 256 Tabouret–Keller, Andrée 51 Tah, Elvis 98 Taliban 146 Tannen, Deborah 25 Tanzania 267, 268, 271, 272, 274, 275 “Ter Conatus” (O'Donoghue) xli Thackeray, William, Pendennis xxxvii Third International, communist xxix Thornton, Edward 134, 137, 138 thug/thuggee (bandit culture in India) 131–46 Tonkinson, Myrna Ewart 190 Tönnies, Ferdinand xiv, xv, 23, 193 totalitarianism xxxi, xxxvii, 222 Tourigny, Yves 262 trauma xviii, xxv, 149, 150, 154, 158, 159, 160, 163 Trinidad, American troops in 158, 161 Tuker, Francis 139, 145 Twain, Mark, Following the Equator 133 Uganda 261–75; education in 264, 268, 271 —See also: Baganda people; Buganda; Kiswahili (language); Luganda (language) Uganda Freedom Movement ( U F M ) 267 Uganda People’s Congress (UPC ) 265



Index

unbelonging xvii, xviii, 154, 229 Under the Wintamarra Tree (Garimara) 192 unfinished community xxxii “Unknownst to the People" (O'Donoghue) xl Vaish, Viniti 114 vampire, as trope 153, 156, 161, 178 van Toorn, Penny 195 van Woerkens, Martine 134 Vedantam, Shankar 295, 301 Vermeulen, Pieter, & Virginia Richter 208 vernacular lexicography 80, 86 Verne, Jules, Around the World in Eighty Days 133 Vertovec, Steven 52, 53, 56, 77 Vladislaviǰ, Ivan, The Restless Supermarket xxi, 171–73, 177–78, 180, 181 Wachendorfer, Ursula 231 Wagner, Kim A. 134, 135, 136, 137, 144, 145 Walcott, Rinaldo 153 Waliggo, John Mary 262, 263 Walmart xxviii Walusimbi, Livingstone 270

319 warm circles (Rosenberg) xv Waxer, Lise 243 Ways of Dying (Mda) 173 Wee, Lionel 5 Welch, Dylan 189 Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe) xxi, 171, 173–76, 179–80, 182–84 Welsh language 87 Wenger, Étienne 25, 90, 101 West, Keon 296, 301 What We All Long For (Brand) 150, 153 White, Joseph 30 Whitney, W.D. 9 Widdowson, H.G. 5, 6 Williams, Raymond xxx Williams, Robert Grant 133, 142 Williams, William 23 Wockner, Rex 287 World Englishes xx, 3–9, 73, 117, 123 Wyld, Henry Cecil 9 Yaeger, Patricia 300, 301 Youndjous, Wenga Suzanne 65 Young, Jock xvii Young, Robert 300, 301