Group items tagged

"This article explores the use of nonstandard English forms and intertextuality in two recent works by Nigerian writers in English living abroad. To date, Chris Abani's Graceland and Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation have attracted little critical commentary, far less any academic survey of their language, yet each book is in its own way representative of conflicting treatments of nonstandard varieties of Nigerian English by writers in the diaspora. Beasts of No Nation owes a considerable debt to the linguistic and stylistic experiments Ken Saro-Wiwa made in his novel Sozaboy and Iweala has drawn heavily on this work in his use of a first person narrator and his assignment of a limited, if forcefully expressive, language to his hero. According to Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy is written in a mixture of Nigerian Pidgin (NP), Standard English (SE) and other forms. Graceland, however, makes selective use of nonstandard forms for reasons closer to those of earlier writers and makes this clear through its author's insertion of intertextual elements. After providing an overview of the background to and characteristic features of NP and Nigerian English this article surveys their use in Nigerian literature and concludes by examining the language of Graceland and Beasts of No Nation through a linguistic comparison of shared episodes and a consideration of thematic similarities in order to place these two novels in a continuum of Nigerian writing in English through their use of language."

"This article presents recent empirical research into emerging literature in English from four African countries. Employing ethnographic research methods to interrogate the current state of emerging writing in English from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, the research recognises the creative writing medium of 'short stories' to capture contemporary concerns of Africans living in the nations noted above. The short stories in this research project are newly sourced and are treated as data per se from which we are able to question the idea of emerging writing in English in these countries being 'beyond the postcolonial'. In essence, the article presents data which suggest a shift from the classic postcolonial text to new, contemporary texts highlighting fresh departures in theme, genre and use of Englishes. The article demonstrates how the emerging writing captures and represents a sense of the zeitgeist of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya respectively. This article presents distinctive scholarly arguments for the use of interdisciplinary enquiry (ethnographic methods to interrogate the field of literary studies) as well as presenting substantial new empirical data to support the notion that writing in English from former postcolonial countries is less indicative of the classic postcolonial text."

"This article examines the ways in which the fact of writing about the postcolonial city of Bombay inflects the language of Rushdie's novels. With specific reference to Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the article proposes that a productive analysis of language in Rushdie can be made by replacing the unwieldy and diffuse category of Indian English with the more meaningful contextualization provided by the category of Bombay English. It goes on to argue that while Rushdie's "chutnified" language offers an enabling point of entry into the complex, multilayered and heterogeneous socio-economic fabric of the Third World postcolonial city, it fails to tease out the relations of power and privilege that are intimately tied to the ways in which language, even a "chutnified" one, is deployed."

In the foreword to his 1938 novel Kanthapura, about the growing participation of village women in the Gandhian movement, Raja Rao explains the experimental method of the tale as a combination of colonial hybridity and cultural difference in language, style, and narrative form: The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.… I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Persian was before-but not of our emotional make-up.… After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly.… There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us-we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.

"Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, I surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various commentaries in academic publications, including MLA Profession, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. What I discovered was illuminating but somewhat appalling. It seems that the perennial (and perhaps self-perpetuating) perception (especially in MLA presidential addresses) is that-whether the commentator is coming from the right or left of the political spectrum-literary studies are in decline, that the public has little understanding or regard for the value of literary analysis or literature in general, and that scholars of literature are toiling in the service of something that is vaguely important but almost impossible to effectively define or articulate, even to ourselves. 1"

This paper investigates the pertinent issues of the arguments on human capital depletion, specifically in the context of the more recent literature that seeks to explain the phenomenon in the context of the English speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM). It further assesses return migration policies of the region in an attempt to ascertain their practicality in redressing skills depletion or accumulation for member states. Clearly, facilitation policies are essential, but there is no documented analysis on their effectiveness, despite the tendency to speak of their usefulness. The main motivation for having return facilitation policies, emerged out of recognition of the potential of the Diaspora and what they can offer for the development of CARICOM nations. There is a tendency for return facilitation policies to favour life cycle re-migrants or retirees with affinity to their homeland, whatever the reason. From observation the all inclusive nature of the return facilitation policy construct does not present a framework for attracting skilled individuals in their productive age. The problem with this is that the retirement age in most member states does not allow for retirees to reenter the workforce to impart knowledge or skills, outside of investment initiatives. This general weakness in return facilitation policy limits what optimally a re-migrant can offer. The counterfactual that return migrants bring with them networks and links from which their home country can benefit is also potentially restricted by the same token.

Convention suggests that multicultural areas tend to exhibit high levels of residential and educational segregation, high degrees of poverty and deprivation and low rates of contact between culturally distinct individuals and groups. By contrast, with the help of a case study of a fast growing English new town, this paper reflects on the experience of multicultural settlement in what might be described as an ordinary city: one in which that experience is relatively recent and whose identity is constantly in the process of being made and remade. It draws on qualitative research, based around semi-structured interviews, participant observation and the use of focus groups, to develop its conclusions. Moving beyond any notion that minority ethnic communities live 'parallel lives', the paper identifies and explores some of the ways in which the new city spaces of Milton Keynes are actively lived, negotiated and understood by the Ghanaian and Somali communities (and particularly by young people from those communities). It highlights the tensions between the ways in which difference is negotiated in practice and attempts to define communities through processes of governance.

In the 1990s, Canadian scholarship produced internationally accepted differentiations between minority nations and immigration-induced ethnic minorities. Charles Taylor's concept of Qubcois and First Nations' 'deep diversity' (versus other Canadians' 'first level' membership in the polity) and Will Kymlicka's liberal theory of 'multicultural citizenship' are just two of the most common examples. However, in these theories, as well as in much of the subsequent scholarship, the relations between different types of national and ethnic struggles for rights and recognition have remained unexplored. Drawing on the results of a study on Central Canadian English-language newspaper discourses during the 1990s, this article examines whether and how images of Qubcois minority nationalism affect legitimizations and delegitimizations of multiculturalism in the public space. The analysis thereby challenges the widespread assumption that the accommodation of historically grown national minorities and ethnic groups of more recent immigrant origin happens in hermetically closed 'silos' with little interaction. On the contrary, the article demonstrates that relations between different categories of groups and diversity accommodations are both theoretically plausible and empirically traceable.

Drawing upon recent literature on what has been called "epistemologies of ignorance" in relation to race, this paper examines an audit of a research project on equality and diversity in a UK university. It argues the audit functioned as a technology of ignorance. This paper suggests that the audit drew upon the cultural associations between white male academic masculinity with notions of quantification, detachment, and disembodied aggression. In this way, ignorance is seen as a form of labor. In particular, this paper suggests that current forms of neoliberal audit in UK universities could be understood in terms of Haraway's notion of scientific gentlemanly modest witnessing. But rather than the scientific gentlemanly masculinity, neoliberal audit legitimates a hyper-rational audit masculinity which casts women and racialized minorities as subjective, interested, and emotional and in so doing performs epistemic violence which maintains whiteness.