Academic literature on the topic 'African language imprints'

Cuban Spanish, its colloquial variety included, is quite a peculiar, perhaps a unique phenomenon. Fruit of the unique history of the Cuban ethnic community, the Cuban colloquial speech has become an amalgam of imprints of many languages, as well as of a host of ethnic and religious traditions. Here, as nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere, with the exception, perhaps, of Brazil, the African heritage stayed very much alive and came afloat first in the language of the Afro-Cuban community as a whole, and then in Cuban Spanish as such. And yet other sources of colloquial Cuban should also be mentioned: first, the colloquial speech of native Spaniards, which were plenty on the Island before the Revolution of 1959 and contributed a lot to the patterns of word-formation in Cuban; and, finally, two more elements: the Portuguese one and the Gipsy one, as units thereof have found a prominent place among the most commonly used Cuban colloquialisms.

Does the study of sources underlying William Shakespeare’s dramas depend on a legacy of colonialism? Studies of this kind have hardly looked beyond European texts in languages that Shakespeare supposedly could read. If any records originating outside Europe are considered as possible source materials, they tend to be marginalized or appropriated within the cultural orbit of the continent. But is it accurate to assume that Shakespeare’s achievements are mainly inspired by European textualities? This essay explores the proposition that much of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre would be unthinkable without African imprints. These are mainly (a) non-classical African mythical or geographical narratives, and (b) literary or historiographical texts written earlier with northern African origins. It is only now becoming visible how type (a) has a likely impact on early modern drama. Considering (b) in conjunction with this enables a new perspective on Shakespeare’s art. We also have type (c): legacies of knowledge culture originating in Africa that leave profound marks on early modern literature. Should we begin regarding much of Shakespeare’s work as being inherently non-European in origin – the opposite of what is generally assumed? Though limited in scope, this essay presents some salient evidence.

Russian imperialism continues to leave a strong imprint on indigenous cultures across Siberia, and throughout the Russian Federation and the post-Soviet republics. Imperialism is invasive and persistent, and it might be impossible to escape its consequences. In 1986, African novelist and postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published his influential essay collection, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. One of his arguments is that no postcolonial subject could be free from the constraints of imperialism until she or he succeeded in freeing the mind from the trap of an imposed (and foreign) language. Ngũgĩ’s experience was based on his own life growing up in Kenya, but his lesson is as applicable to Siberia as it is for East Africa. For indigenous Siberians, language and education are at the forefront of the ongoing postcolonial struggle to maintain their cultural identities in modern Russia.

This article utilizes the hermeneutic theory of Paul Ricoeur and its concepts of text, historicity, distance, narrative and metaphor to map out the salient features of African arts and aesthetics. It also uses the Ricoeurian concept of metaphor to demarcate the boundary between art and popular art. The focus of this mapping out is literature, visual arts, music and art criticism. The identity of African literature bears imprints of various indigenous and foreign languages, and pertinent to Ricoeur, the deployment of metaphor. Thematic concerns are patently African by virtue of the historicity of the discourses that feature in the novels, poems and plays. On the other hand, art criticism in contemporary Africa manifests a lack of responsibility, and its practitioners would enhance their capacity by drawing from Ricoeur’s philosophy of interpretive responsibility. Although discourse is significantly valuable in mapping out identity in the African novel, its applicability to the identity of painting, poetry and music is slightly constrained. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s concept of textual autonomy is of least value in dealing with the identity features of symbolic painting and symbolic arts. Key WordsAfrican arts, Ricoeur, Criticism and Responsibility, Metaphor, Historicity

AbstractNew modes of publishing African Studies accelerate research, creating digital repositories, but valuing the outcomes is complex, and contested. For tenure of both librarians and academics, refereed publications remain the Holy Grail. Fears of quality decline accompany a rise in self-publishing and inverse social media brevity. Valuing works requires reliable sources, but permanency concerns remain: online news in Africa can quickly disappear, as evident with Ebola reporting; and if you trust Google, in African languages some news never occurred! But at the same time, new modes of publishing and communication allow wider review, and the contesting of canon. Twenty years ago, Africanists hoped open access credentialing was just around the corner. This has not eventuated but a measure of recognition is conceded as society itself goes online. Blogs and open access journals will not clinch jobs, but they can let scholars leave an imprint. Graduate digital courses with blogs replacing essays and completed projects offered back to libraries show a trend to capacitise a new generation of teachers, valorising research. Librarian job descriptions insist on digital skills. Granting bodies privilege the digital. Publishers go online. African studies associations hold digital workshops. If output in core media maintains centrality in ranking and citation then there is now a merging of forms. New books appear, some to acclaim, using digital sources, new knowledge discovery techniques emerge. Across all these trends, there will remain a need to balance digital and print collected by libraries, and refereed writing with more spontaneous communication, but their boundary is likely to narrow.

In postcolonial discourse, the concept of the “Other” represents someone who carries dark human traits such as stigmatization, subjugation, domination, socio-political or cultural misrepresentation. The “Other” represents one of the main postcolonial concepts in literary studies because there is indisputable evidence that the term is a colonial construct. In essence, colonialism has left a permanent mark in the minds of the colonized people and this imprint has significantly manifested in literature. This analysis, thus, aims to explore how the colonial “Other” is represented in Second-Class Citizen (1974), one of the prominent postcolonial novels written by Buchi Emecheta, an author from the colonized African society. This study adopts textual analysis in which context-oriented technique is used to understand the character traits of the colonial “Other” in the two selected texts. The analysis draws upon Postcolonial theory, particularly Edward Said’s Orientalist approach. We show that Emecheta represents the colonial “Other” as backward, inferior, and of lower social class. Also, this representation is based on economic and socio-cultural differences as well as conflictual relationships between African indigenous people and British citizens.

Despite being freely available in English language translation since the late 1970s, the writings of Michel Foucault have only faintly imprinted themselves within the work of South African socio-medical scientists. Where references to Foucault do stray beyond mere name dropping, they frequently distort the lines of his thought by pressing it into precisely the liberal-humanist and Marxist analyses Foucault himself was so concerned to dispel. How is this possible, and what is being done by this failure to accurately understand and apply Foucault? Deploying a Foucaultian methodology of strategic questioning, this paper explores the phenomenon to conclude that the failure of Foucault in South African socio-medical discourse is only apparent, the very impermeability of these disciplines to his ideas itself confirmation for the Foucaultian thesis that while sovereignty is the preserve of an elite, discipline is within the grasp of us all.

This is the most complete and perhaps the best treatment of the origins and development of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia yet to appear in the English language. No serious library can afford to pass it up. The author is a Russian scholar who was Middle East correspondent for Pravda for many years, as well as the director of the Institute for African Studies and member of the Russian Foreign Ministry's advisory group. His knowledge of languages is used to great advantage in the book, and his bibliography of Arabic, Turkish, Russian, English, and French works is an impressive contribution to the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Rare indeed is the scholor who has read, let alone been able to retrieve, the number of valuable local histories that Vassiliev has used for the book. Despite its overwhelming attention to detail, his history is written in a fluid and accessible style, holding the reader's attention till the last. The narrative never flags, even when the author reconstructs the minutiae of the almost daily battles between the armies of central, eastern, and western Arabia in great and absorbing detail. In fact, some sections make for riveting reading, especially those in the latter part of the book, when Ibn Saud faces off against the Ikhwan or browbeats both the internal and external opposition to create his own imprint on the Arabian Peninsula.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the simultaneous colonial conquests in Cuba, the Philippines, South Africa, and China through the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. From 1898 to 1901 Dawson's newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and commercial photography demonstrated the power of this symbolic language of flags and balls, heated rhetoric and dazzling cartoons. The Klondike Nugget, the first newspaper in town and the only one run by Americans, took up the claims of global Anglo-Saxonism with the most fervor, although its sentiments were often echoed in the Canadian-edited Dawson Daily News. Differences re-emerged, especially over the boundary between Alaska and Canada, but this brief episode remained deeply imprinted in narratives of the ““two Wests””——both of the North American frontier West and the West as Anglo-Saxon civilization——told at the turn of the twentieth century.

2015 Volume 18 Number 6 Special Edition 21 December 2015 Editorial At a juncture in time when two decades have passed since the establishment of a constitutional democracy in South Africa and almost twenty years since the commencement of the South African Schools Act, this special issue reflects on the interrelationship between Education and the Law. This compilation of ten articles includes a historic look at Education Law as a field of study and reflects on a range of topical issues such as safeguarding learners against exposure to pornography, promoting safety in youth sport, the essentiality of ensuring open deliberative democratic practices during school elections, the role of educator “prosecutors” in disciplinary hearings of learners, pluralism as overriding consideration by the courts, as well as the rights to freedom of expression and life in relation to education. In many respects the multicultural plurality in most educational institutions depicts the coalface of the South African society. Legal disputes and conflicting interests in schools about equal access to quality education, promotion of African languages and non-diminishment of Afrikaans in the face of English hegemony and the accommodation of religious diversity echo the realities of life in South Africa. Johan Beckmann’s personal account provides a historic look at the beginnings of Education Law as a field of study in South Africa expresses the hope that more South African universities will become involved in studying the field of Education Law and that a joint partnership between educationists and jurists might develop in future. Stuart Woolman’s insightful article contends that the constitutional aim to promote pluralism as the grundnorm in South Africa explains some seemingly anomalous judgments in the education context. This plausible explanation leaves much food for thought, but also raises an array of questions. Should the paradigmatic notion of pluralism trump all other legal principles in a constitutional democracy? Are the principles of legality, justice and fairness not as important? Should pluralism underlie the adjudication process of balancing of rights and freedoms according to contextual circumstances in spite of unreasonable or unlawful state action? Have the courts not merely shown deference to an external political schema as arbiter of what "the good life" should be? The criminalisation of exposing children or learners to pornography is particularly relevant in schools in this era of ready access to the internet and social media and is aptly explained by Susan Coetzee. Marius Smit appositely combines legal analysis of provincial regulations with qualitative research, in keeping with the methodology of social sciences, to provide evidence of undemocratic conditions and features as well as shortcomings in the system of school governing body elections. Greenfield et alia contend that a detailed and textured approach to coach education, coupled with a more nuanced judicial appreciation of the importance of sport to society (and schools) and a positive interpretation of the ‘prevailing circumstances’, may help prevent widespread expansion of liability in both rugby and sport more generally. Michael Laubscher and Willie van Vollenhoven suggest that South Africa should take cognisance of the legislative and judicial measures that have been taken in the United States and Canada to deal with the dilemmas posed by cyber bullying in schools. Erica Serfontein explores the nexus between the right to life and education in laying a foundation for the development of learners’ talents and capabilities, advancing democracy, combating unfair discrimination and eradicating of poverty in view of the essential role that the law plays to uphold these rights to attain quality of life. Based on qualitative data, Willie van Vollenhoven contends that student-educators are not able to internalise or apply the right to freedom of expression in practice. He warns that our school system is failing to develop learners as critical thinkers in the marketplace of ideas. Elda de Waal and Erika Serfontein argue that the neither the State, nor parents or educators are able to independently guide learners to responsible adulthood – a collaborative effort in accordance with the democratic principles of cooperation is required. They caution against the reciprocal tendency of parents and schools to blame each other and encourage parents to participate accountably to address learner misconduct. At times educators are required to fulfil quasi-judicial roles as evidence leaders (prosecutors) when conducting disciplinary hearings of learners. Anthony Smith highlights the difficulties experiences by these “evidence leaders” and recommends the provision of specific training in this regard. It is notable that three contributions to this special issue on Education Law utilised education research methodology, which is grounded in social science paradigms, in conjunction with legal analysis, based on law research methodology. This accentuates the interdisciplinary relationship between education and the law and promotes the epistemological enrichment of legal theory. Although the jurisprudence of the field of Education Law is fairly modest, the implications of court decisions on educational issues have a profound effect on the South African society, firstly because schools are microcosms of society, secondly because democratic (or undemocratic) practices in educational institutions leave indelible imprints on the youth that will eventually find expression in the life of a nation, and finally because the success (or failure) of an education system will ultimately determine the level of progress and economic destiny of the nation. Special Edition Editor Prof Marius Smit

Abstract It is not, I think, too much to affirm that in the new literature of Africa expressed in the European languages, the correspondence is a direct one between the themes and preoccupations that have governed the direction of the creative imagination and the distinctive aspects of modern African experience. Indeed those aspects that have gone into the shaping of the modern African consciousness, as much in its bold and broad configurations as in its more intimate manifestations, have also determined the lines of articulation of our contemporary literature. In the process of expressing the tensions set up in our modern awareness by the varied and often contradictory elements of the collective experience, the literature has come both to reflect that experience and to carry its imprint in the modes and particular accents with which our writers have sought to formulate its manifold character and to register its significant moments. This literature has served both as a direct and objective representation of our modern experience as well as a symbolization of the states of mind in Tduced by that experience.

Earth may be a planet of shrinking functional distances, but it remains a world of staggering situational differences. From the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity, place remains a powerful arbitrator. Many hundreds of millions of farmers in river basins of Asia and Africa live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, still remote from the forces of globalization, children as well as adults still at high personal risk and great material disadvantage. Tens of millions of habitants of isolated mountain valleys from the Andes to the Balkans and from the Caucasus to Kashmir are as bound to their isolated abodes as their forebears were. Of the seven billion current passengers on Cruiseship Earth, the overwhelming majority (the myth of mass migration notwithstanding) will die very near the cabin in which they were born. In their lifetimes, this vast majority will have worn the garb, spoken the language, professed the faith, shared the health conditions, absorbed the education, acquired the attitudes, and inherited the legacy that constitutes the power of place: the accumulated geography whose formative imprint still dominates the planet. The regional impress of poverty continues to trap countless millions who are and will be born into it and who, globalization notwithstanding, cannot escape it. The “wealth gap” between the fortunate and the less fortunate, still largely a matter of chance and destiny, evinces a widening range resulting from the perpetuation of privilege and power in the so-called global “core” and its international tentacles. Those disparities, represented at all levels of scale, will entail increasing risk in a world of rising anger and weapons of growing destructive efficiency. At the same time, the notion that the world, if not “flat,” is flattening under the impress of globalization is gaining traction. As noted in the preface, the idea that diversities of place continue to play a key role in shaping humanity’s variegated mosaic tends to be dismissed by globalizers who see an increasingly homogenized and borderless world. “Flatness” is becoming an assumption, not merely a prospect, as implied by the titles of numerous books and articles of recent vintage (Fung et al., 2008).