Journal articles on the topic 'Nigerian poetry (English)'

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

Osundare's involvement in performative poetry is an attempt to fulfill her social responsibilities and connect with her community as her collective poetry is expressed through performance. The rhetoric of his poems and the structure of their presentation explains why he uses the techniques and resources of the African oral tradition in many of his poems. The purpose of this study is to explore the intertextual relationship between the second generation of Nigerian artists and the new Nigerian artists in terms of colonial influences and relationships. This study shows that poet Niyi Osundare is a second generation iconoclast through which he influenced the poetic landscape of contemporary Nigeria. This study shows that contemporary poets are not significant and methodologically influential to other secular poetic texts, so the aesthetic principle of poetry is emphasized when the dialogue between texts is seen in the form of Osundare poetry. Osundare tells about the paradigm shift of intertextual relations from a vertical point of view, and the artistic practices preserved from the colonial period are the vertical practices of the postcolonial space. The research is qualitative in nature and primarily analyzed primary and secondary data from the literature, original research and literature review. This study also uses poststructuralist intertextuality as a theoretical framework to explore the extent of intertextual relationships. This study suggests that in order to understand recent Nigerian poetry in English, there is an urgent need to explore the history of their intertextuality. Beyond the intertextual dimension, this study demonstrates that the symbiotic relationship between power and traditional formation provides an ontological framework for examining the aesthetic experience of recent English poetry in Nigeria.

This article discusses the use of literature as a popular tool for teaching basic language skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking and other language areas such as vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in English as a Second Language classroom. It uses the literary method in its analysis of the Nigerian situation. The reasons and criteria for selecting literary texts are discussed. Also the benefits of different genres of literature such as poetry, short fiction, drama and novel to language teaching are taken into account. The paper recognized that all genres should be carefully selected and used in the teaching of English Language skills and language skills should not be taught in isolation.

Ezenwa–Ohaeto was a poet of immense artistic vision. He was a conscious member of the Nigerian and African polity and a perspicacious user of the African oral tradition, particularly the Igbo afflatus/affiliation of it. A poet of ideas and style, Ezenwa–Ohaeto was to adopt principally as his stylistic tool the Igbo traditional genre of satire called In this essay, effort has been made towards identifying his use of the mode in terms of what he took from it and what in turn he gave to African poetry. It is demonstrated that Ezenwa–Ohaeto utilized satire to draw attention to the ills in the land. While he did so, he used the humour in to smoothe his way through. Although he was regularly concerned with the fate of fellow nationals, he did so light-heartedly, combining the use of airy Igbo iconic figures with mediated English and pidgin variety. Ezenwa–Ohaeto thus left behind an original, captivating and enchanting poetic tradition

Abstract This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir (“The Cleansing Soap”), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma‘rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). In style and content, Balarabe’s poem serves as a corrective to some of the observations on Hausa Sufi poetry made by Mervyn Hiskett in his classic 1975 monograph. Drawing attention to the philosophical background of the poem (a dense web of doctrines that integrates Akbarī Sufism and Aš‘arī theology), the paper also suggests that some of the generalizations made by Hiskett in a 1980 article on the Hausa literature produced by the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa are in need of revision.1

Niyi Osundare’s revolutionary poetics is rooted in his distinctive ability to maximise his bilingual linguistic repertoire to express Yoruba thoughts in English words. In this article, I analyse the creative and stylistic strategies that Osundare deploys to domesticate the English language using poems from his collection The Word Is an Egg (2000). I argue that Osundare uses his autonomy and agency as an African writer to present an alternative perspective on the politics of language in African literature while also meeting the decolonisation imperative of his day. He domesticates the English language by peppering it with Yoruba to create an “African English” or “Yoruba English” in his poetic composition. The article is in five parts. Initially, I situate Osundare as a poet within the Nigerian literary landscape and highlight the critical reception his radical development of Nigerian poetry in English received. A literature review focuses on the contentious language debate in African literature. The third part presents decolonisation theory as the theoretical framework, specifically highlighting language as an African resource for challenging the Western grip on poetry and the hegemony of the English language in African literature. In the fourth part, the domestication of the English language by Osundare, I discuss how he uses English and Yoruba to co-create an African English or Yoruba English in his poetic composition. I conclude by asserting that Osundare’s alternative perspective weakens Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s absolute perspective on language usage in African literature by highlighting the omission and inherent problems in the absolutisation of colonialism in decolonial discourse.

06–235Akinjobi, Adenike (U Ibadan, Nigeria), Vowel reduction and suffixation in Nigeria. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.1 (2006), 10–17.06–236Bernat, Eva (Macquarie U, Australia; Eva.Bernat@nceltr.mq.edu.au) & Inna Gvozdenko, Beliefs about language learning: Current knowledge, pedagogical implications, and new research directions. TESL-EJ (www.tesl-ej.org) 9.1 (2005), 21 pp.06–237Cheater, Angela P. (Macau Polytechnic Institute, China), Beyond meatspace – or, geeking out in e-English. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.1 (2006), 18–28.06–238Chen, Liang (Lehigh U, Pennsylvania, USA; cheng@cse.lehigh.edu), Indexical relations and sound motion pictures in L2 curricula: the dynamic role of the teacher. The Canadian Modern Language Review (University of Toronto Press) 62.2 (2005), 263–284.06–239Cristobel, E. & E. Llurda (U de Lleida, Spain; ellurda@dal.udl.es), Learners' preferences regarding types of language school: An exploratory market research. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 135–148.06–240Diab, Rula (American U of Beirut, Lebanon; rd10@aub.edu.lb), University students' beliefs about learning English and French in Lebanon. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 80–96.06–241Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana (Instituto Superior de Línguas e Administração, Lisbon, Portugal; ana.frankenberg@sapo.pt), A peek into what today's language learners as researchers actually do. The International Journal of Lexicography (Oxford University Press) 18.3 (2005), 335–355.06–242Gao, Xuesong (U Hong Kong, China; Xuesong.Gao@hkusua.hku.hk), Understanding changes in Chinese students' uses of learning strategies in China and Britain: A socio-cultural re-interpretation. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 55–67.06–243Green, Bridget (Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute, USA), A framework for teaching grammar to Japanese learners in an intensive English program. The Language Teacher (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 30.2 (2006), 3–11.06–244Harker, Mihye & Dmitra Koutsantoni (The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, London, UK; mihyeharker@lfhe.ac.uk), Can it be as effective? Distance versus blended learning in a web-based EAP programme. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 17.2 (2005), 197–216.06–245Hawkins, Roger (U Essex, Colchester, UK; roghawk@essex.ac.uk), The contribution of the theory of Universal Grammar to our understanding of the acquisition of French as a second language. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 14.3 (2004), 233–255.06–246Hinger, Barbara (U Innsbruck, Austria; barbara.hinger@uibk.ac.at), The distribution of instructional time and its effect on group cohesion in the foreign language classroom: a comparison of intensive and standard format courses. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 97–118.06–247Jing, Huang (Zhanjiang Teachers U/U of Hong Kong, China), Metacognition training in the Chinese university classroom: An action research study. Educational Action Research (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 13.3 (2005), 413–434.06–248Kapec, Peter (Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany; Peter.Kapec@fh-bonn-rhein-sieg.de) & Klaus Schweinhorst, In two minds? Learner attitudes to bilingualism and the bilingual tandem analyser. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 17.2 (2005), 254–268.06–249Kervin, Lisa,Students talking about home–school communication: Can technology support this process?Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 28.2 (2005), 150–163.06–250Kwon, Minsook (Samjeon Elementary School, Korea), Teaching talk as a game of catch. The Canadian Modern Language Review (University of Toronto Press) 62.2 (2005), 335–348.06–251Lyster, Roy (McGill U, Montréal, Canada; roy.lyster@mcgill.ca), Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 14.3 (2004), 321–341.06–252Makarova, Veronika (U Saskatchewan, Canada), The effect of poetry practice on English pronunciation acquisition by Japanese EFL learners. The Language Teacher (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 30.3 (2006), 3–9.06–253Mckinney, Carolyn (U Witwatersrand, South Africa), A balancing act: Ethical dilemmas of democratic teaching within critical pedagogy. Educational Action Research (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 13.3 (2005), 375–392.06–254Morgan-Short, Kara (Georgetown U, USA; morgankd@georgetown.edu) & Harriet Wood Bowden, Processing instruction and meaningful output-based instruction: effects on second language development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 31–65.06–255Munro, Murray J. (Simon Fraser U, Canada; mjmunro@sfu.ca), Tracey M. Derwing & Susan L. Morton, The mutual intelligibility of L2 speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 111–131.06–256Myles, Florence (U Newcastle, UK; Florence.Myles@newcastle.ac.uk), French second language acquisition research: Setting the scene. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 14.3 (2004), 211–232.06–257Mynard, Jo & Iman Almarzouqui (Koryo College, Japan; mynardjo@hotmail.com), Investigating peer tutoring. ELT Journal (Oxford University Press) 60.1 (2006), 13–22.06–258Neumeier, Petra (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany; petra.neumeier@lmu.de), A closer look at blended learning – parameters for designing a blended learning environment for language teaching and learning. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 17.2 (2005), 163–178.06–259Noels, Kimberly, A. (U Alberta, Canada; knoels@ualberta.ca), Orientations to learning German: Heritage language learning and motivational substrates. The Canadian Modern Language Review (University of Toronto Press) 62.2 (2005), 285–312.06–260Ohata, Kota (International Christian U, Tokyo, Japan; ohata@icu.ac.jp), Potential sources of anxiety for Japanese learners of English: Preliminary case interviews with five Japanese college students in the U.S.TESL-EJ (www.tesl-ej.org) 9.3 (2005), 21 pp.06–261Peltola, Maija S. (U Turku, Finland; maija.peltola@utu.fi) & Olli Aaltonen, Long-term memory trace activation for vowels depending on the mother tongue and the linguistic content. Journal of Psychophysiology (Hogrefe & Huber Publishers) 19.3 (2005), 159–164.06–262Pichette, François (U Florida, USA; pichette@chuma1.cas.usf.edu), Time spent on reading and reading comprehension in second language learning. The Canadian Modern Language Review (University of Toronto Press) 62.2 (2005), 243–262.06–263Ramírez Verdugo, Dolores (U Autónoma de Madrid, Spain; dolores.ramirez@uam.es), The nature and patterning of native and non-native intonation in the expression of certainty and uncertainty: Pragmatic effects. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 37.12 (2005), 2086–2115.06–264Sabourin, Laura (U Groningen, the Netherlands;), Laurie A. Stowe, Ger J. de Haan, Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research (Hodder Arnold) 22.1 (2006), 1–29.06–265Simina, Vassiliki (Thessaloniki, Greece; vsimina@hotmail.com) & Marie-Josee Hamel, CASLA through a social constructivist perspective: WebQuest in project-driven language learning. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 17.2 (2005), 217–228.06–266Sopata, Aldona (Adam Mickiewicz U, Poznań, Poland; sopata@amu.edu.pl), Optionality in non-native grammars: L2 acquisition of German constructions with absent expletives. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press) 8.3 (2005), 177–193.06–267Tokeshi, Masanori (Meio U, Japan), Listening comprehension processes of 6 Japanese junior high school students in interactive settings. The Language Teacher (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 30.1 (2006), 3–7.06–268Trembley, Annie (U Hawai'i at Manoa, USA), On the second language acquisition of Spanish reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals by French- and English-speaking adults. Second Language Research (Hodder Arnold) 22.1 (2006), 30–63.06–269Trofimovich, Pavel (Concordia U, Montréal, Canada; pavel@education.concordia.ca) & Wendy Baker, Learning second language suprasegmentals: Effect of L2 experience on prosody and fluency characteristics of L2 speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 1–30.06–270Véronique, Daniel (U Paris III, France; Daniel.Véronique@univ-paris3.fr), The development of referential activities and clause-combining as aspects of the acquisition of discourse in French as L2. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 14.3 (2004), 257–280.06–271Watson Todd, R. (King Mongkut's U Technology, Thailand; irictodd@kmutt.ac.th), Continuing change after the innovation. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 1–14.06–272Yazigi, Rana (Emirates National School, United Arab Emirates; ranayazigi@hotmail.com) & Paul Seedhouse, ‘Sharing time’ with young learners.TESL-EJ (www.tesl-ej.org) 9.3 (2005), 26 pp.

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. Webb, Alban. “Cold War Diplomacy.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/projects/cold-war-politics-and-bbc-world-service›. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices. Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.