Raced Repertoires: The Linguistic Repertoire as Multi-Semiotic and Racialized

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelyn Oostendorp
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
The South ◽  
Linguistic Repertoire ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Central Argument

Abstract In this article, the central argument is that research on the semiotic repertoire should also focus on how repertoires are racialized, and race is evoked through the semiotic repertoire. The article uses data from the South African educational context to advance a position in which semiotic repertoires simultaneously give and restrict access, evoke evaluation and construct identities in particular ways because of their entanglement with (racialized) bodies. I propose that this simultaneity can be theorized by viewing the black body as ‘intercorporeal’ and ‘grotesque’ (Bakhtin 1984). By drawing on such an approach, processes of racialization are explicitly connected to how semiotic resources are evoked in discourse. This article thus theoretically contributes to the recent movements in applied linguistics that view language as embodied, re-examine repertoires, and view language as multiplex and entangled. In addition, it also offers a framing that can theoretically challenge discourses of post-racialism with its multi-layered account of how race continues to be experienced as a significant form of meaning-making.

scholarly journals THE ELEPHANT SHOOTING: COLONIAL LAW AND INDIRECT RULE IN KAOKO, NORTHWESTERN NAMIBIA, IN THE 1920s AND 1930s

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORENA RIZZO
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Criminal Case ◽  
The South ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Sociopolitical Control ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
A Site ◽  
Indirect Rule

ABSTRACTThe law as a means of sociopolitical control in colonial states has gained significance as an issue in the recent historiography of Africa. This article discusses the making of a criminal case in colonial Kaoko, northwestern Namibia in the 1920s and 30s. It focuses on the problem of African voice and narrative and the ways in which they have been transformed into written evidence in the course of legal investigation. It demonstrates that the archival documents which emerged from this case require careful methodological scrutiny if they are to be used for the reconstruction of the region's past. It goes beyond colonial law as constituting a particular discourse to conceive colonial law as a space for intervention and agency for both colonized and colonizers. The central argument raised in the article is that while the South African administration in northwestern Namibia allegedly aimed at prosecuting culprits and securing evidence for their transgressions, men and women in Kaoko used colonial law as an arena for the negotiation of social and political issues. Concerned with the case's impact on the configuration of gender, the article shows how colonial law became both a site of male representation and power, and a space for female contestation of male claims to sociopolitical mastery.

scholarly journals Disrupting democracy: Democratization conflicts as performative struggles

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Lone Sorensen
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
African State ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
The South ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Public Reaction

This article looks at disruptive political performance in the context of democratic transition. Disruptions take ownership of and re-present the past to evaluate and contest established forms of power in the post-transitional present. They thereby potentially engender conflict that can redirect the future path to consolidation. An illustrative case is the radical opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF’s) disruption of the South African State of the Nation Address in 2015, which descended into violence. The author adopts a mixed-methods approach that prioritizes interpretive analysis and thick description. An analysis of videos of the disruptive performance in parliament is complemented by investigation of its media coverage and the real-time public reaction on Twitter. She finds that the form of the performance engenders conflict; but performance is also its subject, for it seeks to expose the vacuum of democratic substance behind the regime’s masquerade of power. While the disruptive performance therefore serves an important accountability function, it simultaneously sets a problematic course for future democratic transition as it performs this function through moral essentialism. The South African case presents a particular type of disruption with specific functions and democratic implications. But it also demonstrates that a concern with the formal aspects of performance in general is a fruitful lens for considering the relation between observable form in processes of meaning-making, its political functions and the democratic change it can effect.

Institutionalized inequities and the cloak of equality in the South African educational context

2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032199919
Author(s):  
Alexander W. Wiseman ◽  
Petrina M. Davidson
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Education System ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
South African Context ◽  
The South ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
African Education ◽  
African Context ◽  
South African Education

The spread of neoliberalism in the South African education system provides a template for ways that regimes co-opt the values of excellence and equality while implementing policies that contradict these values. Specifically, South Africa’s education system is “cloaked” in equality, although institutionalized inequality persists long beyond the end of the Apartheid system. Neoliberal education policies legitimize the expectation that “excellence” (i.e., quality) and “equality” are synonymous, which is what leads to the development of a “cloak of equality.” But, in practice, these equivocations become mutually contradictory, as the South African context suggests. This paper examines selected elements of neoliberalism as they are embedded within the South African education system and connects those elements to the development of a symbolic “cloak of equality” that masks institutionalized inequities within the broader system.

Research into Reconciliation and Forgiveness at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Homi Bhabha’s “Architecture of the New”

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (02) ◽  
pp. 203-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antjie Krog
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Access Route ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
African Worldview ◽  
Central Argument

Abstract The central argument of this article is that within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), many scholars have insufficiently applied the concept of an indigenous African worldview in their analysis of the TRC’s work, leading them at times to describe the process as coerced, contradictory, and politically manipulated. Using the different stages of my research as well as the different texts that “lit up” every phase, I argue that through a focus on language and translation, the pervasiveness of a particular worldview of interconnectedness can be traced that enabled the commission to execute its mandate creatively and without incidences of revenge. The acknowledgement of an indigenous interconnectedness has wide implications for the concept of transitional justice as it rejuvenates the main concepts of healing, amnesty, and reconciliation. As a journalist who reported on the daily activities of the commission, I move in this piece between the different epistemic communities of journalism, writing, and academia in order to understand the way in which language and its underlying epistemology provides an important access route to understanding the workings of the TRC and the testimonies provided by witnesses.

Exploring recidivism in the South African context.

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Bedell ◽  
Nicholas Challis ◽  
Charl Cilliers ◽  
Joy Cole ◽  
Wendy Corry ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
South African Context ◽  
The South ◽  
African Context

Macroinvertebrate variability between microhabitats of peritidal stromatolites along the South African coast

2018 ◽  
Vol 605 ◽  
pp. 37-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
RA Weston ◽  
R Perissinotto ◽  
GM Rishworth ◽  
PP Steyn
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
The South ◽  
African Coast
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