
Language, Culture and Decolonisation discusses the importance of language in decoloniality from a global perspective, and the decolonisation process from the disciplinary vantage points of history, politics, philosophy, and literary studies.
The book makes original contributions to our understanding of how, in Fanon’s words, colonialism gets under the skin of the colonised by taking control of a people’s history, language and culture, and denigrating all three. This edited volume examines classic and contemporary arguments that make the case for the importance of indigenous languages, including creole, in the cultural formation and expression of one’s identity. It also looks at arguments that make the case for the appropriation of the language of the coloniser as a method of subversion. French and English, for example, became the lingua franca of an elite pan-African intelligentsia.
This insightful book also shows how the coloniser, in promoting indigenous cultures and languages, may defuse and control potential political resistance, as we see in the case of the South African government and the Zulu nation.
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Introduction: Language and Decoloniality in Context
David Boucher
- Language and liberation
David Boucher
- ‘Decolonization and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Circulations and Language in the Postcolonial World’
Caio Simões de Araújo
- Language in Africa and the Impossibility of African Philosophy
M. John Lamola
- The place of colonial languages in Decolonial philosophy and practice
Brian Sibanda
- The Need to Decolonise the Language of Personhood (?)
Mpho Tshivhase
- African literature as Self-interpretive: the Prospects of Indigenous Reading Modes
Ignatius Chukwumah
- Decolonisation and the (Im)possibilities of Literary Language’
Sule Emmanuel Egya
- Revealing the Power of Language and Developing Theory from Historical Artefacts
Siseko H. Kumalo
- Colonialism, politics of belonging and reinvention of African cultures: The case of South Africa
Sifiso Ndlovu
- The Turn to Tradition: Colonialism, Class and the Making of the Zulu Identity
Bongani Ngqulunga
- The Politics of Knowledge Production and Publishing: The Case of the Zulu Society
Jabulani Sithole
- Minority Language Revitalization: European Conundrums
Colin H. Williams
Notes about the Authors and contributors
Index