“Listening vs Lingwashing: Promise, Peril, and Structural Oblivion in White South African Linguistic Nationalism” with Dr. Janet McIntosh
December 2nd, 2016, 12:00pm
Anthropology Department, PLS 102
In recent years a growing number of urban, liberal South African whites have expressed a wish to learn an indigenous language such as isiXhosa or isiZulu, often out of anxiety that their linguistic limitations have become embarrassing, even disabling, to their national belonging. Their efforts have been met with mingled enthusiasm and skepticism. I discuss some semiotic dimensions, promises, and perils of white South African language learning efforts, including shifting aesthetic perceptions of click phonemes; the discomfiting vulnerabilities that may arise in white speakers; charges that white linguistic efforts may be an effort to paint over deeper social offenses (“lingwashing”); and the struggle for some whites to grasp the difference between speaking a language and closing deeper gaps in understanding.
Dr. McIntosh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is author of The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (Duke University Press, 2009; winner of the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion) and Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans (University of California Press, 2016).