Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Education
Bad French: Imagining Illiteracy On The Margins Of Paris, Cat Tebaldi
Bad French: Imagining Illiteracy On The Margins Of Paris, Cat Tebaldi
Cat Tebaldi
Bad French: imagining illiteracy on the margins of Paris.
Following Hill’s (2005) analysis of mock Spanish through internet searches, this paper explores the indexicality of the language game Verlan, as nonstandard, “bad French” in popular media. It explores the construction of a false urban French, that echoes of colonial advertisements and positions speakers as neither fully literate not fully French. Three images, savage illiteracy, comical delinquency, and linguistic terrorists are ascribed to the “ventriloquized bodies” (Inoue 2003) of students of color in France’s urban peripheries. Oasis juice advertisements show a silly, delinquent Verlan-speaking fruit, "Onsfan la Poire", …
Republic And Nation Are Just Metro Stations: Value, Language And Play In Urban France, Cat Tebaldi
Republic And Nation Are Just Metro Stations: Value, Language And Play In Urban France, Cat Tebaldi
Cat Tebaldi
In times of crises over economics, migration, and terrorism France asserts republican values to reaffirm national unity, strengthen national borders, and calm bourgeois anxieties. Yet as republican values are seen to be embodied in particular national symbols and linguistic forms, they become the values of empire (Negri 2000), silencing minority voices and narratives. Ann Stoler describes this as France’s “colonial aphasia” (2011), the lack of a verbal or a conceptual vocabulary for the colonial past. In contrast to this silence and forgetting, young people of diverse origins on France’s urban periphery are coming up with new words and new …