African Languages and Societies Commons^™

An Angry Shepherd: Sudanese Bishop Macram Max Gassis, John Ashworth

The Journal of Social Encounters

Bishop Macram Max Gassis is a near-legendary figure in Sudan since he first spoke out against human rights abuses in his country before a committee of the US Congress in 1988. Targeted by the Islamist military dictatorship which ruled Sudan for thirty years, for protesting enslavement, religious oppression, forced starvation and mass murder in Sudan, he lives in exile, bringing help and hope to his persecuted people.

This essay is condensed from the 2021 book by the same author with the same title.

A Language For The World: The Standardization Of Swahili, Morgan J. Robinson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those …

Slavocracy's Collective Atlantic: Utopian And Dystopian Discourse In Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Jalaine Nicole Weller

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A number of contemporary narratives of slavery speak to a collective experience of the transatlantic slave trade and engage that space as a narrative contact zone of heterogeneous interpretations of slavery. These interpretations emphasize the multiplicity of black and white subjectivity and the personal struggle to self-create utopian relational experience within and without the dystopian reality of enslavement. Overall, it is the Atlantic--as a physical space, temporal triangle, and personal experience--that facilitates this collective experience.

Subsequently, this project intends to explore what I am calling the "Collective Atlantic," which is a concept that applies to the following contemporary narratives of …

Géotropisme De Chamoiseau, Jean-Louis Cornille

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

There seems to be a strange parallel between the vegetable kingdom in which Patrick Chamoiseau sets his Biblique des derniers gestes and the way the narrative is being played out. The mangrove, with its entangled roots and stems, constitutes a perfect image of the novel, whose multiple branches are no longer anchored in any reality or in a centralised system, but seem moved by a principle which we could call “bibliotropic”, since in Biblique one could easily find traces of Perse, García Márquez, Glissant, Césaire and even of Rabelais. But certain “stems” are more difficult to track within this dense …

From "No Country" To "Our Country!" Living Out Manumission And The Boundaries Of Rights And Citizenship, 1773-1855, Scott Hancock

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

During the Revolutionary War and the first decades of the early U.S. Republic, as free people of color sought to define their place in the new nation, they expressed little connection to an American nationality. But antebellum black leaders later articulated a powerful vision of Africans and Americans. As slaves and free blacks had done during the Revolutionary era, they based this African American identity in part upon a biblical view of human rights and a natural rights philosophy, but they also buttressed black identity formation by making a rights discourse the fulcrum of their argument for full inclusion in …

Le Fou, Le Rebelle, L’Enfant Et La Révolution Haïtienne, Gilbert Doho

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The proliferation of fools in independent African nations’ capitals and major cities should have entailed profound analyses. The period after 1804 in Haiti and after 1960 for Africa is marked by irrationality. From this point of view, Aimé Césaire, doom prophet, uses the Haitian past to warn newly independent African nations. The attempt to understand the phenomena has so far been based on psychoanalysis and other euro-centric methods. In this paper, we will attempt to centre our approach on the gaze and thought of the lunatics themselves in order to understand the madness that has taken hold of post-colonial periods. …