Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:12:02.611Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Writing as a problem: African grassroots writing, economies of literacy, and globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2006

JAN BLOMMAERT
JAN BLOMMAERT
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of African Languages and Cultures, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article analyzes a set of handwritten documents produced by a Burundese asylum seeker in Belgium. The documents are instances of “grassroots writing”: their authorship is collective, and they display considerable problems with “remembering.” They are also rather typical text-artifacts of globalization processes, in which literacy products from one part of the world meet literacy expectations from another part. Two general points are derived from the analysis. (i) The function of documents such as these is not “reading,” but rather a complex of reading, viewing, and decoding. The documents are at least partially visual bearers of information. Such functions need to be investigated ethnographically. (ii) The reason for this is the fact that the production and reception of such documents has to be set against the background of widely different economies of literacy. Consequently, the differences between text production and text reception are grounded in worldwide patterns of inequality. This casts doubt on a number of popular theses about the nature of contemporary societies and the role of discourse in late modernity.I was able to write this article in the excellent, generous research environment offered to me by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 2003. A preliminary version was presented at the African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, February 2003. I am grateful to participants of that workshop as well as to Jane Hill and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments. Research for this article benefited from a personal research grant from the National Science Foundation-Flanders (FWO-V), Belgium.

Keywords

LiteracyBurundiasylum seekersethnography of writingglobalization.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 5 , November 2004 , pp. 643 - 671
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barton, David (1994). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barton, David, & Hamilton, Mary (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge.
Basso, Keith (1974). The ethnography of writing. In Bauman & Sherzer, 425–32.
Bauman, Richard, & Sherzer, Joel (eds.) (1974). Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baynham, Mike (1995). Literacy practices: Investigating literacy practices in social contexts. London: Longman.
Besnier, Niko (1995). Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blommaert, Jan (1999). Reconstructing the sociolinguistic image of Africa: Grassroots writing in Shaba (Congo). Text 9:175–200.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2001a). Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers' stories in Belgium. Discourse & Society 12:413–49.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2001b). The other side of history: Grassroots literacy and autobiography in Shaba, Congo. General Linguistics 38:133–55.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2001c). Context is/as critique. Critique of Anthropology 21:13–32.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2003a). Orthopraxy, writing and identity: Shaping lives through borrowed genres in Congo. Pragmatics 13:33–48.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2003b). Commentary: A sociolinguistics of globalization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 607–23.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2004a). Grassroots historiography and the problem of voice: Tshibumba's ‘Histoire du Zaire’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14:6–23.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2004b). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: L'Economie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity.
Boyarin, Jonathan (1992a). Introduction. In Boyarin (ed.), 1–9.
Boyarin, Jonathan (ed.) (1992b). The ethnography of reading. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Briggs, Charles (1997). Notes on a ‘confession’: On the construction of gender, sexuality and violence in an infanticide case. Pragmatics 7:519–46.Google Scholar
Chouliaraki, Lili, & Fairclough, Norman (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Collins, James (1995). Literacy and literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:75–93.Google Scholar
Collins, James (1996). Socialization to text: Structure and contradiction in schooled literacy. In M. Silverstein & G. Urban (eds.), Natural histories of discourse, 203–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, James, & Blot, Richard (2003). Literacy and literacies: Texts, power and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conley, John, & O'Barr, William (1990). Rules versus relationships: The ethnography of legal discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Darnell, Regna (2001). Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Duranti, Alessandro (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Errington, Joseph (2001). Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:19–39.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes (1990). History from below. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRef
Fabian, Johannes (1996). Remembering the present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fabian, Johannes (2001). Keep listening: Ethnography and reading. In his Anthropology with an attitude, 53–69. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fairclough, Norman (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fenn, John, & Perullo, Alex (2000). Language choice and Hip Hop in Tanzania and Malawi. Popular Music and Society 24(3):73–93.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, & Woolard, Kathryn (eds.) (2001). Constructing languages and publics: Authority and representation. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Gee, James (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideologies in discourses. London: Falmer.
Graddol, D.; Maybin, Janet; & Stierer, B. (eds.) (1991). Researching language and literacy in social context. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Gumperz, John, & Hymes, Dell (eds.) (1972). Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. London: Blackwell.
Hymes, Dell (1966). Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography). In William Bright (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964, 114–67. The Hague: Mouton.
Hymes, Dell (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hymes, Dell (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis.
Jacquemet, Marco (1996). Credibility in court: Communicative practices in the Camorra trials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.) (2000). Non-standard orthography and non-standard speech. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 4:497–621.Google Scholar
Jaworski, Adam, & Coupland, Nikolas (eds.) (1999). The discourse reader. London: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther (1996). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther (2000). Early spelling: between convention and creativity. London: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther, & Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.
Kroskrity, Paul (ed.) (2000). Regimes of language. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
Mufwene, Salikoko (2002). Colonisation, globalisation, and the future of languages in the twenty-first century. MOST Journal of Multicultural Societies 4/2:1–48.Google Scholar
Prinsloo, Mastin, & Breier, M. (eds.) (1996). The social uses of literacy: Theory and practice in contemporary South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRef
Rafael, Vicente (1993). Contracting colonialism: Translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog society under early Spanish rule. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rampton, Ben (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.
Rogers, Alan (2001). Afterword: Problematising literacy and development. In B. Street (ed.), Literacy and development: Ethnographic perspectives, 205–22. London: Routledge.
Schieffelin, Bambi, & Doucet, Rachelle (1992). The ‘real’ Haitian Creole: Metalinguistics and orthographic practice. Pragmatics 2:427–44.Google Scholar
Street, Brian (1995). Social literacies. London: Longman.
Urban, Greg (1996). Entextualization, replication and power. In M. Silverstein & G. Urban (eds.), Natural histories of discourse, 21–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.