GLOCAL AFALA 2024
Ethnic & Cultural Studies Foreign Language Learning Humanities, Literature & Arts (General) Language & Linguistics English Language & Literature African Studies & History Higher Education Anthropology Social Sciences (General) Sociology
General Papers (400+)
Interviews (30+)
Poster Presentations (150+)
Methodology / Analysis Workshops (Endangered Languages Network, Globally Prominent Scholars)
Talks
Keynotes
Anthropological Excursion
Cultural Performances
Anthropological Exhibitions
Linguistics Exhibitions
Displays
Academia: https://soas.academia.edu/GLOCALSOAS
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The African context is complex, with a cultural diversity that far exceeds its geographical expanse. These diverse cultural scapes throughout the African continent and African diaspora globally overlap, yet so do African languages, dialects, sociolects, and genres. The infinitely diverse semiotics of these languages complexify that which is already complex.
Central to this complexity of African languages, language varieties, and ethnoscapes, is the ubiquitous mixing of language and cultural codes, which form the materiality of African identities. Sociocultural code-mixing can be contested, yet language code-mixing is widely seen as mandatory, to embody progressive, liberal, and anti-conformist African ideologies. Speakers language code mixing ubiquitously across African contexts, creating a commodity with which to legitimize emergent identities, in acts of decolonization, subverting essentialist representation of an old and new African cultural heritage and language practices, while drawing on millennia of transition and transformation.
Through the complexity of language code mixing, the speaker seeks to commodify cultural affordances, and in the process, to decolonize both region and mindset, as an interrogation of colonialist ideologies, and as a critical act of cultural and linguistic liberation. Such a liberation continuously re-emerges in the uniqueness of every African linguistic code, as a situated performance through which to reinvent each language variety as a fluid language scape. The mixing of language and cultural code is now a normative practice across African contexts and vital to African politics of identity, and yet, it is complexified by new mobilities, technologies, migration, modalities, rewritten historiographies, colonized cum decolonized ideologies, scholarship, and so forth.
This complexity of African cultural and linguistic practice makes for a fertile ethnography. Through the tools of linguistic cultural anthropology, then, we can reframe such an ethnography of the commodification of code and cultural context, to ground understandings of the decolonization of Africa.
The GLOCAL AFALA 2024 theme,
Code and Commodification, as the new Decolonization
Ikhodi kanye Nempahla, njenge-Decolonization entsha
Describes a process deeply connected to the commodification of language and cultural identities throughout African regions, as fertile climates for Linguistic Anthropological attention. Here, the (SCOPUS / ISI) GLOCAL AFALA 2024 invites work that addresses the decolonization of African contexts through the complex appropriation of language and cultural code. To this, the conference selection committee invites abstracts and proposals addressing the contribution of cultural and linguistic mixing to the current decolonization of Africa, that is, the pinpointing of truths on identity, ethnicity, and nation, and a culturally complex Africa.
While proposals and submissions must adhere to the theme Code and Commodification, as the new Decolonization, submissions can diversify the conversation through the complexity of the conference strands.
The University of South Africa, hosting the GLOCAL AFALA 2024 in Pretoria, South Africa, is one of an interchanging series of annual hosts, and in this way, the GLOCAL global network expands to involve institutions worldwide.
We thus welcome you to the AFALA 2024, the Annual African Assembly on Linguistic Anthropology in South Africa, and to the AFALA as a whole.
Professor Nompumelelo Zodwa Radebe