Call For Abstracts: The Global Council on Anthropological Linguistics (GLOCAL) Conference on African Linguistic Anthropology (AFALA), University of Nairobi, Kenya, October 13-15, 2021. Deadline: February 28, 2021.
Theme: Linguistic Landscapes, Cultural Climates, Mazingira Ya Lugha, Hali Ya Hewa Ya Kitamaduni. The framing of language and speech communities within particular geographical and cultural localities, and within boundaries of tradition and heritage, always constitutes an arduous task. However, this becomes intensified in African contexts, in that language and cultural mixing and switching is highly common, if not normative practice, as vital to an African politics of identity. A continuous Bakhtinian re-stylizing of previous language practices then, mediates cultural practices of new generations, while this re-stylizing becomes complexified by new and intensified mobilities, technologies, return migration, multimodalities, (continuously) rewritten historiographies, colonized and decolonized ideologies, innovative scholarly work, and so forth.
The intertwining of the many channels of this eclectic re-stylizing can best, or maybe only, be deciphered anthropologically. And why not through a lens of cultural scapes and climates, where new communities identify with cultural patterns and cultural subjectivities? Again, this becomes an arduous task in African regions, where so much mixing and switching, as normative practice, occurs. Concurrently, the complexity of each and every society in (sub) Urban Africa makes for an infinitely fertile ethnography of language and cultural community, to inform our knowledge of the linguistic landscapes of African countries and regions.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 