Papers by Christopher Stroud
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2020
This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in ... more This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in their struggles to maintain their ancestral sovereignty, Indigenous peoples remind all of us that, for most of our histories as human beings on the Earth, we have exercised and cultivated our individual and collective powers to set in motion dynamic relationships of well-being and mutual benefit. The commentary argues that Indigenous peoples also remind us that it has only been in the last few millennia and in a few aberrant cultures that systems of domination such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and accumulation of wealth have sought to assure that our deployment of what Foucault refers to as the ‘awesome materiality’ of these powers no longer serves the life-seeking interests of ourselves, our communities, and humanity, but instead serves the death-seeking interests of processes of domination, such as colonization.
Ciência e Cultura, Oct 1, 2019
Multilingual Matters eBooks, Dec 31, 2011
Chapter 1: Social Practices and Linguistic Markets Chapter 2: Multilingualism in Late-Modern Sing... more Chapter 1: Social Practices and Linguistic Markets Chapter 2: Multilingualism in Late-Modern Singapore: A Portrait Chapter 3: Multilingualism in Late Modernity: Literacy as a Reflexive Performance of Identity Chapter 4: Some Data about our Data Chapter 5: Fandi and Ping: Literacy Practices and the Performance of Identities on Ambivalent Markets Chapter 6: Edwin, Wen and Yan: Styling Literacy Practices Inside and Outside the Classroom Chapter 7: Sha: A Comparison Chapter 8: Pedagogy, Literacy And Identity Chapter 9: The Dynamics of Language Distribution in Late-Modern Multilingual Singapore
Multilingual Matters eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Multilingual Matters eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Multilingual margins, 2021
South African today remains a nation torn by violence and racial inequity. One of major challenge... more South African today remains a nation torn by violence and racial inequity. One of major challenges for its people is to create new futures across historically constituted racial divides, by finding ways to engage with each other across difference. In this regard, multilingualism holds out the promise of offering a way of bridging difference and opening spaces for engagement and empathy with Others. Today contemporary constructs of multilingualism, both in policy and everyday practice, continue to reinforce racialized divisions inherited from historical uses of language as a tool of colonialism, and a mechanism of governmentality in apartheid, the system of exploitation and state sanctioned institutional racism. In this paper we seek to demonstrate how multilingualism has always been, and remains today, an ‘epistemic’ site for managing constructed racialized diversity. In order to do so we trace periods of South Africa’s history. By way of conclusion, we suggest that alternative linguistic orders require a decolonial rethinking of the role of language(s) in epistemic, social and political life.
Veredas: Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, May 1, 2008
Stellenbosch papers in linguistics, Dec 18, 2013
ABSTRACT Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobil... more ABSTRACT Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this article, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the city's hip-hop community. Specifically, we ask how emcees sample local varieties of language, texts and registers to stage their particular stylisation of voice. By way of conclusion, we make brief recommendations with respect to the study of multilingualism in South Africa and how the stylisation of local voices in Cape Town hip-hop could inform studies on multilingual policy and planning.
De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 28, 2011
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 1, 2010
... 358 Christopher Stroud closer to the village. ... in many parts of the country, able to caref... more ... 358 Christopher Stroud closer to the village. ... in many parts of the country, able to carefully trace ownership back generations, had reclaimed land from Portuguese colonialists. ... Many of the most influential political leaders at all levels were from the southern part of the country. ...
Current Anthropology, 2009
This thesis takes on a non-essentialist view of language by studying the borrowing of linguistic ... more This thesis takes on a non-essentialist view of language by studying the borrowing of linguistic features across languages as natural, everyday language practices. More specifically, this research identifies the need for the accommodation of linguistic diversity and multi-layered repertoires amongst pupils in two monoglossic grade R classes in the area of Manenberg, Western Cape. As a means of accommodating the linguistic diversity and mixed linguistic repertoires of pupils in these two classrooms, it is investigated how the borrowing of linguistic features can be utilized as a linguistic resource in these diverse classrooms. Furthermore, this research also studies how the language ideologies of the teachers of the two grade R classes could possibly influence the absence or the presence of the borrowing of linguistic features in these spaces. This study made use of research methods which closely resemble methods ethnographic in nature, by mainly making use of observations to study t...
Sociolinguistics in African Contexts, 2017
This chapter focuses on the idea that in Mozambique, multilingualism, commonly understood as the ... more This chapter focuses on the idea that in Mozambique, multilingualism, commonly understood as the co-existence and juxtaposition of more than one language, is one mechanism whereby essential features of colonial social logics are reconfigured in contemporary ‘postcolonial’ societies. They interrogate how multilingualism, whilst ostensibly promising a trope for linguistic (and cultural) diversity, is best seen, in common with other forms of neoliberal governance, as a response to ‘the effects of anti and postcolonial movements in the liberal world’. They conclude that this constancy is not accidental, but a key dimension of how multilingualism as a particular political regime of language organization has been used historically and in contemporary time as a technology of liberal governance. The paper highlights the meaning, the significance and the indexical values that African languages have vis a vis Portuguese, in a context where African languages are subordinated.
Linguistic Landscape. An international journal, 2015
The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corpo... more The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooing culture as an illustration, we unpack the idea of ‘the human subject as an entrepreneur of the self, as author of his or her being in the world’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012: 23), by using a phenomenological methodology to explore the materiality of the body as a mobile and dynamic space of inscribed spatialized identities and historical power relations. Specifically, we focus on: how tattooed bodies sculpt future selves and imagined spaces, the imprint they leave behind in the lives of five participants in the study and ultimately the creat...
Benjamins current topics, Jun 9, 2017
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Papers by Christopher Stroud