Grammars of Colonialism

Grammars of Colonialism
Author: Rachael Gilmour
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2006-10-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0230286852

The study of languages was crucial to colonial power in 18th and 19th-century South Africa. This important book examines representations of the South African Bantu languages Xhosa and Zulu, revealing the ways in which colonial linguistics contributed to both the making of the colonial order and to instabilities at the heart of the project.

A Living Man from Africa

A Living Man from Africa
Author: Roger S. Levine
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300168594

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound change—one that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. In this innovative, richly researched, and splendidly written biography, Roger S. Levine reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.

An Age of Hubris

An Age of Hubris
Author: Timothy Keegan
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2023-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813949181

An Age of Hubris is the first comprehensive overview of the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century, chronicling a world punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions, and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. With it, Timothy Keegan contributes new approaches to Xhosa history and, most important, a new dimension to the much-trodden but still vital topic of the impact—cultural, social, and political—of missionary activity among African peoples. The most significant historical works on the Xhosa have either become dated, foreground imperial-colonial history, or remain heavily theoretical in nature. In contrast, Keegan draws fruitfully on the rich Africanist comparative and anthropological literature now available, as well as extant primary sources, to foreground the Xhosa themselves in this crucial work. In so doing, he highlights the ways in which Africans utilized new ideas, resources, and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them, emphasizing missionary frustration and African agency.

Standardizing Minority Languages

Standardizing Minority Languages
Author: Pia Lane
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-09-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317298861

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781138125124, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume addresses a crucial, yet largely unaddressed dimension of minority language standardization, namely how social actors engage with, support, negotiate, resist and even reject such processes. The focus is on social actors rather than language as a means for analysing the complexity and tensions inherent in contemporary standardization processes. By considering the perspectives and actions of people who participate in or are affected by minority language politics, the contributors aim to provide a comparative and nuanced analysis of the complexity and tensions inherent in minority language standardisation processes. Echoing Fasold (1984), this involves a shift in focus from a sociolinguistics of language to a sociolinguistics of people. The book addresses tensions that are born of the renewed or continued need to standardize ‘language’ in the early 21st century across the world. It proposes to go beyond the traditional macro/micro dichotomy by foregrounding the role of actors as they position themselves as users of standard forms of language, oral or written, across sociolinguistic scales. Language policy processes can be seen as practices and ideologies in action and this volume therefore investigates how social actors in a wide range of geographical settings embrace, contribute to, resist and also reject (aspects of) minority language standardization.

A South African Bibliography to the Year 1925

A South African Bibliography to the Year 1925
Author: Sidney Mendelssohn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 704
Release: 1979
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

"In 1979 A South African bibliography to the year 1925 (SABIB), compiled under the auspices of the South AFrican Library, was published in four volumes by Mansell of London. It was essentially a revision and continuation of Sidney Mendelssohn's South African bibliography (London, 1910), which recorded literature about South Africa from earliest times to 1909, regardless of place of publication. For the new bibliography the period was extended to 1925, but for practical reasons the scope was limited to the geographical area south of the Limpopo, and certain material, for example books in African languages, sheet music, maps and periodicals, was excluded."--Preface to Supplement.