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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesAfrican Studies

 Conference

The Other's Other · Performance and Representation in Language

September 25-26, 2017

Program


Call for papers

The purpose of this conference is to bring together new and engaged contributions on the language of inversion and mimesis. We hope to feature contributions on the decentering and de-marginalization of language practices, which, as a form of post-colonial mimesis, portray the Other from the perspective of marginality and subalternity. The Other, who is normally defined in the sense of Fabian (1983), where he is not only different, but remote and inferior, and constructed in relation to the Self has often been denied to have a voice himself (Spivak 1988). But this Other is constructed by productively filling derogatory, trashy labels with new meaning, so that the resulting Other’s Other can speak back, laugh back, and stain the arena in which the Other was formerly ostracized and discarded. The type of space in which the encounter of the Other and the Other’s Other takes place plays an important role in the communicative behavior and language use of both. For example, in terms of language norms under-specified spaces as well as non-places (like beaches, airports, party areas, but also digital spaces) promote encounters of this kind and may force the use of a language of mimesis and inversion.

As a powerful means to turn the gaze from the center to the margins, and to look at what has been discarded, communities and individuals who adopt, as an act of post-colonial mimesis and reflexivity, ascribed negative labels, derogatory identities and abusive terminology and use them in fresh contexts as forms of self-ironic emblems, they remodel ascribed roles. Constructing the Other’s Other thereby does several things: it removes part of the context that helps to construct marginality and recaptures low class styles – the noisy and messy, and it provides a form of mobility across conceptional spaces.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together new and engaged contributions on the language of inversion and mimesis. We invite contributions on the decentering and de-marginalization of language practices, which, as a form of post-colonial mimesis, portray the Other from the perspective of marginality and subalternity. We would like to invite contributions for the following strands:

  • Subversion and queering
  • The language of inversion
  • Othering and humor
  • Discourse on trash and camp
  • Naming and swearing
  • Secrecy and othering
  • Silence and unintelligibility

Abstracts should not be more than 300 words. All abstracts should be submitted via email to Prof. Dr. Anne Storch.

 

Find us on the Sociolinguistic Events Calendar: http://baal.org.uk/slxevents.html