URL for abstract submissions: https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/afala2024/submit

Theme: Code and Commodification, as the New Decolonization - “Ikhodi kanye Nempahla, njenge-Decolonization Entsha”

The African context exhibits a complex, a cultural diversity that far exceeds its geographical expanse. These diverse cultural scapes throughout the African continent and African diaspora globally overlap, as 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 mix ubiquitously across African contexts, creating a commodity with which to legitimize emergent identities, in acts of decolonization, subverting essentialist representations 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 and transform each language variety as a fluid language scape. The mixing of language and cultural code is now normative practice across African contexts, as vital to an African politics of identity, and yet, it is complexified by new mobilities, technologies, migration, modalities, rewritten historiographies, colonized cum decolonized ideologies, scholarship, and beyond.

This complexity of African cultural and linguistic practice makes for a fertile ethnography. Through the tools of linguistic cultural anthropology, then, we can position 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 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 African, that is, the pinpointing of truths on identity, ethnicity, and nation, and a linguistically and 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 GLOCAL as a whole.

Professor Nompumelelo Zodwa Radebe

Chair African Assembly on Linguistic Anthropology, the GLOCAL AFALA 2024

Chair Department of Anthropology and Archaeology University of South Africa