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Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis ASCA

Articulating belonging: translingualism, belonging and the creation of South African social collectivities

2-Day symposium organized by the ASCA, University of Gent, and Zuid-Afrikahuis Nederland, 11 and 12 November 2021 (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam) | You are warmly invited to attend the following symposium on belonging, literature and identity in the South African context. Keynote speakers will be Quentin Williams (director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape) and poet and public intellectual, Antjie Krog (writer in residence at Gent University during the autumn semester of 2021). 

This symposium will zoom in on translingualism and transculturality – broadly understood to refer to the fluidity and dynamism of linguistic and cultural borders – in South African literature and culture. The event has at least three aims. Firstly, it wants to explore how narrative art forms (literature, performance poetry, cinema, theatre and so forth), but also more popular expressions (television series, newspapers, advertisements, graffiti, songs) linguistically produce, and critically reconsider the relationship between language and membership of social collectivities within the South African context. Secondly, this symposium also wants to explore how language variations, multilingualism and translingualism in cultural representations index complex social and cultural entanglements in the day-to-day, ordinary lives of South Africans. Thirdly, it wants to investigate how translingualism, the use of multiple language varieties and different languages in narrative texts “destabilize” the position of dominant and/or standardized languages and what such minorizing practices might imply for how language construes social subjectivity and categories of belonging in the South African context.

(Languages: English, Dutch, Afrikaans)

To register, please fill out this form here before 5 November:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejpPSLu_j3tGhVLyL7eXw4fl-zS1PsoSt5N9DcLj43RE0SUQ/viewform?usp=pp_url

For queries, please email: 

translingualsuidafrika@gmail.com

The conference organizers:

  • Yves T’Sjoen 
  • Annelies Verdoolaege
  • Martina Vitackova
  • Margriet van der Waal