WP353 Linguistic citizenship in Africa

Many thinkers on the cusp of African independences, wrestling with the question of how to ensure participatory and agentive fellowships for new, postcolonial beginnings, found themselves engaging with language. Franz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Leopold Senghor are just a few of those who addressed the specific challenge of how to ensure that the historically suppressed voices of the colonialized would be heard, crafting a generative space out of the intersections of language and society from which to imagine a decolonial politics.

Despite the promise of rethought language and a New Human in ethical and universal togetherness, language and citizenship have remained stubbornly tied to the reproduction of a colonial and racializing modernity intent on denying human difference and equivocality. This is due in no small measure to conceptions of both language and citizenship remaining firmly locked into colonial categories of thought.

This paper briefly explores the colonial import of the nexus of linguistic and citizenship, lifting forward this juncture as generative for how the human has been manufactured in colonialism through sorting out what/who to count as human and what to discard as different and ‘surplus matter’, a process we refer to as mattering difference (as Other). We elaborate on the notion of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) (Lim et al. 2018; Stroud, 2001, 2023) with examples detailing how semiotic practices – so-called acts of linguistic citizenship – articulate alternative agency and voice out of spaces of enduring inequity. We illustrate these workings of LC with examples from the African context, specifically from Mozambique and South Africa, concluding with a note on the interdisciplinary potential of LC.