Creolization versus Essentialism:

The Relevance of Glissant’s Notion of Relation forthe Transformation of South African Higher Education

Kees van der WaalStellenbosch University

21 May 2015

Overview

• Essentialist concepts and their consequences

• Glissant and his views on creolization and Relation

• Implications for transformative pedagogy

Essentialist concepts and their consequences

• Colonial and apartheid essentialisms

– Race, culture, language – classification of units

– Academic (e.g. volkekunde) and common sense

– Discourse and practice: exclusion, racism, identity politics, polarization of imagined static, bounded entities

– South African examples of strong ethnic identities: Afrikaner and Zulu, resistance against mixing

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Essentialism• Problem of essentialism

– Generalization vs variation, complexity and fluidity– Against Essentialism, Stephan Fuchs, 2001: against taking things for

granted, as given– More entangled conception of history needed: relationships,

networks

• Post-apartheid continuities of essentialism in context of inequality– Strategies for nation-building, while using ‘race’– Constitution, Bill of Rights, non-discrimination and equality, but

also separate identities and retraditionalization– Whiteness and xenophobia express polarizations– Cultural and language politics continue to essentialize, exclude

Taaldebat (language debate) at Stellenbosch

• Teaching Afrikaans and English– Intense emotions, primordialist understandings– Exclude students when teaching in Afrikaans– English becomes increasingly dominant in the academic setting– Afrikaans as a teaching medium and as a symbol of white identity

• Studying language politics– Social identity is mediated through language– Pierre Bourdieu, Jan Blommaert: political economy of language,

focus on language situations as speech events– Cultural capital, especially writing and education– Stratification of languages– Ideologies of language underlie the language struggle

• Hegemonic Afrikaans, its symbols and demise– Emerged as a creole in a violent colonial context– Appropriation and standardization– Used in the late 19th and early 20th century to mobilize

Afrikaners– 1976 youth revolt against Afrikaans– 11 official languages post-apartheid– Afrikaner identity was initially mixed with racial

superiority, but after 1990 explicit attempts were made to distance the language from its racial connotations

– Third Afrikaans Language Movement

• Symbolism of the language expressed its link to ethno-nationalism:– A girl 1880– A pearl 1920– A miracle 1959– Monoliths 1975– A vulnerable lamb, death 2009

• Afrikaans had become the standard symbol of white Afrikanerdom

The Taal at Stellenbosch University

• 1918 – 2002 informal pro-Afrikaans practice plus some English

• 2002: Chris Brink, language policy and language options

• Taaldebat uproar from a white elite perspective (alumni)

• The essentialist position claims that the standard form of Afrikaans and the so-called ‘Afrikaans character’ of Stellenbosch University needs to be protected at all costs

• University management into defense: retain 60% Afrikaans courses

• Increasingly metaphors of the body: death, biodiversity, ethnic cleansing, loss

• Setting for language struggle, a last stand

• New demographics and transformation – black students, young Afrikaans-speaking students, issues of access

• Move to parallel teaching in 2009, translation 2014

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) and his views on creolization and Relation

Martinique, France, Caribbean

Poet and philosopher

Post-nationalism

Creolization: close to social experience, non-essentialism

• Derives from Caribbean linguistics: meetings of languages , mixing under conditions of slavery – pidgins and creoles – creolization as a an identity is a reaction to suffering

• Against fixed identities or a dichotomy between Europe and Africa, argues for a connectedness between people in the whole world – creolization as relationship, history as adaptation

• ‘[w]e must be ourselves, but . . . we must be beyond ourselves at the same time’ (Glissant in Dash and Troupe 2006:52)

• Relation = une poétique de la Relation, openness, e.g. a language is never singular, multilingualism is the normal condition, learn another language

• ‘Multilingualism is the passionate desire to accept and understand our neighbor’s language and to confront the massive levelling force of language continuously imposed by the West – yesterday French, today with American English – with a multiplicity of languages and their mutual comprehension’ (Glissant 1989:249)

• Afrikaans a creole language, formerly associated with arrogance and cruelty

• Creolization as a cultural strategy– Celebration of mixtures– Denis Constant Martin Sounding the Cape , 2013

Jazz, Minstrel Carnival, boeremusiek, Afrikaaps

Musical theatre production: Afrikaaps a multimedia hipopera

• 2010 at Baxter and KKNK, a documentary, European tour

• Focus on creole background of working class Afrikaans, the non-standard of the Cape Flats

• Part of empowerment activism using hip-hop and rap

• A political voice, identity claims, strategic essentialism aiming at a more inclusive language politics in Afrikaans

Implications for transformative pedagogy

• Teaching for social justice– Experiencing and accepting of difference– Relation to people studied, students, ethics, power– Critical dialogues, inter-relationships– Reflexivity needed, e.g. Brenda Leibowitz et al 2015

• Towards a critical cosmopolitanism for experiencing common humanity

Debates on classification and its effects relevant to higher education now

Indexing The Human @ Stellenbosch

(www.indexingthehuman.org)

• The ‘Open Stellenbosch’ movement manifesto

– Afrikaans teaching

– Hegemonic Afrikaner culture, role in apartheid

– Transforming the curriculum

– Centre for Diversity and Inclusivity to reopen

• Looking beyond the campus at divisions and inequalities