Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938
ISBN: 9780520911864
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Swahili language -- Social aspects -- Zaire -- Shaba; Shaba (Zaire) -- Languages -- Social aspects;

In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The author's principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of Swahili in the context of work, industrial, artisanal, and artistic. When it was first formulated, the aim of my project was to describe what might be called the workers' culture of Shaba, through analyses of communicative (sociolinguistic) and cognitive (ethnosemantic) aspects of language use.

Fabian Johannes :

Johannes Fabian is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and author of Time and the Other and Power and Performance.


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