Voicing sentiments of resilience: A corpus approach to 1980s conscious rappers in South Africa

The study of people’s response to adversity acquires substantially different connotations in the South African context because of the heavy legacy of apartheid. This article explores the construction of the notion of resilience through the oral narrative production of the most prominent conscious rappers that emerged in the 1980s in South Africa, namely Prophets of Da City and Black Noise. By means of a corpus approach, our analysis with AntConc revealed that resilience is intrinsically connected to the historical sociopolitical struggle of the black group. In building this notion, results show how the parallel emergence of an oppressive other, the white group, plays a fundamental role. Relevant to our study, the affirmation of their black identity appears to act as an effective way of underpinning their possibility of resurgence. Furthermore, the objective analysis of rappers’ linguistic choices in their lyrics underlines their strategic use of personal pronouns, ethnic labels and other contextual-loaded terms whilst conveying their messages and communicating with their audience. These results both demonstrate the contribution of rap music in construction of a specific notion of resilience and highlight the effectiveness of this methodological approach, opening the floor to comparative studies.

Recycled rhetoric: examining continuities in political rhetoric as a resilience strategy in pre-independence and post-genocide Rwanda

Seen as one of Africa's most visionary and enlightened autocrats, Paul Kagame's presidency is often contrasted with the violence and ethnocentrism of his discredited predecessors. Drawing on rarely analysed primary sources, this article disputes this simplified narrative by revealing striking continuities in the ruling elite's rhetorical repertoire in the late colonial period (1956–1959) and present-day Rwanda. Both then and now, rhetorical calls to remove ethnic labels from public discourse in the name of national unity are key resilience strategies designed to shape regime relations with domestic and international audiences in ways that reinforce power concentration by a small (largely Tutsi) elite. Changes in the distribution of power and the scale of anti-Tutsi violence (most notably in 1994) help explain why a similar rhetorical strategy failed to prevent the dismantling of the Tutsi oligarchy in 1961 while strengthening its contemporary counterpart.

The Authentic Ethnic Self

This chapter examines how Mexican immigrants in Santa Ana articulate notions of who they are ethnically. The author conceptualizes group differences in ethnic self-identification in relation to the boundary work being done among Catholics and evangelicals. Generally, most respondents, both Catholic and evangelical, identify as Mexican. A subset of respondents identifies using pan-ethnic labels such as Latino or Hispanic. Whereas both religious groups show similar patterns in the labels of ethnic self-identification that they select, Catholics and evangelicals employ diverging discursive strategies to qualify their responses. Catholics exhibit more confidence in their responses to questions of ethnic self-identification. Evangelicals engage in extended discursive labor to legitimate their ethnic labels. The author argues that these diverging discourses uncover contestations within the broader ethnic community about what legitimate ethnic identity should look like.

Ethnic labeling among pupils with migration backgrounds

This paper analyzes ethnic self-labeling among pupils of a secondary school in Venlo, the Netherlands. Pupils with migration backgrounds, born in the Netherlands, referred to themselves as ‘Moroccan’, ‘Turk’ or ‘foreigner’, and to others as ‘Dutch’. Ascription to these ethnic categories is often understood as an expression of national (un)belonging. Based on nine months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that ethnic labels functioned to manage everyday interpersonal social relations and did not necessarily express feelings of (un)belonging to the nation. Rather, pupils used ethnic labels to associate social personae with particular styles and behaviors and to construct local social hierarchies. The paper contributes to the investigation of ethnic labels as signs with locally contingent meanings, which nevertheless retain indexical links with wider discourses about social categories and belonging. It furthermore emphasizes the necessity of investigating the local meanings of ethnic categories.

Lower and Upper Baram Sub-Groups: A Study of Linguistic Affiliation

It is not possible to determine the exact number of indigenous languages of Sarawak, one reason being the dialect-language dichotomy, as some isolects has not been ascertained. Ethnic labels may not reflect a linguistically homogenous group. That is to say that the language varieties spoken by an ethnic group may have a dialectal relationship with one another, or they may be heterogeneous, which means they are mutually unintelligible. This paper reports on the results of a lexicostatistic study that examines linguistic affiliation of a group of languages found along the Tinjar-Baram river basin, namely Berawan, Bakong, Narom, Kiput, Dali,’ and Miriek, and also their links with Kenyah Long Terawan, Lepo’ Tau and Belait in nearby Brunei. The paper also traces their historical past and describes how languages spoken by these ethnolinguistic groups have become affiliated to each other. For some reason or another, e.g. migration in search of greener pastures, internal rivalry or/and conversion to modern religions, these indigenous communities are forced to move away from their original speech communities, and they call themselves by different names in their new localities, usually after the name of a river or a mountain. These factors and categorisation on the basis of similar cultural attributes have caused misinterpretation of the identity of the indigenous groups in the past. The paper will clarify some of the misconceptions regarding the ethnolinguistic groups in the region.

Where the Lines End

This chapter addresses the disappearance of Charrúas and Minuanes from historical records by the 1830s. Rather than marking the end of Charrúas or Minuanes themselves, this discursive shift was due to three factors. First, during the eighteenth century, colonial agents captured and exiled several thousand Charrúas and Minuanes, whose separation from tolderías rendered them ethnically indistinguishable in written records. Second, as Indigenous go-betweens moved between settlements and tolderías, colonial writers disassociated them from the ethnic labels that they reserved for tolderías. Third, the dissolution of the interimperial border via wars of independence in the early nineteenth century made tolderías an untenable living arrangement. The disappearance of tolderías as political entities engendered the discursive erasure of Charrúas and Minuanes altogether.