Talking parts, talking back: Fleshing out linguistic citizenship
Date
2020Author
Stroud, Christopher
Williams, Quentin
Bontiya, Ndimphiwe
Metadata
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These are the bodies of children and men and women who have inherited the brutalities of
colonialism, plantation servitude and slavery and now re-live these miseries in the belly of
a rampant global neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism. They are the racialized, sexualized,
genderized and godless bodies that first took form in coloniality-modernity in conjunction
with the emergence of MAN, the White, rational, disembodied male as HUMAN. They
retain their shape today through technologies of vulnerability, with which the manufactured
lack of voice works in dynamic synergy. This is particularly the case for South Africa, with its
tender histories and distraught presents, raw emotion and sore vulnerabilities of racialized
and neoliberal patriarchy. In this paper, we suggest that vulnerability, beyond its potentially
devastating effect on souls and livelihoods, may also be a productive site for the articulation
of alternative, and habitually silenced voices. In this regard, we explore how a focus on acts
of Linguistic Citizenship may orientate thinking on voice and agency to different sites of the
body, as well as allow insight into the complex technologies and practices of vulnerability.