Professor Harrow,
Germane Coetzee here :
" But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was.
-- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Totally depressing : With Brexit, the EU ( the resurrected Holy Roman Empire) the end of the English Language as one of its official languages. But "rest assured" that we will continue and will not give up with our inflected local dialect Swenglish over here in Sweden...
More seriously, there's the specie of Pan-Africanists who fondly think of the African Union as one of the youngest Empires, speaking many tongues - youngest - since Africa only lately became politically self-conscious as one enormous landmass plus Madagascar & the smallies - aware of itself - as a great notion with, in alphabetical order the official languages the international languages of commerce, education, culture and diplomacy : Afrikaans , Arabic, English (the official language of 20 African countries) French / African French , (no German) Portuguese , Swahili...
And now new cultural assertions and fresh efforts to develop indigenous language literatures such as in Yoruba (Yoruba cultural nationalism) the musiki is always there, Yoruba-speakers looking forward to more Teju Cole and more Yoruba poetry etc.
At the same time - we wondering how you feel about Glocalized Nigerian pidgin English dominating Nollywood's tremendous output and influence - extending the Naija English empire said to be second only to Hollywood, whilst in Senegal - I have it on the authority of Lamine Dieng (Senegalese actor) just two weeks ago on the way home from a Youssou Ndour show, that Senegalese theatre is currently not as hale and hearty as one would have thought , with Negritude, Senghor and extensions, the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966 , Cheikh Anta Diop and the other Diops as background and blackground...
Less depressing : Did you meet/work with Brodsky during his stint at the University of Michigan ?
On Sunday, 3 September 2017 04:28:45 UTC+2, Kenneth Harrow wrote:
Hi corneliusI find this idea (language holds the empire together), very intriguing. And perhaps there are more than one kind of empire, material, political, military etc. empire endures on the strength of more than conquest by force.The word I need to through into the mix is ideology; thinking gramsci, of course.10% force, coercision; 90% consent, ideological integration. This was ultimately the case in africa, as elsewhere.The trouble is empires were very multilinguistic, multinational, multi race, multi cultural. More than nations, that want to impose single rule of language and state. empires seemed more intriguingly multiple: am thinking of the austro-hungarian and ottoman in particular. But the romans had a latin core and a non-latin periphery, not just ruled via latin. The elite became latinate, which explains how romance languages developed in germanic lands.Then there is something like an empire—the u.s.—that imposes, imperfectly, english, but tolerates an enormous amount of spanish throughout much of the country, and a multiplicity of languges in the cities.Could the claims about single language be pre-global? I say that thinking that the global dominant language, that is english, is really enormously inflected by dialects that are quite different.kenKenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com > on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Date: Saturday, 2 September 2017 at 16:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and May God continue to bless the English LangaugeLet me guess : Farooq Kperogi--
On Saturday, 2 September 2017 23:38:01 UTC+2, Olayinka Agbetuyi wrote:Well, dont be too shocked. Someone on this forum used a similar argument not too long ago...Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.-------- Original message --------From: Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>Date: 02/09/2017 22:17 (GMT+00:00)To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and May God continue to bless the English Langauge--I read this paragraph and gasped, that apart from a shared history etc. it's indeed the English Language that is holding an empire like the Federal Republic of Nigeria together:
Joseph Brodsky's 55 page line by line commentary
on
"September 1, 1939" by W. H .Auden
Pages 309-310 of - Less Than - One Seleceted Essays by Jospeh Brodsky
"Some twenty years later, in a poem written in memory of Louis MacNeice, Auden expresses a desire to " become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe". This is an extremely significant admission , and the crucial word here is , believe it or not , not Goethe but Atlantic. Because what Auden had in mind from the very outset of his poetic career was the sense that the language in which he wrote was transatlantic or, better still , imperial: not in the sense of the British Raj but in the sense that it is the language that made an empire. For empires are held together by neither political nor military forces but by languages. Take Rome, for instance, or better still Hellenic Greece, which began to disintegrate immediately after Alexander the Great's own demise ( and he dies very young). What held them for centuries , after their political centres collapsed , were magna lingua Grecae and Latin. Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; and it's language that does the job, not legions. So if you want to write in English, you ought to master all its idioms,from Fresno to Kuala Lumpur, so to speak. Other than that, the importance of what you are saying may not go far beyond your little parish, which is perfectly commendable, of course; what's more, there is that famous"drop of water" (which reflects the entire universe) approach to comfort you. That's fine. And yet there is every chance for you to become citizens of the Great English Language"
Professor Harrow, do you agree?
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