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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 1297

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Black girls talking “white” in South African desegregated schools: language and the (re)production of race

Authors: McKinney, Carolyn
Submitted by: McKinney, Carolyn (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Previously white, now desegregated suburban schools in South African cities are important spaces for the production of an expanding black middle class as well as for scrutiny of a society in transition. Desegregated schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquistion and maintenance of the prestige variety of English (approximating white South African English, WSAE) that is a marker of such ‘quality’. This paper presents data collected using ethnographic methods in two desegregated girls’ schools in South African cities: one in Johannesburg, Gauteng where black learners have replaced the white learner body; and a second in Cape Town, Western Cape where black learners are in the minority. While black students do not necessarily identify with white students, the continuing normative power of whiteness in South Africa is shown to be replicated through assimilation to white ways of speaking English. Youth discourses on English align WSAE with prestige, or ‘proper English’, while black varieties are frequently stigmatised. Yet at the same time, the resistance of many coloured learners to accommodating to WSAE in the Cape Town school, and the continued use of Bantu languages by African girls in informal spaces in the Johannesburg school. shows discursive practices as a productive site for complex, at times subversive/anti-hegemonic, identity making. I draw on a poststructuralist theorising of discourse and subjectivity (Davies, 2006), as well as Bourdieu’s (1977) and Blommaert’s (2010) theorising of language and power, to analyse learners’ linguistic ideologies and discursive practices. While language has been an important facet of the social construction and ascription of racial categories in South Africa, the language/race relationship has not been a focus of sociological or sociolinguistic study (see McKinney, 2007 and Mesthrie, 2010 for recent exceptions to this). This paper aims to show how language ideologies and language use, as an aspect of cultural practice, offer a window into the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. References Bourdieu, P. 1977. The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information 16 (6). Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, B. 2006. Identity, abjection and otherness: creating the self, creating difference. In Arnot, M and Mac an Ghaill (Eds) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Gender and Education. (72-90) New York: Routledge. McKinney, C. 2007: ‘If I speak English does it make me less black anyway?’ ‘Race’ and English in South African desegregated schools, English Academy Review 24(2). Mesthrie, R. 2010. Socio-phonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1).