230421 South Africa in Film and Literature: Linguistics meets Literary and Cultural Studies (Teil I) (BS) (SoSe 2017)

South Africa is the southernmost country of the African continent, linguistically complex and has thus attracted the interest of linguists from various backgrounds. From an Anglicist perspective, the varieties of English in South Africa are of particular interest and are among the best described. In this class, we will look at the historical/colonial background of the country, taking into consideration its consequences for the contemporary linguistic make-up. We will explore linguistic practices, such as code-switching and code-mixing, and describe the linguistic features of the Englishes spoken in this part of the world.
This will enable us to analyse language variation in films and literature and explore why and how different varieties of English (or different languages for that matter) are used in popular films, novels or poems. We will link this to concepts of variational linguistics and draw on other recent works and approaches in linguistics, dealing with topics such as authenticity, identity formation, style-shifting, and stereotyping.
We shall apply these findings to literary texts and films from and about South Africa studying poems by Lebogang Mashile and Lesego Rampolokeng and reading two short novels: Disgrace (1999) by Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee and Coconut (2007) by Kopano Matlwa, which contrasts the adolescence of two black girls in Johannesburg.
The controversial novel Disgrace received the prestigious British Booker Prize and was adapted for the screen in 2009, but was severely criticized by the South African ANC government for its “subliminal racism”. We shall watch the film adaptation starring John Malkovich and compare the language use here to the film musical Sarafina (1992) with Whoopy Goldberg in the lead.