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Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality
Carole Boyce Davies
And so we arrive at an argument for the use of Jamaican
patois such as in the various transgressive studies of language by UWI scholar
Carolyn Cooper. The intellectual contributions of Cooper offers one of the best
extensions of the meaning of decolonizing language for here is a scholar who has
experimented successfully with doing an entire theoretical paper in “patwa” (the way it is rendered locally
rather than the French spelling patois)
at an academic conference. Having been on the same panel with Carolyn Cooper as
she engaged in that process of doing a paper in patwa, I can testify to the communal reverberations of a scholar
taking such a leap and the affirmations she received from the community at
large. This would lead to her
subsequently writing a column in the Daily
Gleaner using “nation language.” Additionally she became an on the record
defender of the importance of Jamaican-based language in various fora, such as
electoral politics. Her recent defense
of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller during a campaign attack which tried to
present her as wild and irrational because she voiced a condemnation of an
attempt to reduce her to her class origins, was telling. In her essay, “Drawing Sister P's Tongue”[iii] Cooper articulated her response in the following terms:
In the 2007 election campaign, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) attempted to draw Portia Simpson Miller's tongue by provocatively distorting her battle cry. Her fierce words became the mouthpiece, so to speak, of the JLP advertising campaign. I suppose it was easier to knock down Portia Simpson Miller than to prop up Bruce Golding…. In 2011, the JLP has again resorted to drawing Sister P's tongue. G2K is desperately trying to revive that discredited commercial. Portia Simpson Miller's powerful words are misinterpreted as evidence that she needs 'anger management'” Cooper who is the author of a number of books on Jamaican orality such as Noises in the Blood, subtitled Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Duke, 1995), and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dance Hall Culture at Large (Palgrave, 2004) and more recently edited conference collection on Global Reggae (UWI Mona, 2012) is a faculty member in that same department indicated at the start of this essay and through her work has ensured a place for the scholarly engagement with a range of Jamaican popular language and literary forms. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [iii] Jamaican Daily Gleaner, December 25, 2011. |
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Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |