Author: geoplotsadmin

Posted on

Readings on Black Literature

Following up on the BLM moment, I read in and around the topic, starting with  Jeffery Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Paul Beatty’s Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor and his novel The Sellout.

*

Likewise, Black US literature is US literature and has followed a course roughly analogous to “mainstream” US literature. From the 20th century on entire literary culture has evolved  from aspiring modernism to a state of facile identitarian subjectivism..

*

George Schuyler’s 1929 Racial Inter-Marriage in the United States, called for solving the US race problem through interracial marriage, then known by the odious term of “miscegenation”, which was illegal in many states until a 1967 SCOTUS decision

*

In The Walls of Jericho, the first novel by Rudolph Fisher, the lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fisher’s characters—including the prejudiced Miss Cramp, who “takes on causes the way sticky tape picks up lint.”

In 1929, Schuyler’s pamphlet Racial Inter-Marriage in the United States called for solving the country’s race problem through miscegenation, which was then illegal in most states.

He also published the highly controversial book Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, a novel about the slave trade created by former American slaves who settled Liberia in the 1820s.

In early 2020, The New Group (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Group)

announced it was developing a musical adaptation of Black No More directed by Scott Elliott with a book by John Ridley and choreography by Bill T. Jones. Rapper Black Thought is contributing music and lyrics and will appear in the production, originally scheduled to premiere in October 2020.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/roots-black-thought-musical-black-no-more-963733/

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5129/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137545794_8

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/19/george-schuyler-an-afrofuturist-before-his-time/

John McWhorter’s old piece on reparations: https://newrepublic.com/article/90734/against-reparations

Posted on

Notes on the Oxford Handbook of Language Contact

I have submitted a 1500 word review of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Follows a number of reading notes.

*

Pidgins: “two things stand out, namely that of suddenness and that of social barriers. In other words, two or more groups either experience a sudden need to communicate with one another” (OHLC, p 269)

Note that there is no suggestion of any difference in status, functionality, intrinsic value or quality by this use of the terms younger and elder (OHLC, p. 305)

Plain Mixed Languages (M)
Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MS)
“Neo-ethnic” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSN)
U-Turn” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSU)
“Secretive” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSS)
“Assimilatory” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSA)
        (OHLC, p 314)

Shelta, the secret language of Irish Travellers

Lagersprache, the German-lexicon pidgin used in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Ambilingualism – definition – Encyclo – English: Encyclo.co.uk

Code-switching as ludic. The anomaly of monolingualism

Basque, with its scantily attested relative Aquitainian, is one such example (Trask 1997).

Bloomfield’s tripartite division between cultural, intimate, and dialect borrowing is still valuable.

Pattern transfer, which led Grant (1999, 2002, 2004) to develop the complementary (not opposing) term transfer of fabric to refer to the replication of morphs (including lexicon) from one language to another (p 13)

Thurston (1987). One notes his ideas about endogenous and exogenous language creation and the relative permeability of the “endolexicon” and its outer carapace the “exolexicon,” 

It is not always easy to find reasons on a case-by-case basis why the replacement of one item in a language by a borrowed item takes place. Indeed, the solution often eludes us—but exploring such cases of intimate language contact should enable us to dig more deeply into the kinds of linguistic features that are most readily borrowed. p 16

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatypy

New dialect formation (Trudgill 2004)

Paradigmatic  templatic = canonical

Frank Jablonka (Jablonka 2017) on the rise of new mixed ethnolects as a fresh result of language contact. p 30

Procès d’intention (to shift slightly the usual meaning of the term) to presume and project ghost-in-the-machine like presumptions about why or why not a bilingual speaker might borrow a word or structure 

1 Examples from Moroccan Arabic north / south?
2 Was ist Deutsch?
3 Mandarin (sandwich)
4 Sorry-o, dry-o.
5 Wawa
6 Subvention / intervention

 *

The field has always been conceived of as a multidisciplinary area of study, built around linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approaches. Weinreich (1953) was the first to propose a systematized and integrated framework within which language contact could be investigated. In particular, he emphasizes that the components of an explanatory framework must include “purely structural considerations…psychological reasons…and socio-cultural factors” (1953: 44). These three components—the linguistic, the psycholinguistic, and the sociolinguistic—remain central to the study of language contact. Ch 2

I argue that van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) model of language contact offers a more consistent, accurate, and princi­ pled explanation of the processes of change associated with different types of contact. Ch 2, p 52

how macro-level social factors shape the creation of creoles and indigenized varieties, is Mufwene’s (2001, 2008) Ecology of Language (EL) frame­ work. Mufwene argues that different colonization types, and the kinds of economic sys­ tems they engendered, led to differences in population structures, which directly affected the evolution of English and other European languages in their colonial settings. P 54

Andersen (1983: 7) discusses the “long and confusing history” of these terms. P 56

Matras and Sakel (2007: 829) Page 6 of 27

distinguish between “replication of linguistic matter” or MAT (i.e., morphemes and phonological shapes from a source language), and “replication of patterns” or PAT (i.e., patterns of distribution of grammatical and semantic meaning, and formal-syntactic arrangement). P 56

agentivity P 57

Weinreich’s (1953: 6) observation that “the individual is the ultimate locus of contact.” P 57

When such speakers attain greater proficiency or even domi­nance in their second language, they tend to transfer features from it to their original language. Such changes fall under the ambit of imposition via SL agentivity. P 59

deal with the fact that the speaker does not master both language systems to the same extent” (2001: 425). Hence, such a model must be able to account for the following aspects of bilingual language production (De Bot 2001: 425): P 67

In both lexical borrowing and classic insertional code-switching, speakers employ the morphosyntactic procedures of the RL as the dominant language, and selectively introduce source language (SL) lexical items, or more accurately lexemes, which are associated with lemmas belonging to RL lexical entries. p 69?

bilinguals can in fact attach the source language lexeme to the RL lemma as an alternative phonological shape that replaces the equivalent RL lexeme (de Bot 2001: 441).

Posted on

Parting Shot

This site had a simple goal, to open a space for my political ranting, a sideline for me, hence the occasional nature of these pieces. They have become increasing occasional as time’s gone by and, the darkness of (the) age conspiring, my thoughts have erred off into diverse directions. So I am hoping to re-jig this page to allow for more variety,  more … alterity.

Alteritas, the late Latin original lying behind the contemporary buzzword, was as my domain name indicates its inspiration. To alteritas it shall return.

But do let me mention here in one parting political shot my conviction that capitalism is not sustainable, at least as far as humans are concerned. Socialism was only a theory when capitalism was already a behavior and then afterwards an ideology which spawned theory itself. But in a world where capitalism will soon leave humans behind as productive agents of profit and therefore as subjects of interest, the idea and the ideals of socialism remain relevant, if we want to keep humans around.

Enough said on that point.

 

Posted on

Signals through Noise

In the whirl of events in which we are all immersed these days, thanks to media, social or not, I’ve been trying to sort signals out from noise. I have boiled this commotion down to four talking points to help muster my own thoughts. I offer them here without further ado.

  • Until the financial crisis in 2008, the US was the superpower. That phase is over. This turn of events will be traumatic for the US and dangerous to us all. See hegemony.
  • Within the US, a majority of the diminishing white majority has declared demographic war on the rest of the population, which can no longer be categorized in terms of black or white. See majority minority. This conflict is accelerating the decline of US power, soft but perhaps even hard.
  • Capitalism, increasingly based on fictitious capital, has rushed forward from the 2008 financial crisis into a new bubble of imaginary values. When, sooner or later, this bubble bursts there will be unimaginable chaos, trumping the issues of US decline and its internal civil war.
  • Once the weapons existed, nuclear war, intentional or accidental, become possible. There are reasons to believe that it is now probable. Carbon-driven climate change pales against the threat atomic weapons pose to the planet. See GCR.
Posted on

Sad New Year’s Greeting

In guise of New Year’s greetings an old friend sent the following link to a piece in Truthdig by Neil Gabler:  https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-era-wont-pass-without-serious-damage-america/.  Here is what I replied to him (revised for publication here).
*

Thanks for sharing this piece, and of course best wishes for 2018.

Yes, there is a lot of truth in what Gabler says, not just about the racial, gender and generational dimensions of the right wing ascendency, but the religious or quasi-religious social psychology behind it.

Yet I find him overly optimistic about the future of progressive politics in the US. To some extent, Gabler himself is contaminated by the American religiosity he describes. There may well be such a thing as “good” ethically-oriented religion, but I see religion as being generally on the wrong side of the proverbial long arc of which many progressives have spoken, sometimes with but a wing and a prayer. Religion has never been about compassion and ethics; on the rare occasions it moved beyond the primal reaction to fear and the subsequent tribalistic belief in being in some way a chosen people, religious ethics were at best a mitigating overlay, a cover. Marx had it right: religion is the opium of the people. Roughly 40% of the US people are addicted to it, and the rest still fall under its sway.

So I shall not be acting as if I believe that compassionate ethics will serve as a base for the mass movement required to reverse the capitalist order of things, or even the much more modest goal of social democratic movements to improve the lives of those who have only marginal, non-liquid capital, often the paltry pensions and home “equity” acquired via mortgages, those who are paid wages, those who pay rent and are not paid it.  Plus those not paid at all.

Indeed, this crisis may be marking the return of hard-line socialist, indeed communist alternatives to capitalism, or at least renewed consideration of them. Unfortunately, Americans, with their base-line religiosity and jerk-knee belief in (their own) human good have been ideologically innoculated against coherent materialist visions which would drive such a serious “class” struggle.

In other words, we are returning to the nineteenth century political logic in which Marxism and other socialist ideologies were understood by a minority as the sole way to resist capitalism. That will further exacerbate the conflict, especially since the plutocrats are already in power and will ruthlessly try to quash any prospects of change.

All this is say: I don’t like our chances, in 2018 or beyond.