Summer 2019
May 20 – June 16
Adeola Agoke
3 credits
Fulfills Humanities requirement
Do you agree that language use is political? Have you ever considered why you vary your language when talking to different people and in different contexts? I invite you to join me in this class to explore language use and its political underpinnings in Africa and Africa Diaspora contexts. Using primary texts, and texts from multiple genres such as film, music, blog posts, YouTube adverts, political debates, and news, we will examine the processes by which language users across diverse sociocultural contexts use language to perform different functions. We will also explore spaces of language politics; the role of language in creating, negotiating, and resisting various transnational, social, and ethnic identifications.