This study of Cameroon captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the growing disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. It focuses on the resistance of Anglophone Cameroonians to nationhood, which is being pursued to the detriment of minority identities.
Diane Gerin-Lajoie uses survey data and the life stories of Anglophone teachers to illustrate the social practices which connect them with their linguistic, cultural, and professional identities.
This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the current widespread disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. Until the liberation struggles of the 1990s, dictatorship only paid lip service to democracy with impunity, often by silencing those perceived to threaten national unity. Since then, individuals and groups have reactivated claims to rights and entitlements and nowhere more so than in Cameroon. The book articulates the experiences and predicaments of the country's Anglophone community trapped in a marriage of inconvenience pregnant with tensions and conflicts.
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Identities and Englishes -- 3 English in Italy -- 4 Attitudes, motivations and proficiencies -- 5 Facilitators and constraints -- 6 Power and paradox: proficiency, accents and selves -- 7 Positioning the researcher -- 8 Reconceptualizing Englishes and English-speaking identities -- 9 Educating English learners today -- Appendix: transcription conventions -- Index
As members of an official linguistic minority in Canada, Anglophone teachers living and working in Quebec have a distinct experience of the relationship between language and identity. In Negotiating Identities, Diane Gérin-Lajoie uses a critical sociological framework to explore the life stories of Anglophone teachers and illustrate the social practices which connect them with their linguistic, cultural, and professional identities. Exploring the complexity of identity as a lived experience, Negotiating Identities demonstrates the strength of language as a political force in these educators’ lives both in the classroom and outside it. Through comparisons with the other official linguistic minority in Canada, the Francophones, and particularly with Franco-Ontarians, this book tells the stories of Quebec’s Anglophone teachers in their own words, providing a unique account of how these individuals make sense of their lives as residents of Quebec.
This book examines how seas, oceans, and passageways have shaped and reshaped cultural identities, spurred stories of reunion and separation, and redefined entire nations. It explores how entire communities have crossed seas and oceans, voluntarily or not, to settle in foreign lands and undergone identity, cultural and literary transformations. It also explores how these crossings are represented. The book thus contributes to oceanic studies, a field of study that asks how the seas and oceans have and continue to affect political (narratives of exploration, cartography), international (maritime law), identity (insularity), and literary issues (survival narratives, fishing stories). Divided into three sections, Negotiating Waters explores the management, the crossings, and the re-imaginings of the seas and oceans that played such an important role in the configuration of the colonial and postcolonial world and imagination. In their careful considerations of how water figures prominently in maps, travel journals, diaries, letters, and literary narratives from the 17th century onwards, the three thematic sections come together to shed light on how water, in all of its shapes and forms, has marked lands, nations, and identities. They thus offer readers from different disciplines and with different colonial and postcolonial interests the possibility to investigate and discover new approaches to maritime spaces. By advancing views on how seas and oceans exert power through representation, Negotiating Waters engages in important critical work in an age of rising concern about maritime environments.
Have efforts to advance women’s and men’s commitments to democratic governance, women’s rights and gender equality been successful in the Caribbean? Do they reflect local as well as international concerns and visions of gender equality? This edited collection answers these questions by focusing on women’s political leadership, electoral quota systems, national gender policies and transformational leadership as four feminist strategies that aim to engender democracy and citizenship. It offers a rich historical, comparative and ethnographic perspective on the lived experience of these strategies through case studies of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Dominica, Jamaica and St. Lucia. Drawing on national policy debates, election campaigns, state officials’ solidarities, men’s gender consciousness and women leaders’ life histories across these five Caribbean countries, the collection assesses the successes of transnational feminist efforts, the resilience of masculinist resistances, the limits of gender mainstreaming and the possibilities for gender justice in and beyond the Caribbean today.
While neoliberals typically view civil society organizations as vital channels for the implementation of economic and political reforms, they are also inclined to blame the politics of belonging for the poor record of these reforms. Piet Konings rejects such notions and argues that the relationship between civil society and the politics of belonging is more complex in Africa than Western donors and scholars are inclined to admit. He argues that ethno-regional associations and movements are more significant constituents of civil society in Africa than the conventional organizations that are often uncritically imposed or endorsed. He shows how the politics of belonging, so pervasive in Cameroon, and indeed much of Africa, during the current neoliberal economic and political reforms, has tended to penetrate the entire range of associational life, and he calls for a critical re-appraisal of prevalent notions and assumptions about civil society in the interest of African reality.
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.
Democracy is above all about majority rule. But which majority should rule if a part of a country wants to secede and become independent? Should the majority of the whole country decide? Or only the majority in the part that seeks to become independent be allowed to vote? Referendums and democracy have often been perceived to be almost incompatible with nationalism and ethnicity. Are they? Are there limits to democracy and the use of referendums? This book looks at these issues through a comprehensive study of the referendums held on ethnic and nationalist issues since the French Revolution. It analyses the pros and cons of referendums and presents a nuanced and up-to date tour d’horizon of the academic and scholarly writings on the subject by experts in international law, comparative politics and international law. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.