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Writing as a problem: African grassroots writing, economies of literacy, and globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2006

JAN BLOMMAERT
JAN BLOMMAERT
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of African Languages and Cultures, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium, jan.blommaert@ugent.be
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Abstract

This article analyzes a set of handwritten documents produced by a Burundese asylum seeker in Belgium. The documents are instances of “grassroots writing”: their authorship is collective, and they display considerable problems with “remembering.” They are also rather typical text-artifacts of globalization processes, in which literacy products from one part of the world meet literacy expectations from another part. Two general points are derived from the analysis. (i) The function of documents such as these is not “reading,” but rather a complex of reading, viewing, and decoding. The documents are at least partially visual bearers of information. Such functions need to be investigated ethnographically. (ii) The reason for this is the fact that the production and reception of such documents has to be set against the background of widely different economies of literacy. Consequently, the differences between text production and text reception are grounded in worldwide patterns of inequality. This casts doubt on a number of popular theses about the nature of contemporary societies and the role of discourse in late modernity.I was able to write this article in the excellent, generous research environment offered to me by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 2003. A preliminary version was presented at the African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, February 2003. I am grateful to participants of that workshop as well as to Jane Hill and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments. Research for this article benefited from a personal research grant from the National Science Foundation-Flanders (FWO-V), Belgium.

Keywords

LiteracyBurundiasylum seekersethnography of writingglobalization.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 5 , November 2004 , pp. 643 - 671
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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