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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa

Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa

Sanders, Mark

Hardcover

Series: Translation/Transnation, Book 55

African HistoryLiterary CriticismFiction Anthologies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0691167567
ISBN13: 9780691167565
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Mar 22 2016
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.50
Language: English

Why are you learning Zulu? When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history.

Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning--from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa.

Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

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