Bookbeat: October 2010
Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire
by Anna Peterson
Department of Religion
(Columbia
University Press, September 2009)
Available
through Amazon
Americans increasingly cite moral values as a factor in how they vote, but when we define morality simply in terms of a voter's position on gay marriage and abortion, we lose sight of the ethical decisions that guide our everyday lives. In our encounters with friends, family members, nature, and nonhuman creatures, we practice a nonutilitarian morality that makes sacrifice a rational and reasonable choice. Recognizing these everyday ethics, Anna L. Peterson argues, helps us move past the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of culture and refocus on issues that affect real social change.
Peterson begins by divining a "second language" for personal and political values, a vocabulary derived from the loving and mutually beneficial relationships of daily life. Even if our interactions with others are fleeting and fragmentary, they provide a viable alternative to the contractual and atomistic attitudes of mainstream culture. Everyday ethics point toward a more just, humane, and sustainable society, and to acknowledge moments of grace in our daily encounters is to realize a different way of relating to people and nonhuman nature& mdash;an alternative ethic to cynicism and rank consumerism. In redefining the parameters of morality, Peterson enables us to make fundamental problems such as the distribution of wealth, the use of public land and natural resources, labor and employment policy, and the character of political institutions the preferred focus of debate and action.
- Publisher
Book Interviews
Languages of Urban Africa
by Fiona McLaughlin
Departments of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Linguistics
(Continuum, 2009)
Available
through Amazon
‘McLaughlin’s edited volume, at long last, provides us an opportunity to comprehend the multilingual complexity of Africa’s growing urban communities.’
- David Dwyer, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University, USA
The Languages of Urban Africa, which appears in Continuum’s series Studies in Sociolinguistics, consists of a series of case studies that address four main themes. The first is the history of African urban languages. The second set focus on theoretical issues in the study of African urban languages, exploring the outcomes of intense multilingualism and also the ways in which urban dwellers form their speech communities. The volume then moves on to explore the relationship between language and identity in the urban setting. The final two case studies in the volume address the evolution of urban languages in Africa.
This rich set of chapters examines languages and speech communities in ten geographically diverse African urban centres, covering almost all regions of the continent. Half involve cities in so-called Francophone Africa, the other half, Anglophone. This exciting volume shows us what the study of urban African languages can tell us about language and about African societies in general.
It is essential reading for upper level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in sociolinguistics, especially those interested in the language of Africa.
Contents
- Introduction to the languages of urban Africa, Fiona Mc Laughlin (University of Florida)
- The historical dynamic of multilingualism in Accra, M.E. Kropp Dakubu (University of Ghana-Legon, Ghana)
- The story of old-urban vernaculars in North Africa, Atiqa Hachimi (University of Toronto-Scarborough, Canada)
- The spread of Lingala as a lingua franca in the Congo basin, Eyamba G. Bokamba (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
- Senegal’s early cities and the making of an urban language, Fiona Mc Laughlin (University of Florida)
- Discourses, community, identity: processes of linguistic homogenization in Bamako, Mali, Cécile Canut (CNRS-Paris, France)
- The multiple facets of the urban language form, Nouchi, Sabine Kube-Barth (UNESCO-Paris)
- On assessing the ethnolinguistic vitality of Ga in Accra, James Essegbey (University of Florida)
- Multilingualism and language use in Porto Novo, Wale Adeniran (Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria)
- Language choice in Dar es Salaam’s billboards, Charles Bwenge (University of Florida)
- Innovations on the fringes of the Kiswahili speaking world, Haig Der-Houssikian (University of Florida)
- Polarizing and blending: compatible practices in a bilingual urban community in Cape Town, Kay McCormick (University of Cape Town, South Africa).
- Publisher
