Not like a native speaker : on languaging as a postcolonial experience / Rey Chow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chow, Rey, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language acquisition--Social aspects.

Language acquisition.

Postcolonialism--Social aspects.

Postcolonialism.

Sociolinguistics--History.

Sociolinguistics.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 169 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2014]

Summary:

The young mulatto chancing upon a photo about skin color; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in France; Indian call center agents learning to Americanize their accents; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the use of English; the translator acting as a traitor and a mourner in cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast: drawing on these and other personae, Rey Chow depicts riveting scenes of postcolonial languaging imbricated with race, class, and biopolitical demarcations. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. Articulating historical experience to practices and affects based in sounds and scripts, this book definitively transforms the basic parameters of postcolonial inquiry. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Derrida's Legacy of the Monolingual 19

2 Not Like a Native Speaker: The Postcolonial Scene of Languaging and the Proximity of the Xenophone 35

3 Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (Or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence) 61

4 Thinking with Food, Writing Off Center: The Postcolonial Work of Leung Ping-Kwan and Ma Kwok-Ming 79

5 The Sounds and Scripts of a Hong Kong Childhood 103.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780231151443

0231151446

9780231151450

0231151454

OCLC:

873237750