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

• Published in: Language in society Vol. 33; no. 5; pp. 643 - 671
• Main Author: BLOMMAERT, JAN
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01-11-2004
• Subjects: African Cultural Groups; African languages; asylum seekers; Authorship; Belgium; Burundi; Culture; Decoding; Discourse; Ethnography; ethnography of writing; Fabian, Johannes; Globalization; Handwriting; Hymes, Dell; Language; Linguistic anthropology; Linguistics; Literacy; Literary criticism; Literature; Orthographies; Reading; Refugees; Sociolinguistics; Urban areas; Writing; ethnography of writing; Burundi; asylum seekers; Literacy; globalization
• ISSN: 0047-4045; 1469-8013
• DOI: 10.1017/S0047404504045014

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.