presentation by Kees van der Waal at the SOTL @ UJ: Towards a socially just pedagogy seminar series in May 2015.

1. Creolization versus Essentialism:
The Relevance of Glissant’s Notion of Relation for
the Transformation of South African Higher Education
Kees van der Waal
Stellenbosch University
21 May 2015

2. Overview
• Essentialist concepts and their consequences
• Glissant and his views on creolization and Relation
• Implications for transformative pedagogy

3. Essentialist concepts and their
consequences
• Colonial and apartheid essentialisms
– Race, culture, language – classification of units
– Academic (e.g. volkekunde) and common sense
– Discourse and practice: exclusion, racism, identity politics,
polarization of imagined static, bounded entities
– South African examples of strong ethnic identities:
Afrikaner and Zulu, resistance against mixing

5. 5

6. 6

7. 7

8. Essentialism
• Problem of essentialism
– Generalization vs variation, complexity and fluidity
– Against Essentialism, Stephan Fuchs, 2001: against taking
things for granted, as given
– More entangled conception of history needed: relationships,
networks
• Post-apartheid continuities of essentialism in context of inequality
– Strategies for nation-building, while using ‘race’
– Constitution, Bill of Rights, non-discrimination and equality, but
also separate identities and retraditionalization
– Whiteness and xenophobia express polarizations
– Cultural and language politics continue to essentialize, exclude

9. Taaldebat (language debate) at Stellenbosch
• Teaching Afrikaans and English
– Intense emotions, primordialist understandings
– Exclude students when teaching in Afrikaans
– English becomes increasingly dominant in the academic setting
– Afrikaans as a teaching medium and as a symbol of white identity
• Studying language politics
– Social identity is mediated through language
– Pierre Bourdieu, Jan Blommaert: political economy of language,
focus on language situations as speech events
– Cultural capital, especially writing and education
– Stratification of languages
– Ideologies of language underlie the language struggle

10. • Hegemonic Afrikaans, its symbols and demise
– Emerged as a creole in a violent colonial context
– Appropriation and standardization
– Used in the late 19th and early 20th century to mobilize
Afrikaners
– 1976 youth revolt against Afrikaans
– 11 official languages post-apartheid
– Afrikaner identity was initially mixed with racial
superiority, but after 1990 explicit attempts were made to
distance the language from its racial connotations
– Third Afrikaans Language Movement

11. • Symbolism of the language expressed its link to ethno-
nationalism:
– A girl 1880
– A pearl 1920
– A miracle 1959
– Monoliths 1975
– A vulnerable lamb, death 2009
• Afrikaans had become the standard symbol of white
Afrikanerdom

16. The Taal at Stellenbosch University
• 1918 – 2002 informal pro-Afrikaans practice plus some English
• 2002: Chris Brink, language policy and language options
• Taaldebat uproar from a white elite perspective (alumni)
• The essentialist position claims that the standard form of
Afrikaans and the so-called ‘Afrikaans character’ of
Stellenbosch University needs to be protected at all costs

17. • University management into defense: retain 60% Afrikaans
courses
• Increasingly metaphors of the body: death, biodiversity,
ethnic cleansing, loss
• Setting for language struggle, a last stand
• New demographics and transformation – black students,
young Afrikaans-speaking students, issues of access
• Move to parallel teaching in 2009, translation 2014

18. Édouard Glissant (1928-
2011) and his views on
creolization and
Relation
Martinique, France,
Caribbean
Poet and philosopher
Post-nationalism

19. Creolization: close to social experience, non-
essentialism
• Derives from Caribbean linguistics: meetings of languages ,
mixing under conditions of slavery – pidgins and creoles –
creolization as a an identity is a reaction to suffering
• Against fixed identities or a dichotomy between Europe and
Africa, argues for a connectedness between people in the
whole world – creolization as relationship, history as
adaptation
• ‘[w]e must be ourselves, but . . . we must be beyond ourselves
at the same time’ (Glissant in Dash and Troupe 2006:52)

20. • Relation = une poétique de la Relation, openness, e.g. a language is
never singular, multilingualism is the normal condition, learn
another language
• ‘Multilingualism is the passionate desire to accept and understand
our neighbor’s language and to confront the massive levelling force
of language continuously imposed by the West – yesterday French,
today with American English – with a multiplicity of languages and
their mutual comprehension’ (Glissant 1989:249)
• Afrikaans a creole language, formerly associated with arrogance
and cruelty
• Creolization as a cultural strategy
– Celebration of mixtures
– Denis Constant Martin Sounding the Cape , 2013
Jazz, Minstrel Carnival, boeremusiek, Afrikaaps

22. Musical theatre production: Afrikaaps a multimedia hipopera
• 2010 at Baxter and KKNK, a documentary, European tour
• Focus on creole background of working class Afrikaans, the non-
standard of the Cape Flats
• Part of empowerment activism using hip-hop and rap
• A political voice, identity claims, strategic essentialism aiming at
a more inclusive language politics in Afrikaans

23. Implications for transformative
pedagogy
• Teaching for social justice
– Experiencing and accepting of difference
– Relation to people studied, students, ethics, power
– Critical dialogues, inter-relationships
– Reflexivity needed, e.g. Brenda Leibowitz et al 2015
• Towards a critical cosmopolitanism for
experiencing common humanity

24. Debates on classification and its effects
relevant to higher education now
Indexing The Human @ Stellenbosch
(www.indexingthehuman.org)

25. • The ‘Open Stellenbosch’
movement manifesto
– Afrikaans teaching
– Hegemonic Afrikaner
culture, role in apartheid
– Transforming the
curriculum
– Centre for Diversity and
Inclusivity to reopen
• Looking beyond the
campus at divisions and
inequalities