Research
Africa and its Quest for a Linguistic Integration
Language has been a vast field of study in which many brains have been functioning so as to demystify the different predicaments it poses to its speakers and hearers. Since language is taken to be the haven of identities and global integration, it has always been a priority for a country to maintain a unifying language via which all its people would be identified and develop a sense of nationhood. A case in point is Africa, which is still facing a host of challenges appertaining to either the national or regional integration of its multilingual people. Because Africa is teeming with hundreds of languages, the languages of the ex-colonizers (English, French or Portuguese... etc) have played major roles in bringing, to some extent, the Africans together. Still, many Africans have been concerned with the fact that the ex-colonial languages constitute nothing but unifying linguistic options made at the disposal of only the African elites rather than the masses. In this sense, African leaders sensed the necessity of holding a unified African world which would endure the outside economic and political challenges, especially after the era of colonialism. In this respect, this paper is an attempt to prescribe some antidotes for such African linguistic alchemy.
Morocco in Other Words
For many years now, questions of culture, race, sex and identity, among many others, have been coped with at length in Moroccan literary writings in different languages and for different purposes. These purposes, in fact, have been articulated in a variety of literary outlets with the aim of correcting cultural stereotypes, bridging cultural gaps to avoid cultural shocks or enlarging the extremes of intercultural dialogues among nations of the world. However, one such thorny question ought to be raised in this context is the extent to which any foreign language can be a resort to any Moroccan, in particular, and African writer, in general, to express the repressed cultural forms within their cultures. In this account, my contribution places under scrutiny the Moroccan text written in foreign languages, especially in English, as having the ability to translate the miscellaneous forms of the Moroccan cultural diversity to the outside world; a possibility which is now at hands more than ever before. To help capture this phenomenon in its contemporaneity, a combination of both Mikhail Bakhtin and Chantal Mouffe’s philosophies is undertaken with the aim of laying bare the manifestation of a textual enterprise authored or co- authored by different voices in an in-between dialogical as well as virtual space. By this combination, the concepts employed provide the conceptual/critical framework and terminology that can be used in the present analysis with the aim of generating new rhetorical concepts or strategies.
