140125 VO The African Diaspora in China: Topics in Sociocultural Linguistics and Beyond (2014S)

The African diaspora in China, often termed ‘Africa’s newest diaspora’, has been studied from different perspectives, including the sociopolitical, the socioeconomic, and the sociocultural. This course begins with background analysis of the African presence in China, and then focuses on sociocultural linguistics, giving course participants the opportunity to explore, in a different geographical setting, key areas in linguistics, such as contact linguistics/contact grammars, linguistic communities, language and identity, language and communication, and the recent idea of ‘diaspora linguistics’ within which concepts like linguistic repertoires and heritage grammars are salient. The course goes beyond these sociocultural linguistic concepts to explore wider issues about Africa’s links to other parts of the world through the formation of new diaspora communities (such as Africans in Vienna) and what implications this has for conceptualizing African studies as area studies within a global context.