topic3

  Philosophy 101
       Inroduction to Philosophy
  Group Writing Projects

  Topic 3: Language and
       Postcolonial Identity

Introduction

After World War II, African nations and peoples began to throw off the yoke of the European colonial powers. Many Africans had been force-fed the language, customs, social structure, and values of the dominant colonial culture. (There are parallels here to the way the U.S. government treated Native Americans.) The problem after W.W.II was the following: How were African peoples to attain their own identities once they gained their independence? Should they completely eliminate all traces of the language of the colonial power? If negative prejudices, attitudes of inferiority/superiority, and other biases are imbedded in the language of the colonial power and that language is now the official language of the country, how are Africans going to gain a new sense of identity without eliminating that language? Go to our Internet Research Page for more on language and postcolonial identity, especially Jennifer Margulis' and Peter Nowakoski's essay "Language."

Topic: After making an assessment of Bohannan's essay, apply that assessment to the problem described above concerning language and postcolonial identity. For example, was there any real shared communication between Bohannan and the Tiv concerning her telling the story of Hamlet? What did she learn and what did they learn? If they did learn something, how did that learning take place? Can that process be applied to the problem of postcolonial identity?

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