Т. 2. Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность

Секция XIX 242 Азия и Африка: наследие и современность. Т. 2 categories of traditional poetry with a view to determine the extent to which the poet played a liberating role. These categories comprise Court poets, Ritual Poets and Freelance Poets. The second interest focuses on the emergence of a new generation of African poets during the colonial and postcolonial era. They comprise three classificatory categories; The colonial home grown poets, the diaspora poets in Europe and Postcolonial poets residing in Africa. This paper views these categories as representatives of varying degrees of radicalism, but notes a striking disjunction between their reputation and their achievements in mobilizing the people of Africa in the liberation struggles. In reading pre- and postcolonial poetry from sub-Saharan Africa, critics have tended to assert that the ‘progressive’ poets wrote from a point of view of the oppressed and that their revolutionary, often Socialist, consciousness informs their view of the oppressed and enhances the potentialities of the masses. However, the position advanced in this paper is that although these poets may be radical opponents of injustices, they did not anticipate nor have the capacity to confront the injustices, largely because they could not forge alliances with the masses. The colonists barred the colonial-era poets access into the intellectual, political and aesthetic space, thanks to cultural emasculation and a highly restrictive education system. The postcolonial era poets continue to depict the agonies of the underprivileged, disenfranchised masses, but they do not inspire radical consciousness on a large scale. Ideologically inspired poetry that jibes or even rails at the establishment without engaging the masses may be described as isolated, surreptitious gestures of protest. In this respect it can be argued with plausible evidence that the African ‘protest poet’ has been a chronicler of liberation efforts rather than an instigator of it. The paper concludes by reflecting on new directions and possibilities offered by emerging technology. Does this highly accessible space create launch pads for revolutionary movements or will it only provide a democratic platform for competing ideas? Olga A. Ivanova (Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles) Linguistic encoding of agency in naturally occurring Swahili-English discourse on social gender While the performative dimension of agency in language has long been of central importance for linguistic anthropologists 1 , research on grammatical 1 Ahearn L. M . Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30 (2001). P. 109–137; Duranti A. From grammar to politics: Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village. Berkley: University of California Press, 1994.