Full Description
Senegal Abroad explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Capturing the experiences of Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York, it depicts how they make sense of who they are—and how they fit into their communities, countries, and the larger global Senegalese diaspora. Drawing on extensive interviews with a wide range of emigrants as well as people of Senegalese heritage, Maya Angela Smith contends that they shape their identity as they purposefully switch between languages and structure their discourse.
The Senegalese are notable, Smith suggests, both in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to language. She finds that, although the emigrants she interviews express complicated relationships to the multiple languages they speak and the places they inhabit, they also convey pleasure in both travel and language. Offering a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, they blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Understanding Global Senegalese Identity Formation through Language and Movement
1 What's Language Got to Do with It? Language Attitudes and Identity Formation
2 Speaking while Black: The Quest for Legitimacy in Exclusionary Spaces
3 Neither Here nor There: Reflections on National and Transnational Belonging
4 Leveraging Language: Multilingualism and Transnational Identity Formation
Epilogue
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
