Presentation by Alison Phipps, University of Glasgow, with Tawona Sitholé (Seeds of Thought), Gameli Tordzro (Pan African Arts Scotland) and Naa Densua Tordzro at the Conference on Languages and Tourism at the Institut für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie, Universität zu Köln, 30 May 2016

1. Masking Languages, Skinning Languages: Tourism,
Researching Multilingually and The Performing
Body.
Alison Phipps, University of Glasgow.
with Tawona Sitholé, Gameli Tordzro, Naa Densua
Tordzro

2. Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon)
“The disaster of the man
of color lies in the fact
that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the
inhumanity of the white
man lie in the fact that
somewhere he has killed
man.” (152)

3. Linguistic entanglements, emblematic codes
And languaging in tourism
‘Languaging’
Das Zwischenmenschliche
(Buber) ‘quick’ of human
relatedness.
‘Northern project, with
northern epistemologies’
A northern sociolinguistics
born of the monolingualisms
of Europe and its invention
(Gramling, forthcoming)

4. Researching Multilingually at Borders
Two overarching aims:
1) to research interpreting, translation and multilingual
practices in challenging contexts, and,
1) while doing so, to document, describe and evaluate
appropriate research methods (traditional and arts based)
and develop theoretical approaches for this type of academic
exploration.

5. 5 Case Studies
1) Global Mental Health: Translating Sexual and Gender
Based Trauma (Scotland/Sierra Leone)
2) Law: Translating vulnerability and silence in the legal
process (UK/Netherlands)
3) State: Working and Researching Multilingually at State and
EU borders (Bulgaria/Romania)
4) Borders: Multilingual Ecologies in American Southwest
borderlands
5) Language Education: Arabic as a Foreign Language for
International Learners (Gaza)

6. Languages as Social Category and
Social Construct
Largely overlooked in
accounts of tourism
Overlooked in
methodologies
Race, gender, class

7. Masking Languages
From the North: Analysed
through the lens of
postcolonialism and market
relations, critically or
otherwise.
To take a view from the
South:
Tourist body needs to be
understood within the
necropolitics of the age

8. (Northern) Multilingual Dialogues in
Tourism

9. Necropolitics: Mbembe (2003,13)
“My concern is those
figures of sovereignty
whose central project is
not the struggle for
autonomy but the
generalized
instrumentalization of
human existence and the
material destruction of
human bodies and
populations.”

10. Unmooring Northern Epistemologies
of Language
Language and Tourism as
Instrumentalised
Studies of transaction
Studies of discursive
formation
Studies of damage to
language under conditions
of globalisation
Learning of tourist
languages
Cost-benefit analysis of
languaging.

11. Necropolitics and the Tourist
The Tourist is ‘grievable’
The southern host is not.
(Butler)
Racism is the vehicle for the
necropolitics.
Typically we separate the
epistemological relation
Hospitality is ‘an industry’
not an entangled act in
history.

12. Fanon
“Both (Black and White)
must turn their backs on
the inhuman voices which
were those of their
respective ancestors in
order that authentic
communication be
possible. Before it can
adopt a positive voice,
freedom requires an effort
at disalienation.” (180)

13. Naa Densua

15. Performing and Consuming the Tourist
Body
• The body is white
• The body is skinned
• The body is clothed
• The body performs
• The body is

17. Cape Coast
Is language in tourism
settings, through its
situatedness in
Colonialism and power
inequalities, especially
violent and gendered?
Bare feet, green batik,
white skin in black hand.

21. How is languaging fixed?
The Art of Making things
stick (Karin Barber)
Multilingual vernaculars,
translingual practice and
the monolingual tourist
(who may have several
mono-languages)

22. Has he eaten salt? Languaging in
Ghana
“this is a natural conversation. we
are not talking like this to please
you Alison, [laughter] because of
the grant uhmm or because its
our national language but we are
talking because the way we talk
to each other when we say things
like in my language we …in my
culture we.. “
“In my language we….”
This one is called a ….”
Repetoires built of rehearsals of
scrips of behaviour and language.

23. Entanglement
Sara Nutall (post-
apartheid) South Africa)
Concept on periphery
brought centre stage (a
strategy of
defamiliarisation) to
enable both opacity and
clarity and a polyglot
public space.

24. Mbembe 1993/ Nutall 2003
Oppressor and oppressed
do not inhabit in
commensurate spheres:
rather they share the
same epsiteme.

25. Unmooring languages
To be moored requires
twin anchors.
Moored, is how
languages have been
associated, colonially,
(Anderson, 1980) with the
national state.

26. Unmoored
Unmooring occurs when one
or both of the twin anchors are
raised.
Raising both anchors means
movement, a possible loss of
control, a move into what may
be unknown, however
charted. To be unmoored
suggests possibility, potential
pain, insecurity, escape,
freedom, hope, danger,
release and a sea-ward flow.

27. A Guide for the (unmoored) Traveller

28. Cultural Forms
“Literature is where I went
to feel more alive, and to
try to penetrate the
deaness all around; to
know black women more
than I could hope to in
apartheid life” (Nutall
(2003, 152)

30. Researching Multilingually in Tourism
Language Learning as
Oral and Material
Not primarily textual
Connections to
philosophies of Vocal
Expression
(Caveraro)

31. Enlanguaged
Told in a voice that
“involves the
throat, saliva,
infancy, a patina of
experienced life,
the mind’s
intentions, the
pleasure of giving a
personal form to
sound waves.”
(Cavarero 2005: 2)

32. Linguistic Hospitality
‘The voice is sound not
speech. But speech
constitutes its essential
destination. What is
therefore at stake in any
inquiry into the ontology of
the voice – where
uniqueness and relationality
come to the fore – is a
rethinking of this
destination’ (Caveraro)
As Dialogue

33. Spoken Word and its Entanglements
and Emblematic codes
Philosophy ignores the
plural, reciprocal
communication of voices
and their elementary
forms.
Phonic over sonic is the
power relation.

34. ‘The Act of Speaking is Relational’
(cavarero)

35. We move “across
disciplines, searching for
distubances, fluctuations,
oscillations in
conventional accounts.”
(Nutall (2003, 13)

36. Gifts are in the Feet

37. Guide to a Traveller

38. Calabash People

39. • the resistance practices to skin and language which are performed
to and for tourists in these contexts. It will examine the way
performance intervenes and the tourist body is both performed and
consumed in a range of sites and the ways in which languages and
translation practices operate. Using artistic and ethnographic film it
will consider ways in which tourism preserves and changes
languages and how ritual practices form key moments in tourist
encounters. In particular it will work with the poetry of Tawona
Sithole which intervenes in the masking of languages and
operations of tourism and travel. Working through the proverbs and
poetry of the performance piece the paper will also draw on the
work of Fanon to explore the relationship between skin, race and
languages the paper will consider, theoretically, linguistically and
aesthetically, ways in which Fanon’s concepts might also apply to
the operation of languages in tourist settings.