Grassroots Literacy - Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa (Hardcover)

What effect has globalization had on our understanding of literacy? Grassroots Literacy seeks to address the relationship between globalization and the widening gap between grassroots' literacies, or writings from ordinary people and local communities, and elite' literacies. Displaced from their original context to elite literacy environments in the form of letters, police declarations and pieces of creative writing, grassroots' literacies are unsurprisingly easily disqualified, either as bad' forms of literacy, or as messages that fail to be understood. Through close analysis of two unique, handwritten documents from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jan Blommaert considers how grassroots' literacy in the Third World develops outside the literacy-saturated environments of the developed world. In examining these documents produced by socially and economically marginalized writers Blommaert demonstrates how literacy environments should be understood as relatively autonomous systems. Grassroots Literacy will be key reading for students of language and literacy studies as well as an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in understanding the implications of globalization on local literacy practices. Jan Blommaert is Distinguished Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Jyv"skyl," Finland, as well as Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Tilburg University. His publications include Debating Diversity (co-author, Routledge, 1998), Language Ideological Debates (editor, 1999) and Discourse: A Critical Introduction (author, 2005).

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Literacies
Release date:	June 2008
First published:	2008
Authors:	Jan Blommaert
Dimensions:	234 x 156mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	224
ISBN-13:	978-0-415-42631-2
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Education > General
LSN:	0-415-42631-6
Barcode:	9780415426312

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