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Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation
Author(s) -
Newell Sasha
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01029.x
Subject(s) - modernity , indexicality , sociology , civility , anthropology , identity (music) , performativity , performative utterance , gender studies , communitas , aesthetics , history , law , politics , linguistics , art , political science , philosophy , liminality
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d’Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan‐ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d’Ivoire]