Youth Language and Cultural Practices in Postcolonial Cameroon

Focusing on the case of urban youth styles in Duala, Cameroon, this research project will analyze the role of language and cultural practices in the construction of youth social identities in postcolonial Africa, at the crossroads of gender and race power relations.

It will also analyze the forms and meanings of subaltern cosmopolitanisms at work in these multilingual and multicultural practices. My research will take three different angles.

First, I will describe how gender identities are constructed through the use of Camfranglais, a hybrid youth language, while taking into account the multilingual and multi-semiotic dimensions of youth language practices.

Second, I will analyze the construction of subaltern cosmopolitanisms through these youth linguistic, bodily, cultural practices, and their social meanings in the context of postcoloniality and globalization.

I will show how, through processes of 'whitening', these young people can negotiate in interaction among a variety of racialized and gendered subjective positionings.

Third, I will analyze the discursive processes of creating boundaries between ideological constructs such as 'languages', 'registers' or 'styles' in young people's reflexive discourses about language practices. I will also shed the light on the tensions between these discourses and youth semiotic practices observed in situ.

Thus, I will propose a more in-depth understanding of the ambivalencies of racialized and gendered youth subjectivities as produced by postcolonial power relationships in a globalized economy.

Methodologically, this project is highly innovative in that it combines Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology,Visual Anthropology, Anthropology of Youth, Anthropology of Globalization, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Gender Studies.

The dissemination of research results outside academia through an ethnographic film will improve understandings of African languages and cultures among a large audience.