front cover of One or Two Words
One or Two Words
Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia
Aurora Donzelli
National University of Singapore Press, 2020
The Toraja highlanders of Indonesia use the expression “one or two words” to refer euphemistically to their highly elaborate form of political speechmaking. Taking off from this understatement, which signals the meaningfulness of transient acts of speech, One or Two Words offers an analysis of the shifting power relations between centers and peripheries in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse countries. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Aurora Donzelli explores how people forge forms of collective belonging to a distinctive locality through the exchange of spoken words, WhatsApp messages, ritual gifts of pigs and buffaloes, and the performance of elaborate political speeches and ritual chants. Donzelli describes the complex forms of cosmopolitan indigeneity that have emerged in the Toraja highlands during several decades of encounters with a variety of local and international interlocutors, and by engaging wider debates on the dynamics of cultural and linguistic change in relationship to globalizing influences, the book sheds light on a neglected dimension of post-Suharto Indonesia: the recalibration of power relations between national and local languages. One or Two Words will be of interest to scholars of language, politics, power relationships, identity, social change, and local responses to globalizing influences.
 
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front cover of Opera and its Voices in Utah
Opera and its Voices in Utah
Walter Rudolph
Utah State University Press, 2018
In volume 23 of the Arrington Lecture Series, Walter B. Rudolph explores Utah’s operatic history. There is no other written history of opera in Utah and while references are random, they can be consistently found. The list of visiting operatic artists to the Beehive state is imposing, even extraordinary, and equally unexpected is the diversity of standard repertoire and those works unique to, or composed about, Utah. In turn, Utah’s operatic assets have given to the world’s arsenal of singers and created an audience of unique proportions.
 
The Arrington Lecture series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series through the Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections and Archives department.
 
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front cover of Out of the Mouths of Slaves
Out of the Mouths of Slaves
African American Language and Educational Malpractice
By John Baugh
University of Texas Press, 1999

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.

Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.

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