Zannie Bock
Zannie Bock is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Her current research interests include work on discourse and narrative analysis, with a focus on race and language among university students, emerging styles in youth instant messaging chats, and decolonial approaches to literacy in higher education. Recent publications focus on three main areas: first, how young South Africans in a range of multilingual institutional settings use language to negotiate their racial identities and positions, and the role of ‘small stories’ in these complex positionings. A second focus has been the emerging styles of mobile chatting among UWC students. Her overriding concern is with the multifaceted and innovative ways in which young people use language to express their identities and negotiate their positions in a complex and rapidly transforming post-apartheid South Africa. A third significant dimension to her work is a new research project in decolonial literacies and pedagogies in higher education, and the preparation of a volume of essays, co-edited by herself and Christopher Stroud, entitled, Languages and Literacies in higher education: Reclaiming voices from the south (Bloomsbury Press). She is also the project leader and co-editor of the Linguistics department’s textbook, Language, society and communication: an introduction, published in 2014 (second edition in 2019).
Address: Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Address: Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
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The testimonies are drawn from the Human Rights Violation hearings and all are given by testifiers associated with the Bonteheuwel Military Wing: four activists and a family member of one of the activists. The analysis shows that even within a homogeneous group of testimonies there is enormous variability. This variability can be explained by the role of the testifiers (as activist or non-activist) as well as their differing narrative purposes. Each testimony is the product of a number of linguistic choices: from the choice of language as medium of communication to the subtle linguistic choices people make which construe their identities and index their stance.
The thesis is informed by a view of language as social process and draws on theories of Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for its theoretical framework. From Discourse Analysis, theories which view social reality and identity as constructed are used, while from SFL, a number of theoretical tools for the close readings of texts are selected. In this respect, the SFL theories of genre, appraisal, transitivity and periodicity are used. With regard to the theory of appraisal, this thesis makes an original contribution to the theory by arguing that within multilingual contexts, code-switching functions as an appraisal resource. This thesis also offers a detailed description of the macro-generic structure of the TRC testimony, thereby adding to the pool of spoken data analysed from an SFL genre perspective.
The thesis also explores the social discourses testifiers draw on in their construal of their identities. It argues that while the activists share a collective social identity, they select differently from the discourses available for this construal, and infuse these with their own individual identities to create testimonies which are distinctive and unique even though they refer to common experiences. The testimony of the non-activist (family member) draws on a different set of discourses as might be expected, given the different perspective and narrative purpose of the testifier.
Understanding the subtle and significant ways in which different testifiers construe their experiences is important, this thesis argues, to understanding their “narrative truths”, or the way in which they have remembered and made sense of their experiences. It is part of the establishment of the TRC’s mandate to establish “as complete a picture as possible” of suffering under and resistance to apartheid.