Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian Beauty Queen

By (author) Sabrina Billings

Publication date:

29 November 2013

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781783090754

Through micro-analysis of language use, this book chronicles young women's pathways to becoming a Tanzanian beauty queen, offering an original perspective on the intersection of language with globalization, nationalism, and inequality in urban East Africa. This compelling linguistic ethnography considers the real-life effects, both on- and off-stage, of language policy, education, and gender dynamics for the women competing in the pageants. While highlighting many contestants' struggles for escape from poverty and patriarchy, the book also emphasizes their creative strategies – linguistic and otherwise – for bettering their lives and shows how people living in a global economic periphery take part in, and sometimes feel left out of, the wider world.

Sophisticated social theory and the tools of linguistic anthropology join together in this book, a fascinating study of beauty contests in Tanzania that reveals their complex and anxious importance to Tanzanian society. This exploration of the role that language plays in negotiations over the meaning of cosmopolitanism and the morality of gender is linguistic ethnography at its best.