Discursive re(b)ordering of Young Mozambicans : Language, ideologies and subjectivities in contemporary coloniality

Why are we talking about coloniality in postcolonial times? And what does language have to do with it? In addressing these two broad questions, this thesis sets out to provide empirically well-grounded reflections focusing: First, on how young Mozambicans’ linguistic repertoires and discursive practices relate to their sense of being in the world. And second, on how their perceptions resonate with recent sociolinguistic debates about the different roles language and ideologies play in constructing and reproducing conditions of contemporary coloniality. The role of postcolonial Portuguese is particularly highlighted. The introduction provides a critical, decolonial and epistemic reflexion that brings together four seemingly disparate studies. Moreover, it offers an invitation to critically reflect on discourses, ideologies and valuations that are carried in and on our individual and collective historical bodies and minds and are reproduced through different manifestations of what I call ‘discursive re(b)orderings’. Study I, explores how Portuguese spoken in Maputo has changed after independence and underpins the inquiry into the ‘construct’ of linguistic boundaries and its relation to ideas of language purity and how these ideologically laden notions impact knowledge production and perceived and lived mobilities in the ‘postcolony’. Study II, displays ‘languaging’ practices of young Mozambicans and their strategic orientations in their social-spatial deployment of linguistic resources, and explores ‘translanguaging’ as discursive space production. Study III, brings Frantz Fanon into the study of sociolinguistics of subjectivity and explores the reflexes of the ‘other’ in the constitution of the self of young Mozambicans, suggesting that intersubjectivity holds the promise of disentangling Fanon´s notion of ‘sociogenese’. Study IV brings Pierre Bourdieu´s Distinction (1984) into the ‘postcolony’ by emulating his methodology through multilevel big picture data, combining quantitative and qualitative data and analyses with approaches inspired by ethnography to look at ‘positions and dispositions’ of young Mozambicans across fields and markets. Theoretically, the thesis brings Bourdieu and Fanon together, and shows how nexus concepts, intersubjectivity and the historical bodies and minds represent promising avenues to the understanding of language in coloniality. Two nexus concepts, the habitus and the sociogenese, are adopted and complement each other. By mixing methodologies, the studies combined, manage to capture the complexities in the multi-layered and often subtle ways discursive bordering constructs and reproduces contemporary coloniality. Empirically, taken together, the four studies show how ideologies, the ‘constructs’ surrounding language and the symbolic value of Portuguese are taken up in language and discourses and in speakers’ strategic deployment of linguistic resources across fields and marketplaces in the ‘postcolony’. Moreover, it shows how all forms of capital: epistemic, economic, educational, linguistic and symbolic are reconfigured and revaluated. Nevertheless, mobility is contained, and socioeconomic inequalities are mirrored in sociolinguistic inequalities and even in material urban space to the effect of perpetuating conditions of contemporary coloniality.At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.