Accented Futures

Book excerpt: In this wonderfully original, intensely personal yet deeply analytical work, Carli Coetzee argues that difference and disagreement can be forms of activism to bring about social change, inside and outside the teaching environment. Since it is not the student alone who needs to be transformed, she proposes a model of teaching that is insistent on the teacher’s scholarship as a tool for hearing the many voices and accents in the South African classroom. For Coetzee, ‘accentedness’ is a description for actively working towards the ending of apartheid by being aware of the legacies of the past, without attempting to empty out or gloss over the conflicts and violence that may exist under the surface. In the broad context of education, ‘accent’ can be an accent of speech; an attitude; a stance against being ‘understood’; yet a way of teaching that requires teacher and pupil to understand each other’s contexts. This is a book about the relationships created by the use of language to convey knowledge, particularly in translation. The ideas it presents are evocative, thought-provoking and challenging at times. Accented Futures makes a significant and important contribution to research on identity in post-apartheid South Africa as well as to the fields of education and translation studies.