![]() ![]() ![]() Through reference to intellectual history, comparative mythology, and historical linguistics in relation to the |xam and Afrikaans, the dissertation presents a novel perspective on the ways in which archives figure, and are figured, within both academic and popular discourses, the power of the intellectual imaginary, and offers suggestions as to how totalizing, and reductive, notions of languages and cultures can be challenged. This third dimension, similarly to the second, references a reception study – specifically on the historic present tense in Afrikaans. Thirdly, the question of linguicide is critiqued through a historical linguistic reading of a temporal discourse marker in Afrikaans relative to the same discourse marker in |xam a discourse marker which is absent from Dutch, the hegemonic ‘father’ of the Afrikaans language. This second dimension of the dissertation combines a reception history of Gideon von Wielligh’s |xam-Afrikaans collection and a comparative mythological analysis in relation to a number of narratives from the Bleek and Lloyd, Von Wielligh, and De Prada-Samper archives. Secondly, the recent ‘discovery’ of the continued afterlife of |xam folklore in Afrikaans is deconstructed. Through reading the Bleek’s labour and the discourse of death in relation to the ‘salvage paradigm’, the dominant paradigm within anthropological thought of the 19th century, the dissertation points to the ways in which this discourse is symptomatic of a global desire for the ‘vanishing’. To this end, the dissertation firstly presents a study in intellectual history, analysing how the discourse of death was both created and sustained in and through Bushman studies, specifically the work of Wilhelm and Dorothea Bleek. This dissertation presents a critique of the discourse of death that permeates all-things |xam, one of the Khoesan languages once spoken across southern Africa. ![]()
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