The Old in the New, The New in the Old: Migrant Metapors, African Literatures and the Digital Turn

In this keynote address at this historic and epoch-making international conference on “African Literature, the English Language and Contemporary Socio-Political Issues”, I shall engage metaphor as an important literary and linguistic armature for the articulation of local and global realities in time and space. I shall focus primarily on migrant metaphors. These are resilient, widespread and time-tested metaphors which have travelled from past history to present history and also have the potentials of exerting enduring impact on future history. Indeed, time past and time present are both present in time future and metaphors, through their meaning-making protocols, play a vital and significant role in summoning history for the contingencies of the present and the future. I shall demonstrate how through migrant metaphors, the old is present in the new and the new present in the old. In other words, I shall insist that there is an inherence of oral traditional media with its repertory of metaphors in digital media such that we can productively tease out these metaphors to establish the continuum from the old to the new. In this regard, therefore, it is reasonable to argue that oral performance cultures and artistic traditions and the metaphors they embed which were generally associated with pre-industrial or pre-scientific dispensations are alive, and so dynamic, coeval and consistent with digital modernity. Against this backcloth, I argue that the metaphors encoded in oral performance cultures and traditions of the past travel or migrate and assume alternative modes of existence in the present. By so doing, they enact their energies and vitality in digital spaces as they mediate everydayness and articulate global contemporaneity in a variety of ways.

Keywords: Migrant Metapors African Literatures Digital Turn

Author

• James Tar Tsaaior
  Department of English, University of the Free State
  Bloemfontein, Republic of South Africa
  E-mail: jamestsaaior@gmail.com