Pitbull: Little Man or Great Woman?

In the series of finished assignments, here an analysis of the following song. I applied the theory from "Language and Racism" by our professor J.J. Weber to it.



“International Love” is a rap song from 2011 by rapper Pitbull and R&B singer Chris Brown, in which they sing about sexual escapades with women all over the world. The song touches on a lot of the themes discussed in this class. It celebrates the ‘international’ but seems to confuse nations and states, stereotypes women from different countries, and uses translanguaging to express loyalty to a particular identity. Through close analysis, the processes of identity construction in the song can be made visible.

A somewhat warped pdf version of the whole assignment (including the lyrics!) available here

Television and the promotion of national identity: Our Friends in the North on RTÉ

Kevin McAleer, promotion picture for Our Friends in the North. Source

Last year I took a class "Broadcasting and the language of identity". It was a bit of a weird class, in which we talked about national identity, subcultures, music, TV and radio but without very much theory or feedback. However, I had fun writing the final essay for it. It is about the Ulster Scots Broadcasting Fund and specifically about one show funded through it, Our Friends in the North. This is a show presented by comedian Kevin McAleer, from Co. Tyrone, who visits and interviews people who see themselves as Ulster-Scots, to get to know and understand the language, culture and history. In the article I try to pick apart how the programme promotes national identity in a way that makes it palatable to the public.

Click here for the article

Essay: Monolingualism explained from a historical institutionalist perspective.

At the start of the twentieth century it was considered popular wisdom that all nations should be entitled to a state of their own, in which government was conducted in the nation's own language. A hundred years and some of history's most heinous wars later, the ideology of the nation-state has lost a lot of its appeal and so has the doctrine of monolingualism. Scholars and politicians alike are starting to realise that there are actually very few monolingual states (Spolsky 2004:61); that the traditional distinction between languages and dialects is often based on power relations rather than solid linguistics (Barfield 1997); that it is often unclear which ethnic group has the most legitimate claim to a particular territory and thus which language 'ought' to be the official one in that area (De Schutter 2008:111). However, despite these new insights the nation-state ideology is still thriving and countries are still implementing new legislation to ensure the dominant status of their language.

The first part of this essay will consist of a brief discussion of the befenits and disadvantages of the monolingual state, which demonstrates that it is based on an ideology and it is not necessarily the best solution. In the second part, a historical institutionalist theory is used to shed light on why states nevertheless keep pursuing the linguistic territoriality principle. The prevalence of nationalism and the connected monolingualism is explained as the result of an increasing returns process.

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