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Kathe Managan
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Assistant Professor and Anthropology Undergraduate Advisor
Department of Geography and Anthropology
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-3451 ~ Fax: 225-578-4420
E-mail: kmanagan@lsu.edu
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
Ph.D., New York University, 2004.
INTERESTS
Linguistic/Sociocultural Anthropology
Language and Performance in the Circum-Caribbean
Theories of Creolization
Voluntary Organizations
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
In press Anthropological Linguistic Perspectives on Writing Guadeloupean Kréyòl: Struggles for Recognition of the Language and Struggles over Authority. To appear in Studies in French Applied Linguistics. Dalila Ayoun, ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2006 Tensions of French Empire: the reciprocal making and remaking of identities in France and its colonies. Identities: Global studies in culture and power 13:1-12.
2004 Diglossia Reconsidered: Language Choice and Code-Switching in Guadeloupean Voluntary Organizations. Proceedings from the Symposium about Language and Society – SALSA XI. Texas Linguistics Forum (47):251-261.
2000 Ambiguous Processes: Language Choice, Return Migration and the Construction of Social Identity in the French Overseas Department of Guadeloupe. Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe, série Université de Juillet, session 1998.
1999 Gendered Language Ideology in the Martinican Créolité Movement. Engendering Communication: Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Women and Language Conference. S. Wertheim et al. eds. Pp. 321-330. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group.
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
My research includes two main interrelated strands. One strand focuses on how individuals on the island of Guadeloupe draw on the different social and cultural values of their language varieties in interaction to enact various aspects of their identity. I explore aspects of individual identity, such as gender and age, but I also examine how Guadeloupean collective identity is conceptualized in relation to local conceptions of race, geography and language variation. My dissertation research used tape-recorded natural interaction in several Guadeloupean voluntary organizations (associations), along with data from television programming and written texts, to document patterns of language choice and ideologies of language and identity. My next research project examines language use in the performances of Kréyòl-language comedy troupes. I have conducted some preliminary research on this topic and plan to return to Guadeloupe to conduct in-depth fieldwork. I will focus on the performances–both live and on videotape–of Kréyòl-language comedy troupes in order to investigate how actors manipulate locally salient language varieties and draw on their sociocultural connotations to express social commentary and political critique and to make their comedy work for the local audience.
The other strand of my research utilizes the analytical concept of the community of practice to examine voluntary organizations in both Guadeloupe and New Orleans from an African diasporic perspective and explores how these organizations may serve as sites of resistance to individuals in subordinate groups. I contend that voluntary organization activity is especially strong in many African diasporic societies because it represents a grassroots response to the structures of inequality that originated in plantation society and still exist today, and because voluntary organizations draw on the methods that slaves’ descendants developed to cope with this inequality. I suggest that voluntary organizations are very active in Guadeloupe, for instance, because they serve as a means for Guadeloupeans to use French government funding to meet local needs that are not otherwise addressed and to represent local cultural specificity that is otherwise not acknowledged within the French republic. In 2004-2005, under the auspices of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at Tulane University, I undertook postdoctoral research that examined language use, social practice, ideology and collective identity in voluntary organizations in New Orleans and Guadeloupe in comparative perspective. I focused on New Orleans’ Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, examining how they have evolved over time and the roles that that they fill in the fabric of contemporary urban life in New Orleans. I plan to continue this research now that I am back in Louisiana.
HONORS AND ACTIVITIES
2005-2007 Mellon Teaching Fellowship, Anthropology Department, University of Michigan 2004-2005 Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, Tulane University
2003-2004 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, New York University
2000-2001 National Science Foundation Grant for Improving Doctoral Dissertation Research
1999-2000 Wenner-Gren Predoctoral Grant 1998 Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University
COURSES TAUGHT
Latin American Cultures
Ethnographic Methodology |
