Publication Announcement — “Name as National Archive Capturing of Yoruba Masculinist Names”

American Name Society member Ayokunmi Ojebode recently published the essay “Name as National Archive Capturing of Yoruba Masculinist Names” in the edited volume The Cinema of Tunde Kelani: Aesthetics, Theatricalities and Visual Performance.

The book is described as follows:

“This book is the first definitive publication on Tunde Kelani, and represents a mine of divergent scholarly approaches to understanding his authorial power. A collection of articles on the cinematic oeuvre of one of the important and finest filmmakers in Africa, it addresses diverse areas that are crucial to Kelani’s filmic corpus and African cinema. Contributors articulate Kelani’s visual crafts in detail, while providing explications on significant markers. The book offers an understanding of how Kelani’s works represent the African worldview, science, demonstrative law, politics, gender, popular culture, canonized culture and history.”

Read more on the publisher’s website here.

Publication Announcement — Names and Naming: Multicultural Aspects

Several members of the American Name Society have contributed to a new publication at Palgrave Macmillan titled Names and Naming: Multicultural Aspects. The book is further described:

“This edited book examines names and naming policies, trends and practices in a variety of multicultural contexts across America, Europe, Africa and Asia. In the first part of the book, the authors take theoretical and practical approaches to the study of names and naming in these settings, exploring legal, societal, political and other factors. In the second part of the book, the authors explore ways in which names mirror and contribute to the construction of identity in areas defined by multiculturalism. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to onomastics, and it will be of interest to scholars working across a number of fields, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, politics, geography, history, religion and cultural studies.”

Purchase a copy at the publisher’s website by clicking here!

 

Nomina Africana: Journal of African Onomastics / Vol. 34 (1)

The current issue of the Journal of African Onomastics Nomina Africana Nr. 34 (1) has just been published. You may enjoy the below-mentioned articles therein:

Juxtaposition of speech acts and Basotho names in Lesotho by Beatrice Ekanjume-Ilongo, Taofik Adesanmi and ’Maboleba Kolobe

The significance of selected characters’ personal and family names in the Shona novels, Pfumo Reropa and Mubairo by Godwin Makaudze

Scale, street renaming and the continued visibility of colonial street names in Harare by Zvinashe Mamvura, Charles Pfukwa and Davie E. Mutasa

Anthroponomastics of concubinage in traditional Ngwa Igbo society in Nigeria by Chimaobi Onwukwe

The choice of craft beer names in present-day South Africa : an analysis by Bertie Neethling

Corrigendum

Holocaust Education Week lecture explores discrimination based on names

The Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University will host an event on November 3 2020 that explores how Nazis used names to fulfill Hitler’s genocidal vision.

The event runs during 2020 Holocaust Education Week and features a lectures with guest presenter Iman Nick on “Hitler’s Lists: How the Nazis Used Names to Spawn the Holocaust.” It runs from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Even before the infamous Yellow Star, the Nazis devised a simple yet effective method to pinpoint victims for wide-spread discrimination, marginalization, relocation, deportation and finally extermination. Using first-hand accounts from Holocaust survivors and documents unearthed from the once secret files of the Nazi Party, this lecture tells the story of how personal names were used to fulfill Hitler’s genocidal vision. The talk will also present modern-day examples in which something as seemingly innocuous as a person’s name has been used to carry out crimes against humanity.

Register online here to join the virtual event.

Walls of Names as Mnemonic Devices to Commemorate Enslaved People

The article by Ana Lucia Araujo examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. By exploring how, during the twentieth century, memorials of wars and genocides in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have featured walls of names to honor the dead, this article proposes a genealogy of the walls of names, by emphasizing the various contexts in which this device has been employed. Whereas naming has been a long-standing practice to honor the dead since antiquity, naming enslaved individuals in ship manifests or farm books was part of a process of dehumanization. Yet, during the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. By looking at a few case studies in the United States, the article seeks to understand how effectively this specific kind of memorial has been employed to recognize and pay homage to the victims of slavery.

Journal “Onomástica desde América Latina” has interface in English

We are glad to announce that the Journal Onomástica desde América Latina has interface in English and is receiving articles  to compose its volume 2, numbers 3 and 4,  with publication scheduled, respectively, for the first and second semesters of 2021. Student´s papers are welcome, as there is a section called Works that receives articles from graduate and undergraduate students.

The”Onomástica desde América Latina” journal is a semiannual publication dedicated to the promotion and diffusion of onomastic researches in national and international scope aimed at the internationalization of the Graduate Program in Language and Literature at Unioeste  as a  result of a partnership between Unioeste and Unam (National Autonomous University of Mexico).

Names and Selves: Transnational Identities and Self-Presentation among Elite Chinese International Students

What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, Philip Jun Fang and Gary Fine examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, they find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. The authors address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.

Fang, J., Fine, G.A. Names and Selves: Transnational Identities and Self-Presentation among Elite Chinese International Students. Qualitative Sociology (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09468-7

Trends in Onomastic Research in Brazil

An article with this title has just been published at the Swiss “Linguistik Online” (2020) by Márcia Sipavicius Seide and Marcelo Saparas.

 

Abstract
This article brings together recent onomastic investigations developed in Brazil between 2011 and 2018. In the field of toponomastics there is some degree of uniformity resulting from both the use of the same research paradigm and the development of projects dedicated to the production of toponymic atlases in several regions of the country. In the field of anthroponomastics, however, there is dispersion and fragmentation of anthroponymic studies due to non-affiliation with the field by some sociolinguistics and literature researchers The comparison between research papers in this review and a number of onomastic studies in Europe reveals that the socio-onomastic field is an emerging one in both Brazil and Europe. There are investigations that relate the studies of linguistic settings to toponymic studies and socio-anthroponomastic investigations based on data collection in written documents or data generation through field investigations. The existence of comparative anthroponomastic research and studies dealing with theory, methodology and literature review in the field of anthroponomastics can be observed. Studies about Brazilian indigenous onomastics and secondary non-official personal names used by Brazilian city councilors has been found just in Brazil in the literature review presented in this paper.