Language Activism in a Transatlantic “Counterpublic”: The Case of the Haalpulaar’en of Senegal and Mauritania 1 By John Hames PhD Candidate, Anthropology University of Florida johnjhames@ufl.edu Abstract Pulaar-speaking minorities from the Fuuta Tooro region of Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania have created a mediascape consisting of Internet and FM radio stations, as well as TV programming spanning their home countries, Europe and the US. My research has looked at this mediascape’s circulation of counterpublic discourses that contest hegemonic aspects of Senegal’s and Mauritania’s sociolinguistic hierarchies. This paper contextualizes the presence of Pulaar-language broadcast media within the fifty-year history of Pulaar language activism in Senegal, Mauritania, and Pulaar-speaking Diaspora communities. Well-known language activists deploy a form of charismatic authority constituted through the mastery of certain oral communication styles, and an apparent willingness to sacrifice for the promotion of their language. They help define a politics of language loyalty that valorizes a self- sacrificial shunning of wealth and personal gain in the service of language activism. In addition, Pulaar language loyalty appeals to a sense of local, ethno-cultural citizenship that both challenges and reinforces the demands associated with their official Senegalese and Mauritanian citizenships. I. Introduction In February 2013, I visited a friend who runs a market stall in Thiaroye Gare, near Dakar, where he sells Pulaar-language books and newspapers. His place is situated along a single, large row of stalls constructed with corrugate and wood, and which rattles when the freight and passenger trains pass- loudly yet invisibly to those in the market- on the rails behind it. Sam Faatoy Ka, the bookseller who I had stopped to visit, was hosting a friend from his native village of Koɓɓilo, Senegal. The man, now based in Germany, had been waiting years to meet me. When I was in the process of introducing myself, he told me that my Pulaar had improved since he had heard it last. He had, I found out, listened to an interview I gave in Pulaar with the Brooklyn-based online radio station Radio Haere Lao in 2008. The man had tuned in from Germany, where he told me he often listens to Radio Haere’s programming, and he marveled at 1 This paper was presented at the September 28, 2013 meeting of the Southeast Regional Seminar in African Studies (SERSAS) at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. It was later presented on March 29, 2014 at the Southeast Regional Graduate Conference on Identity, Patriotism and the Nation-State at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. 1