Assistant Professor
About
Raevin Jimenez is a historian of Africa's distant past. Her forthcoming monograph Gather Your Ancestors: Gender, Language, and Belonging in Southeast Africa (University of Wisconsin Press), traces the roles of gendered performance and relationships in the construction of multi-lingual, mixed-descent communities in what is now South Africa from the 9th to 19th centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach, including the methodology of comparative historical linguistics, she shows how speakers of Nguni, East Bantu, Khoi, and San languages used gendered practices - including initiation, marriage, and an avoidant speech form known as hlónipha - to channel young people into identities that would allow them to become shared ancestors across generations. In turn, changing notions of ancestry reshaped practices of togetherness over time and created the unique, hybrid character of South African Nguni languages.
