ABSTRACT
Arjun Appadurai (1996) argues that the imagination has over the past century or so become a collective social fact due to technological changes which have led to mass medialisation in the world. This chapter relates Appadurai’s views on imagination in modernity to Kenyan society in order to argue that the developments in information and communication technology and the use of electronic media in the country have led to a situation whereby imagination and creativity is accelerating the creolisation of English and Kiswahili. We are faced with a situation in which global forms of mass communication technology are propagating the spread of localised content, which is not only disseminated in English, Kiswahili, and local languages but is increasingly available in a mixed code that is based on Swahili, English, and local languages. This code has been named ‘Sheng.’ This chapter shows how Sheng, as a marker of social identity, is leading to the production of literary texts that are intended to proliferate the performance of masculinity through a type of online male bonding that invents discourse on gender differences by exploiting the use of the “genres of Billingsgate” – modern manifestations of folk culture – that use ribald humour to subvert official discourse while at the same time creating new meaning through the use of grotesque imagery.
