Quayson’s chapter compares the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1904 with the real-life multilingual city of Accra, Ghana. In these twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts, Quayson finds different forms of epic dreaming and material work. From among these celebrations of the kinetic aspects of urban life, he focuses on advertising billboards and personal slogans and pronouncements, arguing that these slogans and Joyce’s interior linguistic landscape in Ulysses exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari have described as the deterritorialization of language. Quayson draws on these theorists to offer a new way of understanding a central problem of language in Joyce’s writing – the self-interlocution and the relations between external stimuli and internal activities of the mind – and the nature of the Accra streetscape, in which vehicle slogans and inscriptions turn oral discourse into a written text, transforming stigmatized terms of African indigenous languages into co-creative dimensions of English discourse.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT – the religious movement described in Chapter 4 – is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.

Linguistics as a modern science has invested its attention in describing structural rules and “trustworthy” parameters, which involve ideologies of objectivity, stability and invariance. These references conceived of language as an autonomous structured entity that created a kind of fixed ontology, relegating historical phenomena to a subaltern position. One can thus say that linguistics and history have been traditionally kept apart in the field of mainstream language studies. Considering the self-enclosure of linguistics, in this chapter, we begin by discussing how historicity and language are associated by different twentieth-century philosophers whose insights into historicity speak well to contemporary views of language as discourse. We then move into exploring how history is brought into textuality in present-day discourse studies by focusing on the macro–micro theoretical constructs of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. We conclude by drawing upon the relevance of such a theoretical apparatus to account for discourse circulation in fluid and superdiverse contexts. A specific question orients our line of reasoning and the pathway we construct: How can we, as discourse analysts, deal with the temporal–spatial horizon of history in view of the accelerated and ephemeral time-space references we experience nowadays? This question reflects our concern with the challenges that contemporary chronotopes pose to discourse analysis.