New Publication

 PREFACE 

Organising a scientific conference within our context has been a very demanding task. The enterprise gets more daunting when it comes to concentrating workshops of the conference or the entire conference to postgraduate research. Several thorns prick your heart as you successively fail to: Secure funding from the business world for the event which you regard as very fruitful but is systematically looked down upon from many quarters; Acquire institutional support as budget lines seem more flexible for activities other than academic, especially conference organisation; 

-Convince some colleagues to engage in the event; which ultimately favours their upward mobility within higher education and provides them national and international visibility; 

-Make most postgraduate students to understand that their research aggrandisement lies squarely on knowledge and experience acquired at conferences attended and presentations made thereat. 

-These failures are many but have been gradually reducing as some institutional authorities have started shifting interest to academic activities including conference organisation just as some companies have seen the need to sponsor academic activities. 

Many colleagues have over time developed interest in conference attendance and presentation and this too has enkindled interest in many postgraduate students. As a result of the above, a few publications are being produced and some conferences held with focus not only on burning social issues like multiculturalism and national development as minority claims of identity increase, but also on scientificity for established and budding researchers. 

While these centre on various multicultural aspects: song, dance, architecture, dressing, governance, legal system, etc. generally produced by established scholars, this volume resulting from a postgraduate conference held at the University of Dschang focuses on identity and multicultural issues of language, literature and related disciplines mostly thought and written by postgraduates. 

The situation is a likely indication of the dawn of an era when many more conferences even with focus on postgraduate studies shall be organised with more colleagues and postgraduate students getting involved, as they are the immediate stakeholders in this enterprise that may acquire funding from elsewhere or get funded by themselves. We can, and should therefore joyfully wait in pious hope for the coming of a lot of conferencing and publishing! 

Kizitus Nformi Mpoche Professor of Linguistics University of Douala