Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward A Critical History

330 Pages·2017·3.354 MB·

by  Monica Heller, Bonnie Mcelhinny

L A N G UAG E ,
C A P I TA L I S M ,
CO L O N I A L I S M :
TOWA R D A
C R I T I C A L H I S TO RY
Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny
Copyright © University of Toronto Press 2017
Higher Education Division
www.utppublishing.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval
system, without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence
from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) 320–56 Wellesley Street West,
Toronto, Ontario, m5s 2s3—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Heller, Monica, author
Language, colonialism, capitalism : toward a critical
history/Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny
Includes bibliographical refereneces and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4875-9416-9 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-4426-0620-3 (softcover).—
ISBN 978-1-4426-0621-0 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4426-0622-7 (EPUB)
1. Sociolinguistics. I. McElhinny, Bonnie S., 1966–, author II. Title.
p40.h45 2017 306.44 c2017-903607-6
c2017-903608-4
We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publications—please feel free to
contact us at [email protected] or visit our Internet site at www.utppublishing.com.
North America uk, Ireland, and continental Europe
5201 Dufferin Street nbn International
North York, Ontario, Canada, m3h 5t8 Estover Road, Plymouth, pl6 7py, uk
2250 Military Road orders phone: [phone]
Tonawanda, New York, usa, 14150 orders fax: [phone]
orders e-mail: [email protected]
orders phone: [phone]
orders fax: [phone]
orders e-mail: [email protected]
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an error or omission,
please notify the publisher.
This book is printed on paper containing 100% post-consumer fibre.
The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of
the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
List of Figures ...................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................xi
Preface: Hope .....................................................................................................................xiii
1 LANGUAGE, CAPITALISM, COLONIALISM: WALKING BACKWARD
INTO THE FUTURE ......................................................................................1
Language and Inequality: A Wary Approach to a Red Thread World ................2
Red Flags: Keywords, Hegemonies, Ideologies, and Warty Genealogies ............4
Language Out of Place ..............................................................................................12
Knotted Histories: Following the Threads through the Book ..............................15
The End of the Beginning .......................................................................................22
PART i: LANGUAGE, INTIMACY, AND EMPIRE
2 LANGUAGE AND IMPERIALISM i: CONVERSION AND KINSHIP ........................27
“The First Nations Bible Translation Capacity-Building Initiative” ...............28
Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonialism, Decolonization ................................30
Intimacy and Connection Across Five Continents ...............................................32
Reduced to and by Christian Love: Missionary Linguistics .................................35
Family Trees, Comparative Philology, and Secular Religion ...............................42
3 LANGUAGE AND IMPERIALISM ii: EVOLUTION, HYBRIDITY, HISTORY ...............57
“Mixing Things Up” ................................................................................58
Imperialism and Industrial Capitalism ....................................................................60
Evolutionary Theory: Language and/as Race .......................................................63
Slavery, Plantation Labour, Trade, and “Mixed” Languages ...................................71
Americanist Anthropology: The Limits of Cultural Critiques of
Evolutionary Racism ............................................................................77
American Modern: Assimilating Blackness, Disappearing Indigeneity ................81
American Primitive: Extracting Language .............................................................84
Linguistic Relativity, Colonial Ambivalence, and Modern Alienation ...............87
vi CONTENTS
PART ii: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN
INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
4 LANGUAGE AND EUROPEAN NOTIONS OF NATION AND STATE .....................93
“Le Symbole” ..................................................................................................94
The Emergence of the Nation-State in Europe ...................................................94
Markets and Liberal Democracy .............................................................................96
Making Subjects through Language .......................................................................98
Regimentation: Census, Standardization, Literacy ....................................102
Standardization: Grammars, Dictionaries, Canons, Pedagogies ............................106
Language and Differential Citizenship ......................................................108
Creating Peripheries ...............................................................................................110
Regulating Relations in Industrial Capitalism ....................................................113
Making Scientific Linguistic Expertise .................................................................117
5 INTERNATIONALISM, COMMUNISM, AND FASCISM: ALTERNATIVE
MODERNITIES ........................................................................................123
“Visions of the Future” ..........................................................................124
Peace, Geopolitics, and International Auxiliary Languages ................................126
Making Communist Linguistics ............................................................................135
Marrism ...........................................................................................139
The Bakhtin Circle .............................................................................................141
From Language as Action to Language as Tool in the Cold War .........................142
Language and Fascism ............................................................................144
National Socialism in Germany .............................................................146
Language and Race: Yiddish and Esperanto ..............................................149
Race, Propaganda, and Mass Media ....................................................................150
Fault Lines ............................................................................................155
PART iii: BRAVE NEW WORLDS: LANGUAGE AS
TECHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE AS TECHNIQUE
6 THE COLD WAR: SURVEILLANCE, STRUCTURALISM, AND SECURITY .............159
“Black Out” ..........................................................................................160
Battles for Hearts and Minds .................................................................................162
The Investigation of Linguists during the McCarthy Period .............................164
Suspicious Words, Suspicious Minds .....................................................................168
The Prague Linguistics Circle ................................................................168
Fear of the Translator ............................................................................................171
Infrastructure and Institutionalization: Communication Studies,
Area Studies, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics ..........................................176
Machine Translation and the Rise of Syntax ........................................................181
Rational and Universal Principles for Linguistic Analysis: Late
Structuralist Linguistics ..........................................................................182
Freedom, Creativity, and Human Nature: The Rise of
Generative Linguistics ..........................................................................................184
Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Weapon of the Cold War ......................................188
CONTENTS vii
7 ON THE ORIGINS OF “SOCIOLINGUISTICS”: DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT,
AND EMANCIPATION ...............................................................................192
“A Dialectologist in India” .......................................................................193
Engineering Language: Literacy, Standardization, and Education .....................196
Language Policy and Planning: Technocratic Solutions ...............................199
Domestic Development and American Sociolinguistics ....................................201
Challenging ‘Deficit’: Three Approaches ....................................................205
Fear of the Political ...............................................................................................212
Challenging Consensus ...........................................................................214
Feminist Linguistics ..............................................................................215
Difference and Domination: Anti-Racist Critiques ...............................................217
Pidgins, Creoles, and New Nationalisms ....................................................219
The Rise of Sociolinguistics in Europe: Class and Conflict ..............................221
The End of the Trente Glorieuses ...............................................................225
8 LANGUAGE IN LATE CAPITALISM: INTENSIFICATIONS, UNRULY DESIRES,
AND ALTERNATIVE WORLDS ...................................................................227
“Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin” ........................................................228
Late Capitalism: The Expanding Reach of the Market and the
Neoliberal State ...................................................................................................230
Language, Inequality, and Ideology ........................................................................235
Managing Your Assets: Language Quality, Linguistic Diversity,
and Citizenship ....................................................................................................238
Brave New Selves: “I Am a Business, Man!” ........................................................242
Affect, Authenticity, and Embodiment .................................................................244
Recapturing the Commons ...................................................................................252
Reclamation, Redress, Refusal, and Reimagining ..............................................254
This Is How We Hope .............................................................................................257
References ....................................................................................................261
Index ..........................................................................................................295
This page intentionally left blank
FIGURES
0.1 Por un mejor 2017 ............................................................................xiii
1.1 Red thread world .................................................................................1
1.2 “We must create a new future.” Philosopher’s
Walk/Taddle Creek, Toronto, 2016 .................................................23
2.1 Canadian Bible Society: Ojibwe Bible and Tagalog
Bible. North York, 2017 ..............................................................27
2.2 Biblical geneaology as social and spatial relations:
Noah’s descendants.....................................................................48
2.3 Language relationships as family tree ..................................................51
3.1 Diversity? Unity? Hybridity? Race ....................................................57
3.2 W ave theory model of linguistic change .............................................77
4.1 “Le symbole.” Morbihan, early twentieth century ..............................93
5.1 “Espéranto. La langue équitable” ......................................................123
5.2 A Movado watch, La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 2016 ...............126
6.1 A page from Roman Jakobson’s FBI file ..........................................159
6.2 “Happy linguists make a diagram”: Example of a syntactic tree .......185
7.1 John Gumperz with two as yet unidentified colleagues,
India, 1956 ................................................................................192
8.1 Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin (the Great Lakes) in
Anishnaabewomin (Ojibwe) .....................................................227
8.2 Workers in a call centre .....................................................................245
8.3 “cé faitte icitte/not made in china”: mugs made in
Québec by Hugo Didier ..........................................................247
8.4 Trees versus rhizomes ........................................................................254
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would first like to thank our editor at University of Toronto Press, Anne
Brackenbury. Anne first approached us with a somewhat different idea; this
book is the result of many discussions amongst the three of us. Anne’s open-
ness to the idea of what this book has now become, her support, her excellent
questions—all have been vital to this project.
There is a second set of people whose work has been crucial: our grad-
uate assistants at the University of Toronto. Their research skills, sharp eyes,
inquiring minds, and enthusiasm for the project have sustained the book in
countless ways and taught us a great deal. Thanks, then, to (in alphabetical
order): Andrea Derbecker, Erika Finestone, In Chull Jang, Eun Yong Kim,
Kate Morris, Kyoko Motobayashi, Norielyn Romano, Emily Sheppard, Leah
Shumka, Jinsuk Yang, and Han Zhang. Valérie Dailly provided technical support,
for which we are deeply grateful.
Margaret Hogan, Lead Archivist at the Rockefeller Archives, provided
crucial support for the research we undertook for Chapter 7.
Andrea Derbecker rendered the beautiful hand-drawn trees, rhizomes, and
waves in figures in Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 8.
Reviewers at two crucial stages of the book’s development provided
important critiques and extremely helpful suggestions. They gave both the
proposal and the manuscript a close, engaged, and detailed read, for which
we are grateful.
We have been fortunate to have been able to present parts of this work
at various conferences and in the form of invited talks, where we have bene-
fited from insightful comments and critiques. Finally, we have had the support
and feedback from a variety of students and colleagues, some of whom have
commented on drafts of chapters, and others of whom have provided key infor-
mation at critical moments (and of course sometimes both): Kori Allan, Peter
Auer, Sandra Bamford, Lindsay Bell, Annette Boudreau, Josiane Boutet, Cécile
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Canut, Eva Codó, Christine Connelly, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, James Costa,
Gary Coupland, Michelle Daveluy, Alfonso Del Percio, Aaron Dinkin, Alexandre
Duchêne, Claude Gacon, Pedro Garcez, Maria Rosa Garrido, Mireille Grosjean,
Louis Hébert, Kaitlyn Heller, Emily Hofstetter, Paul Hopper, Christopher
Hutton, Kenneth Huynh, Nicolas Kaiser, Ivan Kalmar, Ron Kassimir, Ken
Kawashima, Georg Kremnitz, Chris Krupa, Normand Labrie, Mika Lähteenmäki,
Patricia Lamarre, Imanol Lamea Mendizabal, Xavier Lamuela, Richard
Lee, Jean-Léo Léonard, Ed Liebow, Paul Manning, Jeff Martin, Marinette
Matthey, Mireille McLaughlin, Claudine Moïse, Salikoko Mufwene, Xosé
Núñez Seixas, Jeremy Paltiel, Lilli Papaloïzos, Alejandro Paz, Sari Pietikäinen,
David Price, Joan Pujolar, Alessandra Renzi, John Rickford, Peter Sawchuk,
Mark Solovey, Daniel Stotz, Miquel Strubell, Valérie Symaniec, Sally Thomason,
Humphrey Tonkin, Bonnie Urciuoli, Jacqueline Urla, Saskia Witteborn, and
Ruth Wodak.