[Linganth] CFP AAA: "Voices of Modernity, 20 years on"

[Jan David Hauck]

We are looking for roundtable participants for a roundtable at the 2023 AAA conference in Toronto:

"Voices of Modernity” – 20 years on

Abstract:

Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs’ Voices of Modernity was published in 2003. Discussing the making of language in the works of key thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition, the book details the mechanisms of how structures of inequality were embedded in seemingly innocuous constructions of language through the processes of ideological purification—deprovincializing language as autonomous domain and neutral medium, severed from any indexical ties to nature or society—and indexical hybridization—tying language to the ways of speaking of particular (white, male) intellectual elites as well as national and cultural traditions. Thus the book provides an analysis of the philosophical foundations of language ideologies that are operating wherever we see language being used as a tool for naturalizing power and social inequalities along the lines of class, gender, race, and ethnicity.

Recognized widely as a foundational text in linguistic anthropology, the book went on to win the Edward Sapir Book Prize in 2006. And yet, there has been little sustained engagement with the book’s core arguments. While there is no shortage of citations of the work, save a few notable exceptions most of these are references in passing (especially in relation to Herderian nationalist language ideologies). There has been very little uptake of some of the core themes, such as the mechanisms of purification and hybridization or the broader call for re-provincializing language.

One reason may be that the book is seen as providing a historical and philosophical backdrop to issues that critical scholars of language have already been grappling with from different angles, but not as inaugurating a new research paradigm. The other, and perhaps more important reason, is found in the conclusion of the book itself. Here, the authors explicitly state that as “two white middle-class North American men” it is not up to them to “dictate what would constitute an enlightened position on language and tradition” that would avoid reproducing structures of inequality (p. 316). The apparent lack of “textual success” of their project may have been the explicit wish of the authors.

And yet, the past two decades have seen a number of efforts that can be understood as very much in line with the positions formulated in Voices of Modernity. For instance, scholars in applied and sociolinguistics have been advancing efforts at reprovincialization by ways of “disinventing and reconstituting” language (see Makoni and Pennycook 2007). Concepts such as “translanguaging” (García and Li 2014) or “metrolingualism” (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) have emerged that explicitly question the existence of language(s). Linguistic anthropologists have advanced scholarship in raciolinguistics, highlighting the powerful hybrids of language and race that continue to operate in society to this day (Alim et al. 2016). Others have pushed the boundaries of language into the realm of the nonhuman (Kohn 2013; Pennycook 2018). Yet others have argued for the recognition of conceptions of language from the Global South (Heurich and Hauck 2018; Pennycook and Makoni 2020).

In this roundtable, we take the 20th anniversary of the publication of Voices of Modernity as an opportune moment to critically look at some of these novel efforts and the practices of deprovincialization and reprovincialization, purification and hybridization that they expose and criticize, but that they may also be engaged in in different ways.

If you are interested in joining our session, please send an email with a brief description of what you are working on and would like to discuss at the roundtable by March 22 to jandavidhauck <at> protonmail <dot> com
(roundtables do not require individual abstracts).

We would like to especially invite younger scholars who are working broadly on efforts of decolonizing / reprovincializing language from any angle.
Charles Briggs has confirmed participation in our session.

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Jan David Hauck, Ph.D.
jandavidhauck.com

British Academy Newton International Fellow
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science
lse.ac.uk/anthropology/people/jan-david-hauck/

Postdoctoral Fellow, Geography of Philosophy Project
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
https://www.geographyofphilosophy.com/postdocs
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