Ukraine/The Ukraine

[Eloise Boyle]

Hear hear, Kevin!

Eloise

Sent from my iPhone-so THAT explains the spelling! :-) 

> On Jun 22, 2014, at 6:37 PM, "Moss, Kevin M." <moss at MIDDLEBURY.EDU> wrote:
> 
> I spent the day pondering a response to yesterday's disturbing messages only to find that today's have taken a turn for the even worse.
> 
> First my response off-list to my esteemed classmate Michele:
> "(Never in a million years will I get why this is a big deal.)"
> 
> - because some people get off on offending others and take umbrage at anyone
> who criticizes their god-given right to do that.
> 
> (See all the "Christians" now complaining about persecution because they can no longer stop others from getting married.)
> 
> I agree with Vitaly and Eliot. To Eliot's line about how one would hope for a minimum of empathy, I'd say, for some, apparently, we can't expect even that.
> 
> I have grown used to reciting the fact that I was trained in a Slavic field that had yet to incorporate even a feminist critique, to say nothing of gender, race, or post-colonial critiques. There was none of that. We were a generation or more behind our colleagues in English or Romance literatures and cultures. We can point to our target culture, which still mostly fails to distinguish between gender and sex. But we and our students are not in Russia. We have no excuse, other than willful ignorance, for refusing to learn how to communicate in 2014.
> 
> I wanted to point out, especially for newer generations of scholars, that, while we still have with us some vestiges of the previous era and some trolls, the exciting scholarship is being done by people like Berdy and Borenstein and Chernetsky and Naiman, and, oh look! They're all in agreement!
> 
> I, for one, use в/на Украине as a teaching moment each year in 1st and 2nd year Russian. Language changes and language is political (I'm surprised no South Slavic scholars have chimed in: the language I learned in the 70s is now 3 or even 4, all for political reasons, by which I mean even the 1 was political). I don't know why anyone who claims to be a scholar would want to pretend otherwise.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has contributed, even if we have gone off topic (and I've taken it even further). As someone who grew up in a racist milieu in the South and who now faces a different kind of bigotry fairly often, I think it's always important to call it out. And I don't see why people get so offended at being called a bigot or accused of using bigoted language. Believe me, it's much less harmful than being the object of bigotry in a world where the bigots are in control and where their language goes unchallenged. I don't see many bigots who have been deprived of their freedoms or who have committed suicide because the world is just so so awful to them.
> 
> Kevin Moss
> Jean Thomson Fulton Professor of Modern Languages & Literature
> Middlebury College
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Jun 20, 2014, at 3:25 AM, "Michele A Berdy" <maberdy at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>> 
>> The question is, if they can tell us how to speak English, can we tell them how to speak Ukrainian?
>> 
>> You probably meant to write: If they can ask us to use a form that is, in their view, more respectful, can we ask them the same?
>> I guess so. Why not?
>> If someone asks me to call her Ms., I don't call her Miss; if someone asks me not to call him a Gypsy, I call him Roma; if someone prefers to be called an African-American instead of a Negro, I comply. I don't have to, but why would I want to offend someone? 
>> 
>> (Never in a million years will I get why this is a big deal.) 
>> 
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