Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History

by Monica Heller, Bonnie McElhinny

Overview

Heller and McElhinny reinterpret sociolinguistics for the twenty-first century with an original approach to the study of language that is situated in the political and economic contexts of colonialism and capitalism. In the process, they map out a critical history of how language serves, and has served, as a terrain for producing and reproducing social inequalities. The authors ask how, and by whom, ideas about language get unevenly shaped, offering new perspectives that will excite readers and incite further research for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442606227
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	10/25/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Monica Heller is Professor of Anthropology and Education at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a past president of the American Anthropological Association.

Bonnie McElhinny is Principal of New College, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, and former Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface:  Hope 

Chapter 1:  Language, Capitalism, Colonialism:  Walking Backward into the Future
1.1  Language and Inequality:  A Wary Approach to a Red Thread World
1.2  Red Flags:  Keywords, Hegemonies, Ideologies, and Warty Genealogies
1.3  Language Out of Place
1.4  Knotted Histories: Following the Threads through the Book
1.5  The End of the Beginning

PART I:  LANGUAGE, INTIMACY, AND EMPIRE
 
Chapter 2:  Language and Imperialism I:  Conversion and Kinship
2.1  "The First Nations Bible Translation Capacity-Building Initiative"
2.2  Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonialism, Decolonization
2.3  Intimacy and Connection Across Five Continents
2.4  Reduced to and by Christian Love:  Missionary Linguistics
2.5  Family Trees, Comparative Philology and Secular Religion

Chapter 3:  Language and Imperialism II: Evolution, Hybridity, History
3.1 "Mixing Things Up"
3.2  Imperialism and Industrial Capitalism
3.3  Evolutionary Theory:  Language and/as Race
3.4  Slavery, Plantation, Labour, Trade, and "Mixed" Languages
3.5  Americanist Anthropology:  The Limits of Cultural Critiques of Evolutionary Racism
American Modern: Assimilating Blackness, Disappearing Indigeneity
American Primitive: Extracting Language
3.6  Linguistic Relativity, Colonial Ambivalence, and Modern Alienation

PART II:  THE CONTRADICTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

Chapter 4:  Language and European Notions of Nation and State: 
4.1  "Le Symbole"
4.2  The Emergence of the Nation-State in Europe
4.3  Markets and Liberal Democracy
4.4  Making Subjects Through Language
Regimentation: Census, Standardization, Literacy
Standardization: Grammars, Dictionaries, Canons, Pedagogies
4.5  Language and Differential Citizenship
4.6  Creating Peripheries
4.7  Regulating Relations in Industrial Capitalism
4.8  Making Scientific Linguistic Expertise

Chapter 5:  Internationalism, Communism, and Fascism:  Alternative Modernities
5.1  "Visions of the Future"
5.2  Peace, Geopolitics, and International Auxiliary Languages
5.3  Making Communist Linguistics
Marrism
The Bakhtin Circle
From Language  as Action to Language as Tool in the Cold War
5.4. Language and Fascism
National Socialism in Germany
Language and Race: Yiddish and Esperanto
Race, Propaganda, and Mass Media
5.5  Fault Lines

PART III:  BRAVE NEW WORLDS:  LANGUAGE AS TECHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE AS TECHNIQUE

Chapter 6:  The Cold War:   Surveillance, Structuralism, and Security
6.1  "Black Out"
6.2  Battles for Hearts and Minds
6.3  The Investigation of Linguists During the McCarthy Period
6.4  Suspicious Words, Suspicious Minds
The Prague Linguistics Circle
Fear of the Translator
6.5  Infrastructure and Institutionalization: Communication Studies, Area Studies, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics
6.6  Machine Translation and the Rise of Syntax
Rational and Universal Principles for Linguistic Analysis: Late Structuralist Linguistics
Freedom, Creativity, and Human Nature: The Rise of Generative Linguistics
6.7  Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Weapon of the Cold War

Chapter 7: On the Origins of 'Sociolinguistics':  Democracy, Development and Emancipation
7.1  "A Dialectologist in India"
7.2  Engineering Language:  Literacy, Standardization, and Education
7.3  Language Policy and Planning:  Technocratic Solutions
7.4  Domestic Development and American Sociolinguistics
Challenging "Deficit": Three Approaches
Fear of the Political
7.5  Challenging Consensus
Feminist Linguistics
Difference and Domination: Anti-Racist Critiques
7.6  Pidgins, Creoles, and New Nationalisms
7.7  The Rise of Sociolinguistics in Europe:  Class and Conflict
7.8  The End of the Trente Glorieuses

Chapter 8:  Language in Late Capitalism: Intensifications, Unruly Desires, and Alternative Worlds
8.1  "Nayaano-nibii maang Gichigamiin"  
8.2  Late Capitalism:  The Expanding Reach of the Market and the Neoliberal State
8.3  Language, Inequality, and Ideology
8.4  Managing Your Assets:  Language Quality, Linguistic Diversity, and Citizenship
8.5  Brave New Selves:  "I am a Business, Man!" 
8.6  Affect, Authenticity, and Embodiment
8.7  Recapturing the Commons
8.8  Reclamation, Redress, Refusal, and Reimagining
8.9  This is How We Hope

References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Deborah Cameron

"Ambitious, wide-ranging, and full of fascinating detail, this book really does offer a different kind of history of linguistic ideas, one that every sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist should read."

Joseph Sung-Yul Park

"Sweeping and breathtaking in scope, forking and turning in unexpected directions, yet deeply intimate and honest in its reflection, this book is a new model for critical engagement with the history of linguistics as a discipline."

Richard Bauman

"...a provocative history of the ways in which language ideologies and linguistic practices have served as a warrant for structures of social difference and social inequality from fifteenth-century imperial exploration to the neoliberal globalization of the present day."

Editorial Reviews

"...a provocative history of the ways in which language ideologies and linguistic practices have served as a warrant for structures of social difference and social inequality from fifteenth-century imperial exploration to the neoliberal globalization of the present day."—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington
"Ambitious, wide-ranging, and full of fascinating detail, this book really does offer a different kind of history of linguistic ideas, one that every sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist should read."—Deborah Cameron, University of Oxford
"Sweeping and breathtaking in scope, forking and turning in unexpected directions, yet deeply intimate and honest in its reflection, this book is a new model for critical engagement with the history of linguistics as a discipline."—Joseph Sung-Yul Park, National University of Singapore

From the Publisher