Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism
240
Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism
240Overview
Since the 1980s, poets in Canada and the U.S. have increasingly turned away from the use of English, bringing multiple languages into dialogue—and into conflict—in their work. This growing but under-studied body of writing differs from previous forms of multilingual poetry. While modernist poets offered multilingual displays of literary refinement, contemporary translingual poetries speak to and are informed by feminist, anti-racist, immigrant rights, and Indigenous sovereignty movements. Although some translingual poems have entered Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous literary canons, translingual poetry has not yet been studied as a cohesive body of writing.
The first book-length study on the subject, Translingual Poetics argues for an urgent rethinking of Canada and the U.S.’s multiculturalist myths. Dowling demonstrates that rising multilingualism in both countries is understood as new and as an effect of cultural shifts toward multiculturalism and globalization. This view conceals the continent’s original Indigenous multilingualism and the ongoing violence of its dismantling. It also naturalizes English as traditional, proper, and, ironically, native.
Reading a range of poets whose work contests this “settler monolingualism”—Jordan Abel, Layli Long Soldier, Myung Mi Kim, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rachel Zolf, Cecilia Vicuña, and others—Dowling argues that translingual poetry documents the flexible forms of racialization innovated by North American settler colonialisms. Combining deft close readings of poetry with innovative analyses of media, film, and government documents, Dowling shows that translingual poetry’s avoidance of authentic, personal speech reveals the differential forms of personhood and non-personhood imposed upon the settler, the native, and the alien.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609386078 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2018 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Sarah Dowling is the author of two books of poetry, DOWN and Security Posture. Dowling is assistant professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Translingual Book
IN ORDER to BEGIN examining the ways in which translingual poetics contests settler monolingualisms in Anglophone North America, I will — indeed, must — consider the case of Spanish in the United States. Discussions of linguistic difference and of language politics in the US in the twenty-first century tend to refer, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Spanish. Spanish, after all, is the native language of 41 million US Americans, and is spoken by an additional 11.6 million bilinguals. Despite this demographic density, monolingual tendencies in the disciplinary formation of US literary studies have meant that scholars of US American literature who do not work in fields such as Latinx or Chicanx literatures persistently neglect to consider the presence and position of Spanish in the US. This disciplinary replication of and adherence to US monolingualist formations colludes with the casting of Spanish as the poster language of linguistic nativism. That is, the persistent depiction of Spanish as a "foreign" language in the US is reflected in literary scholars' failure to consider the relationships between Spanish and English as they are depicted in literature or to frame these relationships as a fundamental condition of US literary production. While US literary studies implicitly portrays the English language as longstanding, historical, continuous, and "native," dominant discourses within the field align with broader cultural discourses that portray Spanish as emergent, contemporary, and immigrant — and as an ethno-linguistic difference that is merely personal or cultural. Discussions of literary uses of Spanish or of the relationships between Spanish and English are, then, generally confined to subfields, which, like the language itself, are imagined as subordinate, minor, and particular.
In this chapter, I undertake a shift away from the characterization of Spanish as a present-bound immigrant language in the United States in order to demonstrate the necessity of framing Spanish simultaneously as a colonized language within the US and as a colonial language in the hemisphere. That is, the diminishing and containment of Spanish in US literary studies conceals the fact that Spanish, like English, arrived in the Americas long ago as a tool of consolidation and conquest. The texts that I will examine in this chapter do not negate US Latinx communities' understandings of themselves as colonized peoples. However, they complicate this perspective by calling attention to the temporal and spatial overlay of different colonial, racial, and national histories and ideologies. These works acknowledge the conditions of US imperialism that have historically brought and continue to bring Spanish-speaking populations within the borders of the United States. They also work to reframe dominant representations of the Spanish language through a palimpsestic layering of histories of Spanish colonization, Latin American states' colonial relationships to their territories and subjects, and contemporary US imperialism. Paying particular attention to the violence enacted at the meeting points of these distinct formations, the works I read here frame the relationship between Spanish and English not as a strictly national or US question but as one that requires the tracing of hemispheric and transnational histories. In order to unpack multiple and simultaneous colonialisms, these works recast the seeming opposition between Spanish and English in contemporary geopolitics by placing this struggle within the infrastructures of Indigenous communication technologies.
This chapter examines two book arts–based poetic projects: Instan (2002), which was created by the US-based Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, and Codex Espangliensis (1998, 2000), collaboratively produced by the Mexican American performance artist and poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña with visual artist Enrique Chagoya and book artist Felicia Rice. Each of these books veers away from the bilingual aesthetics that characterize literary representations of spoken vernaculars and from the code-switching patterns typically inscribed in novels. Instead, Vicuña and Gómez-Peña stage linguistic difference through the form of the book itself. That is, Instan and Codex Espangliensis combine the structures of the Western book with other forms, drawing upon the Andean khipu and the Mesoamerican codex, respectively. The khipu and the codex — a system comprised of carefully knotted, colored strings and a painted screenfold — require that readers undertake movements in three-dimensional space in order to derive meaning from them. Appropriated and refashioned in Vicuña's and Gómez-Peña's works, the khipu, the codex, and the movements required to decipher them become physical, performative engagements with Indigenous communication technologies and with the colonial histories that have largely prevented these from being considered as books or as having the capacity to transmit knowledge.
In drawing upon the khipu and the codex, Instan and Codex Espangliensis foreground a writing and reading body — or, perhaps more properly, a meaning-making body — whose gestures produce relationships with an otherness that is limited neither to the human nor to the subjective. Rather, this otherness broadly includes entities such as languages, communication technologies, and the knowledge systems that they contain. In attending to the ways in which these two poets adapt the form of the Western book, I engage the historical convention of associating the book with the human body. Not only were medieval manuscripts written on vellum, a treated animal skin, but the parts and functions of contemporary books are named after bodily structures — even the most ordinary, mass-produced books have spines, bleeds, heads, tails, and so on. Many book artists engage this historical association, using conventional homologies between body and book to frame encounters with books as embodied, tactile meetings with a human or human-like other. The syncretic, translingual books I consider here reimagine the conventional association between body and book in ways that escape the intersubjective logics of witnessing and recognition that ground contemporary theoretical discussions of precarity. I argue that Vicuña's and Gómez-Peña's adaptations of the Western book produce a differently embodied relationship to it, which enables them to represent colonialisms as ongoing, spatiotemporally overlapping processes that are apprehended in and shape the body: they are profoundly physical. Most importantly, in working through the materiality of the book, Vicuña and Gómez-Peña represent encounters with otherness in ways that do not resolve into meetings between persons or subjects. Rather, their syncretic books emphasize materiality and tactility, prioritizing the body over the abstractions of the person or the subject. Vicuña and Gómez-Peña obliquely recount long histories of colonial violence that have produced and continue to produce conditions of precarity for Indigenous bodies, communication technologies, and knowledge systems. In foregrounding bodies and knowledge systems alike, these translingual books propose an ethics that is not based in a relationship between self and other, but in a much wider network of relations that cannot be reduced to the unit of the individual person.
I read these two works' attention to embodiment and emphasis on Indigenous communication technologies as reframing the questions of precarity that have recently engaged scholars across a number of fields: I suggest that when taken together, they provide an opportunity for rethinking discourses of precarity through the lens of settler colonialism. While Vicuña in particular explicitly engages the discourse and terminology of precarity, both poets step away from the framing of precarity as a presentist crisis narrative describing the disaggregation of a previously whole self or subject. I offer a rethinking of precarity through Vicuña's articulation of lo precario, which she has explored in sculpture, performance, and text for nearly fifty years: unlike precarity's emphasis on the attrition of selfhood, lo precario describes bodily vulnerability and highlights capacities for relation, but it focuses on nonsubjective and at times even nonpresent entities. Vicuña constructs analogies between body and book in order to represent an encounter with otherness that is protected from the foreclosure into subjectivity that takes place within discourses of recognition and witnessing. Reading her work alongside Gómez-Peña's, I show that this translation into subjectivity affirms the colonial knowledge systems that produce conditions of precarity for Indigenous peoples, languages, and knowledge systems. That is, Vicuña and Gómez-Peña do not frame their works as representing and bearing witness to the plight of a precarious Indigenous other; instead, their texts draw upon Indigenous communication technologies in order to de-center the singular, individual, and independent selfhood that the Indigenous other is prevented from achieving. Moreover, their appropriations and adaptations of these communication technologies foreground embodied practices of conveying knowledge and making relation. What is precarious in their works then, is neither the self nor a witnessed other, but the bodies and knowledge systems that have been and continue to be threatened.
Working through a translingual poetics materialized in the form of the book itself, Vicuña's and Gómez-Peña's hemispherically oriented works represent competing colonialisms, paying particular attention to the violence produced at their intersections. These texts refuse the presentist tropes that characterize discussions of Spanish in the US and their focus on Latinx "emergence." Vicuña and Gómez-Peña instead turn to questions of temporality and history, materializing these in the form of the book itself. Their works go beyond the US's structuring linguistic division by incorporating an array of Indigenous and European languages and by excavating etymologies from ancient Greek and Latin. Using the techniques of book arts to combine the khipu and the codex with the Western book, Vicuña and Gómez-Peña contain the division between English and Spanish within the frameworks of Indigenous communication technologies. Rather than rearticulating a binary relationship of oppression between the US's two most commonly spoken languages, the poets highlight the interconnection between them as similar, if often opposed, European settler strategies.
It should be said, however, that Vicuña and Gómez-Peña are relatively privileged art-world figures and that their appropriations of Indigenous communication technologies tend to situate these technologies as remnants of a vanished past, belonging to no one in the present. Although these works do not meaningfully contribute to the critical project of Indigenous sovereignty, I contend that Instan and Codex Espangliensis are able to speak to experiences that are not their authors' own and to say more than their authors' personal positionings might suggest. I argue that reading Instan and Codex Espangliensis together reveals a materialized translingual poetics, in which indigeneity is at the center and Indigenous communication technologies are foundational. Vicuña and Gómez-Peña similarly use these technologies, drawing upon histories that predate the formation of settler colonial states. Their rematerializations of the book stage encounters with otherness that refuse to resolve into a meeting of subjects or persons. Instan and Codex Espangliensis place the linguistic and textual histories of colonialism at the center of their inquiry, and they seek to avoid the privileging of the individual that subtends colonial discourse. For both, the formal and material enactment of a dialogue with Indigenous communication technologies provides a robust alternative to contemporary discourses on precarity: they de-center the subject, reject the presentism of crisis, and emphasize continuities of vulnerability across histories of settler colonialism.
Precarity and Lo Precario
In the introduction to this book, I explained that while certain schools of contemporary poetry, such as the poetics of witness, salve the wounds of violence by translating social nonpersons into poetic persons, translingual poetics, in a variety of ways, refuses to perform this translation. Rather, I suggested that the requirement that others — already subjected to transformative violence — appear in the form of the person in order to receive recognition or redress valorizes the category of personhood and its underlying structure of exclusion. This translation into personhood empowers the witness to rewrite and transform the other, according to the witness's own concept of what constitutes a person. The fundamental imbalance of power between the witness and the other who is witnessed is an insufficient foundation for ethics. Not only has this framing of ethics produced a hierarchized relationship between self and other, it also imposes an anthropocentric limit on the ethical relationship, framing it as an encounter between two human individuals.
The bodily encounter with a (not-quite-)human other that is often staged in artists' books places these works in dialogue with twentieth-century philosophical discussions of witness, which, in the aftermath of the Shoah, sought to examine how the self comes into being in relationship with an other. Foundational to this body of thought is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who sought to show that human relation is intrinsic and foundational to subjectivity. Grounding his work in phenomenological description, Levinas claims that the "I" discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other. Levinas frames this face-to-face encounter as the basis of a dialogical sociality, in which the self is constituted not simply through the other's direct address but through the very feeling — perhaps anticipatory — of being summoned by the other. Levinas's philosophy has been taken up by other philosophers, particularly Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, as well as by poets such as Carolyn Forché, as the foundation for an ethics or a poetics of witness. While these engagements with his philosophy differ from one another in important ways, they similarly conceive of witnessing not as a mimetic recounting or narrative, not as an act of memory, but as a response to the fundamental call of the other, in the manner of an ethical or political act. These more recent theories of witness also describe the self as grounded in the existence of the other, arguing that we come into being as selves in and through our encounters with others. However, these theories depart somewhat from Levinas's in that they suggest — especially in Butler's case — that the self is comparatively stable while the other, having been subjected to violence, is basically rendered inchoate as a result of their suffering. Butler proposes that from the witness's position of relative security, the witness can repair or transform the other, conferring normative personhood upon them and allowing them to reenter into circuits of recognition.
While the term precarity is freighted with widely divergent valences and traces its theoretical trajectories through ethics, psychoanalysis, communication theory, economics, and political science, theories of precarity are typically structured as presentist crisis narratives describing the disaggregation of a previously whole and stable subjectivity. Alternately conceptualized as a diffuse affect connected to the dissolution of the capitalist fantasy of the good life, as a description of dependency, need, and the relational condition of social being, and as a process of social and economic redistribution, theories of precarity emphasize the unequal but spreading distribution of risk and vulnerability across populations. Precarity is generally understood to refer to the casualization of labor in post-Fordist economies and the contemporaneous collapse of social welfare in Europe and the United States. Most theorists describe it either as an acute crisis of the present or as a somewhat more longstanding phenomenon beginning in the 1970s. The term tends not to be used to describe more longstanding conditions of violence, nor is it typically used to name the colonial violence that threatens the futures of Indigenous languages and communities.
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Translingual Poetics, Settler Monolingualism Chapter One: The Translingual Book Chapter Two: The Lyric Person, the Legal Person, and the Racial Nonperson Chapter Three: Abstract Citizenship and Alien Racialization Chapter Four: Machine Reading and the Politics of Recognition Conclusion: Refusing Settler Monolingualisms Notes Works Cited IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“Sarah Dowling has made a vital intervention in American letters with Translingual Poetics. Dowling articulates the myriad ways the settler colonial state legitimates its continual violence. Simultaneously, she guides the reader toward horizons of trenchant poetic resistance, contestation, and subversion. This work opens a space for presence in the face of erasure, memory in place of forgetting, and voice that cuts through silence.”
“A sharply written study of an under-examined issue in American literature, and one that deserves the careful attention that this study offers. The book is full of excellent readings that often lead into provocative engagements with the crucial social and political issues of our time.”
“Sarah Dowling has made a vital intervention in American letters with Translingual Poetics. Dowling articulates the myriad ways the settler colonial state legitimates its continual violence. Simultaneously, she guides the reader toward horizons of trenchant poetic resistance, contestation, and subversion. This work opens a space for presence in the face of erasure, memory in place of forgetting, and voice that cuts through silence.”
“This lively, enlightening, and politically engaged study challenges the English-language nativism that undergirds liberal multiculturalism. The book explores multilingual poetry beginning with women of color feminists’ poems written in the 1980s and ending with twenty-first-century experimental writing as they develop a multilingual poetics of (dis)location.”
“This lively, enlightening, and politically engaged study challenges the English-language nativism that undergirds liberal multiculturalism. The book explores multilingual poetry beginning with women of color feminists’ poems written in the 1980s and ending with twenty-first-century experimental writing as they develop a multilingual poetics of (dis)location.”