Colonialism and Language ENGE 5850

Semester 2, 2016-2017

Dr. Emily CHOW

1

Recap

Postcolonialism

Colonialism

Imperialism

• Understanding the irreversible political,historical, social, and cultural impactsbrought by colonialism and imperialism

• Situating Postcolonialism as a reaction tovarious dominations of the colonised

• Postcolonial literature has the potentialto reflect and challenge dominantideologies, be a vehicle thatdemonstrates identity, relationship andculture, and be an agent that allowsreaders to read “outside”

2

Lecture Outline

• Changes in Language(s)

• One of the most importantlegacy of colonialism

• Look at its mechanism andexamine the impact broughtto the colonised in terms ofthe use of English language

1. The significance ofunderstanding the spread ofEnglish language in studyingpostcolonial literature

2. The power of language

3. Major language policy and itssignificance during colonialperiods

3

English

• The British Empire • the largest the world has even seen• its height:

• the early 20th century• covered more than 1 quarter of the world’s total land-

mass • 460 million people (or a quarter of the world’s total

population)• transported a English language around the world

4

The British Empire

5

The Spread of English Language

• David Crystal in The EnglishLanguage (1988)

• Between the end of the reign ofElizabeth I (1603) and thebeginning of the reign ofElizabeth II (1952) the number ofmother–tongue English speakersin the world increased formbetween five to seven million toabout 250 million, of whom four-fifths lived outside the BritishIsles.

6

The Spread of English Language

• English was imported to variousplaces in a huge scale

• Especially during colonisation

• Became the official languages ofmany places

• Similar to other kinds of changesin the lifestyle of the colonised,served as a kind of culturaldomination

• But why it is especiallyimportant to examine the spreadof English language in particular?

Discussion:

What is the significance of the spread of English language in postcolonial literature?

7

The Spread of English Language

• Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

• “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”

• The power of language

• Alters world views and cultures

• In the (post)colonial context English is politically charged

• Important to justify why westudy Anglophone postcolonialliterature

• “Commonwealth Literature”

• a term used by critics inthe 1950s to refer toliteratures in Englishemerging from a selectionof countries with a historyof colonialism e. g. India,the Caribbean, NewZealand, Nigeria etc.

8

Understanding Language

• Structuralism

• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913)

• Language is not mimetic (symbol (word) = Thing)

• But made up of arbitrary linguistics sign

• 𝑆𝑖𝑔𝑛 =𝑆𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑟

𝑆𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑

• Meaning is relational

9

Understanding Language

• Poststructuralism

• Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)

• Transcendental signified

• e.g. God, reason, origin, being, essence, truth, humanity, beginning, end, self etc.

• Self-sufficient and self –originating

• Endless chains of signified and signifier

• 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 = 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛 =𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑟

𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑10

Understanding Language

• Edward Sapir in Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921)

• “Language is purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”

11

Understanding Language

• John Edwards in Language, Society and Identity (1985)

• “Within a language [one can distinguish between] communicative and symbolicfunctions. The basic distinction here is between language in its ordinarily understood sense as a tool of communication, and language as an emblem of groupness, as a symbol, a rally-point.”

12

Understanding Language

• Joshua Fishman in “Language in a Social Perspective” (1972) in Sociolinguistics: a Reader and Textbook

• “Language is not merely a carrier of content, whether latent or manifest. Language itself is content, a referent for loyalties and animosities, an indicator of social statuses and personal relationships, a marker of situations and topics … ”

13

Language in Postcolonial Discourse

Language: one of the key elements of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle1. the colonial process itself

begins in language

2. coloniser cast its control via various language policy

• displacing or replacing native languages

• import the language of empire

• standardise language and allows no variance

3. remains the strongest instrument of cultural domination

• a tool that construct reality

• provides the names by which the world may be “known”

• the basis upon which social, economic and political discourses are grounded

14

Language in Postcolonial Discourse

• Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffiths in The Post-ColonialStudies Reader

• “One of the most subtle demonstrations of the power of languageis the means by which it provides, through the function of naming,a technique for knowing a colonised place or people.”

• “To name the world is to ‘understand’ it, to know it and to havecontrol over it.”

• “The word ‘Africa’, for instance, is determined by Europeanhistorical formations which had little or no relevance to thecomplex of linguistic cultural and economic factors which tied andsometimes separated various societies on the continent.”

15

Language in Postcolonial Discourse

16

Language in Postcolonial Discourse

• Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffiths in The Post-ColonialStudies Reader (cont’d)

• “To name reality is therefore to exert power over it, simplybecause the dominant language becomes the way in which it isknown.”

• “In colonial experience this power is by no means vague or abstract. A systematic education and indoctrination installed the language and thus the reality on which it was predicated as preeminent.”

17

The Case of India – Language Policy

• Thomas Babington Macaulay, the architect of English education in India in ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835)

• English education would train those who were “Indian in blood and colour” to become “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

18

The Case of India – Impacts

• Braj B. Kachru in The Alchemy of English(1986)

• “[t]he english language is a tool of power,domination and elitist identity, and ofcommunication across continents.”

19

The Case of India – Impacts

• Braj B. Kachru in The Alchemy of English(1986)

• “English has become an integral part ofthis new complex sociolinguistic setting.The colonial Englishes were essentiallyacquired and used as non-native secondlanguages, and after more than twocenturies, they continue to have the samestatus. The non-nativeness of suchvarieties is not only an attitudinallysignificant term, but it also has linguisticand sociolinguistic significance….”

20

The Case of India – Impacts• Raja Rao in preface to Kanthapura (1937)

• “The telling has not been easy. One hasto convey in a language that is not one’sown the spirit that is one’s own. Onehas to convey the various shades andomissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in analien language.”

• “I use the word ‘alien,’ yet English is notreally an alien language to us. It is thelanguage of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—butnot of our emotional make-up.”

21

The Case of India – Impacts• Raja Rao in preface” to Kanthapura (1937)

• “We are all instinctively bilingual, manyof us writing in our own language and inEnglish. We cannot write like theEnglish. We should not. We cannotwrite only as Indians. We have grown tolook at the large world as part of us.Our method of expression therefore hasto be a dialect which will some dayprove to be as distinctive and colorful asthe Irish or the American. Time alonewill justify it.”

22

The Case of India – Impacts

• Braj B. Kachru in The Alchemy of English(1986)

• “English does have one clear advantage,attitudinally and linguistically: it hasacquired a neutrality in a linguisticcontext where native languages, dialects,and styles sometimes have acquiredundesirable connotations.”

23

The Case of India – Impacts• Braj B. Kachru in The Alchemy of English (1986)

• “Whereas native codes are functionally marked in terms of caste, religion,region, and so forth, English has no such ‘markers,’ at least in the non-nativecontext. It was originally the foreign (alien) ruler’s language, but thatdrawback is often overshadowed by what it can do for its users. True, Englishis associated with a small and elite group; but it is in their role that theneutrality of a language becomes vital (e.g. for Tamil speakers in Tamil Nadu,or Bengali speakers in West Bengal). In India the most widely used language isHindi (46 percent) and its different varieties (e.g., Hindustani, Urdu), havetraditionally been associated with various factions: Hindi with the Hindus;Urdu with the Muslims; and Hindustani with the maneuvering politicalpandits who could not create a constituency for it. While these attitudinalallocations are not necessarily valid, this is how the varieties have beenperceived and presented.”

24

The Case of India – Impacts

• Braj B. Kachru in The Alchemy of English(1986)

• “English, on the other hand, is notassociated with any religious or ethnicfaction. Whatever the limitations ofEnglish, it has been perceived as thelanguage of power and opportunity, freeof the limitations that the ambitiousattribute to the native languages.”

25

The Case of India

Discussion:

Do you agree that this rather “positive” aspect of

the spread of English language in India articulated by

Kachru is significant to the Indian people?

Do you think it could somehow outweigh the

negative impacts suggested by Raja Rao?

26

The Case of Africa

• A similar scenario in Africa as suggested byEdward Blyden in Christianity, Islam andthe Negro Race (1887)

• English was best suited to unify Africansocieties

• “a composite language, not the productof any one people. It is made up ofcontributions by Celts, Danes,Normans, Saxons, Greeks, and Romans,gathering to itself elements … from theGanges to the Atlantic”

27

The Case of Africa

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind: ThePolitics of Language in African Literature

• “Language carries culture, and culture carries,particularly through orature and literature;the entire body of values by which we cometo perceive ourselves and our place in theworld. How people perceive themselvesaffects how they look at their culture, at theirpolitics and at the -social production ofwealth, at their entire relationship to natureand to other beings. Language is thusinseparable from ourselves as a communityof human beings with a specific form andcharacter, a specific history, a specificrelationship to the world.” 28

The Case of Africa

• Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

• “On that day, completely dislocated, unable tobe abroad with the other, the white man, whounmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself faroff from my own presence, far indeed, andmade myself an object. What else could it befor me but an amputation, an excision, ahaemorrhage that spattered my whole bodywith black blood? But I did not want thisrevision, this thematization. All I wanted wasto be a man among other men. I wanted tocome lithe and young into a world that wasours and to help to build it together.”

29

Legacy of the British Empire’s Language Policy

Discussion:

Do you agree with Fanon and Ngũgĩ in terms of the power of language?

Compared with the “positive” aspect of the spread

of English suggested by Kachru, which one do you

find more significant?

30

Violence in Language

• Slavoj Žižek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)

• Subjective violence

• physical violence that is “directly visible” and “performed by a clearly identifiable agent.”

• Objective Violence

31

Violence in Language

• Slavoj Žižek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)

• Objective Violence

• Systemic violence

• “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political system,” is also employed to sustain power in a very similar manner.

• Symbolic violence 32

Violence in Language

• Slavoj Žižek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)

• Objective Violence

• Systemic violence

• Symbolic violence

• “embodied in language and its forms” because “[l]anguage simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature.”

33

“The Adventure of English – The Language of Empire”

• Discussion:

• What is the significance of English tothe imperial endeavour?

• How intimate is the relationshipbetween language and commerce,politics, education, and culturaldomination?

• In what ways does it confirm or disavowFanon’s claim on the impact of languageon the colonised people? (Fanon in BlackSkin, White Masks: “To speak alanguage is to take on a world, aculture”)

34

Conclusion

• The significance of understanding the spread of English language in studying postcolonial literature

• How language shapes the orientation of the self in various aspects

• The impacts and legacy of language policy (concerning both the native language(s) and English) during colonial period

• Next lecture• Reactions of writers to this

circumstances• The case of Hong Kong• Read Xu Xi’s “Finding my

English: One Hong Kong Writer’s Evolution”

35

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffiths. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Blyden, Edward. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. 1887; Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1994.

Crystal, David. The English Language. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

Edwards, John. Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967; London: Pluto Press, 1986.

Fishman, Joshua. “Language in a Social Perspective.” 1972; In Sociolinguistics: a Reader and Textbook, edited by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski. London: Palgrave, 1997.

Kachru, Braj B. The Alchemy of English. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1986.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.

Rao, Raja. Preface to Kanthapura. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937.

Sapir, Edward. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.

36