The Aesthetics And Politics Of Linguistic Borders

This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.

This book presents inter-disciplinary research on contemporary borders with contributions from scholars and cultural practitioners located in different contexts in the Americas and South Asia. There has been significant sociological work on borders; however there is a relative dearth of humanities research on contemporary border realities, particularly in South Asia. This volume introduces frameworks of critical insights and knowledge on border narratives and cultural productions. It addresses and goes beyond the impact of the partition in South Asia to train a unique comparative and aesthetic lens on borders and borderlands in relation to Latin America and the U.S.A. through oral narratives, photographs, ‘objects’, films, theatre, journals, and songs. It maps border perspectives and their reception in a framework of cultural politics. It revolves around themes such as violence and modes of survival; women’s narratives of migration, trafficking and incarceration; abduction of children; vulnerability as experience; rationalities of mass killings; and proliferation of countercultures to map border perspectives in a framework of cultural politics. First of its kind, the volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of comparative literary and cultural studies, South Asian studies, Latin American studies, border studies, arts and aesthetics, visual studies, sociology, comparative politics, international relations, and peace and conflict resolution studies.

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

Though it might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, translingual writing - texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one - has an ancient pedigree. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism aims to provide a comprehensive overview of translingual literature in a wide variety of languages throughout the world, from ancient to modern times. The volume includes sections on: translingual genres - with chapters on memoir, poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema ancient, medieval, and modern translingualism global perspectives - chapters overseeing European, African, and Asian languages Combining chapters from lead specialists in the field, this volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the vibrant area of translingual literature. Attracting scholars from a variety of disciplines, this interdisciplinary and pioneering Handbook will advance current scholarship of the permutations of languages among authors throughout time.

This book recasts questions about the overlapping boundaries of language, history, and politics that have been at the center of critical and theoretical debates in the study of Romantic literature and thought. While poststructuralism and deconstruction have been accused of privileging language over history, the New Historicism and other historicist and cultural approaches to literature have attempted to restore history's place in the study of literature. Taking its title from a reading of the word Lippe in Kleist's Die Hermannsschlacht, Borders of a Lip is drawn to neither of these poles, but instead to their meeting place or coincidence: the site of a border, a political or national boundary, even the boundary that is the political, the lip that is also the place of language. Through readings of Kant, Wordsworth, Kleist, Mary Shelley, Yeats, and Lyotard, the book examines the convergence of language and history that takes place in their work. Instead of placing language and history in absolute opposition, making the border an unbreachable limit, the book explores how crossing these borders (re)defines the political.

The notion of the native speaker and its undertones of ultimate language competence, language ownership and social status has been problematized by various researchers, arguing that the ensuing monolingual norms and assumptions are flawed or inequitable in a global super-diverse world. However, such norms are still ubiquitous in educational, institutional and social settings, in political structures and in research paradigms. This collection offers voices from various contexts and corners of the world and further challenges the native speaker construct adopting poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives. It includes conceptual, methodological, educational and practice-oriented contributions. Topics span language minorities, intercomprehension, plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, translanguaging, teacher education, new speakers, language background profiling, heritage languages, and learner identity, among others. Collectively, the authors paint the portrait of the "changing face of the native speaker" while also strengthening a new global agenda in multilingualism and social justice. These diverse and interconnected contributions are meant to inspire researchers, university students, educators, policy makers and beyond.

This critical ethnographic account of the Yangon deaf community in Myanmar offers unique insights into the dynamics of a vibrant linguistic and cultural minority community in the region and also sheds further light on broader questions around language policy. The book examines language policies on different scales, demonstrating how unofficial policies in the local deaf school and wider Yangon deaf community impact responses to higher level interventions, namely the 2007 government policy aimed at unifying the country’s two sign languages. Foote highlights the need for a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of language policy, unpacking the interplay between language ideologies, power relations, political and moral interests and community conceptualisations of citizenship. The study’s findings are situated within wider theoretical debates within linguistic anthropology, questioning existing paradigms on the notion of linguistic authenticity and contributing to ongoing debates on the relationship between language policy and social justice. Offering an important new contribution to critical work on language policy, the book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and language education.