Week 11: Language and Knowledge
This week we are discussing the role of language in the colonial project.
T.B. Macaulay was a British politician, and played a role in introducing English to the Indian curriculum. In this essay (1835), Macaulay argues that English is the most refined language, for both technical/scientific knowledge and culture, saying “all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.” His goal was to create a new class in India that was Indian by blood but raised in the language and values of England, to act as translators between England and the common folk. Most of the essay is focused on proving that British culture is the greatest in the world, and that nothing would be lost if other languages/cultures were replaced by English.
As a stark contrast, Ngũgĩ, a Kenyan writer and academic, discusses the impact of using a foreign language in a postcolonial nation. In this essay, he argues that foreign languages were used as a means of domination, and that African literature must be written in African languages to rebuild the nation. Ngũgĩ shows how language is built through acts of communication that encompass/encode a culture. By imposing a foreign language for trade and education (calling it superior), colonists were able to make the idea of progress external to native culture and implant this hierarchy into African daily life and self-image. This allowed for ultimate (economic) domination, by creating internalized inferiority. He calls to African writers to return to writing to the African peasantry, which had kept their native languages and culture alive, and take part in rebuilding a national anti-imperial culture. Ngũgĩ is responding to Achebe’s opposite stance, detailed in our other reading.
In English and the African Writer, Achebe explains why he believes that African writers should feel empowered to use European languages and strongly support Africa. He argues that nations in Africa needed to rebuild unity, history, culture in the vacuum that colonial powers left, and native languages further fragment the population. Modern African nations are unified solely by their common colonizer (not ethnic history), and the process of forming a new national culture must acknowledge that. He believes that African writers can adapt European languages to be able to depict the African experience, while still being accessible to a national+global audience. Ngũgĩ’s response is why spend that energy furthering the colonizer’s language, when you could use it to build up the native tongue?
While my opinion in this debate has no bearing on how people in Africa want to write, I will try to detail it anyways for myself. I think Achebe’s stance is more practical to the current state of geopolitical power. On the other hand, it is important that indigenous traditions and history are preserved or transformed into contemporary culture. There is an immense history encoded in a language, and that ‘aura’ would be lost with the death of those languages. There is also the danger that “high” culture written in European languages is inaccessible to the poorer population, widening the political gap between classes.
Chow’s essay fills in this debate with her own experience from Hong Kong. She sheds light on the political power of language. Admitting “my Cantonese is bad” as a mark of class, small acquisition of whiteness, within the system where English is the only path to social/economic advancement. She also furthers Ngũgĩ’s ideas about the power of language on encoding values/culture. Growing up in Hong Kong, she used Cantonese at home, while Mandarin was upheld as the “high culture” and official state language. So even before adding the English colonizer’s language, Chow was already living plural language. This leads her to question the fundamental idea of a native speaker in the first place. Every location/culture has their own accent or dialect, so nobody can claim a “pure” or “perfect” use of any language. She connects this to Achebe’s statement desire for African writers to form their own dialects of writing, and not write “like a native speaker.”
Themes:
- Nation/culture must be built with native language, because it encodes the nation’s values and experiences.
- Vs: African Writers should feel empowered to use European languages to have wider accessibility, and it is possible to ‘Africanize’ these languages to make them able to portray African life.
- These readings on colonial language highlighted how there is no privileged vantage point from which to study post-colonial theory without bias. We are all immersed in the politics/language/culture of global (post)colonial power structures, and can only examine it from within.