The Rockefeller Foundation has selected the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean at the City College of the City University (CUNY) as a residency site for Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships for 2000-2003 on the subject of "Language and Diaspora Culture." The Institute, commonly known as IRADAC, will host the residency program, in conjunction with the CCNY Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts and the CCNY Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies (CPCPS). Professor James de Jongh, the director of IRADAC, will act as principal investigator.

Given City University’s uniquely cosmopolitan character, we offer an especially fertile site for such scholarship. Both locally and nationally, CUNY has been a lightening rod for the dilemmas and controversies which have attended the changing face of higher education in the latter part of the twentieth century as increasing numbers of people of color, and with the swelling tide of immigration, increasing numbers of non-native speakers of English, seek college degrees which have become the internal passports of American society. In recent years, the University has been engulfed in a highly politicized debate over the place of remedial education in higher education — much of it focused on the acquisition of reading and writing skills in English. Indeed, the first stirrings of this debate were felt when a controversy developed with respect to the progress, or lack of progress, students were making in mastering the English language at Hostos Community College, the only campus of CUNY officially designated to be "bilingual." Yet at the same time, the New York State Education Department was sponsoring a project for the development of "Guidelines for the Education of L.E.P. Caribbean Creole Speaking Students" in order to address the bilingual needs of Caribbean immigrant students whose Creole languages are connected to French and English as well as Spanish. Still earlier, and at the secondary level, a national controversy had erupted over the decision of the Oakland Board of Education to use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a tool for teaching Standard English. These controversial, and often contradictory attempts to address the role of language in public educational policy --the 90s counterpoint to the Official-English city council resolution proposed in Monterey Park, California and the "anti bilingualism" ordinance enacted in Dade County, Florida in the 1980s-- attest to the timeliness of the topic we wish to explore.

All of these controversies indicate that the subject of language and diaspora culture is both highly charged and badly in need of analysis. Readily available models of analysis, deriving for the most part either from the history of American race relations and from the experiences of earlier waves of European immigration, seem increasingly inadequate to the complexities of the contemporary cultural landscape. Historic categories of black and white now confront alternative paradigms of race and racial identity, while immigration to the United States originates increasingly in other parts of the Americas and Asia, and asks to be understood on a model of transculturation rather than one of acculturation. We hope, therefore, that the study group of resident and internal fellows will contribute to the development of a more refined awareness of the ways in which linguistic differences and affiliations interact with other categories of difference and identity, be they of geography, race, economic class, religion or gender, in diaspora culture. While IRADAC has an institutional interest in the place of language in the culture of the African Diaspora, our program is engaged by the more general rubric. We are open to an examination of the role of any and all language systems in our investigation of the broad field of diaspora culture. Our interests are emphatically not restricted to varieties of English. The fellowship program is conceived to welcome attention to varieties of European, Asian, African, and Native American languages as well as to the Creole languages of various lexical bases of the Americas and the Caribbean, including Native American languages of the African Diaspora such as Garifuna. We would welcome proposals addressing aspects, for example, of Ladino or Yiddish, Papiamento, Haitian Creole, Filipino Tagalog, and New York City Spanglish and Franglish.

The conceptual clarifications and empirical investigations entailed in such a project should draw on the involvement of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, literary studies, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Our program will gather scholars from both inside and outside the host institution to explore these issues in their historical antecedents, their current manifestations, and their future developments, and to examine their implications for public policy.

Theoretical Considerations

One of our guiding assumptions is that diaspora cultures are highly dynamic social fields in which individual and group identities emerge more out of the interaction of cultural differences than through the persistence of stable traditions and defining traits. This condition, we believe, need not be viewed either as a falling off from or a transition towards some more stable and unified sense of cultural identity. The argument may be made, of course, that all cultures are the product of such processes; nonetheless, this interaction is particularly salient in diaspora cultures. In fact, we would argue that the currently expanding usage of the notion of "diaspora," which denotes first of all the geographical dispersal and fragmentation of a people, also carries a particular valence, marking on the one hand the resistance of a community to assimilation within an encompassing social totality, and on the other hand a claim to a kind of post-exilic independence vis-a-vis the place of origin. Thus, to cite only one instance of this tendency, the displacement of the word "Hispanic" by "Latino/Latina" asserts the relative autonomy of the Latino experience with respect to its colonial heritage at the same time that it introduces into English a word which, because it can be inflected, insists on the workings of a foreign grammar (and its capacity for marking gender differences). Generalizing, one may hypothesize that within diasporic cultural situations the differences which mark off one language from another tend to function, also, as signifying differences within a linguistic zone whose boundaries are not clearly delimited and are constantly under negotiation.

The conceptual groundwork for the growing consideration of the phenomenon of diaspora culture has been developing for some time and to some extent in anticipation of contemporary cultural developments. We are thinking particularly of those philosophical tendencies, broadly labeled post-structuralist, which have sought to rethink ontological and linguistic concepts of identity and difference in what are currently referred to as "non-essentializing" ways. The link between this post-structuralist project and the task of representing diaspora culture is already evident in Jacques Derrida's work as it has gravitated from broad notions of "dissemination" and "différance" to more specific concerns with issues of translation and the "idiomatic" (cf. Shibboleth: for Paul Celan, trans. J.Wilner).

The recasting of key insights of post-structuralist thought as instruments of cultural and political analysis has taken place across a very broad front involving, to mention only some key figures in the area of post-colonial theory, the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Homi Bhabha, and in the area of African American and American studies, Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, and Werner Sollors. Furthermore, important methodological resources are to be found in recent work in ethnography (e.g. the work of James Clifford), political economy (e.g. the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), and of course, in Bakhtin’s work on heteroglossia and the dialogic imagination and Foucault's work in discourse analysis and the history of sexuality. To the extent that the emergence of diaspora studies as a field has been conditioned by such intellectual developments, the problematic of language that it inherits from them is not one topic among others but a central preoccupation and challenge.

If it sometimes seems that we live in a modern version of the Tower of Babel, that same story reminds us that human language has always existed in a condition of diaspora. Language is fundamentally multiple in its manifestations and without anchorage in a single originary authority which can be invoked to determine what words mean, how they should be used, or what their appropriate form should be. The program we envision will allow for an examination of what some theorists might call the permanently diasporic condition of language and its influence on the understanding and self-understanding of actual communities in diaspora. However, our purpose is not only to refine theoretical postures, but also to engage with a body of linguistic research that has yet to make a compelling claim on the attention of policy makers, particularly with respect to education, such as that produced by the Center for Applied Linguistic Research in Washington, DC and by linguists involved in the well known Ann Arbor, Michigan school case, which involved issues similar to the "Ebonics" controversy in Oakland, California, and in which the Court ruled that it was appropriate to use a knowledge of AAVE in the teaching of standard English. (See Richard W. Bailey, "Education and the Law: The King case in Ann Arbor" in Black English: Educational Equity and the Law, 1983.)

The controversies about bilingual education at Hostos/ CUNY and Ebonics in Oakland, California, are symptomatic of the kind of problems we hope will benefit from the research our program would like to prompt and disseminate. These debates could not have emerged in the form they have were they not fed by fundamental social, political, and economic conflicts rooted in racial and cultural difference. The emotionally charged public discourse has exposed a grave discontinuity in which the terms "language," "race," "nation," "people," and "culture," become problematic and unstable, and subject to tendentious characterizations on all sides.

These controversies remind us further that the interplay of language and diaspora culture occurs in the context of an increasingly multilingual environment within the United States and the globalization of the American economy. As these processes reshape neighborhoods, educational environments, and the workplace, the conflicts and exchanges that attend those processes place the hegemony of English in American culture under constant negotiation. This negotiation is witnessed most tellingly in the various legislative attempts in Monterey, California and Dade County, Florida to keep English "official." At the same time, by a process that may at first seem contradictory but in fact is another indication of a growing porosity of linguistic boundaries, the hegemony of American English continues to extend around the world. This puts some, but not all, diasporic English vernaculars, and the communities with which they are identified, in a difficult position. For example, the relationship of AAVE and the vernacular English forms of Haitian and British West Indian immigrants in the United States to standard American English is not the same as in the independent countries of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Third World. Where local communities of African descent are in the majority rather than the minority position, the Creole of the respective island may be in fact the dominant language although English is the official language. In these places, particularly in the Caribbean, new English vernaculars (varieties of "Nation English" in the terminology of Edward Kamau Brathwaithe) are in the process of evolution.

Significant research has already been done in these areas, but the implications for public policy, particularly with regard to education, have scarcely informed public discourse. Reactions of pundits and policy makers to the Ebonics and Hostos controversies often seem innocent of the existing knowledge base. In the case of Hostos, the linguistic experiences of high achieving individuals among earlier immigrants groups, usually of European origin, are invoked in anecdotes to justify various "get tough" approaches as evidence that the linguistic challenges faced by current generations of students in mastering standard written English are little more than pedagogically sanctioned forms of malingering. And in Oakland, some black leaders and cultural spokespersons compared "Ebonics" to a foreign language in an attempt to improve reading skills, even though African Americans in the United States have been speaking English for centuries; but others felt compelled ironically to denigrate the AAVE of many in their constituencies, in order to underscore the social necessity of mastering standard English.

A more sophisticated grasp of the relationship between language and diaspora culture may be able to improve the formulation of public policy, particularly in the area of education. Education no longer occurs in environments in which the presumption of English as a "lingua franca" can be taken for granted, not even at the post-secondary level. Consequently, the kind of work that we are proposing, though valuable enough in its own terms and limits, may also illuminate current questions concerning the future of urban public education. Our remarkable diversity places City College and City University at the forefront of sociological developments, which are t nationwide in their scope and implications. The real issues buried in such catch phrases, as "too much remediation," "poor degree progress," and "the failure of Open Admissions" are actually far more elusive than is usually recognized or acknowledged. It is our hope that the investigation of the language of translocated cultures and transnational identities can have a direct effect on curricular developments here at City University, and inform urban educational policy decisions that are often driven at best by coarse perceptions of the role of language in the current social landscape. Would it, for example, be possible or desirable to structure the College’s core curriculum in ways that made the heterogeneity of its students’ cultural heritages an organizing concern rather than a source of curricular fragmentation. Or again, might these studies provide a more precise and up to date view on how best to academically mainstream students with diverse linguistic backgrounds at the post secondary level.

Linguistics

We have tried in the preceding pages to explore the many strands of thought involved in the examination of language and diaspora culture we plan to undertake. Now we would like to turn to the specific points of concentration for our explorations of language and diaspora culture. First of all, we would like part of the work of this program to involve descriptive linguistic studies that focus on refining and expanding the terms of analysis for understanding the structure and genesis of linguistic formation in diasporic cultural conditions. (For basic concepts, terminology, and issues, see Arthur K. Spears and Donald Wilford, eds., 1997, The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles; John A. Holm, 1988 & 1989, Pidgins and Creoles, vols. I & II.) We would welcome projects developing our knowledge of language acquisition, and researching the comparative historical linguistic experiences of various immigrant groups. Such studies would deepen our comprehension of how languages change in diaspora settings, create real-time models for the process of charting language evolution, and illuminate the processes by which identity politics translates into linguistic issues, and vice versa.

Clearly, no one linguistic model is applicable to the diverse phenomena to be studied, whether one is talking, for example, about AAVE, Nation English, or Haitian Creole (or for that matter, what happens to Haitian Creole as Haitians migrate to other places in the Caribbean or the United States), or even the linguistic patterns of diverse Latino communities in the United States. Consequently, part of the task is to inventory the diversity of ways in which the language of a diaspora community absorbs or is absorbed by the surrounding linguistic environment, and to examine the ways linguists have conceptualized such phenomena as linguistic shift, linguistic interference, and linguistic death. (Cf. Sarah G. Thomason & Terrence Kaufmann, 1988, Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics.) That said, however, it is clear that descriptive linguistic studies are not separable from consideration of the ways shifting linguistic boundaries and affiliations do and do not map onto other kinds of social divisions and aggregations, be they geographic, economic, political, racial, or of gender.

Social Science

The status of the language of a diaspora culture is conditioned by social attitudes towards it, both from inside and outside. (Cf. Geneva Smithherman-Donaldson and Teun A. Van Dijk, eds., Discourse and Discrimination, 1988) Language may bind together a community living in diaspora, but it may also internally divide a unified or displaced and regathered community, or foster particular forms of cosmopolitanism. Language also complicates the relationship of the dispersed and regathered community with other groups, entities, and institutions with which it must communicate and interact. Communities in diaspora may build myths, or have myths built about them, as being in a condition of alienation and estrangement from some concept of a whole or integrated language. These consequences need to be examined at the point of nexus where linguistic analysis cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of social science and humanities.

We would, therefore, consider as appropriate to our activities not only descriptive linguistic studies but projects which articulate the implications of established research for critical areas of public policy, especially with regard to education. We are interested in studies that examine how class affiliation both determines and is determined by the way people speak. The status of English vernaculars of Americans of African descent, whether native born or recent immigrants, for example, is clearly conditioned by a host of economic and social factors. In these cases, linguistic boundaries function to reflect other forms of social organization, and reinforce the social boundaries. (Cf. Paul Wachtel, Race in the Mind of America, 1999; Arlene Torres and Norman E. Whitten, Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social Dynamics and Cultural Transformation, 1998; and Maryliena Morgan’s edited volume, Language & the Social Construction of Indentity in Creole Situations, 1994.) However, participation in a linguistic community is often in tension with other aspects of social identification. It is as much the fact that the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants speak English as a "mother tongue" as that they were born in the United States that complicates and differentiates their sense of identity vis-à-vis that of their parents. (See E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, 1989, and R. Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriquez, 1982, among many sources.) Moreover, the actual speakers of a language may not necessarily correlate with the group identified with that language; witness the speakers of African American and Afro Caribbean Vernacular English who are not black.

Literary and Humanistic Investigations

Once a community in diaspora internalizes the language of a new home, a linguistic putting down of roots occurs in the form of literary and verbal artistic expressions that problematize or consecrate the displacement from the homeland and pose their own interpretive dilemmas. A variety of literary and humanistic issues arises with respect to language and diaspora culture. This may result, for example, in the formation of communities of writers and readers across divisions of ethnicity and region. Such was the case of the writers of Africa and the Caribbean who, as students in the 1930s, created the Negritude movement in Paris, where they had come from distinct regions of the francophone world to seek the credentials of higher education available only in the colonial metropolis. (See Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, and others.) A comparable example is represented by those creative writers of the hispanophone and lusophone cultures of the same period in South America, Africa, and the Caribbean who recognized new significance in the African elements of their mestizo cultures as they asserted the emergence of nativist identities in the face of the cultural authority of European civilization. (See Emilio Ballagas, Mapa de la poesía negra americana; Rosa E. Valdes Cruz, La poesía negroide en América; David Brookshaw, Race and Color in Brazilian Literature; and Russell V. Hamilton, Voices from an Empire, A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature.) A third case would be the triangular trans-Atlantic cultural exchange among the black writers of the English-speaking territories of Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and the former Commonwealth nations of the Caribbean, and by the relationship of their anglophone literary poetics to the musical cultures of the African diaspora in the same regions. (See Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic.) Like their French, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking cohorts, English-speaking authors of African descent struggled with the choice of reviving or not reviving cultural traditions that had been ruptured or made so subterranean as to be virtually invisible, such as some of the African residuals in African American religion and the visual arts. (See Ferris Booth Thompson, Flash of the Spirit.)

Even when the usual features of geographic and linguistic displacement are not present, a culture can be said to be in a condition of diaspora, with analogous consequences for its writers and artists. For example, there is the post-colonial dilemma of African writers like Chinua Achebe, Wolé Soyinka and Camara Laye, who while geographically and linguistically centered in Africa, chose to address an international audience, including many Africans, who are geographically, linguistically, and/or culturally dispersed, and need to be addressed in a language with a global reach like English or French rather than in the writer's indigenous language. Some writers who followed this pattern initially, such as N'gugi Wa Thiongo (James N'gugi), are taking up the challenge of writing in their own tribal tongues while still addressing the international audience they have won in English. (See O.R. Dathorne, African Literature in the Twentieth Century.)

And of course, there is the question of the relationship of white writers to the language of blacks in the African diaspora, and of black writers to the literary and intellectual traditions of Western culture. In the early twentieth century when Modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein found the dialect of minstrelsy and the plantation tradition to be liberating in their pursuit of literary modernity, black writers in the often felt alienated from the literary use of the black vernacular because of their reluctance to implicate themselves in the demeaning and degrading stereotypes of American popular culture. (See Eric Lott, Love and Theft and Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism.) It is prophetic, therefore, that in the same period, W.E.B. Du Bois invoked a rhetoric of double consciousness and of spiritual striving in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) which was derived from his familiarity both with German Idealist intellectual traditions and popular aspects of African American folk culture. In the twentieth century, black and white writers of various languages and traditions have come to focus on common diasporic themes and motifs at parallel moments in literary history, thereby elaborating a kind of literary continuum across the modern black vernacular forms of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the territories where African slavery once flourished. (See James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism.)

Given this wide range of relevant authors and issues, we would be interested in a variety of projects in cultural studies as well as in intellectual and literary history. We would especially welcome cross-disciplinary proposals considering the relationships of individual artists, intellectual classes, and vanguard groups to the language and culture of diaspora communities, particularly with respect to questions of the interplay of individual imagination and communal self-definition in the African diaspora. Such investigations could contribute to programmatic and curricular development at the undergraduate, post-graduate, and doctoral level in the humanities, introducing a much-needed dimension of clarity and sophistication to the ongoing canon wars at American universities.

Conclusion

In summary then, the program we are sponsoring would focus, with particular attention to the languages and cultures of the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean, on the ways in which language both affects and is affected by diasporic cultural conditions, how under such conditions linguistic differences and affiliations interact with other forms of social difference and affiliation, and how such dynamics are manifested in the literary and artistic cultures of peoples in diaspora. While we are particularly concerned with surveying and interpreting the contemporary cultural landscape, we wish to develop that understanding in the context both of research into its historical antecedents and of broad philosophical considerations of the nature of language. This kind of inquiry calls for a collaborative enterprise involving scholars with many different kinds of expertise who are not only deeply engaged in their own areas of inquiry but who have access to pedagogical forums to exchange the products of research across disciplinary boundaries and distinctions of theoretical and applied knowledge. It is our hope that, in the first place, the work emerging from this project will inform CUNY educational policy, and from there broadly influence public debate and public policy, as the United States comes to terms with its increasingly heterogeneous linguistic, ethnic, and racial map.

                                                                                    top
Back to Iradac home