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A SPATE of right-wing attacks on Teresa Heinz Kerry erupted following her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. Throughout the campaign, Heinz Kerry was chastised for what one neoconservative dubbed her “uncontrolled mouth” (Myford), but after the convention these attacks took a slightly different turn, exemplified in an ersatz news story on the satiric news Web site Broken Newz entitled “Teresa Heinz-Kerry Launches Five-Language Tirade.” The item claimed that Heinz Kerry told a Wendy’s short-order cook to “go to hell” in five languages because her burger was “soggy” and “lacked sufficient mayonnaise.” The story goes on to say, “This latest Teresa tirade comes less than two weeks after her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, where she addressed confused onlookers in . . . five languages” (Myford).
You may remember that early in Heinz Kerry’s convention speech, she addressed her varied linguistic audiences in those five languages—Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and English—a move that brought down the wrath of Republicans. When we recall that Heinz Kerry worked as an interpreter at the United Nations when she first arrived in the United States, this attack should give us pause. Along with the Bush administration’s contempt for so-called old Europe and despite Bush’s courtship of the Spanish-speaking vote on a Spanish Web site and in his occasional spoken Spanish on the campaign trail, the attacks on Heinz Kerry demonstrate the Anglocentrism of my title and the xenophobia that characterizes the current political and cultural climate in which the knowledge and use of languages other than English are seen as strange, even, we might say, barbarous. These attacks have erupted at the very moment when, as the MLA Language Map demonstrates, the number of languages spoken in the United States has increased exponentially. Hence perhaps the insistence, English only spoken here.
Though the plural of our session’s title—“Advanced Literacies in a Multilingual Society”—reminds us there are many literacies, I want to consider one particular form of advanced literacy, literature. In the May 2002 issue of PMLA, scholars from various literature departments were asked to address the question, “Why major in literature—What do we tell our students?” Respondents offered answers ranging from the pragmatic to the abstract. I pose that question again, but ask it with relation to the literature and cultural documents written in other languages—what were once termed the national literatures. According to the MLA survey of foreign language enrollments—and I take the term “foreign” from its title bearing in mind Mary Louise Pratt’s objection to “the term foreign to refer to languages other than English” (64)—enrollments in language courses have increased slightly from a low of 7.3 per hundred student enrollments recorded in 1980 (Welles 12). By contrast, a wealth of anecdotal reports suggests that enrollments in upper-division literature and culture courses in the modern languages have declined, as has the number of students electing to study the national literatures at the graduate level. In such an environment, what can be said about “advanced literacies in a multilingual society”?
Before addressing that question, I’d like to review some statistics that reflect these changes in language study in the United States and point out certain trends—in particular, the often-alluded-to correlation between perceived economic opportunity and advanced language literacy. During the heyday of Japanese economic growth and dominance, there was a steady rise in the study of basic Japanese: between 1960 and 1980, enrollments increased almost sevenfold; between 1980 and 1990, enrollments increased again almost fourfold. Subsequently, with the decline of Japan’s economic fortunes and the rise of China’s, the study of Japanese declined between 1990 and 1998, while the number of students studying Chinese has risen steadily. Since 9/11, we have seen a surge of interest in Arabic that escalates what was already a slowly developing trend. That interest represents perceived opportunities in the United States—needs in the intelligence communities, Homeland Security, journalism, and the like—rather than opportunities for economic investment and growth per se, as in the cases of Japan and China. But the limits of the economic argument can be seen most clearly if we consider German. Germany remains the strongest economy in the European Union, yet the study of German language in the United States has declined more than the study of any other major European language. Even with the modest growth reported across the board in language study since 1998, the number of students studying German is less than half what it was in 1970 (Welles 13, table 5).
The vulgar economic arguments outlined above need to be understood in the context of international relations and foreign policy. As many commentators have noted, so-called area studies were established during the cold war to promote American hegemony. The study of Russian peaked briefly during perestroika and glasnost. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1995, Russian enrollments precipitously declined, to a level they have since maintained (table 5). The study of Spanish has increased (table 5) in response to immigration patterns and the remarkable growth of Spanish-speaking populations in the United States, which despite all their problems, according to the latest census figures showed an increase to 26.6 million in 2003, up 10% since 2000 (P034). In a different but related pattern based on cultural shifts, the study of French has declined over the last three decades in response not only to changing demographics but also to shifts in culinary and sartorial fashion—the swing to Milan, to Prada and Armani, to olive oil and pasta. Those shifts in turn are reflected in the modest growth in the study of Italian over the last thirty years (Welles 13, table 5). But even these changes, confined as they are to a small and privileged proportion of students who once sought a smattering of French to read the menu and attend the ballet, must be seen in the light of the modest numbers outlined above. A disheartening 7.6% of American four-year institutions of higher learning, and 11.3% of two-year institutions, offer no language courses at all other than English (Welles 7). Foreign language enrollments accounted for only 8.6 per hundred enrollments in 2002 (Welles 12, table 4), and only a tiny proportion of those enrollments were in advanced courses. Americans apparently feel little need to learn other languages despite renewed admonitions from government officials concerned with the “defense of the nation” and “success with our international trading partners” and despite the United States Senate’s designation of 2005 as the year of languages. At the postsecondary level, whether community college, four-year college, or university, the language study required is minimal, far from the advanced literacies of the ADFL session’s title.
How can we counter these trends? Why should we counter these trends? In a recently published essay, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, argues that we study foreign languages to improve “America’s relationship with the world.” Using her experience as an African American who grew up in segregated communities, she recounts how the study of Spanish and French expanded her sense of the world, of difference and “intercultural experience” as a means to understanding what she terms “perplexing societal issues”—issues of racial and ethnic hatred and superiority, cultural conflict, and the like (683). For Simmons, the study of foreign languages requires, first, that one step outside “the safety of a particular identity” (684) to understand other intellectual and cultural values through language. She argues that our willingness to study other languages and cultures is a function of our acceptance or refusal of “other cultures, societies and nations as valid and equal partners” in what she terms the “modern international collaborative enterprise” (684). Doris Sommer seconds and expands Simmons’s claims in her recent book, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, in which she argues on behalf of bilingualism and the study of other languages. Drawing on work in linguistics, demography, psychology and child development, education, economics, game theory, and more, Sommer contends that being bilingual makes you smarter, a better problem solver, more successful in business and the professions, even more likely to be a political liberal.
Following Simmons’s and Sommer’s logic, we might expect that the burgeoning ethnic studies programs developing in colleges and universities across the United States would require, or at least encourage, modern language study. Such programs are designed to address student interest in heritage identities and usually offer an amorphous critique of Western hegemony and ethnocentrism. Yet of the ethnic studies programs surveyed informally for the purpose of this article, only one—the Comparative Ethnic Studies program at Columbia University—required study of a language other than English, not even the heritage language of the student’s focus area. Thus an Asian American student may study his or her heritage culture without learning Korean, Japanese, Chinese, or any other Asian language; a Chicano or a Latina student need not study Spanish but is presumed, in the words of the Yale program entitled Ethnicity, Race, Migration, “to have competence in the foreign language related to the student’s area of concentration.” There would seem to be no perceived irony in pursuing the study of your heritage culture in the very language blamed for its colonization, loss, or decline, and for which you are being socially reproduced for the labor market. In such programs at Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford, no language study is required. As chair of comparative literature at Brown, I lobbied the committee framing the ethnic studies concentration to include a language requirement, but to no avail.
Though commentators and practitioners have notoriously found it difficult to define comparative literature, the decennial reports to the American Comparative Literature Association, the 1965 Levin report, the 1975 Greene report, and even the embattled 1993 Bernheimer report all agree on the importance of advanced language literacies to the study and practice of comparative literature. Despite their differences, as the Bernheimer report puts it rather quaintly, “[t]he knowledge of foreign languages remains fundamental to our raison d’être” (43). In the responses to the Bernheimer report, however, certain voices have retreated from this widely held tenet, notably that of my colleague Rey Chow, who advocates for “theory” as the comparatist’s raison d’être. Oddly, Chow avers that she is not particularly worried about the “monolingualism” of our future world, simply
because multilingualism is clearly already part of the life of the elite classes across the globe today—and where there is power and money, there will be continuity. The children of these elite classes, whether they happen to be living in Geneva, Tokyo, New Delhi, Hong Kong, or Palo Alto, are being brought up in at least two or three languages. (110)
Counting on the children of a global, nomadic elite to preserve and foster the study of languages strikes me as misguided. Chow goes on to argue that multilingualism “has always been a part of humanistic intellectual culture which can easily serve the agenda of reactionary politics,” and she rightly points out that “[i]f reactionary politics uses multilingualism for purposes of indoctrination and surveillance, then white liberalism, in a more benign guise, uses multilingualism for embellishment and amusement, for a mere change of decors” (110). My only objection to that formulation is the attribution of such embellishment and amusement to the easy target of “white liberalism,” since Chow’s description of the global, nomadic elite makes it clear that that elite is not only white. Instead she advocates theory as the savior of comparative literature, using as her example a book of literary criticism that reads only English language texts to support its claims. What I find astonishing is the assumption that one can read, do, use theory without advanced knowledge of languages, without the techne of close reading. Theory, like comparative literature, depends on the very multilingualism Chow dismisses. Reading theory without languages leads to a stultifying instrumentalization, or theory “applied,” whereby Marxism or deconstruction or psychoanalysis are merely grids imposed on a given text. Have theory, will apply.
In the final chapter of her lament on the “death of a discipline,” Gayatri Spivak begins with this declaration: “literary studies must take the ‘figure’ as its guide.” “Read the logic of the metaphor,” she admonishes, for “[a]ll around us is the clamor for the rational destruction of the figure, the demand for not clarity but immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average” (71). We cannot claim to have dismantled the elitism of a Eurocentric comparative literature by turning to ideological critique based on a reflective or mimetic model, regardless of how broadly we expand our objects of study to embrace cultural studies, popular culture, and the cultural productions and histories of non-Western cultures and languages. A simple incremental model is theoretically untenable because it leaves in place mimetic relations that poststructuralism has labored to dismantle. Such a model is practically untenable, as any university administrator knows only too well, however dedicated to the study of languages and cultures, as he or she endures the clamor for instruction in an ever-expanding array of languages from Korean to Swahili to Swedish to American Sign. Languages change, erupt, evolve, decline, and die. Linguists preserve them in varied fashion, but perhaps we will lose Mohawk or Xhosa (Sosha) or one day even Czech or German. But even were Anglocentrism our future, as Freud observed of the unheimlich, “in [certain] circumstances the familiar can become uncanny” (220). Shakespeare’s English, like theory itself, can be as unheimlich to an English speaker as any so-called foreign language. “Advanced literacy” is to read in the strong sense of that verb, the sense that attends to figure and rhetoric. There are only foreign languages.
Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
“The Bernheimer Report, 1993.” Bernheimer 38–48.
Chow, Rey “In the Name of Comparative Literature.” Bernheimer 107–16.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth, 1965. 219–56.
“The Greene Report, 1975.” Bernheimer 28–38.
“The Levin Report, 1965.” Bernheimer 21–27.
Myford, Matt. “Teresa Heinz-Kerry Launches Five-Language Attack.” Broken Newz. 11 Aug. 2004. 3 Aug. 2005 http://www.brokennewz.com/displaystory.asp_Q_storyid_E_1051teresafive.
P034: Language Spoken at Home for the Population 5 Years and Over. U.S. Census Bureau: American FactFinder. 29 Dec. 2005 http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en. Path: Data Sets; Detailed Tables; Data Sets with Detailed Tables; 2003 American Community Survey Summary Tables [and] 2000 Supplementary Survey Summary Tables; P034.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship.” Bernheimer 58–65.
Simmons, Ruth J. “America’s Relationship with the World: How Can Languages Help?” French Review 77 (2004): 682–89.
Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Welles, Elizabeth. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education.” ADFL Bulletin 35.2–3 (2004): 7–26. [Show Article]
“YCPS: Chapter IV: Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.” 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.yale.edu/yalecollege/publications/ycps/chapter_IV/erm.html.
© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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