Full Description
Heller and McElhinny reinterpret sociolinguistics for the twenty-first century with an original approach to the study of language that is situated in the political and economic contexts of colonialism and capitalism. In the process, they map out a critical history of how language serves, and has served, as a terrain for producing and reproducing social inequalities. The authors ask how, and by whom, ideas about language get unevenly shaped, offering new perspectives that will excite readers and incite further research for years to come.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface: Hope
Chapter 1: Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Walking Backward into the Future
1.1 Language and Inequality: A Wary Approach to a Red Thread World
1.2 Red Flags: Keywords, Hegemonies, Ideologies, and Warty Genealogies
1.3 Language Out of Place
1.4 Knotted Histories: Following the Threads through the Book
1.5 The End of the Beginning
PART I: LANGUAGE, INTIMACY, AND EMPIRE
Chapter 2: Language and Imperialism I: Conversion and Kinship
2.1 "The First Nations Bible Translation Capacity-Building Initiative"
2.2 Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonialism, Decolonization
2.3 Intimacy and Connection Across Five Continents
2.4 Reduced to and by Christian Love: Missionary Linguistics
2.5 Family Trees, Comparative Philology and Secular Religion
Chapter 3: Language and Imperialism II: Evolution, Hybridity, History
3.1 "Mixing Things Up"
3.2 Imperialism and Industrial Capitalism
3.3 Evolutionary Theory: Language and/as Race
3.4 Slavery, Plantation, Labour, Trade, and "Mixed" Languages
3.5 Americanist Anthropology: The Limits of Cultural Critiques of Evolutionary Racism
American Modern: Assimilating Blackness, Disappearing Indigeneity
American Primitive: Extracting Language
3.6 Linguistic Relativity, Colonial Ambivalence, and Modern Alienation
PART II: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
Chapter 4: Language and European Notions of Nation and State:
4.1 "Le Symbole"
4.2 The Emergence of the Nation-State in Europe
4.3 Markets and Liberal Democracy
4.4 Making Subjects Through Language
Regimentation: Census, Standardization, Literacy
Standardization: Grammars, Dictionaries, Canons, Pedagogies
4.5 Language and Differential Citizenship
4.6 Creating Peripheries
4.7 Regulating Relations in Industrial Capitalism
4.8 Making Scientific Linguistic Expertise
Chapter 5: Internationalism, Communism, and Fascism: Alternative Modernities
5.1 "Visions of the Future"
5.2 Peace, Geopolitics, and International Auxiliary Languages
5.3 Making Communist Linguistics
Marrism
The Bakhtin Circle
From Language as Action to Language as Tool in the Cold War
5.4. Language and Fascism
National Socialism in Germany
Language and Race: Yiddish and Esperanto
Race, Propaganda, and Mass Media
5.5 Fault Lines
PART III: BRAVE NEW WORLDS: LANGUAGE AS TECHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE AS TECHNIQUE
Chapter 6: The Cold War: Surveillance, Structuralism, and Security
6.1 "Black Out"
6.2 Battles for Hearts and Minds
6.3 The Investigation of Linguists During the McCarthy Period
6.4 Suspicious Words, Suspicious Minds
The Prague Linguistics Circle
Fear of the Translator
6.5 Infrastructure and Institutionalization: Communication Studies, Area Studies, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics
6.6 Machine Translation and the Rise of Syntax
Rational and Universal Principles for Linguistic Analysis: Late Structuralist Linguistics
Freedom, Creativity, and Human Nature: The Rise of Generative Linguistics
6.7 Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Weapon of the Cold War
Chapter 7: On the Origins of 'Sociolinguistics': Democracy, Development and Emancipation
7.1 "A Dialectologist in India"
7.2 Engineering Language: Literacy, Standardization, and Education
7.3 Language Policy and Planning: Technocratic Solutions
7.4 Domestic Development and American Sociolinguistics
Challenging "Deficit": Three Approaches
Fear of the Political
7.5 Challenging Consensus
Feminist Linguistics
Difference and Domination: Anti-Racist Critiques
7.6 Pidgins, Creoles, and New Nationalisms
7.7 The Rise of Sociolinguistics in Europe: Class and Conflict
7.8 The End of the Trente Glorieuses
Chapter 8: Language in Late Capitalism: Intensifications, Unruly Desires, and Alternative Worlds
8.1 "Nayaano-nibii maang Gichigamiin"
8.2 Late Capitalism: The Expanding Reach of the Market and the Neoliberal State
8.3 Language, Inequality, and Ideology
8.4 Managing Your Assets: Language Quality, Linguistic Diversity, and Citizenship
8.5 Brave New Selves: "I am a Business, Man!"
8.6 Affect, Authenticity, and Embodiment
8.7 Recapturing the Commons
8.8 Reclamation, Redress, Refusal, and Reimagining
8.9 This is How We Hope
References
Index
