Mother Tongues

In this seminar, students learn how subjectivities are negotiated in and through language, and perform a critical exploration of languages as social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and create hierarchies. We discuss language as part of the social, cultural, and political machinery that enabled the rise of the nation-state, linguistic nationalism and colonialism, and we focus on the emergence of complex multilingual identities against a backdrop of monolingual forces that remain ubiquitous in our political institutions and cultural and epistemological productions.