The Rhetoric of Translingualism

TLDR: Translating students' right to their own language has been a touchstone in composition studies for progressive language campaigns as discussed by the authors, and it has been recognized as a good cause for many scholars of color.

Abstract: The arc of moral composition studies is long, King might say, but it bends toward translingualism.1 I would agree insofar as the term translingualism galvanizes the multidimensional repudiation of monolingual curriculums and yields praxis informed by an understanding that language and language standards are situational, political, arbitrary, and palimpsestic. If, as Vygotsky indicates, a "word is a microcosm of human consciousness" (153), then it is also a microcosm of human history. Every utterance contains tracings of migration, mixing, negotiation, or conquest. Stories have been programmed into our languages just as they have been stamped into our genes. Moreover, translingualism incorporates the view that all language users, or languagers, are perpetually producing and experimenting with multiple varieties of language. Thus, translingualists grasp that the institutional enactment of language standards is repressive in some cases and restrictive in all.Yet I imagine that proponents of translingualism will still have to grapple with the question of how much language prescriptiveness they are comfortable with-lest they assert "none at all" and, as they work in political arenas in which they assess students, seem to evade politics, the last thing a self-respecting translingualist wants to be caught doing. It also appears to me that continual revisiting and reworking of several other concepts of language and difference are necessary to forge a stronger narrative about translingualism. In addition to talk about student language rights, I am concerned on this occasion with the flattening of language differences, the notion of language as an abstraction, the danger of translingualism becoming an alienating theory for some scholars of color, and deeper study of powerfully translanguaging students.As is evident from reading essays such as John Trimbur's discussion in this issue of the 1974 CCCC "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL), the resolution remains a touchstone in composition studies for progressive language campaigns. But as I have suggested elsewhere, the language rights of ethnic assemblages, most prominently African Americans, were the issue and not the language rights of students conceived as individuals (Gilyard 95). No vision was expressed claiming, for example, "my own idiosyncratic thing" as a language that should be honored in schools. Rather, a particular political problem, the harsh penalizing of students who were firmly tethered linguistically to an institutionally discredited heritage, was being addressed. The representative students at the heart of the students' right work of earlier decades were not the idealized ones at the heart of the present translingualist conception. The latter students are more shifting and unpredictable, heterogeneous and fluid, as we all are. They are not the minority others numerically but are the majority not-others occupying the default position, the norm, and are being hindered, at the very least, by gatekeepers. They are less the repressed indigenous ethnics overdetermined by dialect and more the polyglot products of contemporary global dispersion.None of this depiction is objectionable. A good cause needs a good symbol. I advocate, however, that this symbol needs to be highlighted more and needs its specific hardships detailed. Perhaps numerous accounts in this vein exist of which I am unaware. That would be no surprise. My current impression, though, is that the translanguaging subject generally comes off in the scholarly literature as a sort of linguistic everyperson, which makes it hard to see the suffering and the political imperative as clearly as in the heyday of SRTOL. In other words, if translanguaging is the unqualified norm, then by definition it is something that all students, including high achievers, perform. So what problem is there to address? If the answer is that every translanguaging student, regardless of educational success, could stand to be better educated with respect to the inner workings of the discourses and power dynamics that impact their lives, then the project of translingualism is indistinguishable from other species of critical pedagogy. …