Folks,
My new essay has been
published by The Journal of Studies in International Education. This is a long
article (30 pages) that discusses issues around language, education, etc. In
light of our discussions yesterday about language and power, i thought this may be of interest. As always, there are
references to our situation in
Now JSID is a
prestigious academic journal and access to the full article maybe restricted,
unless you use your university library resources, etc. I will bring some hard
copies to 21 Azer event in
Yaver has selected some relevant sections and has
been doing some PR work on the article. Please see below.
Best regards,
Alireza
The
Return of the Subaltern: International Education and
Politics of Voice
Alireza Asgharzadeh
Journal
of Studies in International Education, Vol. 12, No. 4, 334-363 (2008)
http://jsi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/4/334
Key Words: diversity • educational theory •
globalization • human rights • international education • language •
multiculturalism • multilingualism • social theory • sociology of education • subalternity • critical pedagogy
….....
How can one indeed describe the terror of being rendered speechless, the horror
of tonguelessness? The Azeri writer, Reza Baraheni, has come closest to describing such a terror.
"Bring the saw up here." Thus starts Baraheni's
famous novel Les saisons
en enfer du jeune Ayyaz [The Infernal Times of Mr. Ayaz]
(2000). The saw with white and sharp teeth is brought up to dismember a
man, a captive man, tied up to a rack, with a spike passing through his body… His crime? Standing at the crossroads and
speaking truth to power, praising freedom, "shouting something like 'Annal haq!'"
(1999, p. 255). And now his arms and feet are being sawed and severed in the
most graphic, excruciating manner. But the man is still alive, for his tongue
is intact and this makes him defiant as ever. As long as he can talk, as long
as he has his means of expression, he can be defiant and dangerous. Since he
can still talk, he therefore is a threat, no matter how incapacitated, how
mutilated, wounded and broken he is. His spirit is still alive because his
tongue is intact:
"We
requested a long and sharp pair of scissors, and when they brought them up we
requested…two ladders…we ascended them to tear out the roots of his speech…
…and then, working together, we cut out his tongue… we forced him not to think,
and if he should think not to speak, because he no longer had a tongue… …the
slippery, blood-covered tongue, blood fresh and brightly colored, was held in Mahmoud's hand… Words ceased to exist, and he forgot
letters and sounds and words and speech…" (Baraheni, 1999, pp. 258-59).
In this
graphic image of tongue-cutting there is an echo of Baraheni's
own self-amputation. For his mother tongue too was cut out during the rule of Pahlavis (1925-1978) in
...While Spanglish is a habitus of
resistance to the dominance of standard English, there
are other hybrid and mutilated languages that are created as a result of
linguistic racism. "Fazeri," for
instance, represents the case of a hybrid form of speech created from Azeri and
Farsi as a consequence of politics of linguicide
exercised by successive Iranian governments in
southern
Please read the full article
here:
http://jsi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/4/334