The aim of my argument is to challenge the authority of the past by looking at languages and languaging in the context of Western expansion since 1500. I argue that theoretical models dealing with languages have been built in complicity (not necessarily planned, but perhaps resulting from a lack of awareness) with colonial expansion. The linguistic and philosophical models of the twentieth century, and most remarkably those popularized in the sixties and seventies, are of little use for dealing with the transnational dimension of language and languaging, since they appear in academic discourse as a universal speaking subject. This speaking subject, curiously enough, was modeled on the experiences and the idea of national languages that were, at the same time, imperial languages. My argument implies the legacies of the early modern and colonial periods (modernity and coloniality) and joins forces with efforts to demodernize and decolonize scholarship as well as discourse in the public sphere that emerged in postmodern and postcolonial theorizing after World War II. In this genealogy, modernity and coloniality presuppose the coexistence of the modern state and imperial domains in a way that was not yet articulated in the early modern period under the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. It is precisely in the junction between the early modern and colonial periods (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and modernity and coloniality (seventeenth century to 1945) that we witness a significant switch in the way languages are conceived and languaging is practiced, in relation both to colonial control and to the rearticulation of knowledge and reason, indeed two sides of the same coin. What we are seeing now, as the examples discussed below illustrate, is a relocation of languages and cultures made possible by the very process of global interconnection.

It is worth noting that the last stage of a process designed to Christianize and civilize was transformed into a process whose aim is to “marketize” the world and no longer to civilize or Christianize it. Paradoxically, the emphasis on consumerism, commodities, and increasing marketplaces plays against the control imposed by early Christian and civilian programs. In the first place, non-Western languages such as Quechua and minority Western languages such as Catalan are reemerging from the forceful repression to which they were subjected during the national period in Latin America as well as in Europe. Secondly, Western languages such as Spanish, French, and English are being fractured by emergent languaging practices in formerly colonial domains. Finally, the processes resulting from the internal hierarchy within Western expansion and from the displacement of Spanish to second-class languaging rank (as it was considered inadequate for philosophical and scientific languaging) find their way of intervention prompted by migratory movements from areas colonized by the Spanish and British Empires and their national configurations during and after the nineteenth century. If a word is needed to identify the locus of these phenomena and processes, it is transculturation.¹ Transculturation subsumes the emphasis placed on borders, migrations, plurilanguaging, and multiculturing and the increasing need to conceptualize transnational and transimperial languages, literacies, and literatures.

Sociohistorical transformations demand disciplinary modifications as well. The challenges presented to language and literary scholarship by transnational and transimperial languaging processes are epistemologically and pedagogically serious, for they impinge on the very conception of the humanities as a site of research and teaching. This is particularly the case when reevaluations are viewed from the perspective of nations with colonial legacies rather than from the perspective of the European modernity. Such challenges alter the commonly held belief that linguistic and literary studies deal only with texts and literary authors, with canon formation and transformation, and with aesthetic judgments and textual interpretations. Transnational languaging processes demand a theory and philosophy of human symbolic production predicated on languaging and transnational and transimperial categories, on a new philology, and on a pluritopic hermeneutics that will replace and displace “the” classical tradition in which philology and hermeneutics were housed in the modern period. The clouding of national frontiers also demands rethinking disciplinary boundaries, if not undoing them. In the past ten years, a substantial exchange has taken place among literary theorists, critics, and social scientists, chiefly in the fields of anthropology and history. Transimperial and transcolonial (and by trans here I mean beyond national languages and literatures as well as beyond comparative studies that presuppose national languages and literatures) cultural studies could serve as an emerging inter- and transdisciplinary space of reflection in which issues emerging from Western expansion and global interconnections since the end of the fifteenth century might be discussed and linguistic and literary studies redefined. Literacy, the missing and complicitous word between languages and literatures, and languaging, a concept difficult to grasp in the Western denotative philosophy of language, are moving to the forefront of this transdisciplinary discourse.

In the early modern world, languages were attached to territories, and nations were characterized by the “natural” links between them. After World War II, languages and territories were redefined when area studies emerged as a consequence of the hierarchical division of the World into First, Second, and Third. The linking of languages and territories to constitute a particular nation was essentially a move by intellectuals and the state striving for certain types of imagined communities. In contrast, area studies was a distribution of scientific labor among scholars located in the First World that was meant to secure (both in terms of war and in terms of production of knowledge) its primacy in the order of economy as well as of knowledge. Thus, insofar as the configuration of area studies coincided with the latest period of globalization, it brought into the foreground a new meaning for the expression understanding other/foreign languages and cultures. A fundamental question then becomes “understanding diversity and subaltern languages and knowledges,” where understanding is used both as a gerund and as an adjective. When it is employed as an adjective, understanding diversity becomes part of the paradigm in which we encounter expressions such as ethnic diversity or cultural diversity. In such cases, understanding diversity can be read as equivalent to diversity of understanding, provided that we can make sense of expressions such as ethnicity of understanding and cultures of understanding. What follows is predicated on understanding diversity, where understanding is employed both as a gerund and as an adjective. I will first comment on some particular cases (Arguedas, Cliff, Anzaldúa) before coming back to languaging and understanding diversity.

José María Arguedas's introduction to his Tupac Amaru Kamaq Taytanchisman/A nuestro padre creador Tupac Amaru is titled “I Do Not Regret Writing in Quechua.”² The introduction itself is devoted to an explanation of Arguedas's decision. Anticipating objections from “quechólogos,” who would like to preserve the purity of the Quechua language, Arguedas points out that he has used Castilian words with Quechua declension as well as Castilian words written as Indians and “mestizos” pronounce them. He observes that in his text there is just one Quechua word that belongs to a sophisticated register of Quechua and that there are also words taken from the Huanca-Conchucos dialect. Despite these few obstacles, Arguedas states that the book of poems is accessible to the Quechua-speaking population in the linguistic map of Runasimi, from the Department of Huancavelica to Puno, Peru, to the entire Quechua zone in Bolivia. Furthermore, he believes that it could be well understood in Ecuador.

Arguedas also mentions that the Haylli-Taki was originally written in the Quechua he speaks, his native language, Chanca.³ After writing the book of poems, he translated it into Castilian. In the introduction he notes that an “impulso ineludible” forced him to write the poems in Quechua:

A medida que iba desarrollando el tema, mi convicción de que el quechua es un idioma más poderoso que el castellano para la expresión de muchos trances del espíritu y, sobre todo, del ánimo, se fue acrecentando, inspirándome y enardeciéndome. Palabras del quechua contienen con una densidad incomparables la materia del hombre y de la naturaleza y el vínculo intenso que por fortuna aún existe entre lo uno y lo otro. El indígena peruano está abrigado, consolado, iluminado, bendecido por la naturaleza: su odio y su amor, cuando son desencadenados, se precipitan, por eso, con toda esa materia, y también su lenguaje.

Sin embargo, aunque quisiera pedir perdón por haberme atrevido a escribir en quechua, no sólo no me arrepiento de ello, sino que ruego a quienes tienen un dominio mayor que el mío sobre este idioma, escriban. Debemos acrecentar nuestra literatura quechua, especialmente en el lenguaje que habla el pueblo; aunque el otro, el señorial y erudito, debiera ser cultivado con la misma dedicación. Demostremos que el quechua actual es un idioma en el que se puede escribir tan bella y conmovedoramente como en cualquiera de las otras lenguas perfeccionadas por siglos de tradición literaria. El quechua es también un idioma milenario.

(8; italics added)

[While I was developing my subject matter, my conviction that Quechua is a language better suited and more powerful than Castilian to express critical moments of the soul and, above all, critical moments of the mind, grew on me; became a source of inspiration and of growing excitement. Quechua words embrace the human and natural dimension in a density without parallel and, above all, the Quechua words also embrace the relationships that fortunately still exist between humanity and nature. Peruvian indigenous people are sheltered, comforted, brightened, blessed by nature: when their hate and love are unleashed, they hastily move toward grasping humanity and nature, with a force that also includes their language.

Nevertheless, and even if I would like to excuse myself for daring to write in Quechua, I have to confess that I do not regret it at all; on the contrary, I would go even further and beseech those who have a better command of Quechua than I to write themselves. We must enhance our Quechua literature, particularly in the language spoken by the people, without forgetting the other Quechua, the erudite and noble Quechua, that must also be cultivated with the same intensity. We will prove that current Quechua is a language in which it is possible to write with the same beauty and moving effect achievable in any other language that has been improved through centuries of literary tradition. Quechua too is a millenarian language.]

In Latin America, different manifestations of the tensions between linguistic maps, literary geographies, and cultural landscapes can be linked with linguistic dismissal under colonial and Western expansion. Arguedas's need and decision to write in Quechua, to translate his poem into Spanish, and to write a justification comparing Quechua with Spanish clearly articulate such tensions. Arguedas has struggled both with the millenarian forces and the memories of a language grounded in the body of those living and dying in the linguistic map and literary geography of Runasimi (to whom he addresses his poems), and with the centennial and institutional forces of a transplanted language grounded in the body and memories of Castilians living and dying in Spain, as well as in a New World constructed on the ruins of Runasimi.

There are other linguistic experiences complementing Arguedas's and foreshadowing the question of language and colonialism, an area in which linguistic maps, literary geographies, and cultural landscapes collide and in which social and cultural transformations reinforce each other. Let us now compare the Andes with the Caribbean and with the Mexican-U.S. border by bringing into the discussion a Jamaican writer, Michelle Cliff, and a Mexican American author, Gloria Anzaldúa.⁴

Cliff, who underlines the differences between metropolitan English and the colonial English of the West Indies, is more concerned with the political and cultural dimensions of language than with matters of accent or lexicon. Of the several types of creole languages in the Caribbean, I would like to remind the reader of the main varieties: the Creole of French lexicon spoken in French Guyana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti; “Papiamentu,” the Creole language of Castilian and Portuguese lexicon spoken in the Dutch Caribbean; and the English Creole spoken in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, and elsewhere.⁵ Cliff refers to this last variety in her text.

The daughter of an affluent family, Cliff pursued graduate studies at the Warburg Institute in London. Her dissertation on game playing in the Italian Renaissance took her to Siena, Florence, and Urbino, a journey that ended in her participation in the feminist movement and in her rediscovery of an identity she had learned to despise. I will let Cliff speak for herself by quoting extensively from the preface to The Land of Look Behind:

I originated in the Caribbean, specifically on the island of Jamaica, and although I have lived in the United States and in England, I travel as a Jamaican. It is Jamaica that forms my writing for the most part, and which has formed, for the most part, myself. Even though I often feel what Derek Walcott expresses in his poem “The Schooner Flight”: “I had no nation now but the imagination.” It is a complicated business. Jamaica is a place halfway between Africa and England, to put it simply, although historically one culture (guess which one) has been esteemed and the other denigrated (both are understatements)—at least among those who control the culture and politics of the island—the Afro-Saxons. As a child among these people, indeed of these people, as one of them, I received the message of anglocentrism, of white supremacy, and I internalized it. As a writer, as a human being, I have had to accept that reality and deal with its effect on me, as well as finding what has been lost to me from the darker side, and what may be hidden, to be dredged from memory and dream. And it is there to be dredged. As my writing delved longer and deeper into this part of myself, I began to dream and imagine.

One of the effects of assimilation, indoctrination, passing into the anglocentrism of the British West Indian culture is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the form in which it is meant to be expressed. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, and folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers—some, not all—and you will see what I mean. You have to dissect stanza after extraordinarily Anglican stanza for Afro-Caribbean truth; you may never find the latter. But this has been our education. The Anglican ideal—Milton, Wordsworth, Keats—was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be enabled, to compose a work of similar correctness. No reggae spoken here.

(12-3)

Cliff makes it clear that colonial literature will always be viewed as inferior when confronted with the practice defined and exemplified by the metropolitan literary canon. The same language, the same syntactic rules; but the game played under different conditions results in diverse verbal practices: folklore is not literature, just as myth is not history. In both cases, the “wisdom of the people” was invented to distinguish “taste and knowledge of genius and educated fews,” establishing a hierarchy of cultural practices parallel to economic and political regulations and government.

It is languaging, rather than language, that Arguedas and Cliff allow us to emphasize, moving away from the idea that language is a fact (e.g., a system of syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules) toward the idea that speaking and writing are moves that orient and manipulate social domains of interaction. Both Arguedas's and Cliff's linguistic conceptualization and literary practices create fractures within languages (Spanish in Spain and in Peru; English in Jamaica) and between languages (Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula in contact with Spanish “dialects” and in the Andes in contact with “Amerindian languages”; English in England, and in the Caribbean, in contact with creole languages), revealing the colonial aspects of linguistic, literary, and cultural landscapes. The very concept of literature presupposes the major or official languages of a nation and the transmission of the cultural literacy built into them. Therefore it is not sufficient to recognize the links between the emergence of comparative literature as a field of study and literature's complicity with imperial expansion; nor is it adequate to denounce the pretended universality of a European observer, who does not recognize the regionality of other literatures.⁶ It is the concept of literature that, like the concept of languages, should be displaced from the idea of collecting facts (e.g., literary works; masterpieces) to the idea of languaging as cultural practice. Furthermore, colonial expansion and colonial legacies (since the sixteenth century) have created the conditions, on the one hand, for languaging across cultures and, on the other, for inventing a discourse about languages that placed the languaging of colonial powers above other linguistic and cultural practices.

Let me further explore the question of languaging and colonialism by moving to Anzaldúa's Borderlands. To read Borderlands is to read three languages and three literatures concurrently, which is, at the same time, a new way of languaging. It would be helpful to bear in mind Alton Becker's articulation of the idea of languaging, based on his experience of dealing with Burmese and English:

Entering another culture, another history of interactions, we face what is basically a problem of memory. Learning a new way of languaging is not learning a new code, into which the units of my domain of discourse are re-encoded, although the process may begin that way; and if the new way of languaging shares a history with my own, the exuberances and deficiencies may not get in the way of simple interactions. However, at some point the silences do get in the way and the wording out gets slow and hard. A new code would not be so hard and painful to learn; a new way of being in the world is.⁷

I would like to make it clear that I am quoting Becker not as a linguistic authority (even if he is) but next to the experiences of Arguedas, Cliff, and Anzaldúa: theorizing is a way of languaging, just as languaging implies its own theory; theorizing languages within social structures of domination is dealing with the “natural” plurilingual conditions of the human world “artificially” suppressed by the monolingual ideology and monotopic hermeneutics of modernity and nationalism. In Borderlands Anzaldúa remaps linguistic and literary practices, articulating three linguistic memories (Spanish, English, and Nahuatl). Chapter 6, for example, is titled “Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink.” Anzaldúa explains:

For the ancient Aztecs, in tlilli, in tlapalli, la tinta negra y roja de sus códices (the black and red ink painted on codices) were the colors symbolizing escritura y sabiduria (writing and wisdom). … An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness. …

I write the myth in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become. The word, the image and the feeling have a palatable energy, a kind of power. Con imágenes domo mi miedo, cruzo los abismos que tengo por dentro. Con palabras me hago piedra, pájaro, puente de serpientes arrastrando a ras del suelo todo lo que soy, todo lo que algún día seré.

Los que están mirando (leyendo),
los que cuentan (o refieren lo que leen).
Los que vuelven ruidosamente las hojas de los
          códices
la tinta negra y roja (la sabiduría)
y lo pintado,
ellos nos llevan nos guián,
          nos dicen el camino.

[With images I tame my fear, crossing my innermost abyss. With words I become stone, bird, bridge of snakes dragging along to the ground level all that I am, all that someday I will be.

Those who are looking at (reading),
Those who are always telling (or narrating what they read).
Those who noisily unfold the leaves of the codices
the black and the red ink (wisdom),
and what is painted,
They are who carry us and guide us,
          they show us the way.]

These two paragraphs bring to the foreground the juxtaposition of several memories. The Spanish quotation in verse form comes from the Colloquios y doctrina christiana, a dialogue between the first twelve Franciscan friars—who arrived in Mexico in 1524, after the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán—and representatives of the Mexican nobility. The dialogue was recorded in Nahuatl, collected, and then translated into Spanish by Bernardino de Sahagún toward 1565. Originally, then, this quotation, which reports the answers of the Mexican nobility to the Franciscan presentation, requesting that they adopt the Christian doctrine, was in Nahuatl. The excerpt quoted by Anzaldúa narrates the moment in which the Mexican noblemen refer to the Tlamatinime (the wise men, those who can read the black and the red ink written in the codices). Anzaldúa's languaging entangles Spanish, English, and Nahuatl (the first two with a strong “literary” tradition kept alive after the conquest; the third, which was and still is an oral way of languaging, was disrupted during and marginalized after the conquest), and her languaging invokes two kinds of writing: the alphabetic writing of the metropolitan center and the pictographic writing of pre-Columbian Mexican (as well as Mesoamerican) civilizations.

The scenario sketched above is embedded in a larger picture where colonial legacies and current globalizing processes meet, which I introduced in the first part of this essay. The increasing process of economic and technological global integration and some of its consequences (massive migrations) are forcing us to rethink the relationships between (national) languages and territories. The rearticulation of nations, as a result of the global flow of economic integration, is forming a world of connected languaging and shifting identities. As people become polyglots, their sense of history, nationality, and race becomes as entangled as their languaging. Border zones, diaspora, and postcolonial relations are daily phenomena of contemporary life.

How migration modifies languaging is related to its geopolitical direction. While migrations during the nineteenth century moved from Europe toward Africa, Asia, and the Americas, at the end of the twentieth century they proceed in reverse directions. Thus, migratory movements are disarticulating the idea of national languaging and, indirectly, of national literacies and literatures, in Europe as well as in the U.S. On the other hand, the rise of indigenous communities and their participation in the public sphere (such as the recent events in Chiapas, or the cultural politics of the state in Bolivia) complement migratory movements in their challenge to the idea of national languaging and to the one-to-one relation between language and territory. The notion of homogeneous national cultures and the consensual transmission of historical and literary traditions, as well as of unadulterated ethnic communities, are in the process of profound revisions and redefinitions. We need to think seriously about the processes by which languaging and the allocation of meaning to groups of people presumed to have common features (e.g., “ethnic culture,” “national culture,” etc.) are being relocated and how linguistic maps, literary geographies, and cultural landscapes are being repainted.

The current process of globalization is not a new phenomenon, although the way in which it is taking place is without precedent. On a larger scale, globalization at the end of the twentieth century (mainly occurring through transnational corporations, the media, and technology) is the most recent configuration of a process that can be traced back to the 1500s, with the beginning of transatlantic exploration and the consolidation of Western hegemony. Paradoxically, the early modern and early colonial periods (roughly 1500-1700, with the predominance of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires), as well as the modern and colonial periods (roughly 1700-1945, with the predominance of the British Empire and French and German colonialism), were the periods during which the consolidations of national languages took place concurrently with migrations promoted by transatlantic exploration and improved means of transportation. This progress created the conditions necessary to undermine the purity of a language that unified a nation. The construction of the first giant steamer (between 1852 and 1857) made possible transatlantic migrations unimaginable until then. Millions of people migrated from Europe to the Americas between 1860 and 1914, complicating the linguistic colonial map and placing increasing demands on national literary geographies. In Argentina, for example, intellectuals were uneasy at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, when the national and linguistic community was shaken up by massive Italian immigration.⁸ Migrations of people and the internationalization of capitals during the second half of the nineteenth century impinged on the spread of print culture and general education, emphasized by nation builders in both Americas. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, Amerindian legacies were becoming museum relics, more a reality of the past than a critical force of the present. Nahuatl, among others, became a language (i.e., an object) of the past, rather than a languaging activity of millions of people, suppressed by national languag(ing)es.

Migratory factors introduced an element of disorder at the otherwise quiet national horizon of linguistic, literary, and territorial homogeneity. While Arguedas's landscape presents the conflict between languaging practices prior to Spanish colonizing migrations and the introduction of new practices brought by the colonizing migratory movements, Cliff and Anzaldúa draw a map of reverse migration, from colonial territories relabeled Third World (after 1945) toward the First World (Cliff to Europe; Anzaldúa's ancestors to the U.S.). One could say that the cases of Arguedas, on the one hand, and Cliff and Anzaldúa, on the other, are the end of a spectrum whose chronological beginning I locate around 1500. Arguedas experienced the legacies of the linguistic conflict created by migrations from the metropolitan centers to the colonial domains, and the fractures of local languages introduced by colonial ones. For Cliff and Anzaldúa, in contrast, languaging practices fracture the colonial language. In Cliff's texts, these fractures result from the linguistic transformation of imperial languaging practices in colonial domains. In the case of Anzaldúa, such fractures occur due to the languaging practices of two displaced linguistic communities: Nahuatl, displaced by the Spanish expansion, and Spanish, displaced by the increasing hegemony of the colonial languages of the modern period (English, German, and French).

Anzaldúa's observations about the future geographies of languaging practices, are relevant to my argument: “By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more ‘cultured.’ But for a language to remain alive, it must be used. By the end of this century English, not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos” (59). Cherríe Moraga's Last Generation articulates a similar idea: English, not Spanish, will be the languaging practice of Chicano/as and Latino/as.⁹ I am not in a position either to mistrust or to contradict such predictions. I would, however, like to present some doubts based on other experiences. These doubts support the implicit desire (expressed by Anzaldúa and Moraga) not to see happen what they both predict. Anzaldúa's fear, for instance, that English will become the national languaging of Chicano/as and that French will be the foreign languaging of distinction may not look in 1994 as it looked in 1987. I have two reasons to cast such doubts: one is the decreasing number of students taking French at the college level in recent years; the other is the increasing interest in la francophonie, with the changing linguistic maps and literary geographies of French outside France and the growing significance in social and academic discourse of the relationship between language and race. Francophone languaging has as much in common with French languaging in France as Hispanic languaging in the U.S. has with Castilian languaging in Spain: the same languages allow quite different languaging priorities, feelings, and knowledge.

Frantz Fanon articulates the colonial legacies and linguistic politics of French outside France and the complicities between linguistic ideology and race.¹⁰ If nineteenth-century Europe invented the concept of race in order to bridge the gap between a “purity of blood” and a twentieth-century “color of your skin,” the complicity with linguistic ideology has been effortlessly traced. The method of classifying animal species provided the basis for the hypothesis that the “human races” were founded on an inheritance that transcended social evolution.¹¹ At the same time, the new science of linguistics found its inspiration for classifying languages in the method of the biological sciences, associating, by the same token, the supposedly unique character of peoples with the characteristics of their languages. The gaps between Indo-European and Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic) languages were constructed as linguistic oppositions with racial implications. This statement is familiar to those educated in Spanish colonial discourse and the evaluation (with few exceptions) of Amerindian languages. Ernst Renan, for example, talked about the monstrous and backward character of Semitic languages, as opposed to the perfection of European languages, in a way that echoed early Spanish missionaries and men of letters.¹² Today the belief in a hierarchy of human intelligence based on languaging-as-ethnicity is well and alive, even in academic circles.

Fanon's first chapter, an indirect response to Renan, is titled “The Negro and Language.” There he states: “I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man's comprehension of the dimension of the other. For it is implicit that to speak, is to exist absolutely for the other” (17). Fanon's speculations revolve around the black people in the French Antilles with respect to the metropolitan language and, further, with respect to the distinctions, among languages, between those of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans in the Caribbean and those of Antilleans and Senegalese in the context of African diaspora. Colonial mimicry consisted, in the first context, of achieving white status by speaking good French. In the second, Martinicans felt that they were “better” than Guadeloupeans and blacks in the Antilles and “better” than Senegalese, owing to the ways in which they related to the French language. This is why Fanon states at the beginning that “the Black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the White man.” Thus, Anzaldúa's fear that French distinction will prevail over Spanish subalternity in the U.S. may have an interesting turn if we consider the growing force of French out of France (i.e., the so-called Francophonie, although France itself is also a Francophone country), similar to Spanish out of Spain and to English out of England and the U.S. But, in any event, the modern aura of territorial French is being paralleled by Francophone linguistic maps, literary geographies, and cultural landscapes.

From Morocco, Abdelkebir Khatibi rearticulates the early (somewhat dogmatic, although clearly justifiable) positions adopted by Fanon.¹³ Khatibi's concept of “l'amour bilangue,” and his preference for “bilanguage” over “bilingual,” locates him closer to Anzaldúa than to Fanon. To a certain extent, the transculturation of French with Arabic enacted by Khatibi has inscribed in it the silent presence of the early Castilian expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula and the philosophical rearticulation of Arabic and its place in the early modern and colonial periods. By so doing, Khatibi makes an explicit connection between linguistic geographies and not only literary but also philosophical landscapes. His criticism of the social sciences, particularly sociology, could be applied to the disciplinary construction of philosophy in the modern period and to the subsequent suppression of the links between Greek and Arabic metaphysical reflections from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries.

Let me conclude by coming back to diversity of understanding and saying that insofar as linguistic maps are attached not only to literary geographies but also to the production and distribution of knowledge, changing linguistic cartographies imply (implies) a reordering of epistemology. “Serious” knowledge and “serious” literary production have been enacted, since the sixteenth century, in the colonial languages of modernity and their classical foundations (Greek and Latin). Global interconnections are now bringing us back to the relevance of millennial languaging (such as in Chinese, Arabic, Hindu, and Hebrew) relegated to second-class status by the epistemology of European modernity, to a critical examination of the “purity of languages,” and to the relevance of languages suppressed under the banners of the nation (such as Quechua and Aymara in Bolivia and Peru, and Nahuatl and Maya in Mexico and Central America). Thus languages, languaging, and diversity of understanding go hand in hand with subaltern knowledge and with understanding diversity. But this is a topic for another argument, focused on languages and epistemology rather than on languages and the politics of languaging.

Notes

1. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, intro. Bronislaw Malinowski, new intro. Fernando Coronil (1940; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), x.

2. Arguedas, Tupac Amaru Kamaq Taytanchisman/A nuestro padre creador Tupac Amaru (Lima: Salqantay, 1962).

3. With this expression Arguedas refers to his book of poetry, which he calls not poetry (a Greco-Latin derivation) but “Haylli-taki.” In Quechua, hally means “victory, extreme success, triumph,” and taki means “song, chant.” So the expression translates as “victorious or triumphal chant.” I am grateful to Juan Carlos Godenzi and Lydia Fossa for discussing this issue with me.

4. Cliff, The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1985); Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).

5. Luca Citarella, “Problemas de educación y modelos de desarrollo: El caso de los criollos del Caribe,” in Pueblos indios, estados y educación: 46^o Congreso internacional de americanistas, ed. Luis Enrique López and Ruth Moya (Puno: Programa de Educación Bilingüe de Puno; Quito: Proyecto de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural del Ecuador; Lima: Programa de Educación Rural Andina, 1989), 167-88.

6. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

7. Becker, “A Short Essay on Languaging,” in Research and Reflexivity, ed. Frederick Steier (London: Sage, 1991), 230.

8. Roberto Cortéz Conde and Ezequiel Gallo, La formación de la Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1987).

9. Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End, 1993).

10. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 17.

11. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

12. Renan, Histoire générale et systèmes comparés des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1863).

13. Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).