Into the Dragon’s Mouth: The precarity of language work
Hang Tuah—also
known as Laksamana, after the brother of king Rama in the Ramayana--
is the hero of a classical Malay work, the Hikayat Hang Tuah. He is
generally invoked mainly for his courage as a warrior, skilled in the
art of silat (martial arts) and the embodiment of loyalty to
the Malay king and nation. I argue, however, that his is a story
about the central importance of negotiating the lingustically diverse
world of the 16th-17th centuries, at the height
of the flowering of trade and knowledge, at that shimmering moment
when the Ferenggi—the European foreigners—have yet to establish a
strong foothold in Asia. It is the story of the dangerous but
necessary quest for knowledge: a quest upon which we all as teachers
and as students are embarked.
Hang Tuah is sent by
the king of Malacca to explore the stretch of significant space from
Constantinople in the west to India and eastwards to China, south to
Java. On several occasions he acts as an emissary not only from the
Malay world but also to represent the South Asian kingdom of
Nagapatam. Everywhere he goes, he takes time to find a native
speaker to teach him the local language and customs.1
His linguistic explorations are often fraught with danger.
Acquiring and practicing foreign languages are thus the finest form
of silat, for which the prize is not wealth but knowledge.
The following is a brief excerpt from one of the most important
episodes in Hang Tuah’s travels, the mission to gaze upon the
hidden face of the emperor of China.
Hang Tuah’s
knowledge of the language and customs of China endear him to the
royals, and even the emperor has heard about them and expresses his
desire to see how these foreign visiters eat. Hang Tuah’s
situation is placed in stark contrast to the Feringgi who remain
stuck in the harbour and can’t even approach the palace. The
story continues: “Yet after many attempts, Laksamana is still
unable to see the emperor, hidden in the mouth of a golden dragon.
The emperor invites Laksamana to a banquet. “At that banquest I
shall finally gaze upon the emperor of China,”Hang Tuah declares.
To the four ministers of empire he says,. “If you wish to offer
dinner to these Tamil people, they eat neither fish nor flesh. All
of them eat only vegetables, which are to be cooked. However, they
should not be sliced up but must be left whole and long.”
As the emperor
approaches, a loud fanfare of instruments is raised, a sign of the
imperial entrance. And so all 12 thousand royals clasp their arms
and bow down in silence. The emperor emerges, carried within the
mouth of the golden dragon. The four ministers kneel down and
prostrate themselves before the emperor, who speaks, “O ministers
four, protect the people, protect our customs.” And the ministers
reply, “As you will, lord.” The emperor speaks again, “O
ministers four, where is the emissary from India? Serve them food.”
And so the food is
brought in before Laksamana. In Malay and Indian style, he washes
his hands and begins to eat, and all the Malays and Indians also eat
two or three mouthfuls. But Laksamana then picks up a pair of golden
chopsticks, to show that he knows the Chinese custom; with the
chopsticks he grasps a length of kangkung (water cabbage) and raises
the long vegetable up to the height of his forehead, to put it into
his mouth. As he does so, he raises his face and looks straight into
the mouth of the dragon to see the face of the Emperor of China. The
golden dragon has scales made from nine types of gemstones, and
inside its open mouth the emperor is seated on a jewelled throne with
curtains of pearl. He is like the flame in a lamp: a sight as
brilliant as the full moon.
When the royals and
the ministers see that Laksamana has laid eyes upon the emperor, they
rush towards him with drawn swords. But the emperor says, “Do not
cut off his head; he is a wise man.”
It is knowledge of
languages that leads Hang Tuah into extreme danger but at the same
time leads him into a higher level of knowledge. Language work often
involves dancing in this kind of precarity.
Let us now bring
Hang Tuah’s glorious trickery into the 21st century, for
which I would like to use a passage from “The University and the
Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, a
text on the precarious nature of the labour of teaching:
“The subversive
intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of
love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university
needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of
all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground the
downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the
Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the
work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still
strong. ” This 21st century tale of the search for
knowledge continues by raising a question: “What is that work and
what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and
producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be
performing the work of the university…. But it is useful to invoke
this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters,
to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters.” (“The
University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and
Stefano Harney, In Social Text 79, Vo. 22, No.2, Summer 2004.
)
Ask instructors of language what they think of their work and most
will let you know without hesitation that they love teaching
language. They feel that it is the most important way not just to
learn a culture but to learn to live it: its rhythms, its
intonations, its postures, its memories, its feelings. It's not just
how one learns to say "I am afraid" or "I love you"
in a new language but also how to feel afraid and how to love in that
new place. Learning a new language is almost like learning to live in
a different body: at first the slightest movements are jerky as your
body resists this alien thing that's taking you over. No, you don't
learn to master a language -- you let it to master you.
But we're still with our composite language instructors who have just told us how they love teaching--even at the generally mean wages language teaching offers. A deep breath or so later that expression of love--even dedication to the profession-- almost invariably turns to the concerns and worries that frame the work language teachers do; for precarity has become the sign under which this labor, this area of teaching--this profession-- which forms much of the bedrock of the humanities and gives meaning to the claim to universality.
Over the decades, language teaching has undergone a remarkable devaluation at the university, at the same time that the need for more foreign language specialists has grown. Few tenured or tenure track faculty teach language, and when they do it is normally at the advanced level in graduate seminars engaging with "difficult" texts. There is an strong message emanating from both budgetary decisions and hiring choices that language teaching is not a properly "scholarly" pursuit: it does not involve research (no?), one or another theoretical apparatus (no?), or critical perspective (really, no?). Language teaching is thus constructed as the "applied" part of a field: a practice rather than a theory-informed praxis; a work of reproduction rather than scholarly production. In many departments, language instructors--only a very select few of whom make it to "security of employment" through a vetting process that used to be called "the eye of the needle"--are women, and minority men and women. The overwhelming majority are contingent labor whose careers and lives are subject to the arrhythmics of boom and bust capitalism and national/global security considerations. In the case of language work “foreign” is a term of entanglement that may run in different, deeply chiastic directions. The closer the sense of threat, the more cultural and linguistic distance and difference is emphasized in post 9/11 biopolitics.
As is the case with much reproductive labor, adjunct language teaching helps ensure that various branches of the humanities (in addition to social and political sciences, legal studies, economics, business, environmental studies, health and bio-sciences, etc.) keep up with global developments and enable field and archival work. Indeed, this work rendered invisible and mute offers even more than that: If a language instructor teaching one class of a vital "under-represented" language is paid one third of a semester's pay and gets no benefits, that instructor (or her/his family) might actually be offering a form of hidden subsidy to the university, that isn't liable for the full cost of this reproductive work. There isn't that much distance in form between this type of subsidy and the covert subsidies from workers and their families that make the commodities we buy "cheap."
But we're still with our composite language instructors who have just told us how they love teaching--even at the generally mean wages language teaching offers. A deep breath or so later that expression of love--even dedication to the profession-- almost invariably turns to the concerns and worries that frame the work language teachers do; for precarity has become the sign under which this labor, this area of teaching--this profession-- which forms much of the bedrock of the humanities and gives meaning to the claim to universality.
Over the decades, language teaching has undergone a remarkable devaluation at the university, at the same time that the need for more foreign language specialists has grown. Few tenured or tenure track faculty teach language, and when they do it is normally at the advanced level in graduate seminars engaging with "difficult" texts. There is an strong message emanating from both budgetary decisions and hiring choices that language teaching is not a properly "scholarly" pursuit: it does not involve research (no?), one or another theoretical apparatus (no?), or critical perspective (really, no?). Language teaching is thus constructed as the "applied" part of a field: a practice rather than a theory-informed praxis; a work of reproduction rather than scholarly production. In many departments, language instructors--only a very select few of whom make it to "security of employment" through a vetting process that used to be called "the eye of the needle"--are women, and minority men and women. The overwhelming majority are contingent labor whose careers and lives are subject to the arrhythmics of boom and bust capitalism and national/global security considerations. In the case of language work “foreign” is a term of entanglement that may run in different, deeply chiastic directions. The closer the sense of threat, the more cultural and linguistic distance and difference is emphasized in post 9/11 biopolitics.
As is the case with much reproductive labor, adjunct language teaching helps ensure that various branches of the humanities (in addition to social and political sciences, legal studies, economics, business, environmental studies, health and bio-sciences, etc.) keep up with global developments and enable field and archival work. Indeed, this work rendered invisible and mute offers even more than that: If a language instructor teaching one class of a vital "under-represented" language is paid one third of a semester's pay and gets no benefits, that instructor (or her/his family) might actually be offering a form of hidden subsidy to the university, that isn't liable for the full cost of this reproductive work. There isn't that much distance in form between this type of subsidy and the covert subsidies from workers and their families that make the commodities we buy "cheap."
"Lecturers /
adjunct professors play an essential role in the teaching needs of a
university. However, the salaries paid to adjuncts are not adequate
to meet the basic needs of an individual (I know from experience as a
UC instructor). There is a big push right now in the academic
community to properly respect the contribution of adjuncts by
appropriately monetarily valuing their contribution. I think that
designating certain faculty as teaching oriented and having
appropriate benchmarks would vastly improve the education that we
provide. Not all faculty should be research faculty and not being
research faculty should not mean that we devalue them!" -
Patrick, UC Lecturer
This comment was
posted in response to the discussion at the California
Education Leaders Forum on February 1, 2013. Audio
from the Forum is available at the link above.
http://ucaft.org/category/unit/lecturers
In some departments,
an informal but telling distinction is made between lecturers who
teach language and lecturers who teach “content.” Many of the
“content lecturers” have Ph.Ds, while many language lecturers
have M.As, and almost all are “native speakers.” [this is perhaps
one of the few remaining niches of acceptability for the word
“native” applied to humans].
Since “foreign language” acquisition has gained recognition as an important tool in the global economy and security-related sectors, schools such as business or public health which usually do not themselves engage in language teaching may decide to set up ] language courses designed to fulfill a specified need (“business”; “medical", “legal”), especially when departments that have a traditional claim to teaching languages do not offer (or refuse to offer) this “service.” Foreign language departments (or area studies departments) may well find themselves in the problematic position of wishing to claim the labor of language teaching for themselves whilst ignoring the servitude inherent in the work they have relegated to the departmental galleys.
At a February 2014 colloquium organized by the Berkeley Language Center, Claire Kramsch and Lihua Zhang presented an eye-opening study of native language instructors in the University of California syste,. Titled "The legitimacy gap: Native language teachers in an era of globalization" (to be released on the Berkeley Language Center's website March 31st, 2014), the study shows that most native language instructors are women, most have graduate degrees, and the overwhelming majority know more than two languages. The study further indicates that the demands of globalization introduce a new kind of precarity to the subject positions of native language instructors whose legitimacy is no longer derived primarily from their status as "native speaker" of a single language, but rather from the very vulnerabilities of their "translingual/transcultural" positions as they negotiate the complex language, cultural, and even political boundaries they frequently cross in the classrooms, in their working and living habitus, in memory and affect. This makes them truly global citizens. Ironically, given the global aspirations of the UC system, this intimate knowledge of both opportunities and vulnerabilities of globalization has yet to be recognized and rewarded by the institution that the bearers of this knowledge. Could it be that this multilingual, translingual entails a rejection of the limits imposed on the idea of nation-state by imperial spatialization and current security regimes? A disarticulated insurgency against disciplinary singularity? As Moten and Harney remind us, who are ensconced in the negligence of the profession: "Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings" (101-2).
Much language teaching relies heavily on the labor of those who have acquired native speaker fluency, -- this presents an interest twist: where Moten and Harney – the authors of the second narrative—say that adjunct instructors cannot reproduce themselves. In the case of language teaching however, since universities no longer invest seriously in advanced language teaching, language teachers must reproduce themselves.
Since “foreign language” acquisition has gained recognition as an important tool in the global economy and security-related sectors, schools such as business or public health which usually do not themselves engage in language teaching may decide to set up ] language courses designed to fulfill a specified need (“business”; “medical", “legal”), especially when departments that have a traditional claim to teaching languages do not offer (or refuse to offer) this “service.” Foreign language departments (or area studies departments) may well find themselves in the problematic position of wishing to claim the labor of language teaching for themselves whilst ignoring the servitude inherent in the work they have relegated to the departmental galleys.
At a February 2014 colloquium organized by the Berkeley Language Center, Claire Kramsch and Lihua Zhang presented an eye-opening study of native language instructors in the University of California syste,. Titled "The legitimacy gap: Native language teachers in an era of globalization" (to be released on the Berkeley Language Center's website March 31st, 2014), the study shows that most native language instructors are women, most have graduate degrees, and the overwhelming majority know more than two languages. The study further indicates that the demands of globalization introduce a new kind of precarity to the subject positions of native language instructors whose legitimacy is no longer derived primarily from their status as "native speaker" of a single language, but rather from the very vulnerabilities of their "translingual/transcultural" positions as they negotiate the complex language, cultural, and even political boundaries they frequently cross in the classrooms, in their working and living habitus, in memory and affect. This makes them truly global citizens. Ironically, given the global aspirations of the UC system, this intimate knowledge of both opportunities and vulnerabilities of globalization has yet to be recognized and rewarded by the institution that the bearers of this knowledge. Could it be that this multilingual, translingual entails a rejection of the limits imposed on the idea of nation-state by imperial spatialization and current security regimes? A disarticulated insurgency against disciplinary singularity? As Moten and Harney remind us, who are ensconced in the negligence of the profession: "Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings" (101-2).
Much language teaching relies heavily on the labor of those who have acquired native speaker fluency, -- this presents an interest twist: where Moten and Harney – the authors of the second narrative—say that adjunct instructors cannot reproduce themselves. In the case of language teaching however, since universities no longer invest seriously in advanced language teaching, language teachers must reproduce themselves.
Translation as a
dimension that is folded into language teaching.
Translation used to
be a major part of the work of knowledge production and circulation.
Today, the work of translation--like language teaching--is devalued
within the university (although outside--especially in security
circles--translation , whether written or oral/simultaneous, is
considered essential, though it is possibly not very highly regarded
either.)
There was a time, after the fall of Byzantium, when Arab translations of Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi thought and knowledge enabled a worlding of the knowledge that Byzantium had eschewed for its pagan roots. In Andalusia, the work of translators--Muslim, Jewish, Christian--made Europe open and flexible: a shifting, concept until reconquista and expulsions turned borders into policed barriers and fixed a white, Christian, masculinist identity poised to wrest control of world markets and labor.
Those who work between languages always put themselves at risk: politically, ethically, creatively. We must constantly attend to the deep games played at different levels.
There was a time, after the fall of Byzantium, when Arab translations of Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi thought and knowledge enabled a worlding of the knowledge that Byzantium had eschewed for its pagan roots. In Andalusia, the work of translators--Muslim, Jewish, Christian--made Europe open and flexible: a shifting, concept until reconquista and expulsions turned borders into policed barriers and fixed a white, Christian, masculinist identity poised to wrest control of world markets and labor.
Those who work between languages always put themselves at risk: politically, ethically, creatively. We must constantly attend to the deep games played at different levels.
In the age of orientalist scholarship, language work was the work of the humanities did: translating (and transcribing) ancient, obscure texts to make them legible, literally, figuratively, and politically. language work also involved teaching languages, generally serving the practical needs of colonial regimes of subjugation and exploitation.
A good example of
the deep politics of language teaching is a Javanese language manual,
published in the early twentieth century at Leiden, intended to teach
Dutch people conversational skills.. Covering areas of linguistic
engagement from the marketplace to the plantations, criminal
investigations, the courts of law and points in-between, the
conversations provide an acute representation of the guilty
entanglement of language work with colonial constructions of
difference and deep biopower, training the Dutch to occupy a superior
language position and the natives to assume linguistic and
politically subservience. Samples of conversations:
Master: “Overseer,
where is Ali? Why is that coolie not working today? "
Servant: "Forgiveness your humble slave begs of thee, great master, illness has betaken Ali."
Master: "Go to the market and get someone to replace him,
[damn you to hell].”
Servant: "Forgiveness your humble slave begs of thee, great master, illness has betaken Ali."
Master: "Go to the market and get someone to replace him,
[damn you to hell].”
This last, ‘damn
you to hell” was not in the conversation; nor was it translated in
the manual. It did get translated into the languages of the colonies:
GODVERDOMME (Dutch--usually in a loud voice, thus the caps), became
“perdom”, whispered in Malay, in Javanese, in Sundanese, and came
to mean “the master is angry”. Thus whispered, it spread fear but
also generated a kind of contempt for the red-faced “Tuan”
("Master" -- another misappropriation through translation)
and his unbridled emotions and unrestrained power.
European woman is interpellated into this lingua-racial superiority at the same time that the subject position as housewife is cemented into colonial society, in the colonies and the motherland. Most of the women who accompanied their husbands to the Indies were not of high social status in their hometowns; their transition to the East, however, put them in charge of native servants occupying a variety of subservient positions. Conversations in the manual explicitly train Dutch housewives to speak as superiors (addressing the Javanese in "ngoko", the low register), and to learn to hear the servant address them in the exalted vocabulary of the "high" ("krama") register:
European woman is interpellated into this lingua-racial superiority at the same time that the subject position as housewife is cemented into colonial society, in the colonies and the motherland. Most of the women who accompanied their husbands to the Indies were not of high social status in their hometowns; their transition to the East, however, put them in charge of native servants occupying a variety of subservient positions. Conversations in the manual explicitly train Dutch housewives to speak as superiors (addressing the Javanese in "ngoko", the low register), and to learn to hear the servant address them in the exalted vocabulary of the "high" ("krama") register:
Mistress: "Hey
Djaja, the tables and chairs are a mess; you didn’t clean
them."
Servant: "Begging thy pardon great mistress; thy humble servant wiped them the day before."
Mistress: "Clean them again."
Servant: "Begging thy pardon great mistress; thy humble servant wiped them the day before."
Mistress: "Clean them again."
Such exercises in
Javanese conversation are language lessons on the surface only;
underneath, they translate what the West had identified as a
peculiarly Javanese language hierarchy into Dutch thought, action,
policy and law. Fashioning the Other as the transparent subject of
domestication is but part of the solipsistic nature of language work
in its colonial (and postcolonial) form. We might assume that Dutch
wives did not address their Dutch husbands in Javanese, but we might
wonder whether asymmetric language usage translated into marital and
sexual relations as well. Language work carries contamination in
whichever direction it goes.
These conversations
clearly sprang from the position of power and looked upon the other
language as inferior. Do the remnants of these hierarchies remain?
Does teaching language then require a consciousness of position
within a particular hierarchy? Or, in the end, will linguistic
diversity be represented in the global world by “englishes”:
hinglish, singlish, chinglish, etc….? What will that mean?
As you can see, this
leads to ever expanding circles of questions.
What is clear today
is that when language work is reduced to a "service," with
language instrumentalized, stripped of heteroglossia, in order to
make the Other penetrable, the institution does not need to invest
directly in the reproduction of instructors with native language
skills; it simply engages in a hidden and guilty outsourcing.
1
In the traditional Malay language, “bahasa” does not mean only
language but also customs and accepted behaviour. And the mark of a
civilized person is that he or she be well-spoken. “
