Politics of Language: Privilege vs. Access

Dear All,

We ended last night's class on the notion that what our critical race theorists were promoting as "double-voicedness" (what we also know as heteroglossia) comes with representational risks. Just as genres and textual practices are not completely free of engendered, racialized, and/or encultured assumptions (or ideologies), neither is our ability to use language completely innocent when we try to speak on behalf of those we think need to be spoken for.

I didn't necessarily plan it this way, but much of what we've read these past couple of weeks has led us to talk about how to make room for difference in developing an epistemology for writing. As a result, it seems like some interesting research questions have come out of every class discussion:

• (How) Is it possible to make the unknowable known? What's the concept we'd have to question or abandon or break in order to do so?
• (How) Is identification learned?
• Who can resist, and what kind of authority does writing resistance require? (Would there ever be good reasons not to resist?)
• What does/could it look like when a discourse doesn't include you? What does it mean if there is no paradigm to account for you?

As we move into the next couple of weeks, I'll encourage us to carry these realizations from literacy activism along -- just to see how they get complicated or transformed. Next week, we'll venture into politics of "language," where language is discussed in terms of privilege and access; in fact, language may be presented by these theorists as more of a liminal space than a set of credentials or identifiers. I'm hoping we'll be equally troubled and intrigued by this notion of language as liminality.

We'll be reading 

• James Baldwin's "Black English" essay in its entirety
• and we'll excerpt Adam Banks's "Oakland, The Word, and the Divide" (pp. 827-29, 856-66), although you are always free and encouraged to read the whole essay. By raising more questions than answers, Banks asks us to think about digital divides in terms of access and identification, and he complicates "access" as a concept.

I've also asked you to view 

• "Shit+/Awk/Frag/Huh?" (Part One and Part Two)

This was a project developed by faculty and students in the department of English at Cal State Fresno, and it was intended to provide "an empirical look at a writing program's commenting practices." The video was first presented at the 2009 Conference of College Composition and Communication in San Francisco, CA, pretty much to a standing-room only audience. There are many reasons why. The faculty mentor on this project is a great teacher and very affable guy; the topic is provocative and interesting; and the video is accessible and fun. But I think the project developers were doing more than just promoting a quick, off-the-cuff response about whether certain practices are "good" or "bad," making fun or pushing popular opinion. In fact, they would probably say that all empirical data should be read with caution, including theirs, since statistics are "dumb" on their own -- they need to be given context.

We'll talk more next week, and I'll offer up our inclusive topics, but I won't introduce any new terms right away. I think our glossary is quite full at the moment!

Prepare fervently and well for the midterm! See you next week,

-Prof. Graban