Stop, Look, and Listen #17
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
Content warning: Murder; Genocide.
Multilingual environments
Globalisation and large-scale migration are often described as having made contemporary societies far more multilingual than ever before. Yet this notion was sharply challenged by the publication last year of the edited collection Multilingualism and History, whose chapters provide case studies into multilingual societies dating back to antiquity. Ukrainian-American linguist Aneta Pavlenko, who edited the book, recently spoke about its findings on the Languages on the Move podcast, on the
, with host Ingrid Piller.Pavlenko argued that this misconception was an outcome of the fragmentation of the academic field of language study. At the same time, she warned against also perpetuating a myth of benign cosmopolitanism in historical multilingual spaces, when language usage was really shaped by hierarchy, violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. In such contexts, monolingualism has often arisen from a position of privilege, accompanied in the recent past by the rise of linguistic nationalism and language suppression.
Language inequality is also the subject of a Guardian Long Read by Ross Perlin. He highlighted the existence of a large number of languages with relatively small pools of speakers, in contrast to a handful spoken by vast numbers globally, such as English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Perlin outlined the power structures underpinning which languages are spoken widely and which are not. Linguists have only relatively recently recognised the need to study and protect minority languages, rather than dealing with abstract workings of language as whole. Perlin stressed the need for them to work with speakers of minority languages, who can suffer substantial harms when they can no longer express themselves in them.
One example of English’s ubiquity comes from the Nordic countries, as debated on an episode of the New Nordic Lexicon podcast, hosted by students at Aarhus University in Denmark. They spoke extensively with linguist Elizabeth Peterson in particular, who highlighted the multiple forms that exist of English as a language, and the danger of reinforcing the colonial hierarchies underpinning relations between them by privileging some forms over others in Nordic societies. Peterson also argued that the continuing dominance of Nordic languages in those countries means there is no need for them to be protected from English by government policies, in contrast to countries such as Ireland, where indigenous languages have genuinely been displaced.
Hearing and sounding out languages
Staying on the topic of linguistics, the lingering oracy of many languages was the topic of a wide-ranging discussion between hosts
and on the Lingthusiasm podcast. They spoke of how oral cultures are inherently performative and dynamic but also incredibly durable, and that their stories they bear lack a sole creator, despite the subsequent mythologisation of certain figures like Homer or Aesop. McCulloch and Gawne contrasted this with how literacy has sought to fix as definitive particular versions of stories that lacked a single original version, as well as noting the continuing oral dimensions of many literary forms, such as poetry.Oral poetic traditions have played a key role in the politics of Somaliland, as
has written about in NOĒMA. Poetry there has provided a medium for expressing sentiments – sometimes abstractly, sometimes directly – that would simply not be permissible in other contexts, helping to mobilise dissidence that eventually culminated in the downfall of the autocratic Somalian leader Mohamed Siad Barre in the 1980s, and the subsequent establishment of an autonomous quasi-state in the breakaway Somaliland region. Somaliland’s poetry has tended to take an open, oral, and dialogic form, but its recent history intersects heavily with that of technological advancements: from being broadcast on early Somali radio; through the efforts of the new Somaliland government to record and archive it in the early 1990s; to the use of social media in circulating poetry now.The innovative use of language novel to challenge state repression was also addressed in an episode of Eurasian Knot. Hosts Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova welcomed historian Nicholas Bujalski onto the podcast to talk about political prisoners in nineteenth-century Russia and their secret ‘knocking language’. This was a highly advanced and longstanding prison knocking code, first introduced by the Decemberists, to breach the forced silence and isolation of incarceration, and that later spread to the outskirts of the Russian Empire and beyond. Bujalski connected its ermegr to the incorporation of the experience of imprisonment into a coherent narrative of revolutionary life, and the establishment of the political prisoner as a key symbolic figure for dissident movements to rally around.
The killing of Alexey Navalny
The issue of political prisoners in Russia and their mistreatment is an unfortunately pertinent one. Earlier this month, dissident politician Alexey Navalny died in suspicious circumstances, aged 47, in his cell in a Siberian penal colony, having previously survived an attempted poisoning by the Federal Security Service. The aforementioned episode of Eurasian Knot began with a statement paying tribute to him.
A number of thoughtful pieces have been written since news emerged of Navalny’s death about his political journey, his importance as an oppositional figure in Russia, and the significance of his passing. Historian Tony Wood wrote for the London Review of Books Blog of his bravery in returning to Russia in 2021 to face almost certain persecution and indeed his end, as well as the way he galvanised resistance to the Putin regime and highlighted its corruption. Russian political theorist and activist Ilya Budraitskis reflected in Jacobin on how Navalny mobilised support using even the chimera of electoral democracy, and the lessons the left could learn from him about the necessity of freedom of speech and assembly in fighting for social justice. Both also discussed his ideological trajectory from liberalism through anti-immigrant nationalism and neoliberalism to a more social justice-focused liberalism.
, meanwhile, wrote in his Unpopular Front newsletter about Navalny’s ‘ordinary heroism’: the way his unassuming manner offered a starkly different public model of masculinity to Putin, and his admirable refusal to take Putin’s regime seriously, but also his lack of either cynicism or credulity. Ganz argued that the Russian government’s motivations for killing Navalny may partly have arisen from its own weaknesses, and Putin’s reliance on the toolkit of the secret policeman, but also its desire to ensure the wider population’s demobilisation and apathy by highlighting the risks of challenging the status quo.Western complicity in Gaza
With an estimated 30,000 people having been killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza since last October, Western states have collectively failed to rein in their ally, even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled it plausible last month that its conduct in the conflict could amount to genocide. Moreover, following claims made by Israel that some members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees participated in the Hamas attacks in Southern Israel on 7 October, the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Canada all suspended funding to the agency.
Yet political theorist Adrian Kreutz has argued in a piece for OpionioJuris that this course of action carries some risk of those states being found guilty of complicity in, or of even aiding and abetting, genocide, in light of the ICJ ruling. This is because the collapse of funding for UNRWA would likely lead to severe famine conditions in Gaza, and there exists already the precedent set by the European Parliament in defining the Holodomor – the death of millions of Ukrainians from starvation in 1932 and 1933 as a result of Soviet policies – as an act of genocide.
Meanwhile, in an article for Just Security, International Crisis Group senior advisor Brian Finucane has written on the unhelpful ambiguity of the US as to the applicability in Gaza and the West Bank of the Fourth Geneva Convention. This holds that states are required to protect civilians in territories they occupy, including not replacing the existing population with its own citizens. Finucane notes that the US had long held the position that Israel was an occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank. It subsequently took a more cautious stance after the 1993 Oslo Accords, due to the complex governance situation that ensued in those territories, and its desire not to alienate Israel as it pursued two-state solution, but only really shifted to rejecting the applicability of the convention under Trump. Finucane argues that the Biden administration has a responsibility to state unequivocally whether it believes the convention does apply in Gaza and the West Bank, and to be more rigorous in ensuring it is implemented.
The US government continues to assert its commitment to a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine. Yet as
and have written in an article for Foreign Affairs, it is wishful thinking to assume that a two-state or even a just one-state solution might be viable after the Gaza conflict is over, given the entrenchment of the far right and marginalisation of pro-Palestinian sentiments in Israeli politics and society, and the Israeli government’s continued undermining of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Rather, they argue that the US neds to instead pursue a policy of applying the same red lines in the case of Israel as it does elsewhere, including trying to enforce the ICJ intermediate ruling, and making military aid to Israel conditional on it not breaching human rights.If you want to support my work, please consider becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. A paid subscription is, at time of writing, available at a standard rate of just £3.50 per month, or £35 for a full year. Paid subscribers receive additional posts in regular series, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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