Critical Connections: Nationalism, Citizenship, and Cultural Appropriation

The “migrant caravan” of Central American refugees and asylum-seekers headed north through Mexico toward the southern border of the United States has become a focus of electioneering rhetoric, national security discourse, and humanitarian concern.

Some have suggested, without concrete proof, that this caravan of indigenous people and native Spanish-speakers heading northward has been infiltrated by presumably ill-intentioned people “of Middle-Eastern descent,” something that, they believe, would make this migration especially alarming.  Others argue that these likely asylum-seekers intend to enter the United States “illegally” (though there are legal avenues in place for migrant refugees seeking asylum).

I think it’s fair to say that some portion of this concern is fueled by nativism – not simply “nationalism,” a concern for the territorial and political integrity of the nation-state, but “ethno-nationalism,” an insistence that America as a nation is and must remain a white man’s country that cannot and must not absorb those deemed to be cultural or ethnic “others.”

I would like to draw a critical connection between this fraught political moment and two new works of historical scholarship that address questions of nationalism, citizenship, and/or cultural appropriation.

An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States, by Rosina Lozano (University of California Press, 2018)

Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, by Siraj Ahmed (Stanford University Press, 2018)

Rosina  Lozano’s An American Languageprovides the fascinating history that follows froman oft-taught fact of American territorial expansion in the 19^thcentury:  the United States victory in its war against Mexico in 1848 incorporated new southwestern territories and created by law in one fell swoop a large new group of American citizens who spoke, legislated, and governed in Spanish.

Lozano examines the fraught history of Spanish as the de facto language of governance and politicsin three major areas, among three major populations:  the tejanosof Texas, the californios of California, and the nuevomexicanosof New Mexico, which at the time of the conflict included much of West Texas as well as what is now the state of Arizona. These “treaty citizens,” as Lozano terms them, brought with them a long history of administrative record-keeping, government communication, and daily business conducted in Spanish, the lingua franca of the southwest.

While the tejanos andcalifornioswere not a state-wide majority in government at the time of annexation / admission to the Union, some government business was conducted in Spanish. In the case of the nuevomexicanos, Spanish-speaking residents of the New Mexico territory, who were designated as American citizens by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, almost all local and territorial office-holders were Spanish-speakers and continued to conduct the business of the territory in Spanish, to legislate in Spanish, and to conduct political campaigns in Spanish.  When New Mexico and Arizona were admitted to statehood, all office-holders were required to be able to speak English.  But English was not made the “official language” of either of those states, and the states’ history and governance long reflected, and still reflect, the herencia hispanohablanteof its people.

There is nothing “foreign” about the Spanish language in the United States compared to other European languages.  Spanish was the first European language of documentations, administration and governance anywhere on the continent; the oldest still-inhabited city founded by European colonizers is St. Augustine, Florida, and some of the youngest states to enter the Union in the 20^thcentury became fully American while retaining full and frequent use of Spanish.  Indeed, the political and legal world of Arizona and New Mexico was often fully and fluently bilingual.  English was not simply imposed upon these “treaty citizens,” but grew among them while Spanish continued to flourish, and the relationship between the two languages remained fraught and contested throughout the 20^thcentury.

In the United States, whatever “old world” languages we may speak, se habla español, first and still.

Imposing the language of empire, whether Spanish or English, on a colonized population was one way to conquer, control, and channel native wealth – including a wealth of knowledge – to imperial ends.  Mastering the “native language” was another route to dominance and wealth.

In Archaeology of Babel, Siraj Ahmed pushes back against the call to a “return to philology” – a call emanating even from postcolonial studies scholars.  Instead, Ahmed illuminates the connection between philology and colonialism, arguing that the privileging of certain written versions of Muslim and Hindu law and lore as the“standard” texts that defined for Europeans a proto-canon of “world literature” was an act of conquest and control. The development of philology as a discipline depended on the work of colonizers/scholars connected with the East India Company, and their work, while shaping what Europeans could know about the people they were subjugating, also froze the dynamic and discursive function of those multiplicitous written traditions within colonized cultures.

Ahmed argues that the Western scholarly “mastery” of legal traditions, including Shari’a, translating and defining those traditions, ended up allowing Western administrators and plunderers of wealth and knowledge to define and delimit the possibilities for plundered cultures to speak back to European presence and influence.  The philological study of the Persian, Hindu, and Arabic texts, which turned them into a “literature” conforming to broader expectations of the emergent discipline, and into manifestations of a single “Indo-European” linguistic tradition, drained them of their particular political power.  This was not an unfortunate side-effect, but a central function, of colonialism.  Only by reading texts “antiphilologically,” Ahmed concludes – that is, by reading them “unhistorically,” as living messengers to living men and women – can scholars overcome the colonialist project of academic philology.

For a class in the history of literature or the history of the humanities, Ahmed’s book would pair very well with James C. Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities.  Indeed, it would be fair to say that they are diametrically opposed scholarly projects, which could make for a riveting class discussion.