Race language and culture pdf

Barry, Brian. Google Scholar. Benhabib, Seyla. Bloemraad, Irene. Blum, Lawrence A. Buchanan, Allen. Carens, Joseph H.

Cohen, Joshua. Eisgruber, Christopher L. Elster, Jon. Fetzer, Joel S. Christopher Soper. Ford, Richard T. Frank, Thomas. Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. Gooding-Williams, Robert. Gutmann, Amy. Haslanger, Sally. Hattam, Victoria. Hollinger, David. Kronman, Anthony T. Kymlicka, Will. Levy, Jacob T. The language he speaks is English, according to his nationality, he is a citizen of the United Kingdom and the main governing body of the Catholic Church resides in Rome.

The influence of these colonial nets on Stephen consequently explains why he is unable to form a clear understanding of the Irish culture and why he cannot be of aesthetic service to Ireland if does not leave the country. The entanglement of the Irish people in the nets that have been cast by the external institutions governing the country have made them regard themselves from an external perspective.

Such a British perspective on the death of Gladstone being evoked by an Irish ensemble thus indicates how the Irish have adopted an external perspective of looking at their own situation. In order to regain the capability of observing his own culture from an undistorted perspective Stephen will thus need to escape the nets that force an external perspective on him and his country, so that he may thereby forge the uncreated conscience of his race.

Moving to another part of the United Kingdom is therefore not an option as this would still not allow him to escape the British frame of reference. Paris thus becomes a logical destination as it is a city with a thriving artistic scene that is as close to the Irish situation he aims to describe in his art as possible while still being located outside of the UK.

By thus answering the questions of where Stephen emigrates to and why he does so, we have learned that he has emigrated to France in order to free himself from the nets of colonialism that are flung upon Irish souls like his. The next chapter will build on this idea to suggest that reading Stephen as a colonial subject allows for an examination of the problems of language that emerge from the complex Anglo-Irish history in the Ireland of A Portrait.

It will furthermore explore how these problems have influenced cultural development in Ireland and suggest that this novel, when regarded from such a perspective, offers an interesting view on modern-day attitudes towards Irish culture.

In more recent criticism, Caitlin McIntyre has drawn on this idea of Joyce as a colonial writer to suggest an environmental way of reading his work,7 and Jacob Bender has employed the idea of a postcolonial Joyce in a comparison with Jorge Luis Borges.

Expanding on this idea, I will approach that same political and historical context in A Portrait from a different angle, proposing that by regarding Stephen Dedalus as a colonial subject instead of regarding James Joyce as a colonial writer, a new perspective emerges on the evolution of culture in the complex historical situation that is twentieth-century Ireland. This approach will demonstrate how the historical development of Anglo-Irish relations has 7 McIntyre, Caitlin.

As John M. In addressing this strand of thinking, I aim to show the complexity of the historical background underlying the Ireland of A Portrait, thereby pointing out that caution must be observed when thinking about Stephen Dedalus as a colonial subject.

Firstly, we must consider at what moment in time the novel is set. Although Joyce never explicitly mentions this, he has left enough clues to designate an accurate timeframe. One of these is the fact that A Portrait mentions the recent death of Charles Stewart Parnell when Stephen is still a little boy at Clongowes Portrait This hero of Irish independence died in We also know that the narrative of A Portrait takes place before because the events of Ulysses unfold at 16 June of that year Ulysses This means that all events before are in some way significant to the history that underlies the Ireland of A Portrait.

And when this history is considered with a focus on Anglo-Irish relations, as is the main interest of this dissertation, several periods can be distinguished in Irish history up until the timeframe of A Portrait that will indicate a growing complexity in the relationship between Ireland and Britain. This is the period in which the English monarchs and finally Oliver Cromwell sought to achieve control of the Hibernian Isles through invasion, diplomacy, and the quenching of many a rebellion.

But even though this era is characterized by violent conflict between the two countries, I must agree with Stephen Ellis that in in this phase of history the relationship between England and Ireland was not much different than that between any two other warring European kingdoms at the time.

However, the argument that Ireland does not have a colonial history and that natural state-forming completely explains the English presence in Ireland must be dismissed, as will be shown in the second period. This second period ranges from to A long and very significant era in Irish history, this period is characterized by a British approach to Ireland that can hardly be described as state formation.

It is the time of extensive plantation politics and the ascendency of a Protestant ruling class in which the ten percent of the population who were Protestant mostly immigrants from Britain were highly privileged over the ninety percent of the 9 I am not a historian and do not claim to be: history is much more complex than a division into clearly delineated periods.

However, as an all-encompassing analysis of Irish history is beyond the scope of this dissertation, such a simplified division will do for the purposes of this analysis of A Portrait.

Mooij 35 population who were Catholic. It is furthermore the era of religious discrimination, repression and a total loss of self-governance for most of the Irish population. In this lengthy period, one can therefore confidently speak of a colonial situation. I take as a turning point between two periods because this is the year in which both the British and the Irish parliament passed the Act of Union: the amalgamation of both parliaments that marked the total incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom.

The Irish were therefore not simply a colony governed from London, but a significant part of this United Kingdom. Of course, the watchful critic or historian will remark that due to the Test Act these members of parliament were required to be Protestant and that there was still no equality between Catholics and Protestants.

However, in this third period two very significant bills got passed in parliament: the repeal of the Test Act greatly furthered political equality between Protestants and Catholics and the implementation of free trade between England and Ireland ensured that Irish wares could now be traded with the British colonies on the same terms as British merchandise.

This period thus sees a continuing incorporation of Ireland into the very core of the United Kingdom and therefore presents an Ireland that is far from being an imperial colony. History is complicated further by the formation of the Home Rule league in , which constitutes the transition between the third and the fourth period. Both acts gave more power and security to the Irish tenants and as such took power away from the landowners with a mostly British background.

This growing political movement eventually led to the enactment of the Home Rule Act in and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December which conceded the implementation of the Home Rule Act and marked the beginning of the Irish Free State. This fourth period is therefore one of gradual political change in which the Irish indicate that they no longer wish to be a part of the United Kingdom.

Mooij 37 It must therefore be concluded from this brief overview of history that Anglo-Irish relations are exceptionally complex and perhaps even paradoxical by nature.

Considering the second period in particular, a convincing case can be made for a history of colonialism in Ireland and in the Ireland of A Portrait. However, this idea is severely complicated by earlier processes of medieval state forming and the eventual incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom which positioned the Irish on the other side of the colonial system.

Consequently, the Ireland of A Portrait cannot simply be designated as a colony, but it must also be acknowledged that issues of colonialism have unquestionably been present in Irish history and must have made their marks on Irish culture and the development thereof.

Regarding Stephen Dedalus as a colonial subject may therefore not be perfect in its historical accuracy, but it does present him as a useful lens through which the reader can observe what problems this partly colonial but highly complex history has raised in Ireland. This consequently allows for a discussion of how these problems have influenced the development of Irish culture, and thereby provides a new perspective on the question of why Anglo-Irish relations are still tense nowadays despite the fact that Ireland has been independent for years.

In his collection of essays entitled Decolonising the Mind, he describes the interrelation between colonialism and language and suggests that this connection influences cultural development in colonized communities.

For the purpose of delineating what reading Stephen Dedalus as a colonial subject means for such an understanding of cultural development in Ireland, we must therefore consider the interrelation between language and culture.

In the Kenyan community described by Ngugi, the linguistic aspect of 11 This process may be misconstrued as an example of what Homi K. Bhabha termed mimicry. However, the situation described by the idea of the cultural bomb differs from the concept of mimicry in the fact that it does not encompass a form of resistance through mockery. Mooij 40 colonialism has severely impeded the development of the native culture through a combination of language substitution and education and is subsequently capable of halting this development completely if left unchallenged.

Asked Stephen. Said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish? The … the funnel. Asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must. The simple answer would be that both men come from a different cultural background. Stephen is fundamentally Irish, whereas the dean is solely described in terms of Englishness.

Notice the lack of punctuation in this sentence, giving it a frustrated and annoyed character. It is attitudes to language and values attached to language that cause him to become annoyed. The dean assumes that a word he does not know must be dialect, and thus that the British version of English is the correct and the standard one.

And it is in the acceptance of this power dynamic that the linguistic problems raised by the complex nature of Anglo-Irish history start to emerge. At this point, the political potential of language must be considered to elucidate how this power dynamic has come into existence between two men who speak the same language. Ngugi has shown that language becomes a problematic arena in a colonial setting once it is made by the colonizer into a means of division and an instrument for cultural repression through a devaluation of the local vernacular and an evaluation of the colonizing language.

As a consequence, the imposition of the language of the colonizer slowly makes the world of the colonized disappear. This would indicate that the answers to the questions of how the English language has placed Stephen within a power dynamic and how this has consequently influenced his development as an Irish artist are to be found in his past experiences with the English language.

And lastly, this primacy of the English language cannot be attributed to colonial processes alone. Yet the existence of the Gaelic Revival movement and its large following also indicate a strong wish for a revival of the Gaelic language.

In this book, Derrida describes how he, as a French-Algerian, had no other language than French. It was the language in which he was raised and educated and the official language of the state and the people around him. Naturally, the history of French in Algeria differs significantly from the history of the English language in Ireland.

This difference mainly lies in the fact that the French language has been consciously introduced in Algeria, whereas in Ireland the primacy of English can at least partially be ascribed to natural linguistic evolution due to the physical closeness and the closeness of contact between England and Ireland. Thus, much like Derrida, Stephen is faced with the feeling that the language he speaks natively is not his own.

The reason for this lies in the fact that language is not just a linguistic entity. As has been explained by Ngugi, language is also the primary carrier of culture.

I argue that this is what causes both men to feel uneasy towards their language. Because both Derrida and Stephen feel that their mother tongue is not theirs, a power dynamic emerges between them as colonial subjects and those who do have ownership of the language that they as colonial subjects lack.

The question therefore remains why Stephen feels that there is no Irish cultural heritage in the language that he speaks and what the consequences of this dispossessed language are for his development as a creator of Irish culture. Language therefore carries a way of looking at the world through images and these images are specific to a particular culture. Such collections of images make up the specific perspective with which members of a particular culture look upon and approach the world.

Each culture thus transmits its own perspective on the world through its own specific language. By adopting the English language, the Irish have therefore also inherited the English way of looking at the world.

However, the images encapsulated in the English language may correspond to the English world, but they do not correspond to the Irish experience of the world. One might however argue that after centuries of speaking English, the Irish had appropriated the English language by the era of A Portrait and made it their own. And indeed, linguists have identified a specifically Irish form of English.

However, such a relatively young variety does not immediately carry the same cultural capital as an older language that has evolved with the culture it is specific to. When the Irish started speaking English, this language did not carry their culture.

But for Swedish and Danish people English is only a means of communication with non-Scandinavians. Only when Hiberno-English had emerged and was commonly adopted, did a specific form of English become a carrier of Irish culture.

But that language could only be a carrier of Irish culture from the moment in Irish experience where the Irish became part of the English- speaking world. It becomes more relevant in modern history, but I will address that point later on in this chapter. Medieval Irish English must therefore mainly have been a communicative tool, convenient merely for trade and diplomacy.

In the period of British rule, once Hiberno-English had become the primary language of Ireland, that language did not yet carry a specifically Irish cultural capital since it had not been not much more than a means of communication before. Because this dissertation aims to present the perspective A Portrait offers on a political situation in the real world, the commonly refuted and discredited ideas of psychoanalysis are not considered in this discussion. Mooij 48 But how does this problematic relationship with his Irish dialack t influence Stephen and the development of Irish culture in general?

The answers to these questions will emerge when the influence of education on a colonial subject is considered. In education, children are generally confronted with a new level of the Other. They are quite literally introduced to a new world through geography, the learning of new languages and the experience of a direct connection with the Other through the interaction with literature.

Education in a new language thus functions as a both a window and a mirror to the colonial subject: the new language is the tinted window through which he sees the Other and behind which stands the mirror of education in which the image of that Other makes him reflect on himself.

The tint of the window is made up of the images reflecting reality that are embedded in that particular language, and therefore the tint of the window affects the image in the mirror. When Stephen, as a colonial subject, is placed within an educational system, he too experiences this mirroring window.

However, his experience must differ from the Kenyan experience of Ngugi, whose window of English had been imposed on him. Ngugi saw the Other with all its cultural capital through the tinted window of a language that felt wholly external to him, making him aware that it did not reflect his reality. The mirror of education therefore showed him an image of a large cultural capital which was impressive but, through the tint of the window, did not seem to fit in his Kenyan situation.

Stephen, living in Ireland, experiences this differently. He too encounters a new level of the Other in education, as most people do. And he too is educated into the culture of the ruling classes, which in his case also means education into the British culture. How early this begins can be seen in the very first year of his education at Clongowes.

Here, the class is structured into the groups of Lancaster and York, competing against each other Portrait 9. The names of these groups refer to the Wars of the Roses, a very significant period in English history. By being assigned to one of these groups, the Irish boys are thus made to identify with English culture.

This means that the richness of the English culture he is made to observe corresponds to the images encapsulated in the window presented by his native language and thus appears to fit within his Irish reality. When looking at the image reflected in the mirror of education and seeing the English culture, the tint of his window therefore makes him identify with that image rather than aspire to it. Depending on the person, this identification can affect the evolution of the Irish artist in either one of two ways and therefore has two effects on the development of Irish culture.

Firstly, there is the situation in which the Irish artist does not become aware that the English language carries images that do not correspond to the Irish reality. The artist will continue to produce art from a British perspective, which results in an art that reflects this British perspective and thus adds to the British or UK culture. However, because its images do not correspond to the Irish reality, such art does not add to Irish culture.

The effect of this situation is therefore a stagnation of the development of Irish culture. For him too, his language at first appears to correspond to his reality. As a consequence, the colonial alienation that Ngugi argues to be caused by the treatment of language in education 28 does not emerge in Stephen for a substantial part of his development. Just how hard this is to come to terms with is shown in the slow way in which Stephen realizes this.

When the dean then continues on the subject of the tundish, the realization that his language is a dialack t strikes Stephen and his attitude changes to one of adversity This slow realization of the fact that his language is not his own indicates that by this realization, Stephen loses a deeply rooted belief.

On realizing the lack in his dialack t , Stephen too is confronted with this internal paradox as the refinements of his mind that shape his view of the world all happen in English. The realization that his language is external to him must therefore change the tint of the window that is presented by this language and thus alters the image he has come to identify with in the mirror of education.

Furthermore, a family tree diagram posits a hierarchy of branchings over time which rests on a view of history as a movement from primitive to ever more highly developed languages and peoples.

The increasing attempt to provide comparative linguistics with a firmly scientific footing parallels the late nineteenth century attempts to provide a scientific basis for the analysis of race. Both rested on rigid hypotheses which ignored exceptions and bore little relationship to empirical evidence.

We see this disturbance of linguistic theory time and again as post- colonial societies appropriate language for their purposes, demonstrating the extreme elasticity of languages.

This is exactly the differentiation underlying the development of ethnology in the nineteenth century. For these reasons German philology was particularly amenable to anthropological questions of race, which became deeply implicated in assumptions about national character. This deep cultural affinity between language and national character led philologers such as Theodor Waitz to justify the influence of linguistics on two grounds: the characteristics of language are more stable than racial or ethno-racial qualities and thus provided a more reliable guide to historical continuity; and the methods of comparative philology had reached a higher stage of exactitude than those of physical anthropology Poliakov Cultural scholars had in effect, created a new academic territory — primitive life — in order to banish their materialist rivals to it.

The creation of language was the common act of prehistoric communities and the ground of common human existence. But differences in language were held to indicate differences in moral and mental capacities. Humboldt had inspired the doctrine that of the three kinds of languages — the isolating, the agglutinative and the inflected — the inflected languages, such as Indo-European and Semitic, were superior.

Consequently for philologers such as Steinthal, because all thought was linguistic, the structure of a language could determine the mental capabilities of its speakers. This assumption has a long history. The emergence of racialist theory in the nineteenth century found many of its principal exponents in those French thinkers most deeply influenced by the emerging Orientalism of Napoleonic France.

People such as Michel Buffon and Count Arthur de Gobineau are well known for their development of race thinking and for ideas which, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, seem absurdly ethnocentric.

But the philologist-historian who had the most to say about the link between race and language was Ernest Renan. Renan was a voluminously productive and extraordinarily influential Orientalist whose career spanned three quarters of the nineteenth century. Language is the key for Renan, because language plays a dominant role in the formation of a culture. Is the mention of skin colour meant to be seen as arbitrary, or does the colour of the skin provide the biological frame for cultural dominance?

The second problem is that when positing the deterministic link between language and culture, he must answer the question: Which comes first, language or culture? On the face of it, this seems to describe the complex interactive relationship between language and culture, but it represents precisely the dilemma we encounter when we attempt to posit, in a deterministic way, that a culture somehow precedes language.

But this contradiction — that the language to which a culture gives birth becomes its restraint and limit — is often repeated by Renan. We may examine this problem where Renan becomes more specific about language and race.

For at one point he sheets the entire supposed superiority of the Aryan race to its ability to conjugate verbs: The Aryan language was highly superior, especially as regards verb conjugations.

This marvelous instrument, created by the instinct of primitive men, contained the seeds of all the metaphysics that would be developed later on by the genius of the Hindus, the Greeks or the Germans. The Semitic language, on the contrary, got off to the wrong start where verbs are concerned. The greatest mistake this race ever made because the most irreparable was to adopt such a niggardly mechanism for treating verbs that the expression of tenses and moods has always been imperfect and awkward in its language.

Even today, the Arabs are still struggling against the linguistic error committed by their ancestors ten or fifteen thousand years ago Renan : 35 This is a racial dichotomy quite breathtaking in its scope and we could hardly imagine a more explicit example of cultural determinism. This starkly exposes the logical problems of a deterministic view of the relationship between language and culture. Yet the way a race treats ideas is determined by the grammar of its language.

Clearly, the complexity of the relationship between language and culture requires some other explanation. Either the linguistic identity of a culture lies in the ways it uses the language available to it, or the culture can never change, and can never appropriate that which lies outside it. Since the latter is disproved by history, we must conclude that the culture of a people does not lie within language as an inherent property, but in the complex ways in which that people creates, uses, develops, deploys, and engages language.

These ways will interact with the historical, geographical, climatic, religious and material experiences of its speakers and the discourses within which those experiences emerge. The support such bizarre claims gave to the racial dichotomies of imperial discourse is clear. If races are primitive today the fault is in their ancestors who created their languages. But the assumption, that race is somehow embedded in language, has taken a tenacious hold on contemporary thinking because the idea of an essential link is an attractive prospect to both colonizers and colonized.

It is not the purpose of this essay to try to suggest any causal lineage from nineteenth century philology to contemporary views of race in language, but rather to point out the paradoxical connection between them. Language, for the black writer was, not a neutral, transparent instrument, but the determining medium of thought itself. In his pursuit of self-definition, the black artist saw the inherited colonial language as a pernicious symbolic system used by the European colonizer in order to gain total and systematic control of the mind and reality of the colonized world.

This is a familiar refrain: language embodies the European culture and represses the reality of the African or Caribbean. It is important to understand the great historical and cultural differences between different languages, such as French and English, and their very different roles in the two different forms of imperialism. But the distinction between langue and langage is one that holds for all speakers.

All language, in its actual use is langage so there is always in language itself, its amenability to appropriation, its flexibility and malleability, the possibility of transformation, of a self expression which resists the imperial confidence of Prospero. Yet this is not what Sartre, nor Fanon after him are saying. For them, the language is a discourse firmly demarcated by the cultural boundaries of European civilization. But the sense of language embodying culture has been a feature of post-colonial resistance writing for a very long time.

When we look for the source of this attitude we do not have to go far past Frantz Fanon. But surely what Fanon means here is that proficiency in language represents civilization. This distinction is in fact crucial to the whole debate over language. This sentence is quite correct We can compare this assumption of status through the use of language with the ways in which language operates as a class marker.

Speaking in a refined way acts as a class marker, a sign of elevation, and indeed the speaker may be making great pains to change into someone of a different class. But the language will only ever be a signifier of that change. There is no secret formula in a language that effects an inner transformation in its speakers.

What Fanon is saying here is an important indication of the social function of language performativity. However, the problem of a slippage between metaphor and metonymy comes about because of the extreme Manicheanism of race.