We are living in times where the issue of identity and difference has taken on a more defensive hue. The tide is turning towards an inward-looking nostalgia of sameness based on fear rather than on understanding. The experience of hearing another language, the way it is spoken, and being faced with the image of the other is now more complex, imbued with projections of powerlessness, fear, terrorism, and survival. The issue of identity appears to have become even more complex. All cultures are concerned with how we speak and communicate as this represents identity, history, and home. Communication is also essential for survival, both emotionally and socially. The speaking person is an individual but also part of a culture or cultures with dense collective and individual shapes. The issue of identity, that feeling of belonging, is essential, full of possibility, and, at times, very uncomfortable, as it touches the tensions between who we are and who we are becoming. This sits next to more complex historical experiences and memories of languages and cultures being changed or lost or banished due to the colonial, imperial, and regional moves of powerful nations in search of conquest and economic gain. This collection addresses how language affects therapists and their patients, and how it can be understood culturally and therapeutically. Drawn from talks given at the Multi-lingual Psychotherapy Centre (MLPC), the contributors not only bring a therapeutic slant but also their other roles as academics, writers, and artists. These reflections, memories, and stories give a glimpse of the multilingual journey the MLPC has been exploring for over twenty years, and leave much food for thought. The book contains contributions from Cedric Bouet-Willaumez, Giselle China, Patricia Gorringe, Natsu Hattori, Monique Morris, Esti Rimmer, and Edna Sovin.

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

The author "presents the latest and most controversial research from the origins of language itself to the way the human brain makes and stores it, as well as how infants create it."--Jacket.

Edited by Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi, Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry analyzes contemporary translingual Sinophone poetry and discusses its creative processes and translational implications, along with their intersections. How do self-translation and other translingual practices mold the Sinophone poetic field? How and why do contemporary Sinophone writers produce (new) lyrical identities in and through translation? How do we translate contemporary Sinophone poetry? By addressing such questions, and by bringing together scholars, writers, and translators of poetry, this volume offers unique insights into Sinophone Studies, while sparking a transdisciplinary dialogue with Poetry Studies, Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. How deep does your language go back? Jaji’s artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and the present; they capture and claim the losses, the ironies, and a poet’s human evolution. Mother Tongues is a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.

We are living in times where the issue of identity and difference has taken on a more defensive hue. The tide is turning towards an inward-looking nostalgia of sameness based on fear rather than on understanding. The experience of hearing another language, the way it is spoken, and being faced with the image of the other is now more complex, imbued with projections of powerlessness, fear, terrorism, and survival. The issue of identity appears to have become even more complex. All cultures are concerned with how we speak and communicate as this represents identity, history, and home. Communication is also essential for survival, both emotionally and socially. The speaking person is an individual but also part of a culture or cultures with dense collective and individual shapes. The issue of identity, that feeling of belonging, is essential, full of possibility, and, at times, very uncomfortable, as it touches the tensions between who we are and who we are becoming. This sits next to more complex historical experiences and memories of languages and cultures being changed or lost or banished due to the colonial, imperial, and regional moves of powerful nations in search of conquest and economic gain. This collection addresses how language affects therapists and their patients, and how it can be understood culturally and therapeutically. Drawn from talks given at the Multi-lingual Psychotherapy Centre (MLPC), the contributors not only bring a therapeutic slant but also their other roles as academics, writers, and artists. These reflections, memories, and stories give a glimpse of the multilingual journey the MLPC has been exploring for over twenty years, and leave much food for thought. The book contains contributions from Cedric Bouet-Willaumez, Giselle China, Patricia Gorringe, Natsu Hattori, Monique Morris, Esti Rimmer, and Edna Sovin.