Marjorie Perloff, Language, and Political Insularity
Marjorie Perloff examines post-9/11 America in a new piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, deeming our current outlook myopic and suggesting that the political has once again turned personal. "Threatened from without by forces seemingly too overwhelming to control, and besieged by endless talk of surveillance and security, many of us have turned with some relief to the local—to what might make us feel better." She also writes:
The very language of the decade expresses our anxiety about the outside world. Talk of the "third world" and "emergent nations," expressing as it does a first-world confidence and sense of control, has given way to the ubiquitous "our planet," as in, "saving our planet." A decade ago, under the sign of the Baudrillardean "simulacrum" and Derridean "difference," postmodern representation and ambiguity would never have tolerated a noun as generic as "planet." It would have been dismissed as hopelessly essentialist: How could we know the planet, much less call it "ours"?
Furthermore, there is the question of language itself:
In the wake of 9/11, there was much discourse about the need to learn the language of the attackers, specifically Arabic. According to statistics from the Modern Language Association, more than 20,000 people in America enrolled in Arabic-language higher-education programs in 2006, double the number who signed up from 1998 to 2002. The need for Arabic-speaking professionals was held to be essential for security purposes. But the statistics are deceptive. According to a representative of the National Resource Center at Brigham Young University in 2007, of those 20,000 students, "not even 5 percent are likely to graduate with functional speaking proficiency." And at the elementary and secondary levels, the dropout rate in Arabic programs was estimated at 75 percent.
Why? According to the report, Arabic is an extremely difficult language, especially for those who have no other language training. Then, too, there is, to date, a shortage of trained Arabic-language teachers in America. But I suspect that the real cause is elsewhere. In the course of the past decade, a vague desire for a quick language fix has run into the insular conviction that English is, after all, the global language and, hence, sufficient. Note that on-the-scene reporting—say, in Egypt—increasingly relies not on the simultaneous translation of interviews with foreign diplomats or politicians, but rather on the reports of American "global" newscasters like Anderson Cooper, a pundit who, despite the epithet "360," is largely dependent on what people with a smattering of English want him to hear. As for academe, the big news by the end of the decade is how many comparative-literature and modern-language programs have been downsized or simply eliminated.
Perloff goes on to consider how language study can provide a more rigorous kind of self-reflection "in relation to the developing nations and cultures in our 'global' backyard." Absolutely! You can read the entire article here.