“Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan”: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Birgit Neumann
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intercultural Relationships ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
The Family

AbstractThe essay offers a close reading of On Earth We’re Briefly Georgeous, the remarkable novel by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, showing how the text’s critical engagement with the notion of the mother tongue is used to negotiate subjectivity and community in diasporic contexts. It assesses the importance of the tongue within the broader context of contemporary migrant and transcultural fiction and reveals how the tongue functions as a trope to explore possibilities of self-articulation after the loss of the mother tongue. Further, the essay draws on the concept of translation, exposing both its violent dimensions and its liberating potential within uneven intercultural relationships. Struggling with the unavailability of his mother tongue, Vuong’s central writer-protagonist performs multiple acts of translation between the unequal languages of Vietnamese and English and reconfigures both in terms of their foreignness. These acts of translation materialize in a multilingual poetics that thoroughly unsettles the priority of closed entities and that confronts the organic genealogy inscribed in the “family romance” (Yildiz 2012: 20) of the mother tongue with open, non-identitarian modes of sociality.I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Anglia as well as Christina Slopek, Martin A. Kayman and Susan Winnett for generously sharing their thoughts on earlier versions of my article with me.

Review of The Family Romance of the Imposter-Poet Thomas Chatterton.

1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-202
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  
Family Romance ◽  
The Family

Sense of local identity, attitudes toward dialects and language teaching: The Hungarian minority in Serbia

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonora Kovacs Rac ◽  
Sabina Halupka-Rešetar
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Language Retention ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
The Family ◽  
8Th Grade ◽  
Identity Attitudes

Abstract A large body of academic literature (e.g. Fishman 1977, 1999; Giles and Johnson 1981; Romaine 2000, among others) claims that language is one of the most significant markers of ethnic identification and that it plays a crucial role not only in the external perception of an ethnic group by outsiders but also in the selfidentification of an ethnic group. In a minority environment, sense of ethnic identity and language retention are connected very tightly, which is why it is of extreme importance to study attitudes towards the dialects of a language and value judgments about them. The paper presents the results of a research into attitudes toward dialects, conducted with approximately three hundred 5th and 8th grade pupils (age 12 and 15, respectively) attending school in Hungarian in two regions of Vojvodina, Serbia. It explores the subjects’ local features of identity, given that the research was conducted in eight different localities. The results of the research serve as a sound basis for developing use-centered, functional-situational mother tongue education of Hungarian minority pupils living in Serbia, since the current curriculum completely disregards the language varieties of many Hungarian minority pupils brought up and living in rural areas, who acquire and use the dialect spoken in the family.

scholarly journals The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 210
Author(s):  
Miklos Hadas
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
French Version ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Church

Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination was published in English in 2001, three years after the appearance of the French version. In order to deconstruct in vivo the working of sociological paradigm-alchemy, a close reading of the Bourdieusian argument is offered. After summing up the main thesis of the book, Bourdieu’s statements will be intended to be questioned, according to which the school, the family, the state and the church would reproduce, in the long run, masculine domination. The paper will also seek to identify the methodological trick of the Bourdieusian vision on history, namely that, metaphorically speaking, he compares the streaming river to the riverside cliffs. It will be argued that when Bourdieu discusses ‘the constancy of habitus’, the ‘permanence in and through change’, or the ‘strength of the structure’, he extends his paradigm about the displacement of the social structure to the displacement of the men/women relationship. Hence, it will be suggested that, in opposition to Bourdieu’s thesis, masculine domination is not of universal validity but its structural weight and character have fundamentally changed in the long run, i.e. the masculine habitual centre gradually shifted from a social practice governed by the drives of physical violence to symbolic violence.

Reading for differentiation: the family romance plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 118-168
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
The Family ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
The City

Despite George Scharf’s professional success and eventual social status, most people who have heard the name are thinking of his father. It is George Scharf Sr’s urban sketches– tracking street by street and demolished house by demolished house the emergence of Regency London and of the city we know today–that were brought together in the 1980s as an exhibition and a book, both entitled George Scharf’s London. If George Jr does not get to possess, in the contemporary imagination, the city in which he, too, lived and worked, he did in his own time manage to surpass his father in reputation and class, to leave behind the slightly pathetic figure, the chronically underemployed immigrant debtor who shared– that is to say, anticipated– his name. The remarkable story of George Jr’s class and professional ascendancy, marked by increasing signs of public respect, achieved its apotheosis in the nominal change that shortly preceded his death: the not-quite- posthumous creation of ‘Sir George Scharf’, the addition of ‘Sir’ to the name of the son, marked the distance between the two men for posterity.

The family romance

2018 ◽  
pp. 241-276
Author(s):  
Ania Loomba
Keyword(s):  
Family Romance ◽  
The Family

scholarly journals Exceeding the Limits of Reconciliation: ‘Decolonial Aesthetic Activism’ in the Artwork of Canadian Artist Meryl McMaster

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-22
Author(s):  
Allyson Green
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Relationship Building ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Critical Engagement

In this paper I consider whether, and if so how artistic creative uncertainty can facilitate processes of imagining new relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s model of reconciliation seems to promise improved Indigenous/settler relationships, yet many Indigenous scholars and allies question the efficacy of it as an approach to expedite relationship-building. For that reason, Indigenous critics like David Garneau suggest that alternate methods be deployed such as ‘decolonial aesthetic activism’ in order to build relationships that exceed the limits of reconciliation. Within this model, ambiguous, discordant, and indigestible artworks operate as one method by which we/settlers can become aware of how we are implicated in the structures of settler colonialism. I apply Garneau’s theory by conducting a close reading of the performative self-portraits by Meryl McMaster. My analysis reveals that art can put forward critiques of settler colonialism that unsettle assumptions, thereby creating new spaces for us to imagine worlds otherwise. Accordingly, I argue that McMaster’s art does have the potential to exceed the limits of reconciliation and conclude that critical engagement with her photographs is an important first step in the process that is decolonization, a process that exceeds the limits of reconciliation.

Formal Education and Aboriginal Children

1986 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.J. Christie
Keyword(s):  
Formal Education ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Normal Children ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
Aboriginal Society ◽  
Aboriginal Children ◽  
First Time ◽  
Informal Process ◽  
Vast Range

All children, black or white, learn a lot more outside the classroom than inside it. All normal children, by the time they go to school for the first time, have already learnt to speak their mother tongue, have learnt who they are and where they fit into their family or community, and have learnt a vast range of behaviours which are appropriate (and inappropriate) for members of their culture. They have learnt all these through the informal process of socialization which affects all members of every culture throughout their lives. In traditional Aboriginal society, for example, hunting and food preparation skills, the traditional law, patterns of land ownership and important stories from the past, were all learnt informally in the daily life of the family. Only some sacred knowledge would be transmitted formally in a ceremonial context.

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