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1 - Language as a Contested Site of Belonging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2022

Reiko Shindo
Affiliation:
Coventry University
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Summary

Two contradictory relations between language and community

This book examines how language is incorporated into the process of challenging and redrawing a community's boundary. As Anderson (1991) once described so evocatively, language is intimately tied to the notion of community and continues to capture our imagination when we talk about what community is and who belongs to a community:

What the eye is to the lover – that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with – language – whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue – is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. (1991: 154)

Many studies have demonstrated this intimate link in different contexts (see, for example, Shaw, 2008; Patel, 2013). As such, the observation that language plays a cardinal role in imagining community comes almost with banal undertones. This banality, however, somewhat intuitively suggests the captivating power language persistently holds in our conceptualisation of community: language is embedded so deeply in our political imagination that it is taken completely for granted as an authentic sign of belonging.

As many wealthy nations are struggling to cope with the current challenges of migration, language is almost unquestionably used as a tool to delineate the limits of the community's edge. For instance, since the race riots in 2001, the UK government has begun to regard English proficiency as evidence of integration in policy areas ranging from community cohesion to naturalisation (Fortier, 2013, 2017). In 2016, in response to a number of UK citizens joining Islamic State (also known as Daesh), the government decided to set up a £20 million language fund to improve Muslim women's English abilities. Its stated objective was to help these women to better integrate into ‘British’ society. David Cameron, the then British Prime Minister, said: ‘If you’re not able to speak English, not able to integrate, … you have challenges understanding what your identity is and therefore you could be more susceptible to the extremist message coming from Daesh’ (quoted in The Guardian, 2016).

Type
Chapter
Information
Belonging in Translation
Solidarity and Migrant Activism in Japan
, pp. 1 - 28
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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