The Mojo Dojo Casa House of Language: On Whiteness and Monolingualism
An invited talk at
Princeton University, Department of German, May 3, 2024
Thanks everyone.
It’s nice to be back in Princeton. And see a lot of old friends and familiar faces.
Anyway, is my title clear to you? Do you know where it comes from? Just yell it out…. Slides for Talk
[Next slide]. Yup. So, we’ve got Professor Jameson over here, and we’ve got the King of Kendom over here, Ryan Gosling, chilling in his mojo dojo casa house. For those who conscientiously declined to see the 2023 Barbie film, “Mojo Dojo Casa House” is the name Ryan Gosling’s Ken character lands on after he takes a trip to the real world from Barbieland—and sees all of its social and symbolic forms, including really existing patriarchy and misogynist violence, and he determines without a doubt that “mojo dojo casa house” is the only appropriate name for his new house and dwelling place, for his new subjectivity and for his property, for his dominium back in Barbie land.
And he is incredibly, defiantly proud of this conceptual innovation. It is a hard-earned revelation for him, a slogan, a muscular fortification of thought and feeling, and he wants you to celebrate it with him, and for him. So based on his brief and hapless tour of the real world with Barbie, Ken sees fit to build a patriarchal society from scratch, with Ken in the very centre of things. This is what he comes up with for himself and his fellow Ken dolls to dwell and be in, and speak from, a Mojo Dojo Casa House.
[Next slide.] And this is where I might invoke the call for our conference where we are gathered here in part to work through “concepts that are destructive because they carry a systemic function for subjugation, but also concepts that have been overheard in the general clamor, concepts that have been hijacked or hallucinated, concepts lurking in invective and satire.” Thanks to Barbara [Nagel] and Daniel [Hoffman-Schwartz] for that lovely prose for the conference call, and for this idea of “overheard, hijacked, and hallucinated concepts” from Claudia Rankine, because I think that is exactly what Ken is doing with his Mojo Dojo Casa House conceptualization: he is hallucinating it based on a manneristic overdose of decontextualized input from a Real Symbolic world he has just visited for the first time.
And that’s also what I think white monolingualism generally does in its recent, late forms since the 1980s. It double-talks with extractive impunity, it makes sure to be profoundly immune to hypocrisy or self-reflection, it is opportunistic and motivated by a neurotic kind of optimization and self-aggrandizement. It is the kind of scheme that neoliberal late capitalism already fuels. And in that sense, it is poised to win a long battle of linguistic and cultural supremacy,, because there are no effective opponents.
As far as I know, critical reception of Barbie hasn’t been interested in this kind of linguistic phenomenon, and I’m super interested to understand why Ken’s hallucinatory monolingualism has remained unmarked among all of the otherwise frothy critical hubbub about the movie.
[Next slide.] Now Frederic Jameson himself wasn’t wonderful, in his 1972 Prison- House of Language book, at thinking its core critical questions multilingually, and that’s in part what led Emily Apter to write a piece about it in Diacritics in 2019 where Apter, among many other things, points out that Nietzsche’s Will to Power never talked about a prison-house or the like at all really, and that Nietsche’s German actually reads as follows: “Wir hören auf zu denken, wenn wir es nicht in dem sprachlichen Zwange tun wollen, wir langen gerade noch bei dem Zweifel an, hier eine Grenze als Grenze zu sehen.” And it appears that Jameson rather adopted “prison-house” from Erich Heller’s free translation of Nietzsche, in Heller’s essay “Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Notes,” which he published in Encounter in 1959.
So, here we have a Jameson whose theorizations about language and structuralism originate in this kind of unforced error, and which could have been so much richer, I think, if he had taken multilingualism and translation seriously. The fact that he didn’t is interesting, and is part and parcel of the way that Language critique is always vacillating between whether it alleges to critique Language with a capital L, as the broad human faculty, or whether it intends to engage in an actual sociolinguistic critique of languages-in-use (including all of their forms and varieties and idioms). Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Marxism were never particularly interested in that distinction and that decision, i.e., whether it was language in the capital and singular that they wished to critique, or whether it was lower-case l- language in the real world of languages. And so Jameson was never apparently prompted or pressed to make this distinction either. And here we are in 2024 at Princeton, still with what Michael Boyden and Eugenia Kelbert characterize as an immense and persistent theory deficit in the area of translingualism studies.
[New Slide.] But I’m not here to find fault with Jameson so much as to find fault with my self, for a different but parallel omission, which is that, in my last 15 years of writing in a sustained way about mono and multilingualism, I’ve never really insisted on anchoring these concepts substantively in an analysis of the subjugative systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. I’ve tried to account for the inventions of multilingualism and monolingualism in subtle contradistinction to linguistic racism, linguistic imperialism, linguistic colonialism, accentism, nativespeakerism, etc., because I believe that mono- and multilingualism are historical discourses that ought not be subsumed into these other important analytics, or mistaken for them.
But I’ve generally failed to go the next step and show how they, monolingualism and multilingualism, are achieved and fortified through patriarchal and white supremacist schemes and visions. There was a moment in a 2009 Unterrichtspraxis piece where I did propose that a new cosmopolitan monolingualism in Germany—a ius linguarum as I called it—had kicked into high gear in the 2000s to use standard language proficiency in German to perform the civic and administrative exclusions (and also literary exclusions) that ethnic membership (ius sanguinus) or birth claim (ius soli) had done, in pre-1999 Germany or the United States, respectively.
And I wanted to show that these kinds of linguistic thickenings of citizenship administrative law were attempting to encase Germanness in a kind of white and white-adjacent linguistic performance regime cloaked in constitutional patriotism. But my subsequent work in the three books that came after that did honestly leave racialization and, definitely, gender rather out of the central picture of what mono/multilingualism is and does, which is a shame.
Recently, too, I was asked to write an essay about “mother tongues” and found, to my horror, that I had almost nothing to say about the gendered nature of this historical concept, despite two whole decades of working on monolingualism. Thank goodness my mother, Kathryn Gramling, was willing to co-author a piece with me about “mother languages” because I frankly couldn’t be trusted to do it right on my own without her expertise as a mother and a phenomenologist.
But back when I first was invited to join you today I wanted to take up this conference call as an opportunity to get myself back in gear on this, and to look more closely at how historical institutions like the Academie Française and the Royal Society of London since the 17th century have vigorously tried to propose and promote monolingualisms that do the work of white supremacy and patriarchy by alternate means, and continue to do so at accelerated rates in the 21st century.
The Royal Society of London did so starting in the 17th century by gatekeeping which planetary communities get to count as having a “well-formed language” in the British view of what a language is supposed to have, and not have. And the Academie Française by deliberately subordinating the feminine in French grammar such that, after the mid-17th century masculine forms trumped feminine forms in syntax in ways they had not done in French prior. (Thanks to my colleague Mathilda Poulenay for this insight.)
And, of course, I’m also trying to become responsible to the ways that global south scholars, like the Indonesian applied linguist Setiono Sugiharto, the Australian Alastair Pennycook, and the Zimbabwean American pan-African sociolinguist Sinfree Makoni have been telling Northern scholars, who are very excited about multilingualism all of a sudden, ‘Hey, y’all, you know what? The indigenous global south has always been and continues to be multilingual in ways that you barely have the tools to fathom, and it has never had a colonial thing like monolingualism like y’all Europeans invented, so how about let us tell you how we do social multilingualism, aesthetic translanguaging and purpose-driven translating in Zimbabwe and Bengal and Peru and Indonesia before you start telling us how exciting you think literary multilingualism is.’
[Next Slide] So before I go further, I just want to share some of the amazing work that has influenced my own thinking on this topic of white monolingualism over the past decade the common thread in this diverse work is the ways multilingualism and bilingualism have been rebranded as concepts in a reactionary way since 2000 by policy-makers and legislators to serve white monolinguals more than they serve, for instance, Latinx, Afro-Latinx and Black multilingual people. [Next Slide.] And in fact some scholars like Guadalupe Valdés and Jane Hill had been making this argument back in the 1990s too.
[Next Slide.] So the basic question was something like this: “How the heck did we, since the Reagan era, hallucinate a concept of multilingualism where white monolinguals tend profit from it symbolically, professionally, and financially more than multilingual people of Colour do? Put differently: “How does Global North Ken visit the Real World and come back to Barbieland with the bright idea that the coolest, most optimal, most advantageous thing to do with language and subjectivity in his simulated civilization is to steal a word of African or African-American Gullah descent Mojo, a Japanese word Dojo, and a Spanish word casa and then just pile them on top of one another and make out of it a hallucinated, laminated white monolingualism, without learning any of those languages or knowing they exist?”
After all, that is exactly the kind of immoderation and inefficiency in usage that the scientistically inclined Royal Society and the Academie Française absolutely hated when they were trying to engineer monolingualism: they tried to drum out of English and French the profligate borrowings, the translingual redundancies, the lyrical irrationality that Ken re-innovates for white monolingualism. Ken’s reasonable snap-shot deduction about the Real World order in 2023 that he encounters is that you go out and collect language cameos and use all of them to fortify your dominance and standing. This is perhaps a form of what Anjali Pandey calls linguistic exhibitionism, or Paul Kae Matsuda calls linguistic tourism, or Yuliya Komska calls ”conspicuous multilingualism”. And so white monolinguals like Ken can do it all without ever actually learning any other language. They can become multilingually empowered persons, and use that power over actual multilingual people.
{New Slide.] Here are some of the books that help me work through this amazing hallucinatory paradox. [New Slide.] I think this is also something Kafka tried to signal in his Oklahama Theater section of the America novel, the positive mythologization of monolingualism under the sign of multicultural inclusion.
So what I’m working toward here is an understanding of a white supremacist “late monolingualism” that is most effectively expressed, even already in the America novel and Barbie, through “English”—a language that is so empirically multilingual that the energetic rhetorical hallucination behind its performative monolingualism somehow gives adequate cover for the patent evidentiary impossibility of such a structure.
[New Slide.] The Puerto Rican anthropological linguist and ethnic studies professor Ana Celia Zentella explained further how, in the last few decades, much of this kind of discriminatory cultural power has moved over into the realm of language: “In the USA, where race has been remapped from biology onto language because public racist remarks are censored, comments about the inferiority and/or unintelligibility of regional, class, and racial diaelcts substitute for abusive remarks about color […], with the same effect. […] “Incorrect” aspects of grammar or pronunciation label their speakers as inferior, with an added injury not inflicted by racial comparisons, i.e., no one expects you to be able to change your color, but you’re expected to change the way you speak radically to earn respect.”
[Next Slide.] I think a lot of us in German Studies could make good use of this work, in these neighbouring fields, to come to grips with what is going on in German white-normative multicultural monolingualism and the like. And also to understand the ways that white monolingualism achieves its globalist ends by “friendshoring” and ”nearshoring” multilingual competence in various nearby Special Economic Zones of precaritized multilingual labour, This is something Quinn Slobodian writes about in detail in his 2024 Crack-Up Capitalism book, though it never thematizes language directly, which is unfortunate.
And, thinking back to the conference call: this is how absolutely untenable, unreal, hallucinatory concepts get produced and fortified for 21st century policy making and research. It’s how Ken gets to have and keep his Mojo Dojo Casa House, without even having to account for its provenance. It’s how white monolinguals get to have dominant, multilingual symbolic power.
[Next slide.] I want to close by saying that I’ve been on Whatsapp with my scholar colleagues in Gaza these last months, particularly with my colleague Nazmi Al-Masri, Vice President for External Affairs at Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City,—whose university and whole scholarly community was razed to the ground—calls “Palestinizing” concepts. And I want to close simply by saying that one way to reverse and de-hallucinate some of these opportunistically manneristic and impunity-fueled concepts as white supremacist late monolingualism is to do what Nazmi frequently asks me to do, which is to try to proof-test concepts from a Palestinian standpoint, from a Gazan standpoint, which is what he calls “Palestinizing” concepts—and see how they hold up.
By this I think Nazmi means: to see the phenomenon/concept from a Gazan perspective, to test it against the baffling taboos and silences and injustices that structure global academic discourses, taboos and silences that Gaza’s academics can never afford, and to imbue these concepts with courage in the face of endless siege and diminishment, and to see whether and how the resulting concepts hold water in that real world, rather than in Barbieland and Kendom.
This is, also, the kind of thing that Yiddish is extraordinarily helpful with too, as a postvernacular linguaculture of creativity and critique: prooftesting conceptions of culture and language and community, when you have no nation state or funding apparatus to rely on to prop it up and fortify it. But one thing I’m now very intent on doing in future, as a Germanist, is to consult with my academic colleagues in Gaza whenever I am trying to work toward a new conceptualization or a new argument about culture and language, as all Nazmi and his colleagues at IUG in Gaza City have ever asked of me is for scholarly friendship and dialogue in pursuit of peace and justice—and, of course, at this moment, an immediate and permanent cease fire on all of Gaza.
Thank you.
