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How did the Latin verna, which once designated an enslaved person born in their master's house, come to signify freedom from mastery: linguistic, aesthetic, political? From its use by Dante, in the early fourteenth century, to champion the production of literature in the spoken languages of the Italian city-states rather than in Latin, the idea of the vernacular has been entwined with notions of mother tongue, native tongue, indigenous language, natural or "ordinary" language, common language, and language of the "folk" or the "people." In such guises, the vernacular hitches literature and other arts to revolutionary potential. Vernacular idioms have informed anti-elitist national culture in Europe (e.g., Britain, France, Germany) as well as anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-hegemonic demands--across the Americas, Asia, and Africa--for the production and recognition of literatures in languages such as African American Vernacular English, kreyòl, South Asian vernaculars, dialectal Arabic (ʿāmmiyya), and Gĩkũyũ. Yet as the annals of modern imperialism and nationalism attest, the ideological construction and propagation of vernacular idioms--often opposed to transregional standard languages declared "dead"--have also been potent instruments of colonial and state dominion. Whether by curbing the communicative range of rival cosmopolitan or subnational languages or by denying colonized or marginalized peoples access to the language of the "center," both colonizing powers and postcolonial nation-states have strategically held the tongue of the disenfranchised within the compass of the local. Moreover, ideologies of the vernacular have driven imperially inflected visions of modernity--extending the reach of dominant Enlightenment philosophies of sound, script, signification, and the social sphere--across the global East and South. From modern China to Turkey to Egypt, "natural" (often also national) languages were imagined keys to the present and to progress: scientific, aesthetic, sociopolitical.

This graduate seminar will explore the complex history, theory, and politics of the vernacular, including its entanglements with imperialist and liberationist language ideologies and its vexed equivalence with presumed synonyms in African, Asian, and creolized languages beyond the Latinate pale. Our focus will be on the long history of the vernacular in comparative theories of language and literature spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe and crossing into visual/film/sound studies and political theory. As we explore the liberatory power of the vernacular, we also will interrogate its coercive logics. Are the notions at the core of vernacular language politics--namely, that writing should resemble speaking, and that spoken language is language in its most natural or native form--born inside a master narrative? Is it possible to understand language otherwise?

In discussions and final papers, you are welcome--indeed encouraged--to relate your research to these and other questions and to assigned texts. Our readings range widely, including works by Adejunmobi; Almallah; Anderson; Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant; Barbery, Ben Jelloun, Borer, et al.; Brathwaite; Brustad; Dante; Diagne; Ertürk; Farred; Herder; Hu Shih; Hugo; Hurston; Lahiri; Leow; Lienau; Mallette; Ngũgĩ; Pollock; Rajendran; Safouan; Sarkar; Saxena; Shang; Sorensen; Yildiz; Zaydān; and Zhou.