Abstract
Emerging from a discomfort with the blind spots encountered within and across theorizations of language and space in the field of human geography, in this article, we argue for “making space” for conceptualizations that speak from and through the everyday territories of migrants in Europe today. Inspired by a range of writers thinking postcolonially and multi/trans-lingually, the authors draw on their own embodied migrant experience to argue for re-envisioning Europe’s borders through multiple languaging practices. “Languaging”, in this view, takes linguistic practices in a migrant context as an inherently prosthetic activity, whereby any dominant, national host language is inevitably subject to the subterranean rumblings of all the languages a migrant brings with her on her global journeys. Conceived as being saturated with prosthetic “absence(s)”, migrant languaging practices rework cultural geography’s bounded, inward-looking, and security-fixated understanding of the language/territory nexus, the better to open a vital space for re-envisioning language’s everyday territories as sites for translational solidarity and becoming.
Highlights
Emerging from a discomfort with the blind spots encountered within and across theorizations of language and space in the field of human geography, in this article, we argue for “making space” for conceptualizations that speak from and through the everyday territories of migrants in Europe today
How are borders being transformed under heightened conditions of globalization today? As evinced by the above-mentioned narrative derived from the lived experience of one of the authors of this essay, we argue that borders, at least in Europe, are currently being reconfigured in significant ways through
In France, since the French Revolution, language has been sacralized to the degree that, as the primary vehicle for the dissemination of the declaration of the “rights of man”, the French had to extirpate all rival language groups so as to erect itself as sole language of L’Hexagone. By way of this conceptual typology of territorial/linguistic practices, Raffestin proposes the disciplinary grounding for a renewed cultural geography, one which has the virtue of opening continental European geography to the “language question” as a dynamic process composed of both material as well as immaterial domains, in dialogue with the past and open to future-oriented action
Summary
“[L]angue et territoire n’ont pas à être enracinés dans une géographie spécifique: ils peuvent tout simplement être là, à disposition ou produits, pour des raisons dont les causes sont ailleurs.” ([1], p. 90, emphasis added). “At one stage of my self-translation, it was important to me to go over my childhood experiences in English; I could pick up the other part of the interrupted story and grow up in Polish. This, I think, is the source of the pleasure: That it is possible to go back and forth with the knowledge that both languages that have constructed me exist within one structure; and to know that the structure is sturdy enough to allow for pliancy and openness—and, who knows, perhaps for new discoveries yet.” ಎಲೊಲ್ೕ?...Qué mejor lenguaje que del cuerpo para experiencia las fronteras como vuelo y vuelo como las fronteras?” [3]
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