Sonia Das: Mapping a Heritage Language Industry: A Genealogy of Transnational Circulations within French-Tamil Societies
The Tamil heritage language industry, which is defined as the system of cultural values and ideas integrating the production and distribution of Tamil language commodities for im/migrants and their descendants, is more than mere multicultural or modern-day institution. As both transnational and historical phenomena, its incipient practices can also be documented in the circulation of linguistic and literary goods within obscure trade circuits, including those existing between 19th century colonial French India and sugar plantations in French Guiana and between present-day Montreal and other diasporic cities. These routes presuppose specific bureaucratic conditions under which language commodities are commissioned, produced, and exchanged with Tamil indentured laborers and refugees. In describing and comparing transnational circulations of heritage language goods in select French-Tamil societies, this paper exposes the diverse language ideologies of spatial belonging implicit in this industry’s institutional and other material practices.
I begin by considering the roles that different social actors, including colonial interpreters, state administrators, indentured laborers, and refugees, play in the publication, translation, and trade of Tamil heritage language goods (e.g. French-Tamil dictionaries, newspapers, course syllabi, educational media, religious texts, translators, and devotional speakers). I also ask how laborers and refugees’ analogous linguistic repertoires and experiences of post-migratory incarceration, immobility, or racialization are refracted by large-scale imperial contests and consolidations of state power. Ultimately, I suggest that the timing, directionality, and framing of exchanges between linguistic goods in transnational circuits index diasporic Tamils’ efforts to map virtual routes of reunification and eventual return despite state efforts to circumscribe geopolitical spheres of economic productivity. By both presupposing iconically-bounded spaces of localized belonging and entailing indexically-linear spaces of trans-local belonging, the Tamil heritage language industry thus paves a genealogy of morally asymmetrical landscapes in the wake of its circulations through colonial and post-colonial worlds.
Biographical Statement:
Sonia Das is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She completed her Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2008. Her research describes the communicative practices and language ideologies of diasporic/mobile South Asians, focusing in particular on post-colonial and colonial interactions between Tamil, French, and more recently Hindi-speaking interlocutors. She is broadly interested in topics of multilingualism, heritage language education, sociolinguistic scales, race/ethnicity, and transnationalism, with an emphasis on diasporas and globalizing cities. She is the author of “Between Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas” in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1):1-23 (2008) and “The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal: A Study of Intersecting Language Ideologies in Nationalist Quebec” in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8(2): 230-247 (2008).
