Native Tongue

Author: Carl Hiaasen
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0307767426
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author comes a novel in which dedicated, if somewhat demented, environmentalists battle sleazy real estate developers in the Florida Keys. "Rips, zips, hurtles, keeping us turning the pages at breakfinger pace." —New York Times Book Review When the precious clue-tongued mango voles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills on North Key Largo are stolen by heartless, ruthless thugs, Joe Winder wants to uncover why, and find the voles. Joe is lately a PR man for the Amazing Kingdom theme park, but now that the voles are gone, Winder is dragged along in their wake through a series of weird and lethal events that begin with the sleazy real-estate agent/villain Francis X. Kingsbury and can end only one way....

Native Tongue

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617760
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
First published in 1984, Native Tongue earned wide critical praise, and cult status as well. Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use. The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action. A complete work in itself, it is also the first volume in Elgin’s acclaimed Native Tongue trilogy.

Native Tongues

Author: Sean P. Harvey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674745388
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its “manifest destiny” of westward expansion. Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was a key marker of racial ancestry, inspiring conjectures about the structure of Native American vocal organs and the grammatical organization and inheritability of their languages. A racially inflected discourse of “savage languages” entered the American mainstream and shaped attitudes toward Native Americans, fatefully so when it came to questions of Indian sovereignty and justifications of their forcible removal and confinement to reservations. By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific efforts were under way to record the sounds and translate the concepts of Native American languages and to classify them into families. New discoveries by ethnologists and philologists revealed a degree of cultural divergence among speakers of related languages that was incompatible with prevailing notions of race. It became clear that language and race were not essentially connected. Yet theories of a linguistically shaped “Indian mind” continued to inform the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.

Learning One’s Native Tongue

Author: Tracy B. Strong
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022662322X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Citizenship is much more than the right to vote. It is a collection of political capacities constantly up for debate. From Socrates to contemporary American politics, the question of what it means to be an authentic citizen is an inherently political one. With Learning One’s Native Tongue, Tracy B. Strong explores the development of the concept of American citizenship and what it means to belong to this country, starting with the Puritans in the seventeenth century and continuing to the present day. He examines the conflicts over the meaning of citizenship in the writings and speeches of prominent thinkers and leaders ranging from John Winthrop and Roger Williams to Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin Roosevelt, among many others who have participated in these important cultural and political debates. The criteria that define what being a citizen entails change over time and in response to historical developments, and they are thus also often the source of controversy and conflict, as with voting rights for women and African Americans. Strong looks closely at these conflicts and the ensuing changes in the conception of citizenship, paying attention to what difference each change makes and what each particular conception entails socially and politically.

Earthsong

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558619186
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The final volume in the trilogy feminist science-fiction fans have been waiting for.

The Judas Rose

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1936932652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Book Description
In this dystopian science fiction classic set in a world where women have no rights, the patriarchy sends a covert female agent to take down the resistance. In the second entry of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside… Originally published in the 1980s, the Native Tongue trilogy is a classic dystopian tale: a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. “This angry feminist text is also an exemplary experiment in speculative fiction, deftly and implacably pursuing both a scientific hypothesis and an ideological hypothesis through all their social, moral, and emotional implications.”—Ursula K. Le Guin “Less well known than The Handmaid's Tale but just as apocalyptic in their vision…Native Tongue along with its sequel The Judas Rose . . . record female tribulations in a world where…women have no public rights at all. Elgin's heroines do, however, have one set of weapons—words of their own.”—Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, New York Times Book Review “A pioneering feminist experiment.”—Literary Hub “A welcome reminder of the feminist legacies of science fiction…Explores the power of speech, agency, and subversion in a work that is as gripping, troubling, and meaningful today as it has ever been.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062417444
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
“Vastly informative and vastly entertaining…A scholarly and fascinating book.” —Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.

Mother Tongues and Nations

Author: Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1934078263
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

Silence Is My Mother Tongue

Author: Sulaiman Addonia
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

Not Like a Native Speaker

Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231522711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.