De-centering Modern Language(s): The Case of Chinese, Portuguese, and Swahili

Abstract

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the deprivation of the political agency of writers by way of a comparative case study of the modernization or standardization of the languages of Chinese, Portuguese, and Swahili against the backdrop of comparable processes of other modern European languages. Aside from provincializing the modern ethnocentric understandings over matters of language(s) and identifying new grounds for more decentered comparative studies of language-based scholarships, I also highlight the urgency for literary scholars to pay more careful attention to the perspectives of the different peoples involved in the different processes, instead of the formal attributes of the outcomes of the language reforms. It is intended as a step forward toward a de-imperialized epistemological reform conditioned upon the multilingual awareness of intellectuals capable of recognizing the different forms of multilingual nuances in writing and regrouping the works according to the nature of the actions involved, against the administrations of imperial forces mediated through the problematic uses of languages.

The methods I employ are close-reading of works from select writers and intellectuals who are involved in different capacities in the modernization or standardization of languages in relevant linguistic contexts, reading across national, ethnic, linguistic, genre, and discipline-based divisions, dwelling also upon the meanings of the non-explicitly said and the ambiguities in documents with the deployment of aesthetic sensitivity. It calls for a more comprehensive global and multilingual perspective on things pertinent to a differently experienced global modernity for the interpretation of each piece of work, and appeals to the cultivation of a habit of writing for a global audience in a decentered manner, keeping in view the need for a genuinely democratized new lingua franca which still awaits to be negotiated and constructed with more active efforts of similar natures from different points of departures on an equitable and dialogic basis, which is urgent for the recognition of commonalities behind differently verbalized forms of resistances across historical, cultural and regional divisions, and the facilitation of critical dialogues on pressing issues experienced in the world at different levels.