206: Dr. Shakil Rabbi

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to episode 206 of The Big Ratorical Podcast. I'm your host, Charles Woods. On this episode, I interviewed Dr. Shaquille Robbie about his new book, The Language Movement in Bangladesh, Translingualism, and a Struggle for Ratorical Sovereignty. - So if you're thinking about that, like, "Oh, why is that, like, what happened?" Where it's a complete alien language to me, and it's a completely other language to me, even though 60, 70 years ago, it was our language on some level or the other, and sort of unpacking those things through the archive, really helped me, and that was sort of what was personal and trying to figure out my own biases, and my own sort of myths and unpack those myths. In terms of what I got from my teachers, I think it sort of a generosity and patience in a certain way. I was lucky enough to come here to my undergrad and then lucky enough to also go back to Bangladesh, and get a degree there, and then come back here again, and complete my PhD here. And through each of those steps I had, I was lucky just pure luck to come across, I really, fantastic people who gave me their time and their patience. - Shaquille Robbie is a assistant professor in the Department of English at Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing studies, and research methods. His new book, The Language Movement in Bangladesh, charts the Bangla Language Movement, from a rhetorical perspective. Shaquille investigates the rhetorical facets of this debate and its takeaways, or critical conversations around translingualist perspectives and rhetorical sovereignty. Robbie analyzes the role of traditional modernist and folk ideologies during this era of subcontinental history through a combination of digital humanities and translingualist methodologies. I hope you enjoy my interview with Shaquille Robbie. Who are you? What's your name, your institutional affiliation, your title and your role there? Who are you, and what do you do? - My name is Shaquille Robbie, and my institution, I work at Virginia Tech, I'm an assistant professor, and I teach graduate courses, I teach undergraduate courses, part of the writing program here to basically academic work, advising graduate students as well. So that's part of a big part of what I do professional. I'm originally from Bangladesh, but I came in 2003 for undergrad, and I went back home for a couple of years, and I came back into 2011. So then I've sort of been here ever since, I got my doctorate, I worked at Bui State before this, now I work at Virginia Tech. - How long have you been in Blacksburg? - For five years. - Okay, so you're settled then into the town and community and university. Very cool. - And it's a beautiful part of the country for sure. - I have heard that it is really beautiful. I've never been to Blacksburg, but I hear that the university and the area is quite beautiful. - Yeah, it's a college town, but it is a very picturesque, I think it's the mountains, and you forget, this is actually something. - Yeah. What are you teaching this fall? Are you teaching this fall? And if so, what are you teaching? - So I'm teaching a technical grinding course which is sort of a service, and then the other one is intercultural issues and professional writing, and that's for our majors, and that's a junior seniors, and that's part of the major we have here in one of the majors. - Okay. - What's a reading from that second class? What's a reading or assignment that you are really enjoying, that the students might be enjoying, and why? - So I, one of the assignments I ask students to do in this class is sort of do an intercultural interview. So where they find someone who's, they take a certain test, is the Hofstra cultural makeup test, and they have a certain makeup, and they're going to interview someone from the other end of the spectrum, and the idea of that is sort of understand how cultural differences manifest in terms of cultures, situation roles, and the personality in certain ways. And I really enjoy that because, at the end of the day I'm a social, I'm very much a qualitative social scientist. I love interviews, I like doing interviews, and I sort of work with them to do those things, and teaching them how to create questions, teaching them how to get a good transcription, teaching them how to analyze it so that they can see, oh, the contradictions are throughout, and it's not, oh, you're from here, so you're like this, you're from here, you're like this, within the same sort of answer, it's always been very informative for them, and me to figure out how they're doing this thing, and what they're learning from the sort of complexity of it. And it's a data first rather than idea first, and I always enjoy that, it's always messy. And I think I like the messiness of it, it's always a challenge, right? - Right, well, no better place to think about interviews than on an interview podcast like ours. Today, you are on the podcast to discuss your book, the language of movement in Bangladesh, trans-lingualism, and a struggle for a rhetorical sovereignty. Congratulations on the book. Tell me, how did this book come to be? What's the subject, and what research methods are used throughout the project? - So the language movement is a mass movement about language rights in Bangladesh, what is now Bangladesh, back then it was East Pakistan, who was sort of a movement from 1948 to '56, and it is sort of the foundational myth of Bangladesh's society in a way. The same way you might think the Boston Tea Party leads the conditions for the independence movement here. So it is part of Bangladesh, you, it's every year, it's a big event, it's the entire month of February, it has a lot of things around it. So I grew up growing up in Bangladesh, this was part of the water, this was part of our foundational myth, what counts as what makes us the nation that is exceptional, because we are the nation that fought for our language and died for our language, et cetera. So it was very much a fundamental topic that I knew growing up. And so when I started thinking about what I could do as a researcher here in my career, so much of the sort of work that was happening in this scholarship was about trans-lingualism that I was a part of. And the discussions on trans-lingualism are sort of discussions around language, what comes as language, a critical sense of what language is in the world, whether it's in the classroom, whether it's in terms of policy, whether it's in terms of how people make sense of things. And given this sort of conversation, I was a part of through my graduate studies and as a scholar, this topic was pretty self-evident to me, that we have so much of our national identity and national investment made into this mass movement around language. It seemed a very clear way to map out these things in the archival way. Archival in the sense that it was modern now, that all of it was recorded by 48 to 56. If you think of that, every newspaper article, every sort of mass event, every sort of protest, every big speech was somehow, somewhere, whether in the newspapers, whether in sort of national archives somewhere was there because the nation had in the Bangladesh had invested so much in recording this stuff throughout the history. So this gave me a very easy object to mine using digital humanities methods, like distant reading, corpus methods, and tried those out simultaneously to have the critical conversation around translingualism. What does that mean? Critical close reading with distant reading approaches. They'll tend to it. So that's sort of the two, I hope that sort of gets at your question. It's what research methods, distant and close reading. Why do this book? Because I grew up with it and it was everywhere. And the subject is the language movement or a mass language movement of our language, right? That also problematizes certain conversations of trans-levels and forms to a rhetorical sovereignty. I think in your answer here, you've expressed part of the personal nature of the project. But it becomes clear in the acknowledgments that it is very much a deeply personal project, a long gestating project. And in those acknowledgments, you wrote that on a personal note, I want to think my various teachers in Bangladesh and my family for their constant care and support. Before moving on to truly a poignant moment of gratitude for your wife, what are the personal elements of this book? And what are some of the things that you took from teachers in Bangladesh which have influenced the project? To personally, this book just was always self-evident in front of my eyes because this is a language right if you're trying to have a conversation about trans-lingualism or multilingualism or the role language plays in society, which is very much three substantial topics in our field. This is front and center and it's a very high-stakes thing. It's not only just a policy document, it creates the nation, it creates leads to independence 15 years later. It creates this sort of makeup of what counts as a Bangladeshi now, makes the people in a certain way. So it was always very self-evident in front of me. At the same time, one of the things I recognize and through this process of writing this book which I had to end up doing is uncover the myth of it and then in that way unpack parts of myself in that process. I thought this was the thing, it was always going to be a sense of language as a mother tongue being like intimately connected to us as a people. It's very important, mother tongue is mother tongue at the same time. The records initially really bear that out because it's 60 years later and the sort of myth emerges that over the people that die for our language. Whereas the record once you look into it in close, close ways, it's not that simple. It really wasn't as, it was a maximum moment about politics that gets articulated over language rights. It's not necessarily just, and that's what the interesting parts of it is. What does it mean to say it's about language or what is language? It's politics, but also not. It's me being able to understand, oh, this was true, this is what we thought, but the evidence shows, oh, that isn't true. This is very different. Again, like to give you an example that I write about in the book. Urdhu, the other language there is a complete foreign language to me. I can't, to me conceptually, even something like French or Spanish would be closer to my identification because of its close proximity westernization and how much I've lived in the West. Then Urdhu ever would be. Even though it was part of another 70 years ago, it was one of the essential languages, and my parents both could write, would do Urdhu, I cannot. If someone reads it out to me, I can sort of get what they're saying because it was close proximity to Hindi, which I can sort of understand. But I have no identification with Urdhu at all. So if you're thinking about that, like, oh, why is that? Why, what happened? Where is a complete alien language to me? And it's a completely other language to me, even though 60, 70 years ago, it was our language on some level or the other. And sort of unpacking those things through Dhaka really helped me. And that was sort of what was personal in trying to figure out my own biases and my own sort of myths and unpack those myths. In terms of what I got from my teachers, I think it's sort of a generosity and patience in a certain way. I was lucky enough to come here to my undergrad and then lucky enough to also go back to Bangladesh and get a degree there and then come back here again and complete my PhD here. And through each of those steps I had, I was lucky, just pure luck to come across. I really fantastic people who to give me their time and their patience. And I have a personal sort of personality of look at the shiny thing and just hold that direction. And having teachers who were patient enough to hold my hand while I learn new methods each of the ways and sort of clumsily in a distant way, like figured out along the way and not sort of get frustrated as much as I would be in their position. Like, why are you doing this and then this and then this, they're not connected like something. So they've really been very generous with me, like patience. I think I talked about that with my, like that point, like the acknowledgement. Even my wife, like it's just sort of the patience, and you know this as well, like I think the readers would also know this, like riding and researching is a really frustrating process and you go out, ebbs and flows and having the long perspective and the patience of this, like having, oh you didn't expect what you found. That's not necessarily bad thing. You're sort of forced to think otherwise to like sort of go back to the research interview stuff that I make my students do. It's always frustrating. They don't find what they expect to find and then they're sort of forced to grapple and make sense of that. And that is very much a learned skill that I figured out from seeing how to figure stuff out and my teachers have taught me that like you're never going to, if you found something going into something that you expected, then you didn't really find anything. You're just confirming your own thing. Yeah. So one of the things I really found really interesting, I'm a person who loves to use epigraphs. All right, so I found your epigraph interesting. You use a quote from Farouk Wasif and here's what you, here's the epigraph that you use. I don't know if there's been any other political symbol as powerful as the Shahid Minar in the history of the Bengali nation. The language movement and the Shahid Minar both highlight a truth. That language itself is a political arena. What arises in this field of language must be inherently political and must emerge from within society itself if language is to be truly liberated. Why did you choose this quote and why is the topic of your book critical, timely right now? So with the Farouk Wasif the quote, it comes from there was a 50 year I believe or anniversary print edition that was there in Bangladesh. People commemorating about the movement and his speech, he's also very good writer in Bangla. I sort of translated it and the point he to make is that it's about the monument that emerges, which is also very central in the movement and in terms of the Bangladeshi identity overall. Think of sort of the Statue of Liberty, the equivalent, like it is an icon of what America is supposed to be. One is supposed to be what it is, that's the image, right? It's on the coins, it's on whichever, same thing for the Shahid Minar for Bengalis or Bangladeshis. This monument is a thing. It is the icon icon in a certain way around which so much of our myth-making identities, rituals, center around. So he's talking about this but he's also sort of saying something that I thought was very interesting because he says that it arises in the field and it's inherently political and it also must emerge within society if language is truly ready to be liberated. So because so much of my work in this project was about retort sovereignty and the idea of retort sovereignty, the SCOTLINE argument, was that the sense of how people use language, the sense of language has to be emergent from the people themselves. Whether or not that coheres to a western ocean of language, which is like this is a fixed set monolingal or translingal in the sense that it's all one repertoire, it is the people who use it would define it. And this is what he was sort of talking about there that within the sort of this movement, it talks about this idea of language that it must come from the people who are using it and they get to themselves define it whether it corresponds to the dictionary sense of language, it could or it corresponds to the sort of language of the street sense, both are equally valid. You're not being sort of internally colonized, if you're from Bangladesh and post-colonial society, if you subscribe to a Western sense of language as a monolingual subunit as a unit that is dictionary because that the fact that Bangladesh came together and defined it in that way inherently means that it isn't necessarily an internal colonization. Thank you. Thank you for that response. Well, we've talked about the acknowledgments a little bit in the epigraph. Let's move forward onto the next part, the introduction of the book. In the introduction to your book, you write, quote, "current traditional rhetoric stress a sense of communication around competence forms and modes, seeing differences as errors to be corrected. By contrast, process and post-process approaches have focused on teaching communication through a series of steps that can situate meaning-making, viewing errors not as failures of competence but differences in communication practices." And there, you cite James Berlin. And you go on to write, the distinction between these two approaches demonstrates the abiding influence of dualist thinking about languages. What do we mean when we talk about languages? Do we mean language as an idea of the language as a practice? What does it mean when we prioritize one over the other? How might we talk about languages in ways that recognize both these senses? So my question is, and I guess it's a big one, but what do we mean when we talk about languages, particularly in relation to your book? Right. So that's pretty much the thing I've been trying to work with throughout my career. Okay. The idea of language and the practice of language. And in sort of the social linguistics and the rhetorical sense, there's two components to it. Language as thing that makes us constitutive, language that puts information into container and passes it forward. So the communicative. Those two dimensions are simultaneously how sort of philosophies of mine like Charles Taylor or whomever always have been like these two dimensions. That is, it's always then someone like Locke talks about the communicative, someone like what's the German thinker's name? Herder talks about the constitutive. And they're always grappling on this and V2R2, right? Like McGee talks about constitutiveness and Berk talks about conservation and identification. And those are always there part of this. So what do we do when we're talking about languages, particularly? Is it a minimaking system? Sure. It is in my sense, the way I approach it, is it is a minimaking system which is made up of the discourse, like discourse, the units of speech, units of grammar, syntax, all of that stuff. If you extend it out in terms of the semiotic, then potentially embedded into it. But within our case of this case, this book, it was very simply what is how the speech of the Bengali people, the speech of the people in Bangladesh at the time was a language that was appropriate and modern enough, Islamic enough, folk enough to be a part of the language of the state in an official sense. And that in that sense, I think it was modern now because it fulfilled the communicative functions of being standardizable, being able to be equal in all the printing purposes, communication purposes, indexical purposes, finding meaning or having like the right vocabulary to talk about something inherently in a technical way. It fulfilled that criteria. It also fulfilled the criteria of Islamiveness in the sense of it was sufficiently able to hold Islamic ideas, Islamic cultural concepts because it had been doing that for hundreds of years in translation form or in terms of glossing of the Islamic idea in terms of Bangladesh for the general people. And then the folk concept which is again constitutive, it was language of the place, it was language of the region of Bengal, it was the language of the people that had been living there for six, seven hundred, a thousand years, 1500 years. So in all those ways, it was a language that connected to the history and the place throughout and it also responded enough to be modern, it corresponded enough to be Islamic and corresponded enough to be part of culture in their local space. And that's why it was appropriate for a language of the nation alongside Uddu at the time. Okay. Later in the same chapter, you write that quote, "demands for recognizing Bainla became the vehicle through which the disenfranchised population of East Pakistan turned political grievances into a popular resistance forcing the Pakistan state to change its policies." There you're quoting Van Schindel and you go on to write quote, "they organized around demands for state language recognition." And after 1952, tryoffed over the central government's position of promoting Urdu as the sole lingua franca. It was a struggle for rhetorical sovereignty. It took place in academic and policy spaces alongside political mobilization and public protests. Can you talk a little bit or talk a bit about the importance of these conversations, conversations about language occurring in both academic and policy spaces and among various publics? So this was the main gist around which I ended up organizing the book because it was not, it was because the discussions here were simultaneously trying to modernize the language in a certain way to suit modern nations. And it was also operating in public conversations, op-ed newspapers, mass protests, public ceremonies, performances where these discussions were being made in not just about language, but the idea of Bangla, the idea of the culture that Bangla represented and politics in the sort of rights around the big, for being valid people, the ability to access jobs and work. Like the reason this issue became so sort of widespread is for the longest time in Bangladesh or Urdu. In post-Colonial, in colonial South Asia, people would get, those who were lucky enough to get an education would get employment in the state system and bridge state systems. So you were educated in English and all the bureaucracies, all the sort of jobs were in English, if you were competent. And one sort of alongside towards the end, it also became like the local language. So the common jobs, the forms, all those things, you filled out the schooling, working in school, working in sort of the bureaucracies, you could do it in English and the local language. And that was a very good job. Like people dreamed of getting that permanent position. He was tenured in that sense back in the day of government positions, advantages still like the dream for a lot of people because it's permanent. And it was sort of a vehicle for upward mobility. And when Pakistan emerges and the partition happens in India's breaks into Pakistan and in India. And Pakistani self, Urdu is going to be the state language. What that does is systematically, the Bengalis were especially afraid of this, that it would make all the educated Bengalis who had been working in the government or working in like these good jobs illiterate because they couldn't operate in their language anymore. And that was a huge political consideration for sort of the professional past, the bourgeoisie in a certain way. And they were pushing back on it and they were pushing back on it in these policy spaces, that is, op-ed in newspapers, academic conferences where they were debating the nature of language, Bengali language, whether or not it was sufficiently Islamic in the cultural sense to be able to work with it. Because there's some association back then with Hinduism in India because it was associated with sort of Sanskrit derived language, but academics proved systematic that this wasn't true. This was sort of a branding that people tried to do to make it seem as if it was part of the prestige language of Sanskrit, which it wasn't. But on that end, while that was also having simultaneously at first most Bengalis or Bangladesh in East Pakistan, couldn't be bothered about it. There were instances where And this is where the personal story again comes into place where I had to undo the myth that I grew up with. The myth is, as soon as they said it, all the Bengalis or the Bangladeshis, immediately rose up saying, oh, this are mother tongue and we need to fight for it and this is horrible. But that wasn't the case in the beginning when they tried to impose, would do only policy and people in the university, the students, the upper middle class people, who were going to go into bureaucracy, try to do these protests and they left the university ground. They were getting beat up by the regular people, saying like, what are you doing? Like this is anti-national. We're trying to build a nation here and Urdu is a good vehicle for there. It's like, stop your rabble, like, you know, like you're being too radical, like the world isn't that easy. So they were very much at first equally invested in the Urdu position, even though they were Bengal, even though they didn't necessarily understand Urdu because of the idea of nationalism that was there, or Islamic nationalism. But through the process of day in, day out, day in, day out over the couple of years, when even the mass group of people recognized that Pakistan was treating East Bengal, that province as a colony and was denying its economic opportunities, it was denying sort of political representation, it was denying any sense of being heard from them in all these domains. And that's when this debate around language, this demand for language took on a very mass movement characteristic because it was a topic that everyone could understand in that context. Like, oh, we demand this, what do you want? We just want this. And it took on all these like economic, political, social, racial, demands into this one God term, which was Bangal, or demand for Bangal as the mother language. And that's how sort of, it came to sort of simultaneously respond to the position academically, like, oh, this, if you look at it, language in the court sense, in the sort of modern sense, this is what Bangal languages, this is what makes it more effective as a state organization language. That's what the intellectuals were making. The mass movement was making the demand of this is the language of the people, this is the language of justice, this is the language that represents equality and authenticity for us. In this way, it was happening simultaneously. And that's what was important about this. And that's why I think this maximum is really interesting because it's simultaneously happening in the academic space or the policies, the discourse space led us to that intellectual space. And it was creating these categories and arguments that were very sophisticated, that were deeply rooted and connected to historical weight. But it was also doing it outside the academy, outside the sort of intellectual spaces, and they were building off of each other. Like the arguments were, the mass movement arguments were getting weight from the historical analysis of the intellectual and the intellectuals were getting sort of substance from the mass movements outside. And for it to be victorious in a political arena and the mass social language rights discussions, I recognize that both had to happen. You can't just win an argument is intellectually and expect it to, you can't just win the mass movement argument and not expect it to sort of deform itself into sort of marble or superficialness. The sort of depth comes from the intellectual elements. And again, I'm being a little like simplistic here. And the breadth comes from the mass movement. And both had to happen for the movement around language right to succeed as it date because it fundamentally dated, it changed, it changed everything around, hence of South Asian politics. - Yeah. That's really one of the fascinating things about your book is that it ties the importance of language to movement, to rhetorical sovereignty, but also just presents a rich history. So a little bit of a different question. How does your book, the language of movement and Bangladesh, fit into the larger purview of the trajectory of writing studies? - So I sort of talked about earlier, like the idea when I was going through this in the graduate school and some of my work posts is this debate around language that has been circulating in the field for the last, since 2011, let's just go that way, right? Like the publication of Translingo article by Bruce Horner means I'll do all of them. In that state of this debate around language, what counts as language? What does Translanguage mean? What does Translingo practice mean? What does it mean to make room for multiple languages and the dynamic nature of communication in the classroom? And how the communicative practices of the students might be very distinct from the expectations of standardized written edited English that you might have in the classroom. And how having these discussions with the Translingo frame simultaneously creates a historical frame of thinking critically about language at the same time creating opening up the space for process of other languages or other modes of communication in that composition process. So the Translingo conversation was front of mind for me. And this mass movement is a case study. It is literally sort of a Translingo thing. And one of the points I really thought needed to be pointed out is so much of the Translingo work has been done on the Western space. And by itself, that's because the sort of habitus or the idea of monolingualism, that is, the sense that anything can be said in one language, is just a translation question. It is so naturalized in the sort of Western psyche. Even if you're trying to work with, oh, they have these different languages operating and we should make space for other languages, you still end up producing the monolingual frame because that is the sort of response. You're trying to say, this is monolingualism. And this isn't necessarily equitable or just because our students have all these other repertoires we should adopt. We should respond to it by opening up the space. We should respond to it by negotiating the space. That still reproduces the monolingual frame and reifies it. That is, it becomes multiple, multi-lingualism, as some have said, is multiple monolingualism. This, this, this, and separate units. And it reproduces that framing. The case in Bangladesh, which is less so now, then it was in the 14th because the nation hadn't been built yet. It wasn't monolingual in that sense. It was very, the category of language or the code didn't exist because the nation hadn't been established. It was still a colony and then it's sort of finding itself as a modern sense of the nation state with one people, one language, one space. So that didn't exist. So the idea of responding to a monolingualism as a corrective through these multi-lingual practices or these different practices of language difference wouldn't be done because people just didn't think like that. And what happens when we, that is more accurately the translational mindset. When I look at the record there, they are very much not thinking, oh, this is this would-do thing and we need to respond to it and show, open it up in terms of would-do and bound. They were just operating the sense that we want our mother language right. And it has to be this or this. Some of it is mixed with would-do Arabic. Bangla, some of it is English, Bangla, Arabic. It's all sort of one mix. Like there's this one chapter where I talk about a very famous intellectual who was talking and his speech has like five languages in there. Arabic, would-do, Bangla, English, all mixed in in there and sort of the dialect that he's operating in. And no one's responding like, oh, hey, you didn't translate this. You need to translate this so we can understand. Everyone just assume, I didn't understand a big deal. Like that person understood it. It's all sort of built into that process because you're just assuming that and that is a translational mindset that that was operating in. And which doesn't reify monolingualism in the sense that some of the ways we respond to monolingualism and the translational phrase in the West tends to reify and reproduce it. So I think that's what one of the things was really about. The second thing was about transnational retreats or global retreats. So even in the rhetorical practices, there were sort of indexing Islamic retreat to rhetorical practices, logics that are distinctly Islamic where I sort of for talk about the example of like how some of the intellectuals that we're talking about, talking about like the idea of queer community. communication in the Quran, and when they did that, or the dictates of it, they were doing analogies as sort of the logic system, which is one of the prescribed ways that Islamic argumentation happens. It's called a Kia. And the analogy framework, they distinctly draw on it in that invention process because they know when they do this analogy to this situation, to that situation, it becomes a legal argument. And that's in the Islamic sense. If you don't know how to read it in the Islamic sense, you would think it's an analogy. It is an analogy in the reasoning sense, like I'm doing this comparison to this, but it becomes like a Islamic law dictate as soon as you make the analogy to the Quran moment. As soon as the Quran moment and the other given moment are shown as comparable, that given the moment's dictate becomes legally obligatory, because it's a God's word. So those distinct strategies are Islamic, and those examples of Islamic rhetorical practice in a transnational sense. And the third, which was, again, what I was trying to figure out was just demanding. How can you use corpus methods, decision reading methods, to sort of show the big picture and then use that big picture thing to close read the things. And all of those things, I think, are important trajectories in the field. So a translingual, the transnational rhetoric, and the sort of distal humanities approaches to looking at big corpus. Yeah. Thank you for your answer to that question. I think it's one of the more important questions that I asked, folks. So one thing that I'd like to do on the podcast is just read a selection from your book, and have you respond to it. So I chose a passage from chapter one, quote, "The language movements vision offered a space-yotemporal and dynamic view of language, unlike the ruling classes linguistic hierarchy, which backgrounded historical developments to a sense of languages, the movement foregrounded their intertwined geographic and temporal dimensions. It recognized Bangla's development through space and time in Bengal. It's transformation into a literate language during Islamic rule and the emergence of the Bengali Muslims and used these connections to argue against the imposition of Urdu as the lingua franco. Bangla was rotted in both geography and history, and the movement used this as the topoi for a dynamic and evolving rhetoric around identity and resistance." So in terms of what I was trying to get at there was the ruling class created this hierarchy of language, that is Urdu above Bangla below in terms of this. Right. And we operate in that level too, like English as a global language currency, so it has the highest order. Then you have the local language, well yeah, you should learn your local language or whatever you want to express yourself at, at the same time for the sake of deliverability or mobility, you better learn this higher order language all the time. And which is pretty much the status quo of like university education, right, in that sense. And you learn that because it has given you mobility across the world. So what Urdu was doing in that case was okay, Urdu is the language of broader Islamic identification because it has its association with sort of Islamic civilization of the late 19th century, South Asia and the emerging Islamic modernity movement that was in the middle of the 18th century. A lot of that was in order sort of the modernization movements of the Aligar movement in South Asia was written out in order to all the sort of big thinkers that were there in the late half of the 19th century were in Urdu or Urdu writers. So they created this sense like if you want to be an Islamic nation, Islamic part of the broader Islamic civilization. And it's identification with the Middle East, it's identification with Iran, you better speak or do because that's what the Muslim civilization recognizes, it won't recognize Bangla because it's not in that register, excuse me. In opposition to that or as a response to that what the Bangla movement did or the language movement did is it showed one and it reproduced the sense of language and operates in South Asia for a long time which is language is the system of the place. It has secondary to do with the people whereas which is very different concept in the west, the nation is the people who live in a place and speak a language. There is like a primary definition of the nation coming from the Islamic system in South Asia in the in the Shastras and it the people are the people living a place. The place is primary. You're primary talking about the place and the nation didn't exist as a concept. It was much more a place and those people live in that place and speak that language. Not that there's a nation that lives in that place and speaks that language. It is there's that place people live there and they speak this language. So the place is primary and that is a Shastra, it's a Sanskrit word, it means rainbow. So that concept abided in South Asia, again this is debatable before the advent of like modern concepts of nation. It's a place for a rather than like a people first. In that sense, the Bengali language movement, the language movement picked up on that framing and sort of showed like, oh this place, this geography is where Bangla emerged in this this way historically and so it is primarily like the language because this nation is situated in this place, it has to operate in that language rather than the people, the Islamic people live here therefore they need to like change it into that Islamic language. So they sort of, they work in that frame rather than the orders of the indexicality frame that the Udu speakers were talking about which is this has more currency geographically, therefore we need to do this. The Bengali speakers were saying this is the language of the place. The nation is in that place therefore you need to speak this language and did that through historical, it goes back 800 years in this way, it did it through in terms of the look at the culture and the various ways the people here express it through music, through art, through sort of mass everyday practices that rooted to that place, any nation that is in that place has to be in that language. Thank you for responding to that passage. So when folks read this book, what do you hope they take up and take away from it ultimately? One I do hope they take away the utility of digital humanities methods for our field. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. Because I found this was very helpful and useful in just understanding like the massive corpus of text in a way that I would not have read otherwise, they generally added value that close reading would not have been able to. So going back to this, like the myth was okay, when they said Udu will be the only language people rose up and erroneous sort of criticizing it. But if you look at it from the distance, the distance reading wise, the first thing that emerges is that not true, like the valence or like the if you do sort of the what is that term again like sentiment analysis of like the the corpus around Udu versus around Bangla, you see like they're equal around like till 1951 after 51 and 52 when the sort of killings of student protesters happen, the Udu thing falls off a cliff because it becomes very negative, very polarized. But before that, it was really close enough, it wasn't a mass reaction, it was a mass resistance thing and that I picked up very directly from, oh hey, this sentiment analysis is not showing that at all, why not then I could go around and try and figure out what was happening in that corpus versus that corpus to actually read it and see oh, that's what was happening, it was a debate about more descriptiveness rather than argumentation and I would not have picked that up, if I just went into this knowing specifically where I'm from, like already having that history of like oh Udu was in imposition, Bangla was sort of authenticity question and we won, therefore it was righteous and it was just false rule or so, I wouldn't have picked that up, that's the first, the utility of this. And when I was working on this, I also had that very clear direction in my mind for why write this, what do I want to ban this audience to get from this, because the banish audience already knows this story very thoroughly, like we, you know, like from grade 1 to grade 2 to grade 3, like everyone's reading this all the time, you're sort of expressing your cultural things all the time. So this is not a new story. for them. What is new, I hope for them was, oh, we can take our sort of corpus and use open source jithil humanities methods to look at it and look at it otherwise. And I sort of hope to show, okay, yeah, you can do it this way. You want to do corpus analysis of how certain works have been translated in and out. You can do that. That's like, it's not hard or costly. It wants you like know how to do this. And you can sort of mine it in your own history rather than you could look to the West in a certain way and try and get their terms from there like whichever theoretical term might have emerged and import that to understand the same thing again and again, you don't necessarily need that. So that's like the second thing, that's the first thing. I think the second thing is really this complicated nature of language, that it is always a practice and always an idea. And when we try and get to this thing and try and grapple with it, it always we end up reproducing one over the other. That is, we might justify well, the idea of language of a standardized written English has a certain cultural capital, therefore you should learn it in terms of education and career wise. So the idea operates and has a certain power. Or you go the other route of the critical disposition sense and say, well, there are all these different languages operating and the ideal standardized written English is illegitimate or ideological because of power that it hides. And therefore we need to open that up and you open up critical argument to do that. And in that sense you sort of say that the ideas aren't really real, they're false consciousness. But the truth of that, I want to argue that both have to be dealt with simultaneously. The idea of language with the academics we're doing in the mass movement and the practice of language which was the mass movement. Both have to happen at the same time to win this mass movement argument. And as your total scholars, we also have to think about how rhetoric has to happen at the ideal level and the practice that will simultaneously or to be persuasive. I want to think about teaching pedagogy for just a moment. How can instructors take up some of the information, take the knowledge in your book and adapt it into their teaching? How can they engage students with these ideas and knowledge? I think it's a way of approaching language as a topo of rhetorical education. So you might have the metrics of language, whatever that means. You can see how if you're having these conversations with students, you might say, okay, like this is our rhetoric operates in the politics domain. This is our rhetoric operates in terms of the social justice domain. This is how rhetoric is operating in terms of the digital domain. What I want to serve foreground is a real sense of, oh, this is how you can work with this idea of language rights. Or what does that mean? It isn't just this committee speaks this language and therefore the demand recognition of this language in the space of power and institutions. It is also the process of functions. That is how the language and the idea of language operates in that society to create the community, how the community itself can change with the idea of language that it's working from. While also if everyday practice or everyday ways of communication actually shows and contradicts the ideas around language that they were working from in the first place. So if you're having this debate of okay, students need to be proficient in standardized written English for education for employment purposes. You can make that argument while also recognize a making space for the fact that the actual process of it is contradicting that standardized written English idea in the first place. And that doesn't discount one or the other over the other. So you can hold both ideas at the same time, the Constitution and the communicative dimension. So those discussions can be very generative for gratitude. Especially gratitude is if you're trying to like look at read rhetorical education to grasp themselves around. Not just a critical sense but a functional sense because language is so substantially the essence of what makes a human being that you can see it operating in your like everyday space, in the social space, in the political space, in every domain and every domain sort of operates on like the idea of the thing you're referring to. But the practice of the thing which automatically by definition contradicts the thing because I'm gesturing to make meaning while I'm talking about the thing at the same time. So why do I need to gesture if I'm trying to just rely on language. Both are important but one the idea of language is also happening at the same time that we are both recognizing that there's this thing that I'm referring to indexing which might be English and right now. So a fascinating conversation should kill. What's next for you? Where you headed next in your research or maybe in your teaching? So teaching and research I'm still teaching the course I'm teaching I teach a research methods class as well which I really enjoy. In terms of my next work I'm really looking at linguistic landscapes sort of you can put that with rhetorical landscapes I would put it. Some sort of examining how minority communities in the US specifically Muslim minority communities try to make spaces of belonging through discursivity that is like indexing identity categories of what it means to be Muslim discourse categories that is they're switching in our language. So Arabic, Urdu, Bangla, other things that are part of their community transnational speaking English and then the digitality that all these spaces are also happening in the digital space. A lot of them are happening through WhatsApp groups, WhatsApp groups and sort of those things. Like many things that is interesting like I did some work earlier about ethnography. Whereas like a lot of the mosques in New York City for economic and social reasons don't have a full sort of iconography of the mosque that is the dome, the minaret, all of that stuff. Because there's a suspiciousness, there's a wonder of a void. So they would just use façades like tarps a sign that has someone etched a dome on it with a chalk to show that. And that's one cheap, right? Like economically it's easier. You don't have to do with building permits, all of that stuff. You can repurpose all these bus stations, all of that stuff, easily without having to create codes or work with building codes, city codes of like making a minaret, making a dome. That's a lot of extra work and it's very owners, it's expensive. But it also like avoid the sort of gaze of suspicion. So these are like discursive practices that they're doing. They're also operating in the digital spaces, right? All these WhatsApp groups that are always having these conversations, they're linking different languages, they're linking different sort of pictures, images, whichever to create these spaces of international belonging about ideas, not necessarily even about the idea, like Islamic topic, it's not about them. It is just, oh, have you seen this? And they just end up talking about it and they like link two different languages as well. So trying to figure that out and create. That sounds like a really fascinating project, truly. Where can people reach out to you if they found our conversation interesting and want to know more, how can they reach out to you? And importantly, where can they get the book? So the book is, if you have J store, from what I understand with the Pithwork, it's really available on J store, digitally and anywhere that is, it has it, obviously you can get it from Pithwork press site, which I think carries a discount. If you can get it from other places, right? I'm not going to talk about the big Tajima where you don't need books from. Everyone knows what that is, right? From the press, right? Right. And you can order your library to get it, that's always the best thing to do. So, and yeah, like that's where you can get the book. I'm hoping to start doing some more work on the linguistic landscape space. So I have to build some of that work from this book there too. And if they want to reach out to me, you can look at my website on Virginia Tech and just email the email there. Yes. Yeah. Well, it's a fascinating book and congratulations on it. The language movement in Bangladesh, Translingualism and a struggle for rhetorical sovereignty is available now from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Thanks for joining the podcast. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks. I really enjoy talking to you too, then I call the great work you do. Thank you. Same to you. As you heard at our interview, the language movement in Bangladesh adds to scholarship around language rights and language ideologies with an examination of a politically explosive debate in a non-western and post-colonial context. It's a critical book that is engaging and well-written. Thanks to Shaquille Robbie for joining me on the podcast. Get your copy of the language movement in Bangladesh. Translingualism and a struggle for rhetorical sovereignty available now from the University of Pittsburgh Press. I'll be back soon with another new episode of The Big Ratorical Podcast until then, always be listening rhetorically. The Big Ratorical Podcast is produced by Exalt Digital Media, Exalt Digital Media, not for profit. This podcast was recorded on land on which Georgia Tech stands in the ancestral and traditional territory of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy and the Cherokee Nation. 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