Language Is a Place of Struggle

Language Is a Place of Struggle

Author: Tram Nguyen

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780807048009

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"Language Is a Place of Struggle" is the first truly multiracial and polycultural quote book, collecting quotations from both historical and contemporary novelists and poets, activists and political leaders, and artists and musicians. Within these pages, readers will find wisdom, wit, and inspiration from Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans, American Indians, recent immigrants to the United States, and many others. With nearly fifteen hundred quotations, this exceptional book covers a broad spectrum: from insights on spirituality to words inciting social change and justice; from the impact of colonization, slavery, and racism to observations on gender, sexuality, and identity. The quotes show how people of color in the United States have been shaped by various community histories, ongoing political and cultural struggles, and personal evolutions. Each quote reflects three core themes from the histories of people of color in America: the significance of mass movements and the role of individuals within them; the vision that binds one society to another; and the foundational relationship between an evolving society and a changing self. Each chapter—Roots, Selves, Relationship, Work and Play, Making Change, and Inner Visions—adds to the larger story about people of color in the context of history, culture, and community. An invaluable tool for speechwriters, educators, ministers, and librarians that is accessibly organized for all readers, this entertaining and thought-provoking book is a much-needed resource for anyone interested in multicultural issues. Here you will find: Gloria Anzaldúa on borders and margins; Margaret Cho on failure and success; Edwidge Danticat on women who write; Junot Díaz on masculinity; Vine Deloria, Jr., on activism; Suheir Hammad on miscegenation and identity; bell hooks on identity and oppression; Edward P. Jones on the system of racism; Philip Vera Cruz on leadership; Chögyam Trungpa on spiritual materialism; and much more.


The Way of the Linguist

The Way of the Linguist

Author: Steve Kaufmann

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2005-11

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1420873296

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The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey. It is now a cliché that the world is a smaller place. We think nothing of jumping on a plane to travel to another country or continent. The most exotic locations are now destinations for mass tourism. Small business people are dealing across frontiers and language barriers like never before. The Internet brings different languages and cultures to our finger-tips. English, the hybrid language of an island at the western extremity of Europe seems to have an unrivalled position as an international medium of communication. But historically periods of cultural and economic domination have never lasted forever. Do we not lose something by relying on the wide spread use of English rather than discovering other languages and cultures? As citizens of this shrunken world, would we not be better off if we were able to speak a few languages other than our own? The answer is obviously yes. Certainly Steve Kaufmann thinks so, and in his busy life as a diplomat and businessman he managed to learn to speak nine languages fluently and observe first hand some of the dominant cultures of Europe and Asia. Why do not more people do the same? In his book The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey, Steve offers some answers. Steve feels anyone can learn a language if they want to. He points out some of the obstacles that hold people back. Drawing on his adventures in Europe and Asia, as a student and businessman, he describes the rewards that come from knowing languages. He relates his evolution as a language learner, abroad and back in his native Canada and explains the kind of attitude that will enable others to achieve second language fluency. Many people have taken on the challenge of language learning but have been frustrated by their lack of success. This book offers detailed advice on the kind of study practices that will achieve language breakthroughs. Steve has developed a language learning system available online at: www.thelinguist.com.


Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Renard Press Ltd

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1913724271

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times


The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language

The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language

Author: Adrian Holliday

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-09-27

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0194423085

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This book is about the worlds and conflicts of TESOL teachers and researchers whose professional lives are both enriched and problematized by the cultural and political interfaces created by working with an international language. Central to this discussion is the balance of power in classroom and curriculum settings, the relationship between language, culture, and discourse, and the change in the ownership of English.


Language and Woman's Place

Language and Woman's Place

Author: Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-07-22

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 019534717X

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The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations. Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day. The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field. This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.


Talking Back

Talking Back

Author: bell hooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1317588223

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In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.


Esperanto and Its Rivals

Esperanto and Its Rivals

Author: Roberto Garvia

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0812291271

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The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today. Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages—Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido—Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.


A Place at the Table

A Place at the Table

Author: Maria Fleming

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0195150368

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Examines the efforts of many different people in American history to secure equal treatment in such areas as religion, voting rights, education, housing, and employment.


Yearning

Yearning

Author: bell hooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1317588150

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For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks's classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the '80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The result is a poignant collection of essays which, like all of hooks's work, is above all else concerned with transforming oppressive structures of domination.


The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1478611707

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Kenyan-born novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo, have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character, Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment. Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”