SILENCING THE SUBALTERN NATION-STATECOLO

SILENCING THE SUBALTERN: NATION-STATE/COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES Nelson Flores

Foucault on governmentality:  the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. (p. 108)

Question: Is the epistemological orientation attributed to Bauman and Briggs the same as that which imposes legibility, and that which frames problems as computationally tractable?** Is Computational Thinking colonialism? **

A return to my idea of curriculum as documentation. 

Though Latino activists were able to re-appropriate nation- state/colonial governmentality in ways that made it more inclusive of bilingual national subjects, they were not able to change the epistemological terms of the debate.

Analyzes positioning of Cummin’s work as moving from community empowerment to bureaucratic institutionalization; bilungualism becomes coopted into the project of creating ideal national subjects. This ought to be an important allegory for parallel work. 

At the core of Cummins’s theorizing is the idea that the language practices of “language majority” households are more concep- tually rich than the language practices of the “language minority” because their language practices are more closely aligned with academic language.

I should reiterate that I am not calling for the complete overthrow of Cummins’s defense of bilingual education. On the contrary, as somebody who has dedicated my life to advocating for language-minoritized students, I have used this very narrative in particular contexts and will continue to do so. However, I refuse to be bound to a narrative whose epistemological orientation perpetuates their marginalization by representing their language practices through a colonizing lens. That is, I refuse to stay bound to a narrative that is complicit in the continued silencing of the subaltern. In what follows, I attempt to develop a new language ideology outside of this colonizing lens.

 the dynamic turn in applied linguistics that seeks to break out of the static conceptualization of language (Flores, 2013)

Herdina and Jessner (2002) offer a model they term a dynamic model of multilingualism (DMM)

TO READ: 

Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.