Untying The Mother Tongue

Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.

Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.

The conference Untying the Mother Tongue intends to re-think affective and cognitive attachments to language by deconstructing their metaphysical and colonialist presuppositions. If traditional constructions of a monolingual speaker, a pure "mother tongue" reveal the ideology of the European nation-state, then today's celebration of multilingual competencies simply reflects the rise of global capitalism and its demand for transnational labor markets. French poststructuralist thought has problematized the notion of a "mother tongue" by dividing it into two discrete elements-the "maternal" and the "linguistic"--And by exposing their metaphysical and colonialist presuppositions. Can something be salvaged of the notion of a mother tongue? What are the remains, traces, or vestiges of a language no longer directly tied to the mother yet resounding with a maternal echo and at the same time manifesting itself as a primary idiom with respect to its affective and aesthetic dimensions? This "residual notion" of a mother tongue supposes that language is indeed a basic human need (like food, shelter, or clothing), since it provides an indispensible access to a symbolic dimension shaping affectivity and knowledge.