Summer writing project (Week Seventeen): A new distraction for the new year

I finished my grading this week for the summer class just in time to start getting ready for the fall semester that starts September 8. In the meantime, I'm waiting for August 30, when Taiwan's English-language streaming service, TaiwanPlus, starts up. They also have a YouTube channel. It appears that the twelve-part historical drama, SEQALU: Formosa 1867, might be streamed on this channel. If so, I might be persuaded to watch it, despite Brian Hioe's somewhat disappointed review of the first two episodes and despite my own party interested/partly disappointed reaction to the trailer. Here's the trailer:

(After watching the trailer, I asked one of my former Tunghai colleagues if he planned to watch the program. His somewhat abrupt reply: "It is on here, but I don't want to watch it.")

Summer writing project (Week Sixteen): New Year's Resolutions for the 2021-22 Academic Year

The summer is almost at an end (though since I've been teaching for the past seven weeks, it ended a long time ago for me). The soon-to-come beginning of the semester is signaled by two dreams I had last night: the first in which I was back at Tunghai, trying to figure out on the first day of classes where to find a copy machine and whether my FENM (Freshman English for Non-Majors) class was supposed to meet in our regular classroom or the language lab (with a subplot involving the fact that my clothes hadn't yet arrived in Taiwan, so I was teaching without a shirt). The second dream must have been partly inspired by Henri, the tropical storm that is currently in the news: it was the first day of classes, but I slept in and didn't go to school because there was a hurricane and I assumed the university would cancel classes. When I woke up, I found that Northeastern hadn't canceled classes for the hurricane (evidently Harvard hadn't canceled classes, so NU decided they couldn't either). 

Usually at this time of year, I write out my new year's resolutions for the upcoming academic year. If last year taught us anything, it's to not expect the resolutions to mean anything. I think my main resolution for this year is for all of us to stay healthy and avoid getting COVID, which will be enough of a challenge, considering my son and I both have to have on-ground classes (he's starting first grade, I'm in 47th). Other than that, I have those two writing projects to try to resurrect (remember them?) and try to finish before any squirrels run past to distract me. 

I think that will be it. If I get any of these accomplished, you'll be the first to know!

Summer writing grading project (Week Fifteen): More on translingualism

This has been the next-to-last week of class, so I've been reading and commenting on paper drafts, conferencing with students, and doing some grading. It's been busy. I haven't had much time to do anything else, although I do have a few things to finish before the end of the month. (And I need to prepare for the fall semester, when I'll be on campus for the first time since February 2020! Not really looking forward to that, but what can you do?)

One quick addition to what I wrote last week about Bruce Horner and the relationship of translingualism to SRTOL. My colleague Cherice Jones steered me to the CCCC Demand for Black Linguistic Justice, which I had seen before. What I hadn't noticed previously, and what seems relevant to Horner's argument in the chapter I referenced last week, is part of Demand #3 ("We Demand that Political Discussions and Praxis Center Black Language as Teacher-Researcher Activism for Classrooms and Communities!"), where there is a "sub-demand" that:

• "researchers, educators, and policymakers stop using problematic, race-neutral umbrella terms like multilingualism, world Englishes, translingualism, linguistic diversity, or any other race-flattened vocabulary when discussing Black Language and thereby Black Lives."

If I understand correctly, the writers aren't saying that those terms like translingualism, etc., are problematic in other situations, but they specifically point to how these terms ignore race when discussing language--specifically, Black Language. This raises an issue that I hadn't considered before, but now seems very obvious: in arguing that "translingualism sees difference in language—located in time as the ever emerging product of language practices—not simply as the norm but as inevitable, arising even in exact repetitions of conventional usage" (Horner 60), there appears to be a validation of the "inevitable" difference in language and language practice at the expense of the very specific experiences of users of particular languages--specifically, users of Black Language. April Baker-Bell, et al. (the authors of the Demand), tie Black Language to Black Lives in a way that "translingualism" as an ideology doesn't seem (able) to account for. 

I'm still thinking about all this and I'm admittedly no expert, so I'm open to input on this....

[Update, 8/16: And now I realize that Keith Gilyard wrote about these very issues back in 2016! h/t again to Cherice.]

Summer writing project (Week Fourteen): Notes on GHK and translingualism

Not surprisingly, I didn't get anything done this week on my writing project. In fact, on Monday I woke up thinking about George Kerr and that earlier project, and I started getting interested in picking that up again. 

So a question for all of my reader(s): should I put my "main" project aside for a bit and go back to my Kerr paper, with the hope that putting the other project out of my mind for a while will allow me to come to it anew when I do that? These are two very different projects, I need to mention, and for very different audiences. What do you do in this situation? 

I should add that I've been dragging on both projects. You can see from my blog that I've been doing stuff with Kerr for about 10 years or more, and I haven't really achieved much in terms of publications (well, there's that introduction to the Camphor Press edition of Formosa Betrayed, which I enjoyed completing). I think I mentioned that the other project, a more rhetoric-focused project, has also been percolating in my brain for about 15 or so years. I have trouble getting things done, in other words. One of my Syracuse professors once said to me, when I was telling her about my idea for a project, "Everybody has ideas! Some turn into books, and some turn into after-tea chat!" I sometimes think I'm more the after-tea chat kind of idea person... *sigh*

I was also interviewed this week for a project some of my colleagues are working on. One of the questions had to do with what I knew about translingualism, so of course, being who I am (see "academic imposter syndrome"), I prepared for the interview by reading whatever I could about translingualism so I wouldn't sound like I didn't know anything. I even ordered an ebook for the library (which came the next day!) entitled Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing, edited by Tony Silva and Zhaozhe Wang. It's a collection of essays growing out of the tensions between the academic field of second language writing and what I'd probably call the "translingual movement" in composition studies. I read a few chapters of that, including those by 

• Paul Kei Matsuda ("Weathering the Translingual Storm"), 
• Jonathan Hall and Maria Jerskey ("Tear Down the Wall: Institutional Structures vs. Translingual Realities"), 
• Xiaoye You ("The Yin-Yang of Writing Education in Globalization"), 
• Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro ("Critical Pragmatism as a Middle Ground in Discussions of Linguistic Diversity"), 
• Michelle Cox and Missy Watson ("A Translingual Scholar and Second Language Writing Scholar Talk It Out: Steps Toward Reconciliation"), and 
• Bruce Horner ("Language Difference, Translinguality, and L2 Writing: Conflations, Confusions, and the Work of Writing"). 

(I always overprepare for interviews, though it usually doesn't show it in the end!) The chapters gave me a lot to think about. One thing I thought about centers around whether I'd consider my own pedagogy "translingual." I'm hesitant to call it that, particularly after reading Horner's chapter, which disavows the idea that translingualism is exclusively concerned with second language writing (or teaching writing to multilingual students, which is my primary job). In his chapter, Horner claimed that translingualism isn’t primarily about L2 writing, but rather that it’s more closely tied to the Students’ Right to their own language movement and the idea of allowing people with different dialects of English to use their own styles. As he writes,

In other words, while the growing numbers of students and faculty speaking and writing languages other than English may have contributed to galvanizing the development of translingual language ideology, and while that ideology is certainly as applicable to those using multiple named languages as it is to those claiming to use and know only one, that demographic change is not, in fact, the most appropriate conceptual lineage by which to understand the emergence of translingual ideology. (58)

I have to admit that, after I copied that quote in my journal, I said that I found this idea a bit disingenuous, "as though [I wrote] he thinks he owns the term 'translingualism.' (Note that he identifies 'Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach' as sort of the urtext of translingualism in composition studies.) There are a heck of a lot of scholars (as he himself admits) who have used the writings of people using different 'named languages' as part of their research on translingualism." Some of them have collaborated with him on translingual projects, as well.

But, I continued, "if Horner wants to say that translingualism is not primarily related to L2 writing, I’m fine with that. But that leaves us to think about this question of my familiarity with translingualism in my role as a teacher of multilingual students." Along the way in his paper, Horner characterizes translingualism as a "language ideology" that is opposed to the other language ideology (are there only two?) of monolingualism, and that it really applies to both the teaching of "L2"/multilingual writers and everyone else. Whether you teach writing from a translingual perspective becomes, then a political question, or what seems to me to be a moral question. That is, you're either working from a translingual perspective or you're not, and if you're not, you're on the wrong side (of history, of pedagogy, etc.). 

As a lapsed evangelical, I find myself "allergic" to these moral arguments. I'm also resistant because how this ideology is supposed to work in practice is such a murky thing. I found myself more in tune with the "critical pragmatism" discussed by Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro. Critical pragmatism draws on Critical English for Academic Purposes (EAP) "to 'rediscover' the middle ground between the two polarities of pragmatism (which is often framed as assimilationist) and idealism (which is often framed as resistant to linguistic norms)" (141). They show how a writing course (and a writing program) can balance these two motives and avoid the "false dichotomy between conformity and resistance" (147). They even quote Horner and Lu to point out that these translingualists also have a pragmatic perspective at times: Lu and Horner (2013), say Ruecker and Shapiro, "have (re)defined a translingual approach as 'a disposition of openness and inquiry toward language and language differences' (p. 586), including toward standardized English" (147). This sense of translingualism seems closer to critical pragmatism than some of the other stuff I've read about it.

After reading their chapter, I felt a bit more clear about what I'm doing in class--what I'm already doing that could be seen in this light (whether you call it "translingual" or "critical pragmatism") and what I could do to make my course more "open" to language and language differences. 

Well, that was a longer update than I expected to write. And it got way off whatever it was that I thought I was going to write. But that's OK. I recommend looking at Silva and Wang's book, though, if you have access to it and you're interested in the "debate" between SLW and translingualism. 

Summer writing project (Week Thirteen)

Lately, I've been putting more time into writing these notes than I've spent on the paper itself, so that's a sign that I should cut back on my once-daily thoughts and frustrations regarding my summer writing project (which will probably extend into the winter, at the rate I'm going).  

There's not much to say for this week; most of my working hours have been devoted to teaching and reading student work. This past week was a busy one because we're finishing up one project and starting another. The course seems to be going smoothly, though. I haven't talked with many students (I think I chose the wrong time for office hours), but I've met with a couple of students (virtually) outside of office hours and had good conversations with them.

Talk around the academic Twitterverse has been around the various plans (or lack thereof) concerning how universities will open up in the fall. My school plans to require everyone (vaccinated or not) to be tested once a week if they're coming in at least once a week. I think I like that idea, although I am not eager to go back to campus at this point, with the spreading delta variant on the loose and an unvaccinated first-grader at home to worry about. I realize there are people who need to go back to in-person classes for all kinds of reasons. I just hope that my program and school can give instructors flexibility to do what they need to do, too.

Anyway, we'll be in August soon, and I have a couple of things to do in August (in addition to teaching and preparing to teach in the fall). I probably won't have time to work on my paper for a good long while. We'll see...

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-Seven through Sixty)

"Seventeen years I've wanted that little item and I've been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest... well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only... five and fifteen seventeenths percent." 

(For years I've been wondering what "five and fifteen-seventeenths percent" means; fortunately, someone explained it on one of the two entries on their blog(!).)

The last few days have been filled with commenting on student work, setting up groups for the second project in my class, a doctor visit, all kinds of errands, and not a whole lot of writing. Time away from a project can lead in at least two directions--primarily, the distance can enable you to think anew about it and have new perspectives on what it is that is troubling you (OK, me) about it. That can either make you/me see a new path toward finishing it, or it can lead to despair over ever being able to do it or the feeling that it's an impossible or even wrong-headed task. 

So now I'm rethinking the whole thing (again). This is definitely not going to be writing my journal article in twelve weeks...

Summer writing project (Day Fifty-Six)

I'm back to doing some primary research--close reading of a text I'm using as an "exhibit" (in BEAM terms) to see if I can use it as evidence for what I'm arguing (or part of what I'm arguing, anyway). Also had a good email exchange with my "virtual writing partner" or "writing accountability partner" (I think I'm going to have to acknowledge him in my paper if I ever get it published!)

Tomorrow is going to be devoted to reading student drafts of their first assignment. Might not get to my own paper. (Not that I'm complaining. Reading their drafts is a major part of my job, after all!)

Summer writing stalling project (Days Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five)

Not much to report here. Yesterday's work grading had to be put off to today because my internet was out all day yesterday.  Also found myself looking wistfully at a different paper I haven't worked on for over a year but is now looking more attractive to me than my current paper. [Insert meme of that guy... you know who I mean...]

Summer writing walking project (Day Fifty-Three)

I did some grading today and then had a little time to work on my paper. So my son and I drove out to Medfield to check out the old Medfield State Hospital, which we've driven by a lot but never visited. Turns out it's a pretty big place! We walked all around the grounds and I took a few pictures. (Unfortunately, I only know one of the buildings: the chapel.)

Here are some of the pictures. I think you can click on them to make them larger.

Here's the chapel.

Poem on the side of a wall.

The porch needs some work...

[Update: This was the female nurses' home.]

I took some other pictures, but I want to go back and take some more, I think. (I'm sure there are millions of pictures of the Medfield State Hospital on the web, though.)

So that's how I spent my day! It was a good day for my son and me to run around, considering it has rained every day so far this month.

[Update: I found this old map of the hospital grounds. And some information from the Town of Medfield about what they're thinking of doing with the property.]

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-One and Fifty-Two)

I was too busy deleting mails from my school's in-box yesterday and neglected to catch up on this. (I was just doing that in between approving students' choices of scholarly articles for their first assignment.) It was interesting reading my school's evolving response to COVID--I'm tempted to keep those emails just for historical purposes.

Anyway, today I had some time to look over my paper. I read through most of it slowly, making comments in the margins. It was depressing in some ways because I can see that there are places where I need to do a lot of work; it goes off in all kinds of directions. But I also see some promising spots, if I can corral the rest of it together. Mostly, I got the sense that it is worth working on, which is a good feeling.

Summer writing grading project (Day Fifty)

Fifty days into my summer writing project and I feel like I've basically given up on it. I've got to do something, though, to try to jump-start this thing and force myself to make some progress on it, even if  it's just a few millimeters. (Did I ever tell about how when I was in elementary school, Jimmy Carter was president and wanted to convert the US to the metric system, so we learned the metric system instead of whatever the other system is called [the 'Murkin system?] So we learned centimeters and milliliters and all that sort of thing. Then, of course, Reagan became president, but I don't think we ever learned the other system in school, so I still don't know how many quarts there are in a mile. Anyway...)

[Update: Ah, I see now it was Gerald Ford who signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Well, it was probably expedient to blame the whole thing on Carter anyway.]

Summer writing grading project (Day Forty-Nine)

Today I did some grading and other teaching-related work. It's going to be an intense seven weeks, so I don't know how much writing I'll get done. We'll see... 

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Eight)

I did my presentation today. I found I'm a bit rusty giving conference presentations (just noticed from looking at my CV that before today I hadn't done one since 2015!). I think our panel went well, though I wish I had not talked so much and had given the audience more of a chance to share their ideas. Oh well, next time...

Now the second summer session has begun, so I move my focus to teaching. I will try to work a bit on my paper, maybe trying for a half hour or so a day if I can get up early enough in the morning. Wish me luck!

Summer writing project (Days Forty-Six and Forty-Seven)

Forgot to write last night--today this is going to be short. I'm doing a bit of tuning up to my presentation for tomorrow because I want to make sure I have a clear focus that distinguishes what I'm talking about from what other people whose subjects overlap with mine will have talked about. 

On another topic, I see that my friend and fellow Kerrdashian Yukari Yoshihara has published an article about Kerr in American Quarterly:   

Yoshihara, Yukari. "Postwar American Studies in Asia and Its Prehistory: George Kerr and Taiwan as an American Frontier." American Quarterly, vol. 73 no. 2, 2021, p. 349-354. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/796806.

Be sure to read it!

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Five): Current events and my project

Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China. 

This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu. 

I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers. 

That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)

Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!). 

*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Four): The importantce of proofreading!

I just found that 1999 paper that I wrote on doing research on the internet. It was published in a 2000 volume of essays on communication and culture that was edited by the conference organizer. When it was published, I was unhappy with the proofreading because the student worker who did the copy-editing decided (or followed the Word recommendations that decided) that the word "Internet" should have a "The" in front of it every time. So my paper, originally titled "Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students," became "The Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students." That's not too bad, but then there were also sentences that ended up looking like this: "What problems might EFL students have regarding research on the English The Internet?" I also had two figures that I wanted to include, but for some reason the same figure was inserted in both places. (By the way, to show you how old this paper is, here's the figure--a screenshot of Infoseek's search results for "computer virus":

Now doesn't that bring back memories? No? Oh well...)

One thing that I can't blame the copy-editor for is this gem of an overlooked placeholder that I left in the final draft, to wit: "'Paper' publishing is a demanding process that involves many people, a good deal of money, and complicated apparatuses of control and stuff." I believe I was referring to print publishing (not sure why I called it "paper publishing"), but I really love the "and stuff." Lucky my language wasn't a bit more colorful...

OK, back to working on my presentation. And a reminder to myself to proofread carefully!

Upgrade (II)

As of today, I am now officially a full Teaching Professor at Northeastern. It's not a tenured position, but there's some job security in that I'm now on a five-year renewable contract. Mainly it means that I can finally order some new business cards...

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Three, I think)

I spent today working on my presentation for next week. Got some slides revised, but I need to figure out if my whole presentation will fit within the 20-minute time limit. Guess I need to finish my script and try it out. I can always take out an example or two, I suppose.

I realized the other day that I had talked about a very similar topic all the way back in May of 1999. Similar problems that we have today with the internet (back then, though, we called it the "Internet"). The more things change, ...

Summer Non-writing Project (Day Forty-Two)

I managed to make three screencasts for my summer class today, so I guess I achieved something. My videos are not at all professional, but at least I've graduated to the point where I can edit out my "ummms" and coughs (well, most of my "ummms"). I've seen some colleagues' and friends' videos, and I can only be depressed about my own. But, as I told one of my friends, not depressed enough to want to do better(!). Actually, I guess my videos aren't that terrible. The only thing students have complained about regarding the videos is that some of them are too long (around 20 minutes sometimes).  

In addition to working on my course, I took a drive this evening. Saw this interesting cloud formation. (It didn't rain, though.)

Summer writing project (Day Forty-One)

I did some thinking about my topic and paper today, but mainly I was working on my course materials for the class I'll be teaching next week (!).

I also "attended" a webinar on Taiwan Studies, "The State of Taiwan Studies: A Roundtable Discussion on Methods and Directions," run by the Fairbank Center. The panelists were:

• Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
• Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University
• Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine

The discussant (who actually didn't get a chance to say a lot, but raised an important question for the panelists), was Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

There was a big emphasis among the speakers on Taiwan's geopolitical relations and status and the importance of studying Taiwan in terms of these geopolitical considerations. As Lawrence Yang put it (and this might not be an exact quote, but pretty close): Taiwan can be seen as "both an outcome of geopolitical mediation among empires or Taiwan itself as a medium by which powers create geopolitical mapping." 

The question that Professor Hsu brought up at the end concerned how China should be situated in Taiwan Studies. This is an interesting question (and potentially, the question itself was even more interesting than the answers themselves), and it's something that probably a lot of people studying Taiwan wrestle with. (Prof. Nachman mentioned this, too.) Both this question and the emphasis on geopolitics have confirmed to me that I've got a good idea for this paper that I'm writing. (Though they also remind me that I have to make sure I actually make a clear argument in the paper!)

Here's the YouTube video of the panel.