New book in the former native speaker's library

In lieu of telling you how my writing plan is going (badly), I'll tell you that I just received a new/old book: Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West by Shih-Shan Henry Tsai (M. E. Sharpe, 2009). 

I think I saw it cited somewhere and thought I should check it out. Unfortunately, since M. E. Sharpe's collection is now owned by Routledge, there were no copies I could find on Amazon for less than $50. As John Ross wrote in his succinct review, 

For the fun of it, I went to eBay and was happily surprised to find a copy for only around $22 from a shop called Zuber. So I ordered it, and it came today. It wasn't quite what I expected (the image they used on eBay was of the new Routledge edition), but I'm not going to be picky when the alternative is to spend up to $150 just for a fancier cover. (I do see there was a complaint a couple of years ago about Zuber's tendency to send different editions than what appears to be advertised. If that's the case, I'll have to be careful in my interactions with them.)

Anyway, I'll be sure to get into reading this book to further put off my writing!

Semester writing plan

Classes start tomorrow--I have to go in for one in-person class that I'm teaching. This time I'm taking the commuter rail instead of driving. I'll probably wear about 30 surgical masks on the train.

I'm in a writing group this semester. We meet virtually Monday mornings and tell each other what we plan to get done, then write for 2 hours and come back after that to tell each other what we did. One of the things I did during the two hours was to decide that I'm going to go back to getting up earlier in the morning, at about 5:30, for a half hour of writing as many times as I can in a week. I'll try to mention here when I've succeeded in doing that, just for the sake of accountability. Gonna try to get one of my papers done this semester, if I can get over my imposter syndrome. Wish me luck!

2022 New Year's Resolutions

This year I resolve to use fewer ellipses and to have fewer parenthetical comments in my writing. (I've decided to go for the low-hanging fruit this time around...)

Top post of 2021

Don't think this will change by the end of the day: I was amused (or is it bemused?) to see that the most-visited posting on this blog from 2021 was a one-word negation of the hope expressed on the last day of 2020 that I would be more hopeful about 2021 on the first day of the new year. I'm not going to link to that posting because I don't want to push up the hits more than necessary; you can just look for a one-word post.

Coming in a distant second, with less than a third the number of hits as Number One, was a posting from July about how to interpret supposedly graphically violent language in a speech by Xi Jinping. Not sure why that got more hits than the other stuff I posted. It's a big mystery. 

Anyway, I don't know what 2022 holds for us. I'm getting too jaded to be hopeful, though. I'm guessing it's more of the same or perhaps an accelerating downward spiral. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, though.

Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements page

When news of the death of China historian Jonathan Spence reached me yesterday, I immediately thought of the acknowledgements section of his massive 1990 book The Search for Modern China. 

It ends with what is to me a most memorable word of thanks:

This book was written, in just about equal parts, either in Yale's Cross Campus Library, or in Naples Pizza on Wall Street, New Haven. I would like to thank the entire staffs of those two admirable establishments for providing two complementary worlds in which to mull over, and then to pen, this record of the past four hundred years of China's history.

I visited Naples Pizza on a visit to Yale about twenty years ago and wondered where Professor Spence might have worked on his book. I imagine him sitting in a booth (though I can't remember if they had booths) "mull[ing] over" notes and documents as he literally "pen[ned]" his manuscript. For me, as for any writer or would-be writer, this image is both familiar and inspirational. Since reading that book in 1990, I have worked in a lot of eating establishments when writing my dissertation or other articles, though I have been neither as productive as Spence nor as faithful to one restaurant as he was. 

I wonder, too, what the staff of Naples Pizza thought of his thanks. It would be interesting to see in one of Spence's obits a quote from someone who worked there when he was frequenting the restaurant. Unfortunately, like Professor Spence, Naples Pizza (later known as Wall Street Pizza) is no longer with us.

[Update, 1/14/23: Just saw this on Twitter--it adds some good detail to what I wrote, like the facts that Spence wrote the book on legal pads and that the Naples restaurant staff called him "Johnny."]

Mary Louise Pratt on the relations of movers to "stayers"

Came across this seven-year-old talk by Mary Louise Pratt on "The Rough Guide to Geopolitics," about travel as relationship of people who are in place (the "stayers") with people who are displaced (the travelers or movers).

She takes this idea from a variety of perspectives. Maybe I can use this video in my travel writing class if I get to teach it again.

End of semester thoughts and questions

It's the end of the semester (grades were submitted yesterday), and I am thinking about how I'm going to teach my first-year writing (FYW) course next semester. I've got some ideas, based on this semester's events and on some related readings I did, for changing the grading scheme to a kind of contract grading approach that has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so. I more or less do contract grading anyway, at least in the sense that for major assignments, at least 50% of the grade is based on labor/process. This will take it even further, though, by making everything complete/incomplete, including final drafts of papers. To me, it's a logical outgrowth of my feeling that final drafts of papers--at least in a FYW course--should not be treated as some high-stakes product that should be weighted more heavily than the process that went into it. So I'm cool with trying out the contract grading approach for FYW and seeing how that goes.

The problem (as always) is in figuring out what to do in the class--whether to adapt stuff that I've done before or go in a really different direction (or in a different old direction). This semester I let students do research on their own topics that they developed in consultation with me. It was a diverse batch of topics, but very enlightening in some cases as to what is on the international students' minds. A sampling of topics written on this semester:

• Boston (public transportation and Chinatown)
• various aspects of social media and technology (pros and cons of social media, internet and online gaming addiction, VR, social media in advertising)
• climate change and the environment (the Brazilian Amazon, climate change and crop production, air pollution, animal extinction)
• politics, race and media (anti-Asian racism, multiculturalism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hip hop and politics)
• mental and physical health (the uses of melatonin, factors influencing sleep, international students' mental health, Asperger Syndrome)
• various other topics (beauty standards across cultures, pet abandonment, online vs. traditional learning, and others) 

It's always a challenge to work with students on so many different topics, and though I learn a lot in the process about all kinds of things, the process was rather exhausting. So I was thinking, for next semester I might narrow the range of topics they can write on and use some common readings for the research so that I can help them more efficiently with issues such as source usage, critical reading strategies, and other issues.

But then in my course evaluations, I saw this sentence from a student: "He let us choose topics by ourselves which is very good in facilitating inclusive learning." So now I'm back to the drawing board. Fortunately, we don't start classes until January 18, so I have some time to think about this. 

Guess I'd better write something before the month is over

The semester's not over yet, but it has been a tough one. One of the challenges has been teaching in-person again for the first time since the fall of 2019. Another is that we've all had to stand or sit around in masks, which hasn't made the interpersonal part of teaching (where you actually get to see others' facial expressions) particularly effective. Another is that I think we all were trying to come out of our caves this semester, and I don't know how the students felt, but I felt a lot of sensory overload as a result of being on campus again. I tended to spend my time between classes huddled in my office with the door shut. (I didn't curl up on the floor crying, as I had predicted, but I did nap on my chair a few times.)

I didn't get much writing done on those projects I mentioned back in August. I had switched my attention to my Kerr project, but after a conversation with my department chair a couple weeks ago, I felt encouraged to look again at my other project (until I looked at my draft and threw up my hands). Anyway, I noticed a cfp for the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference next June, and I think my paper is at least partially relevant to the theme of the conference. Maybe writing an abstract and a conference paper--having a clear deadline--will motivate me. Will have to see if it gets accepted, of course. If they're interested in hearing some guy pop in every 8 years to talk about George Kerr! (Actually, I wasn't really there in 2014; my paper was presented in absentia--at least I hope it was!)

Saturday morning trip with the little guy

My son and I had some time this morning while my wife was teaching in Quincy, and I had seen something about the Granite Railway Incline Plane on Atlas Obscura, so we decided to check it out. 

As they say on the website, the railway ruins are located in a neighborhood near the highway. Google Maps took us right there.

Entrance to the Granite Railway Incline

Sign providing a history of the Granite Railway Incline Plane (Click to enlarge)

Plaque introducing Granite Railway

Looking up the incline from the bottom of the hill

Looking downhill from near the top

When we got to the top, we walked for a while along a pathway for awhile. We came through the woods to a clearing and found out we were in the middle of an old quarry (see this description on Atlas Obscura). 

The scene from the clearing (apologies for the jerky video!)

The little guy, running as usual

View from the top of the quarry

As we were leaving, we ran into a group of men who were headed into the quarry from another direction. They were either going to film something there or play musical instruments (one guy had drumsticks, I think), or maybe they were going to film themselves playing musical instruments. We didn't hang around to see what they were up to, though. (Maybe we should have!) 

We'll have to go back sometime, perhaps before it gets much colder out.

A belated RIP to Gary Blankenburg

My brother sent me Gary Blankenburg's obituary this evening. Dr. Blankenburg, who died last year, was a poet and high school creative writing teacher who could be said to be the reason I'm a college writing teacher. (In my darker moments I'd say he's partly to blame for my career...) I didn't go to Catonsville High School where he taught, but I met him through my brother, who worked for Dr. Blankenburg's wife Jo at a Waldenbooks  (remember those?) in Towson. At the time, I thought I was a poet, or I was trying to be a poet, and I must have run into him at one of the Maryland ArtScape literary festivals--I went one year when a young poet named Millie Bentley (a former student of his), who had just published a chapbook, gave a reading. This article from the Baltimore Sun gives a better review of his career than I could.

When I was a freshman in college, I started out majoring in communications, and a professor in my introductory class assigned us the task of interviewing someone in the career we'd like to have (presumably in communications). I thought I wanted to be a career poet, so I got my brother to ask his boss to ask her husband if I could interview him. We met at an IHOP one evening, where he drank coffee and I drank tea, and he told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should become a college professor. High school English teachers, he explained, don't have time to write because they're spending all their time grading papers. But college professors, they have time to write. I guess that started me on this track. I've discovered, though, that "having" time to write and "making" time to write are two different things. He seemed to make time, which I haven't been as good at doing.

A few years after that interview (can I call it life-changing without sounding maudlin?), Dr. Blankenburg generously published a couple of my poems in the Catonsville Times (hopefully copies of that issue are lost to history) and invited me to give a reading to his creative writing class at Catonsville. I think my reading was terrible, and I couldn't really answer any of the students' questions about writing poetry. I never thought of it until now, but I guess I can say that was my first time in front of a writing classroom. Not a very auspicious beginning, considering my performance, but I would like to thank Dr. Blankenburg for the opportunity. He took my writing and career aspirations seriously, even though I was probably taking them too seriously at the time, and based on that Sun article, that was typical of him. A generous man. Rest in peace, Dr. Blankenburg.

CFP: 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies

Trying to decide if I should submit something to this. Due date: Oct. 20:

The University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program (UW-TSP) will host the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies from June 27 to 29, 2022.  The quadrennial conference is jointly organized by Academia Sinica and UW-TSP. The WCTS brings together the world’s leading Taiwan Studies scholars to share their research. The 4th Congress will pursue the general theme “Taiwan in the Making,” exploring the processes, forces, and dynamics that made and continue to make Taiwan. 

The 4th Congress will be the first to take place in North America. Previous congresses were held at Academic Sinica in 2012, at the University of London SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies in 2015, and at Academia Sinica in 2018. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4th Congress has been delayed by one year. 

We are now circulating our Call for Papers. We welcome applicants to propose research papers on Taiwan from the social sciences and humanities. The Congress will highlight a number of sub-themes throughout various panels and roundtables, such as (but not limited to):

• “Worlding” Taiwan: Taiwan in Global Context
• Contested Sovereignty: Taiwan in Comparison
• New Directions in Taiwan Studies
• Consolidating Taiwan’s Democracy
• Gender and Society in Changing Taiwan
• Environment, Ecology, and the Future of Taiwan
• Ethnic Identity and Diversity in Taiwan
• Taiwan History through Primary Sources

These topics are merely examples, and we encourage applicants to submit applications in any field or area of focus broadly under Taiwan Studies.

Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: October 20 (Wednesday)

Acceptance notification: November 30 (Tuesday)

Presentation paper (6000 words) due: May 16 (Monday), 2022

Abstract Submission

Please submit a one-page long abstract (no more than 600 words) and include the following information: Author(s) Name, Paper Title, Email, Current Position(s), and Affiliation(s) to: [twstudy@gate.sinica.edu.tw]

Accepted participants will be provided on campus accommodations for up to 3 nights from June 27 to 29. Accepted participants traveling from outside of North America will receive up to 4 nights (June 27 to 30). Breakfast and box lunches are provided, as well as dinners on the first two days of the conference.

For junior scholars (PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct faculty, and independent scholars) who do not have access to institutional funding, the WCTS may be able to offer a modest, partial subsidy toward airfare. Details will be arranged after proposal acceptance.

Please refer to the WCTS webpage for further details.

One Marine's War and the Robert Sheeks-George H. Kerr connection

I got curious about Robert Sheeks because of some correspondence he had with George H. Kerr over some materials he was helping Kerr transfer to the Shikiya Memorial Library at the University of the Ryukyus in 1958. The Asia Foundation, for which Sheeks worked, was in charge of purchasing the collection on behalf of the University. This correspondence is located in the Kerr collection at the Hoover Institute. (My thanks to Dr. Yukari Yoshihara of the University of Tsukuba for sharing these documents with me!)

Also in the Kerr papers is a note from "rbs" (probably also Robert Sheeks) to "Mr. Stewart" regarding a 1955 letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in which Kerr traced a history of US-Taiwan-Chinese relations up to that time and predicted "a violent crisis within Nationalist ranks at Taipei" that the US needed to be prepared for. In his note to Stewart, RBS characterized Kerr's letter as "a wonderful gift to the communists." He continued, 

His bitterness has grown, as much because the Department of State did not take his advice as for [sic] reasons connected with the uprising and its violence. Aside from this increased bitterness, he is back in Formosa of 1947 --- as he happened to view it in those days. He viewed everything for the I.P.R. at that time.

Kerr is supposed to be a scholar; he has the whole Hoover Library setup at his disposal. He omitted mention that Formosa was ceded to Japan as part of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese War.  I am sure that this is intentional, and it helps paint the kind of picture he wants to portray of the Formosan, Mainlander, and Japanese roles.

Incidentally, Art Goul [a reporter who worked in China and Taiwn] phoned me this morning to ask about Kerr's background. I gave him a few items of past history which are fairly well known. 

I am curious about the "items of past history" that RBS told Goul about, of course, so I looked up Sheeks and came across this website about him. (I should note that Dr. Stephen Craft of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told me about Sheeks and the website several years ago, but for some reason I never followed up on that, which will probably be to my eternal regret.) Anyway, the website about Sheets got me interested in the book about him by Gerald Meehl, One Marine's War, and I just finished reading it today after receiving it yesterday. (It's a quick read.)

The book mostly focuses on Sheeks' career as a Japanese Language Officer (JLO) during World War II and his attempts to convince the Marines to let him try to persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians who were holed up in caves on the islands where the Marines had landed to give themselves up rather than fight to the death or commit suicide. It's a fascinating story, but there was only a little in the book about his postwar years, including his time in Taiwan as director of the United States Information Service. That's what I'd like to know more about, as well as his work for the Asia Foundation in the 1950s. Well, I can't criticize a book for not covering what it wasn't intended to cover! Maybe I'll try to contact Sheeks now and see what he can tell me about his experiences in Taiwan (and about his memories of Kerr). 

Monday morning, week four of classes

I'm listening to workmen playing Steely Dan and tearing out some rotten wood from the soffit. ("Soffit" is a word I just learned a couple of weeks ago from my 94-year-old mother.) 

[Update, 9/29: They're now playing the Eagles, interspersed with other music primarily from the '70s. Still some Dan in the mix.

When I was in college in the '80s I was amazed at one administrator's knowledge of the music of the '50s. Now I'm in that administrator's position regarding music that's almost 50 years old rather than "only" 30 years old. Yikes.]

Honest-ish question

How do you write about the cool things you've found in the archives without making your paper sound like it should be titled, "Cool Things I Found in the Archives?"

Scene from pandemic-era teaching

We had a virtual English Department meeting today. After we got off Zoom, we all ran into each other on the way to the restroom.

Something to watch when I get a chance...

The summer is over, so I'm getting ready for the semester that starts next Wednesday. (Yikes!)

I came across this video on YouTube and want to put it here to watch later and share with my reader(s). I thought it looked interesting. It's a debate from 1956 among high school exchange students from the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, and the UK about prejudice.  

What caught me about the beginning of the video (I didn't have a chance to get far into it) is when the moderator asked the students about their own prejudices. When she gets to Raul Contreras, a fifteen-year-old from the Philippines, he directly says he is prejudiced against the Japanese, and glances somewhat furtively at the Japanese girl on his right (Yoriko Konishi) while he explains why. Not surprisingly, his prejudice comes from the Philippine experience under the Japanese during World War Two. He admits he's too young to have really understood it himself, but his feelings come from what older relatives have told him about their experiences. 

Hope I get a chance to watch the whole thing at some point. (Maybe even figure out a way to use it in one of my classes?)

There are some other videos like this, with "debates" from students from different countries. They're from a YouTube channel called ArchiveMC, which has posted a lot of Cold War-era videos.

[Update, 9/4/21: I should add that if you watch the video on YouTube, you'll see in the comments that Raul's daughter has responded to the video and provided more information about his life and subsequent career. It's really interesting! Some information is also given about Yoriko.]

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.