https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777783/the-politics-of-language-oppression-in-tibet

Shannon Ward: Your book deals centrally with the biopolitics of language oppression, charting how techniques of governance institutionalize the elimination of Manegacha. In Chapter 6, in particular, you show how biopolitics reaches into interpersonal relationships. I was struck, however, with the book’s opening scene, where a girl insists she understands her father’s Manegacha, and with the survey data you present that emphasizes the enduring significance of Manegacha to its speakers. Do you see any social spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized, perhaps subtly and even in response to efforts for elimination?

Gerald Roche: I think there are still a few social and physical spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized. These spaces are really important, because they essentially act as life rafts for the language. Unfortunately, I think they’re also decreasing. Here, I’ll just focus on one example of a physical space.

The most significant space for the language is the four villages where the majority of Manegacha speakers live. I think it’s important to emphasize that people choose to speak the language in those spaces, as a reflection of the values they expressed in the household surveys I conducted. Most adult Manegacha speakers today are at least bilingual, in Manegacha and the local variety of spoken Tibetan. Many of them also know some form of Mandarin as well. So, with the exception of some members of the eldest generation who really rely only on Manegacha to communicate with people, it would be possible for pretty much everyone in those villages to stop using Manegacha with each other, and to communicate only in other languages. I think we need to recognize this for the decision it is, and for the fact that people make it every day, in the context of immense pressure to eliminate Manegacha.

I’m not sure if resistance is the best word to use to describe this situation, however. Resistance, to me, implies a level of collective organization and an explicit oppositional stance of some sort, and I didn’t see much of either of these. So instead, I described that decision as a practice of endurance, taking the term from Elizabeth Povinelli’s work. Although I think that term works fine in the book, more recently I’ve been reading the social movement literature, and there are several useful terms there that apply equally well, such as Asef Bayat’s concept of a non-movement, or the anthropologist Julia Eckert’s concept of practice movements: “forms of unorganized, collective action, which are distinct from conventional social movements in various ways, first and foremost by their direct expression of goals in their practices.”

Villages provide a safe space for these practice movements, where Manegacha speakers have some relief from the relentless everyday discrimination they face from other Tibetans. Of course, those spaces don’t completely isolate the community from those pressures, and that’s why so many families are choosing to withhold Manegacha from their children now. But they do provide some relief. However, the villages are being swallowed up by the growth of a nearby town, and so those safe spaces are being dismantled. That’s partly what the image on the book’s cover shows us – how the presence of Manegacha speaking communities is erased by the construction of Tibetan space and identity. 

Shannon Ward: You trace chronological changes from the mid-20^th century, when Manegacha speakers used their language in a rich range of cultural practices, to the present, when dynamics of language oppression overdetermine speakers’ decisions to use Tibetan (or even Mandarin). In Chapter 5, for example, you describe how state-building has advanced elimination. Yet, there are possible worlds where Manegacha could have been included in state-building (pp. 116-117). In these pages, you assert that describing such possibilities helps to illuminate the violence of erasure. Are there instances, however, in which these possibilities are actively articulated or reflected on by Manegacha speakers? And, are there areas outside of the purview of the state where these possibilities could be actualized?

Gerald Roche: Manegacha speakers do articulate these sort of alternative possibilities – not necessarily the full range that I described, but there are examples.  

One of the things that came up in my conversations with Manegacha speakers was a range of vernacular writing practices in the language. There’s no standard written form of the language encoded in textbooks or taught in formal contexts. But people in the community have repeatedly been motivated enough to develop their own systems to write the language and use it to communicate with small networks of friends. Some people use Tibetan script, some use Chinese characters, and others use the Roman alphabet.

Another example came from social media. When I started doing this research, just over ten years ago, smart phones and social media were still somewhat recent. There was a fair bit of enthusiasm among Manegacha speakers for making little media clips in the language: dubbing over a cartoon for example. I haven’t been able to see how this has developed since the growth of platforms like Tiktok, and it would be fascinating to see how Manegacha speakers are using that.

Anyway, in both cases, I think we see examples where people are motivated to try out pushing the language, at a very small scale, into spaces where it has been excluded from, such as formal education and mass media. If we take that together with the strong attachment to the language that I recorded in the household surveys, to me it raises an important question about how things could have been otherwise, under different conditions. Prompting the political imagination in those sort of ways not only helps bring to the forefront the current oppression that exists, which is what I try to do in the book, but it also hopefully helps create a sort of current where the practice movement amongst Manegacha speakers might grow to become something else. 

Shannon Ward: In your writing, you made an active choice not to openly depict slurs against Manegacha and other minoritized language speakers, instead describing the general translations of these terms or representing them as slashes. Can you say more about how and why you made this decision in representation?

Gerald Roche: I thought about this in relation mostly to one particular term that is used to describe Manegacha speakers. It took a lot of time and reflection to come to the conclusion that the term was in fact a slur. When you are in a different social and cultural context, in a different language, problematic terms don’t always necessarily jump out at you as they would in more familiar circumstances, and that’s especially true when those terms are normalized in the local context, even by the people who are labelled with the slur.

Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks really helped me think through how slurs work – the “crushing objecthood” that they impose on people. I also found Jane Hill’s writing on the topic in The Everyday Language of White Racism helpful, as was some of Judith Butler’s writing, for example Excitable Speech. In the end I described a slur as a sort of ‘semiotic landmine’ that releases a sudden, harmful blast of negative associations and implications, and I think that’s a reasonable description of how this term works in practice.  

Once I concluded that the term was a slur, the decision that I found myself faced with was – do I want to introduce this term into the English language? There are important debates to be had about how slurs in English can have complex social lives and sometimes allow for what Michael Hertzfeld called ‘cultural intimacy’: the use of sources of stigma to foster collective belonging. But the slur I was dealing with would be unknown to pretty much anyone reading the book, so why create knowledge of a harmful term where none existed, and run the risk that the harm of the term was amplified, showed up in new spaces, and so on? Similarly, I tried to imagine, while writing the book, how it would be read by someone from the Manegacha speaking community. Why go to the trouble of explaining how this everyday term is actually a slur, and then just repeatedly expose them to it? That seems callous to me.

In addition, I also think that eliding the term dramatizes it and gives the reader increased impetus for reflection. Because I do that explicitly, in a novel context, and because the absence of the term is visually striking, the reader is forced to slow down, and hopefully to consider their own stance on the politics of slurs.

Shannon Ward: In the Introduction and Conclusion, you write about the shift in your approach from endangerment linguistics (pp. 5-6) to one of decolonizing solidarity (pp. 154-156). What do you see as the role of language documentation and other traditional language revitalization tools in decolonizing solidarity?

Gerald Roche: The traditional suite of methods and techniques that have emerged in linguistics and allied fields since the late 1980s and the emergence of endangerment linguistics are not the most effective tools for bringing about the changes that are required to secure language rights and end language oppression. However, sometimes they are the only tools we have.

One reason that we have access to a limited toolkit is that most of our work is done at the behest of donors, whether private or public, and also requires some kind of institutional buy-in from a university. Shrinking funding pools and the neoliberalization of the university creates a bad environment for coming up with new ideas, but does create lots of incentives to tweak and redeploy existing tools. This set up also encourages people to use toolkits that seem, superficially apolitical, though of course they have their own politics.

A second reason why it is important to rely on this toolkit is that in large swathes of the world, basic civil and political rights do not exist. If they did, people would be more likely to already be agitating for the change they need, and our job would be to support that. But in China, for example, that’s not possible. So we can either abandon communities in those situations to state violence, or we find other ways to work with them. I think finding other ways is the right choice. So we take the superficially apolitical tools we have and do what we can with them in those contexts. 

If we use them mindfully, those tools can help build decolonial solidarity in several ways. Maps, for example, are one way of countering hegemonic efforts to erase particular groups, such as Manegacha speakers. They help render visible what the state attempts to destroy, and create a permanent, public record that counteracts denial and diminishes impunity. Surveys provide a chance to counter harmful assumptions that facilitate assimilation, for example, the data I collected showing people’s deep attachment to their language contradicted victim-blaming narratives which suggested that the community simply didn’t care enough to maintain their own language. Finally, research activities also provide opportunities for the redistribution of material and symbolic resources, for example, I tried to make sure that I spent my research funding in ways that supported Manegacha speakers. 

Shannon Ward: In the Conclusion, you draw a distinction between settler colonies and exploitation colonies (pp. 151-152). Do you see each of these contexts as lending itself to a particular form of decolonizing solidarity? That is, are there particular approaches to decolonization required in exploitation colonies that have not been adequately recognized or supported by scholars?

Gerald Roche: I think the debates around decolonization certainly have been patchy, though I’m not sure that the division necessarily lies along a divide between settler colonies and exploitation colonies. India is perhaps a good starting point to try and explain what I mean.

We have vast amounts of literature looking at India as a British exploitation colony, but discussion of India as a contemporary colonial state is less prominent, even though the relationship between the Indian state and Kashmir, the Adivasis, and the entire northeast (at least) are all classically colonial. Ethiopia is another good example. Before the modern nation-state of Ethiopia was formed, it was a classical colonial empire, with patches of settlement and exploitation, and yet a recent handbook on settler colonialism talked about Ethiopia only in terms of its invasion by Italian fascists, and much of the analysis of the recent Tigray war elided the roots of the conflict in Ethiopian empire building.

As these two brief examples hopefully suggest, we tend to take colonization as a sort of vanity project that only Westerners can engage in. If anyone else is doing it, then it’s just domination, or even worse, putatively national liberation. This is certainly part of the reason why the colonial relation between China and Tibet remains so under-analyzed.

On the other hand, when people do analyze Tibet as a colonial situation, there is a tendency to simply apply models of what happened in Canada, or Australia, or the USA. Instead of denying the colonial relationship, we erase its specificities. So, for example, although I think settler colonialism plays a role in Tibet, I think we need to look at how settlement by Han people is part of a broader, and unique, colonial strategy in Tibet.

Understanding the specificities of different sites and systems of oppression is essential to building thick solidarity as I discuss in the book’s conclusion. Refusing to impose historical and analytical templates developed in the Australia or the USA is also essential to building decolonial solidarity. Ultimately, I want the book to contribute to dismantling systems of language oppression that Manegacha speakers face. We can’t do that by cutting and pasting tactics and concepts from other places. Our solidarity requires us to do the work of understanding what we are actually trying to change.