Of Peoples and Tongues: Creole Languages, Curriculum Reforms, and the Decolonial Moment Roundtable

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Historicizing the Neocolonial "Languages" of Inclusion and the Good Life as Pathways for Transformation Roundtable

Abstract

The so-called peculiar status of Creole languages, and the long-considered “exceptional” conditions of their emergence in former plantation colonies, have foregrounded much prejudices and negative attitudes towards Creole speakers – largely composed of mixed slave descendants – due to connotations of impurity, impoverishment and illegitimacy often associated with these languages. In places like Mauritius, for instance, colonial mythologies of linguistic corruption and deficiency – that portray Creole languages as oral dialects, lacking sophistication, and unfit for Western modernity – continue to marginalize the experience of certain racialized groups, largely seen as uneducated, or backward because of their use of Mauritian Kreol. More recently, decolonizing perspectives in Creole Studies have yet exposed such (neo)colonial fictions, as well as taxonomies and epistemological values creating difference and exclusion (DeGraff, 2005), thus reframing creolization in a more positive light that calls for the rehabilitation of both Creole vernaculars and their speakers.

This paper extends the premise that the rather recent inclusion of Creoles within several school curricula across the globe cannot be studied solely as a “linguistic” question, but must be connected to broader issues of decolonization, linguistic rights, historical reparation, and epistemic justice for so-called indigenous groups whose languages have been historically excluded from institutional realms of possibility. Focusing on the multilingual and multiethnic Republic of Mauritius, it namely examines how the 2012 introduction of Mauritian Kreol within the national curriculum constitutes a transformative step both in the “making of” Mauritian Kreol as a full-fledged language, and toward the inclusion of its speakers within such realms as education and politics. I make use of historicizing methods and examine curricular materials such as textbooks and curriculum frameworks, to demonstrate how the “making” (Hacking, 2007) of Mauritian Kreol is a process that can be traced historically (Foucault, 1991) and entails the commingling of people, knowledge, and social change. Consequently, I approach this “making” of Mauritian Kreol, not as a (fixed) linguistic phenomenon, but as a matter of course (López López, 2018) whereby both language and speakers are granted differentiated sociopolitical statuses at different points in time, and under specific circumstances.

In this paper, I start by providing an overview of the representation and evolution of Mauritian Kreol in sociopolitical discourses and performances, both during the colonial and post-independence periods, to demonstrate how the marginalization of the language has historically deprived its speakers from political recognition. I then focus on the formal introduction of Mauritian Kreol within the curriculum to examine how this “event” constitutes a strategy for political empowerment and symbolic rehabilitation of its speakers. In doing so, I ultimately argue that language policies within the Mauritian curriculum operate within a complex and non-linear framework of inclusion/exclusion that calls for a reassessment of the correlation between Creole identity, curricular reforms, and ethnolinguistic claims, namely from the part of those racialized groups whose knowledge, language and experience have long been denied access to the School.

Author

• Nicholas Natchoo, The University of Kansas