 Hi everyone. Welcome to Multilingual 2.0. My name is David Grammling. I am an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies here at the University of Arizona. And on behalf of my co-organizers, Chantel Warner, we're here, Oslo Usses and Bramacosta. I have the happy job of welcoming all of you here to Tucson to, from all points all around the world, Catalonia, Seattle, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where else? Scotland, Glasgow, Oxford. Welcome here to Tucson. To my presenters, I want to thank you not only for accepting our hopeful invitation and also for traveling thousands of miles to get to be with us, but also for your patience and your goodwill and your intellectual investment in the idea of this event. Southern Arizona, I can say, is truly blessed to host such a dialogue among this esteemed group of scholars. On a personal note, I believe I can say that I've never been in a room full, more full of people to whom I'm intellectually indebted, professionally indebted, translationally indebted, culturally indebted. It goes on and on. So I'll start with some gratitude. Oftentimes when I go to conferences and things begin with acknowledgments and thanks, I think that it's a pro-former kind of honorific gesture. I've realized over the course of this process that it is absolutely not. And the experience of putting together this symposium with my collaborators of working with so many very, very busy, very talented people has made me really look forward to being able to thank them publicly. And I really relish the opportunity to do that now. First, I'd like to thank the people who first expressed faith in the possibility of this event happening. That was around 18 months ago when Chantel and I went from the kind of back of the napkin stage of this idea to the, oh my gosh, this is actually going to happen stage of this event. And those people were our department chair, Professor Barbara Costa in the German studies department. Where's Barbara? Hi, Barbara. And also our dean, Mary Wildner Bassett, the dean of the College of Humanities. Also, Ann Bederidge, Professor Ann Bederidge of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Professor Linda Wah, former director of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in second language acquisition and teaching. Both of them had very wise, very calming advice at just the right times. So we're very grateful for them. And the initial nod from these very experienced, very fine colleagues of mine convinced us that this was an initiative that was worth doing. It was worth pursuing. It was worth working very hard on. And crucial to our being here today and the reason why we're able to offer this symposium free over the course of the weekend is a major financial support from the new Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry here on the U of A campus. After only a year of official existence, the intellectual and interdisciplinary impact of Confluence is being deeply felt around campus under the capable director ship of Professor Javier Durán of Maria Teyes and Willie Costley who are assisting him in that effort. We have further major funding from the College of Humanities, the College of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of German Studies, the School of Information Technology and Arts, the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. So we're deeply grateful for their support. I would also particularly like to thank the fantastic staff of the College of Humanities and the School of International Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Silk, who are under the direction of Professor Alain Fili Durán and also Kelly Moyes, their Senior Business Manager who've been unflagging in their support for this endeavor. I want to give a big shout out to the inimitable Aleksandar Gans who's up there in charge of all the magical technical things that are going to happen over the next two and a half days. Alex, did you wave? I can't see you up there. Oh no, where did Alex go? All right, well we used to be in good hands and I think that we will be in a moment. Alex, I was, I got to take part in a ceremony on Tuesday night where Alex was named the Outstanding Graduate Student Leader of the entire University of Arizona campus. So we're really grateful to have him as part of our Transcultural German Studies doctoral program and he has just finished the written portion of his PhD comprehensive exams and is here literally 17 hours later directing all this amazingness up there. So thank you to Alex. This symposium is kept in motion by a fabulous Tucson ground crew of volunteers, drivers and hosts and although I can't introduce all of them to you right now, I do want to ask a few of them to either wave or stand or otherwise make their presence known and these are the people that you go to if you need anything within reason. They're all really fun to talk to as well. So they're four doctoral students in SLAT, Second Language Acquisition, and teaching Kasey Peking Power. Where's Kasey? Do we see Kasey? Somebody else see Kasey? All right, Malena Samaniego, where's Malena? Okay, Kristen Mickelson, excuse me, Kristen and Ambalia Thomas. Do we have Ambalia? All right. I'd also like to point out our graduate student in Middle Eastern and North African Studies. He's going to be our blogger in chief. We're going to ask him to be fair and balanced or you know whatever, balanced and fair, something along those lines. And I'd also like you to turn to the inside, no, I'm sorry, to the back of the program to look at our other institutional sponsors. We've had an incredible amount of good faith support from our colleagues around this campus from various programs, schools, colleges, and we're incredibly grateful for their support, especially in a moment where budgets are incredibly tight. And I would also like to say thank you to all of our unofficial sponsors who are here. I know that you know who you are and that your support over these months has been really important. Center of Creative Photography has loaned us their lovely, lovely space for the next 52 hours. I would like to thank Janet Livingstone for helping us coordinate that. I've also made a solemn personal oath to the center that neither I nor these wonderful friends of mine will bring a beverage of any sort into the auditorium. Coffee beverage, other beverage, snack, anything like this. So this is going to be one of the most difficult things for me to uphold over the course of the weekend, but I am committed to that effort. I'd also like to thank the profoundly multilingual staff of the University of Arizona for helping us with everything from parking permits to vans to catering, security, driving, cleaning, procurement, and funds disbursement. I don't know. On the last note I'd like to thank my mother, Dr. Catherine Gramling of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth College of Nursing for sending us these beautiful flowers that we have right in front of her. So thanks mom. They're beautiful. How's the sound up there? Is it too loud in the back? Yes, no? Okay, good. So now I'm going to assume some personal responsibility for the quizzical title of this event. A number of you have been asking me very patiently, what 2.0? That's from 1994. Why are we doing 2.0? Why multilingual comma 2.0? With a question mark after it. And I think I remember an email exchange with Chantel about 18 months ago where she said, I don't know, I don't think I like it all that much. And yet it kind of, it stuck and it began to intrigue us and we began to think about it and we were interested in its ambiguity. We were interested in its ambivalence, its kind of progressivist conceit, and its dark side. So we're going to look at the dark side a little bit, I think, over the course of this weekend. And since this is the last chance that I'll have to justify this title, I'm going to give it my best shot and you can, over the course of the weekend, let me know if my justification holds water. So in the struggle to produce a public definition of what multilingualism and translation are, as phenomena, as practices, as experience, in this public civic effort to produce a definition of these things, higher education is currently losing ground. It's losing ground to corporate research and development departments to content management platforms of various kinds, to guilt firms, globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation firms, and the state apparatuses that love them. The prerogative of defining what translation, what language learning, what study abroad, and what translingual competence in general are and what they are for, of defining what the desired outcome of these commitments are and why we are there for making choices to either learn or to not learn languages that we did not grow up with. These questions used to belong to discourses led by secondary and higher education and scholarship, and today they belong to the university and the public school less and less. In the past 25 years, the epistemological paradigm around mono and multilingualism has not just shifted in the university, it has absconded from the university. As corporate R&D have developed how and why to identify and isolate translatability as an ideal and then how to automate it, how to monetize it, and how to reify it, to automate, monetize, and reify how we make and how we shepherd meaning across languages from one language to another. And certainly that paradigm shift has brought with it new technological affordances and new potentials for practice that all of us in this room regularly avail ourselves of and I personally am a very grateful user of a lot of these technological advancements and affordances and of course they're making possible all of the communication and exchange that we're doing right now. But the price tag on that paradigm shift is a kind of blithe credulity inherent in any progressivist conceit or technocratic optimism, a belief that the versions of multilingual being and knowing in the public sphere just keep getting better. Now they just keep 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc. So this is a kind of teleological vision about the relationship between language and machine that needs to be looked at very carefully and very literately even as we partake in its commercial and political spoils. And by literately I mean that humanists and social scientists, we need to learn how to read search algorithms as much as we have been trained to learn to read trochaic hexameter or to read the racialized body in Emily Bronte, things like this. We have to learn how to read and be literate in search algorithms and how those kinds of things produce meanings across languages. So even as we celebrate a number of things around multilingualism and translation that couldn't have happened 20 years ago, like the tweets from Tahrir Square or Skype conversations between French learners in Berkeley with their French native speaker counterparts in Lyon or the somewhat united Europe's new state governmental policy of universal civic trilingualism. And even as Germany shirks its ethno-national self-understanding for a discourse that views the learning of German among immigrants as a kind of civil right rather than as a coercive tool of governmentality. And even as Microsoft develops their software updates with 100 national languages in mind and will not produce a piece of software unless it can be readily translated and produced in multiple global codes. And even as Random House will only option monolingual manuscripts that are marketable in translation in at least five other languages, otherwise they're not going to purchase the book in the first place. Even as our cheapest disposable cell phones come with autocorrect in Turkish, Norwegian, Swahili, Mandarin, and French Creole, we need to take a really good long pause. And this for me is the comma in multilingual 2.0 to look at what categories of meaning might be suffering a kind of invisible structural attrition. Sometimes a slow one, sometimes a sudden one among all of this hubbub around multilingualism and translatability. Whose meanings are being preserved and translated? Which meanings are being perceived as more readily translatable and therefore can thread the needle of foreign language proficiency assessment and mechanical translation faster than others? Whose meanings and vernaculars, whose knowledge in language is entitled to cross languages via translation, foreign language teaching and technology, and under which circumstances and conditions are they entitled to do so? Whose meanings, vernaculars, and knowledges in language are extraordinarily rendered across languages without their consent or knowledge, and under which conditions and circumstances does that take place? And for those who are copyrighted, certified, and patented to traffic meaning across languages by various apparatuses of the translational industrial complex, what kinds of behaviors and identities do they need to commit themselves to abiding by in order to remain certified as such? How are these criteria of legitimacy distinct from how they were in the year 2000, in 1945, or in 1806? Which meanings get across language thresholds and which ones don't? This is a distinction, I think, that my colleague, Professor Yasin Narani, describes as hard multilingualism versus soft multilingualism, which I'm a big fan of that distinction, and also what Alistair Penney Cook describes as semi-diversity versus glossodiversity. We have with us today Mary Louise Pratt. Mary Louise, where are you? Okay, Mary Louise in the second row. Mary Louise, whose major contributions to humanistic and social science analysis include what she calls the traffic and meaning, a concept that has also been further theorized by Clare Khamsh, also in the second row here, and Mac Halliday. I'm not sure which row Mac Halliday is. Rather than a vision of translingual competence as the business of possessing and manipulating multiple signs for the same thing, these theorists are concerned with how meanings embody situated historical, communitarian, ecological, and material meanings, meanings that cannot be disarticulated into signifier and signified and the kind of analytical, Protestant, semiotics. These theorists are concerned with how meanings, not just signs, but meanings, can and are moved from one language to another. So the speakers that we have come here today to share their work are interested in knowing what's involved in this particular moment, this 2012 in which multilingualism is on everyone's tongue, and we're interested in who carries these meanings, what kind of laborers carry these meanings, what teachers, what speakers, what smugglers, what corporate raiders, what filaments, what operating systems, what viruses, what algorithms, what penal codes, and what market protocols. This post-monolingual condition is so deeply felt here in this city of Tucson and probably in this room as well. And so there it is, this quizzical, ugly, unmarked, and undefined term monolingualism. Not so much a thing, nor a condition, nor a personal or institutional characteristic, but a logical conceit of some sort, a durable mythology, a metaphor we live and speak by, this belief which leads to the durable disposition that has me addressing you in English today rather than in other languages. Monolingualism and multilinguality are co-present here in this room right now, and how can that be? Is this a contact zone of some sort? And if it is, how is it working? And all of this makes the anthropological category of a speech community also less and less convincing. The romance of community, of committed exclusive presence in a group that shares a vernacular vocabulary of practices, experiences, and histories has been rigorously tested by our own Miranda Joseph here at the University of Arizona in her book Against the Romance of Community. And the idea of shared meanings, though it is a lovely and very reassuring notion for a communitarian kind of cancer like myself, obscures as much as it reveals about what humans do with their meanings on a day like today and about what we will do over the next three days here in this room. We will most probably not be a speech community. Our various multilingualisms, disciplinary ones, stylistic ones, embodied ones, and national ones will make sure of that. But we can perhaps be, as Braj Khatru suggests, a speech fellowship, and I'd like to thank my graduate colleague Jerry Lee in English for this reference. Or perhaps we will be a speech commons to borrow from the work of Jose Esteban Munoz who lectured here last week in the Institute for LGBT Studies at the Miranda Joseph endowed lecture, when he spoke of the brown commons of Mexican-American embodied becoming. Munoz told us that the brown commons, and I quote, pulses with the turbulence of the enclosures that seek to subsume it. And likewise, our meanings over the next few days will be beautifully turbulent in their various enclosures. They will swerve in the midst of our translating. We will often not understand one another while we think we understand each other. We will again and again fall victim to that, to what our guest Deborah Cameron calls the intermental fallacy, one of my favorite of many, many beautiful terms from Debbie Cameron. And this failing will be one of the many turbulent human constants that characterizes a speech commons like Southern Arizona. And I'm just about to finish so we can move on. This evening at Casa Vicente we will hear from the poet Renato Rosaldo who will read from his new poetry volume Diego Diego Luna's Insider Tips, beautiful title, to his most recent poetry collection released February 2012. I want to share very quickly something that I encountered in this volume last week when I picked it up and taken and taken you books on Fourth Avenue. Particularly, I was interested in two poems, one called Widower and one called Viudo. These two poems are quite similar to one another at the outset and one can be justified in thinking that one is the translation of the other or vice versa. But the third and last stanza does something even more magical than translation and I want to read both versions of that stanza for you very quickly or slowly because poetry should be slow. Two oval shadows face me, then the sound of stepping of stepping bones without their cushioning flesh, from a boombox by the path Aretha belts out, chain, chain, chain. Then the bones fall slough-like kernels from an ear of corn, rattled by rhythmic lamentation, I stoop to collect the scattered debris. So that was from the poem Widower and right next to it on the opposite page is a poem called Viudo and I will read that last stanza right now. Me miran dos ovalos oscuros, luego suenan los pasos de huesos sin carne que vienen brinque y brinque como títeres bailando al compás de un ritmo que se me escapa hasta caer sueltos como un elote que se desgrana, desconcertados por los sollosos melódicos me agacho a recoger los escombros desparamados. So the one version of this poem does not serve as a translational replacement of the other. The meaning lies between them where the pages are articulated. And this is perhaps the basic term of human meaning making in 2012. The co-presence of these two articulations, the articulation of these two articulations, not the substitution of the one for the other, but their co-presence, their double vision, their boombox, their chain, chain, chain, their Aretha that disappears and the debris that the poet must stoop to re-possess, their puppets dancing to the compass of a rhythm that escapes him. So this escape of rhythm forms the multi-language of a turbulent commons, and yet our structuralisms don't really know what to do with it. Neither did deconstruction really. Communicative language teaching has looked escance at multi-language like this. Functionalist translation studies finds it beautiful, but somewhat inadequate. And mechanical translation products and platforms overlook it as they do exactly what high modernist and structuralist conceptions of language have told them to do. So what this multi-language needs from us is not just another relational analysis, but a fundamental change in how we understand the substantiality of language, its locations, its status amid becoming. And if we are able to move this show about multi-lingualism and monolingualism a bit this weekend, then maybe we can come back in a few years, hold another one of these lovely discussions, and as a name for that, I might suggest multi-lingual 1.9. The last thing I'd like to do before I introduce my wonderful friend and colleague Oslo Usses is just to mention that as people registered, I saw a wonderful constituency of people who were attending this symposium, second language acquisition and teaching doctoral students, K through 12 teachers, my colleagues in various departments around the university. It's lovely to see you all here. And I hope you stay for as much as possible of the weekend because there really isn't a moment of it besides my introduction that you're going to want to miss. So Oslo Usses, my colleague in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, welcome. Thank you, David. Thank you, David, for this eloquent introduction and thought-provoking ideas. And our guests, welcome to the Sonoran Desert. It has been indeed a privilege and a great pleasure to work with my colleagues, David Gramling and Chantel Warner, who were the originators of the idea from which this symposium sprang. And graciously invited me and my colleague Brama Costa from Spanish and Portuguese to join forces as a collaborative to engage this project before confluence the Center for Creative Inquiry generously awarded us the grant for our symposium. In that light, we actually spent a very exciting academic year at Arizona. During the fall 2011, spring 2012, we organized a series of roundtables and discussions where UA faculty and graduate students put many important issues on the table and debated them in relation to multilingualism in anticipation of this symposium. We have tried to bring different, our different disciplinary paradigms, sets of questions to generate an interdisciplinary dialogue to discuss about issues of multilingualism. But then we came back into a full circle as my colleague Yasin Urani said, isn't dialogue an implication of speaking the same language. So in what follows, I would like to briefly offer a few key points, drawing from those discussions but combining them with my own work and then leave the table for our speakers today. If modernity is a series of social, cultural, economic and political processes that led to changes in the structural patterns of different social formations characterized by a cluster of institutions, as Stuart Hall argues, then the nation state is one of its key political institutions, more commonly based on homogeneously defined and unified national body politic than not. Many modern nation states are responsible for various attempts at erasing differences in national identification and generate one singular narrative for the affiliation and genesis of the nationals. Language played, as we all know, a key role in the consolidation of national identification and literature departments have also played a key role in this consolidation. In an age of post-nationalism, when national state policies of homogenization and purity, as well as the dynamics with economically, professionally or politically driven immigration and globalization are being put into question in various places, it is my sense that humanism gained new implications. One that is informed by humanitarianism, engaging exclusion-inclusion practices, narratives and practices of belonging at a political and social level, in short, one that arguably functions as a recursive remedy for exclusionary practices. Perhaps not unlike 19th century humanists who traced their identification as European, for example, through tracing their genealogies to ancient Greeks or Romans, for instance, and made civilization no claims for self-identification, contemporary public domains, and for this we can include many contexts, unravel many similar self-identification practices that similarly resort to tracing genealogies. Only this time, rather than going back to maybe ancient Greek or Roman heritage, it is through family heritage with ethnic attributes that then become a cement for discussing cultural identification claims with, again, ethnic undertones. As such, memoirs, family histories, documentaries on minority groups, narrated through personal life stories or experiences, and so on, have flourished in multiple public domains throughout especially the 1990s and 2000s, turning authors into ethnographic subjects and informants. These products also altered the field of literature as the field of professional writers, and I don't mean to say that these other authors are not professional writers, but there has been some kind of attention, and as, for example, was visible in 2000s in Turkey, where there was a symposium that was organized by writers of novelists, and the title of the symposium was, I Want My Literature Back, and raising questions about death of the author at yet another level. These engagements with identification have, in my opinion, altered the implications of the human, perhaps, and informed a different kind of humanism. Again, maybe none of these things are new, but because we are of the era that we are discussing these phenomena and dynamics, they gain a different kind of political meaning. As such, rather than exploring ancient ruins, through these practices, we are invited, that is, you know, books and memoirs and personal family histories, we are perhaps invited to explore the ruins of the nation's state and its homogenization policies, their inclusion and exclusion practices, and engage its remnants through such personal histories. This in turn turns, and I don't mean to say that these are not problematic accounts that they should be essentialized, but I try to address a particular dynamic within the field. This in turn turns the human into a site of excavation itself, one that is disposed to retrieve such stories, memories, and personal takes on experiences. In each nation's state, we can see different dynamics of engaging differences and diversity, rediscovering perhaps multilingualism, because we know from history that multilingualism was not something new, only because we are now discussing it in the aftermath of those nationalization processes, they gain a different kind of meaning in a way of rediscovery. But because these also practices of the nation's state era, let's say, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, because of these practices that were geared towards the standardization of language and identity in many nation states, not all, of course, but they also generated their own hierarchies and differences. For example, in the context of present Europe, let's say, which one has more of a symbolic capital, being a Basque or an Algerian in France? In this slide, for example, it must also be noted that the European Union differs from the US context. These are different kinds of models. For instance, in the EU, while there are the state-sponsored cross-cultural exchanges of language, culture grounds such as the Erasmus Student Exchange Program, commissioner of multilingualism, et cetera, that seemingly celebrates multiculturalism, but then how much of these policies extend to the recognition and redistribution of the rights and presences of the immigrant communities located there. In fact, these come across as generating efforts of one unified identity, but this time under the umbrella of Europeanness, one that does endorse multilingualism in that manner. And again, how much is Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, for instance, are endorsed as part of such curricula as opposed to French, English, Spanish, German, and so on? Actually, with this kind of selective multiculturalism, a civilizationally defined discourse of Europeanness shows us how older forms of humanism, one that genealogized Europeanness and European culture, so to speak, as anchored into Greek and Roman civilizations, for example, are resilient and might not have disappeared after all. Coupled with the unfortunate dynamics that emerged in the aftermath of 9-11, such differences, reified as Western and non-Western worlds, are now attached to larger narratives of civilizational clashes. How do we then engage multilingualism, which clearly cannot be reductively engaged as a mere form of multiculturalism? What are the hierarchies involved? And what kind of hierarchies also that are emerging at the intersections of these practices and policies that both inform and are informed by the contemporary dynamics? More specifically, how do we teach and learn languages? How do we navigate our habitus through different fields of education, politics, and cultural production, while at the same time grappling with the dissemination of neoliberal policies that spread market values across a larger spectrum, generating yet another form of hierarchization that puts us teachers and academics in relevance wars, perhaps, to show that learning languages are important, or it is important to address these issues and questions. And so then why do we study certain particular subjects as relevant? What kind of opportunities then I would like to conclude? Does multilingualism provide both as a category of analysis and practice to borrow from Fred Cooper and Roger Brubaker's nomenclature? And I very much look forward to the discussions that will happen throughout the symposium. Thank you.