New Books in Language and Translation

In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to be true are also necessarily true – true not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity (Routledge, 2022), Tristan Grotvedt Haze revisits the concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a method of “factorization” to explain the sort of a priori philosophical analysis that can give us insight into modal status, but – in contrast to Kripke – defends a neo-Fregean theory of meaning. Grotvedt Haze, who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, also considers the nature of metaphysical necessity itself, and ends up being a skeptic about strong metaphysical necessity.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words."The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing."Mentioned in this episode: "Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine "Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth. Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964. Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016 Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883. Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985. Listen to the episode hereRead the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A conversation with Michael Fiden about University of Texas at Austin’s new open access online resource for second-year Sanskrit students, either for self-study or as a supplement to instruction.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Some time, millenia ago, people began using sounds: to coordinate, to solve problems, to think. Explaining this leap—from non-linguistic beings to language-users—Nirmalangshu Mukherji argues that we shouldn’t focus only on language. In The Human Mind through the Lens of Language: Generative Explorations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Mukherji draws on resources like René Descartes’ conception of mind, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally different than animal cognitive systems. He grounds this distinction in what he calls “Principle G,” a recursive, generative ability underlying human language and other domains. Mukherji’s book takes up competing and compatible theories in cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy, refining his conception of mind and language in conversation with Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Michael Corballis, and others.Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention.Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001).Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode from the Vault, we hear from historian Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent visitor at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His talk, Literacy and the Tower of Babel, took place in November 1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity.Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in English in 2020, in Jeremy’s translation. Jeremy, in addition to having translated more than 20 books from Chinese, is also a novelist and a playwright currently based in New York City. This conversation roams from cryptozoology to Confucius, from the market for World Literature to the patriarchal structure of language. Yan reads from the “Sacrificial Beasts” chapter of her novel, and Jeremy envies the brevity and compression of her Chinese before reading his own English translation. Throughout this warmhearted conversation, Yan and Jeremy insist upon particularity: upon the specificity of language, even in translation, and the distinctiveness of identity, even in a globalized world. We learn more about Yan’s decision to write in English, and Jeremy’s cat chimes in with an answer to our signature question about untranslatability! Tune in and keep a look out for Yan’s English-language debut, Elsewhere, a collection of stories, due out in 2023.Mentions:-Yiyun Li-Liu Xiaobo-Jhumpa Lahiri-Confucius-Strange Beasts of China-Tilted Axis Press-State of Emergency-Yu char kway-WittgensteinFind out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Contributors to Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and semantics of the Chinese language with philosophy of language, from the classical Chinese and contemporary analytic Anglophone traditions. The result is an anthology which explores what Mou calls “the constructive-engagement” model for doing philosophy.In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about the book’s contributions, which includes essays on the famous “White Horse” paradox of Gongsun Long, Heidegger and Zhuangzi on the ineffable, pluralism about truth in Chinese thought, and the relationship between Davidsonian philosophy of language and methods in Chinese philosophy.Bo Mou, Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Rochester, is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University, USA, and editor of the journal Comparative Philosophy.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today.W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay "The Souls of White Folk" was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others—a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement.The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well— and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth.Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language