TY - JOUR
AU1 - Bryant, Andrea, Dawn
AU2 - Neuman, Nichole, M
AU3 - Gramling,, David
AU4 - Malakaj,, Ervin
AB - Abstract In their February 2019 Forum piece in Applied Linguistics, Bhattacharya et al. (2019) present longitudinal evidence that the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) still struggles to realize core principles of diversity and advocacy despite the passing of its 2013 resolution ‘Affirming Commitment to Promoting Diversity’ (AAAL 2013). They outline several trends in the available institutional data confirming that inequitable practices continue to hinder Scholars of Color from achieving full recognition within AAAL and, more broadly, the international, interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics. Echoing the work of Bhattacharya et al. in this regard, we reflect on parallel concerns in one of the component disciplinary realms of Applied Linguistics, namely the teaching of German language and culture (sometimes referred to as German Studies). As members of the Diversity, Decolonization, and German Curriculum (DDGC) Collective, we would like to contribute to the ongoing conversation begun in forum piece by Bhattacharya et al. (2019). Specifically, we take this opportunity to share the inception, purpose, and actions of the DDGC scholar–practitioner collective towards effectively developing just curricular practices and equitable teaching/learning/working conditions in 21st-century German language and culture curricula. Acknowledging that ‘the willingness to enter the slow and difficult process of linguistic and cultural translation’ (Kramsch 2019: 69) requires transdisciplinary engagement and bridge-building across disciplines, solidarity work, and continuous communication between scholarly associations, we have set about envisioning a field that is truly capable of dismantling white supremacy in its cultural, social, linguistic, political, and institutional forms. Background Founded in 2016, DDGC is a scholarly collective whose work centres on diversity and decolonization in the pursuit of more equitable and just curricula, pedagogical approaches, and working conditions in German Studies. At the second Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum conference in March 2019, a critical incident transpired among the 70 gathered participants, which led us to suspend normal conference proceedings and to reflect slowly and honestly on a panel question ‘Whose German Studies? Diversity and Inclusivity in Promoting German Studies’. Guided by one of the event’s featured speakers, Dr Natasha R. Kelly, the conference attendees were asked to write down what it is that they want from their representative professional organizations: primarily the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG 2019), German Studies Association (GSA), and Austrian Studies Association (ASA). Out of this spontaneous feedback from the 70 attendees, a picture quickly formed: despite their announced efforts at promoting diversity, these organizations have not succeeded adequately since the 1990s (when the AATG made first efforts to analyze diversity in the discipline) in representing, actively engaging with, and recognizing historically minoritized groups within German Studies—that is, teachers and learners whose experiences learning German are profoundly shaped by structures of race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability differences, religion, gender identity, and class. Of greatest and most immediate concern for attendees was the ongoing, sometimes subtle, and usually unquestioned collusion between (hard and soft) ethnonationalism in curricular design and the violence of white supremacy/racism in our societies. Many DDGC attendees expressed how curricular and institutional reliance on ethnonationalism (flags, stereotypes, culturalist tropes, and so-called traditional holidays)—features often felt to be innocuous by those who do not experience their exclusionary effects—were continuing to legitimize aspects of white supremacy that these organizations profess opposition to in the abstract. The profound and rare opportunity taken collectively by the 70 attendees at DDGC 2019, to pause conference proceedings and voice accounts and memories of marginalization often not heard at larger association meetings, modelled for us a crucial, critical space of reflection and dissent. The handwritten comments gathered from the DDGC participants were digitally transcribed by a working group immediately following the conference, taking care not to lose or paraphrase any of the feedback. A smaller subset of that working group thought through the comments, considering commonalities and potential actions. This process resulted in a wide-ranging and polyvocal ‘Open Letter’ and ‘10-Point Program’ (DDGC 2019) of recommendations, which were publicly shared for signatures and then sent to the American Association of Teachers of German leadership in April 2019. In the Open Letter, the DDGC took as a point of departure a 1992 special issue of the AATG journal Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (25/2), which also had focused on diversity—30 years ago. The Open Letter reflected how, ‘That moment [in 1992] announced a future in which Scholars of Color (SoC), LGBT people, Jews, women, refugees, immigrants, non-native speakers, and low-income learners would count in German Studies, not as peripheral topics to be discussed and included, but as core makers of the consciousness of German Studies’ (DDGC 2019: Preamble). The 10-point programme, inspired by the ‘Black Panther Ten-Point Program’ (Black Panther Party 1966) and the Combahee River Collective Statement (1986), resonated quickly and far beyond the group of 70 German teachers who had assembled on the conference weekend in March 2019. In a matter of days, it gathered over 250 signatures from educators and scholars in German Studies, as well as critical friends from other disciplines in North America and Europe, including French Studies, Anthropology, Applied Linguistics, and Translation Studies. Although the DDGC’s work focuses specifically on the field of German language and culture teaching, we gratefully recognize the parallel and interwoven work colleagues in various disciplines are currently undertaking to effect the dismantling of white supremacist, ethnonationalist, and exclusionary habits of thought and practice in our professions. As Bhattacharya et al. (2019) point out, academia has long been constrained by a ‘dominance of Eurocentric epistemological perspectives across disciplines [that] can marginalize “the ways of knowing and understanding the world that faculty of color often bring to academia” (Bernal and Villalpando 2002: 171)”’ (p. 2). We share this understanding and stand in solidarity with call by Bhattacharya et al. for sustained and critical reform within and beyond our professional organizations. Drawing insight from their work, we will continue to agitate for effective structural change in our fields and beyond. Cultivating an Anti-Racist German Studies As Robin DiAngelo reminds us, the complex nature of white supremacy and racism is embedded in society, culture, and symbolic codes, which means the process of undoing racism has no plausible horizon of completion in our time; there is only continuous learning and intervention (2018: xv). As a process, racism must continually be addressed, just as we—and our respective organizations—must continually evaluate our progress or lack of it. Even after 25 years of various effort-making towards diversity, norms, policies, and practices that inform German-language instructional contexts in the USA are still only in the rudimentary stages of acknowledging, addressing, working through, and dismantling underlying colonizing and white supremacist premises. Meanwhile, neoliberal, financialized, and securitarian approaches to language teaching and learning often win the day in matters of funding and curriculum design. As the Open Letter noted, a future where ‘antisemitism, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black racism’ is openly opposed remains ‘announced, but not enacted’ (DDGC 2019: Preamble). While efforts to recruit and retain Students and Scholars of Color in German Studies have been underway for quite some time, the deeper work of addressing and dismantling systemic racism remains marginal to the recruitment enterprise. For example, the AATG’s ‘Alle lernen Deutsch’ [‘Everyone learns German’] committee looks to SoC to lead the efforts to recruit and engage Students of Color in learning German. Such initiatives perceive the underrepresentation of Students of Color ‘in German and in upper level language classrooms in particular’ as a possible solution to waning German enrollments, especially since ‘they [Students of Color] are underrepresented in world language classrooms in general’ (Alle lernen Deutsch 2019: History). Such messaging belies larger and more complex assumptions about systems of oppression: If German Studies includes Students (and Scholars) of Color, how can it be racist? In the German Studies context, the narrative of diversity often focuses on what Students of Color can do for the discipline (strengthen enrollment numbers and ensure long-term growth). Equating efforts to recruit and retain Students of Color and SoC with anti-racist engagement further continues a cycle that grasps racism as a missed opportunity of marketing, easily solved with the right contacts and messages, rather than as a complex socio-political process requiring continuous dismantling and some significant cost and adverse complications for the organizations themselves. Such enduring misalignments suggest that institutions often opt for the ‘moves to innocence’ they find nearest at hand, that is, ‘forms of resistance to anti-racist (or other anti-oppression) discourses, practices, and initiatives’ (Malwhinney 1998: 100). As Malwhinney highlights, motivations for ‘the deployment of moves to innocence range far beyond individual self-protective strategies, to the institutional structures and the ontology of subjectivity in materially oppressive conditions’ (Malwhinney 1998: 100). As such, moves to innocence arise when institutional actors (as political subjects) distance themselves from an imputed position of privilege, cite a lack of personal insight about experiences of oppression, or resort to a combination of both (Fellows and Razack 1998, as referenced in Malwhinney 1998: 100–101). Postulating as an imminent ideal a happy and diverse (read: not racist) world, the institutional actor/subject imagines a field and their involvement in it as always on the verge of equitable and fair practices despite ample and overt evidence to the contrary. Thinking across disciplines and contexts, we recognize that even the most heart-felt efforts towards diversity can reinforce, rather than challenge, hegemonic practices that keep in place a sturdy and effective hierarchy, often articulated around race, class, ‘native’ language, and ability difference. Seeking out non-white bodies in order to secure German language and culture teaching for the future is yet another move that solidifies oppressive structures in order to further subsume individuals as a form of control and containment (see Ahmed 2012: 51–70) and ‘ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite’ (Tuck and Yang 2012: 5). Such moves, which contribute to the disciplinary inability to effect the unfulfilled promise of opposing a white supremacist past (and present), interlock with other intransigencies found throughout the North American educational and intellectual system more broadly: language instruction in the USA, since the 1990s, has been able to function as a commodity from which those already in positions of white privilege benefit (see Flores 2017; Subtirelu et al. 2019). Looking to critical race theory for insights, Flores points out how the institutionalization of bilingual education in the USA has functioned to refortify, rather than challenge, a seemingly latent white supremacy (2017: 567). Housed under the guise of diversity, such moves commodify racial identity only to uphold whiteness as the norm (see El-Tayeb 2016: 16–27; Kubota 2016). Concluding Reflections and Calls for Action What, then, would anti-racist work look like in the teaching of German language and culture if it did not rely on recruitment manoeuvres targeting Students of Color or other kinds of ‘moves to innocence’? On this question among others, the DDGC Collective will pursue fearless and ongoing dialogue with all North American German Studies associations and with any organizations interested in finding effective and honest answers. The initial Open Letter was addressed to the AATG leadership because (i) AATG is the largest scholarly association dedicated to the teaching and learning of German, (ii) the letter evolved out of a specific context of experiences at the AATG/ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) conference in 2015–2018, and (iii) the attendees at the March 2019 conference specifically envisioned AATG as an important site for intervention and improvement. However, we are eager for productive conversations with other disciplinary organizations, including AAAL and AILA (Association International de Linguistique Appliquée). Among the DDGC’s goals is to create opportunities for scholarly support, publishing, and community-building for SoC and other minority and minoritized groups within German Studies; scores of scholarly communities and organizations beyond German Studies share a similar vision. Opportunities for solidarity and mutual guidance are many and imminently at hand. Supporting and sustaining grassroots efforts, while also interfacing with scholarly associations, is an essential approach for effecting the (inter)disciplinary shifts we desire. Bhattacharya et al. (2019) offer guidance on how can we, as members of interdisciplines like Applied Linguistics and German Studies, can identify—and begin to undo—our own collective moves to innocence. For us, too, one key answer involves conducting an extensive study of the enrollment and employment demographics and patterns in German Studies today. The last survey of demographics in the field was conducted in the early 1990s (Peters 1994; Schulz 1993). While the DDGC has initiated a qualitative survey to gain more insight about what motivated signatories of the Open Letter, it does not yield information about the demographics of the field as a whole. We sincerely hope that our respective German Studies associations—as well as the German cultural centers and institutes—will join forces to undertake a large effort towards gathering substantial data for the purposes of informing discipline-wide curricular, advocacy, and professionalization reforms devised to improve working and learning conditions for minoritized and precaritized learners and personnel. These data will serve as an accountability measure: as a strategy for the field to face itself and attend to its shortcomings frequently elided as a result of a certain studied agnosticism about its actual personnel composition. Ultimately, this information will help advocates and key stakeholders develop antiracist policy and curricular principles as well. We acknowledge that ‘the de-centering and de-essentialization of subjectivity and experience is necessary to disrupt the production of white privilege, particularly as it is normalized in the progressive context of the organizations in question’ (Malwhinney 1998: 13). Underlying, yet long-standing habits of thought about which voices and perspectives have a rightful place in the German language canon and classroom underwrite a covertly racist association that equates authentic German language voices with white personae. Many who signed the Open Letter confirm this view; consider this emphatic contextualization from a faculty member at a public university in the USA: The passages addressing white supremacy and ethnonational messaging really struck a chord with me. Since the 2016 election, let's be honest, Trump's America has made it somehow ‘acceptable’ to voice opinions of hatred and xenophobia among the student body. I have had students the past few semesters who say (or write) things like ‘Germany should be for the Germans’ and ‘refugees have no right to complain about discrimination in a country that took them in’. Students in course evals have mentioned wanting to ‘read more works by real Germans’ as opposed to texts written by minorities and contemporary writers whose identities more accurately represent the collection of diverse voice in German discourses. As this particular signatory illustrates, racism is not an ‘outside issue’ in matters of curriculum design. Particularly today, it is no longer forgivable to rely on a vague idea of progress to do the future-shaping work our fields and learners need in this moment. We need to continue to agitate and interrupt until our organizations dismantle white supremacy, and until People of Color and other folx that seek representation, visibility, and voice in our representative organizations find equal footing, rather than tokenized inclusion.1 As members of the Diversity, Decolonization, and German Curriculum collective, we seek allies and dialogue partners across disciplines in the pursuit of a just, anti-racist, and truly affirmative language and culture curriculum, in and beyond German Studies. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Andrea Dawn Bryant is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in German at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, USA. Before beginning doctoral studies, she completed an MA in German at the University of Oklahoma. In the 2015–2016 academic year, she investigated the personal, academic, and cultural transitions of 27 Chinese users of German in Germany as they were preparing to matriculate as mainstream university students in the German university system and remains grateful for the financial support of the DAAD for making this possible. Her dissertation research interrogates the representation of race in German-language instructional contexts in the USA. Address for correspondence: Andrea Dawn Bryant, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. <andrea.dawn.bryant@gmail.com> Nichole M. Neuman is an Assistant Professor of German and Hoyt-Reichmann Scholar of German-American Studies and German Language and Culture at Indiana University—Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), where she also serves as the Director of the Max Kade Center. In the 2018–2019 academic year, she was the Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin through the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Recent publications include a chapter on transnational film archives in Becoming TransGerman (Neuman 2019) and a forthcoming article on the beginning of cinema studies in the Twin Cities (The Moving Image 2020). Address for correspondence: Nichole M. Neuman, Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, IN, USA. <nmneuman@iu.edu> David Gramling is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, AZ, USA. His most recent books are Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (de Gruyter 2019, co-authored with Robert Gramling) and Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, co-authored with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd). He serves on the Board of Directors of the American Literary Translators Association. Address for correspondence: David Gramling, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. <dgl@email.arizona.edu> Ervin Malakaj is an Assistant Professor of German and an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Prior to joining UBC, he served as Assistant Professor of German and Coordinator of the German Program at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX, USA. Together with Regine Criser at University of North Carolina at Asheville, with whom he co-founded the international scholarly collective ‘Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum’ in 2016, he has edited a collection titled Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies (Palgrave, forthcoming). Address for correspondence: Ervin Malakaj, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. <ervin.malakaj@ubc.ca> Footnotes 1 The usage of folx is intentional, and its usage acknowledges and includes gender nonconforming, gender neutral, and/or gender nonbinary individuals. This use of the term aligns with Kapitan’s (2016) and Flint et al.’s (2019) use of folx and Latinx, which demonstrates the awareness that every individual is not necessarily born either man or woman. REFERENCES Ahmed S. 2012 . On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life . Duke University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC American Association for Applied Linguistics. 2013 . Resolution Affirming Commitment to Promoting Diversity in AAAL. Retrieved 13 July 2019, from https://www.aaal.org/resolutions. American Association of Teachers of German. 2019 . Alle lernen Deutsch Committee. 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Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Tuck E. , Wayne Yang K. . 2012 . ‘ Decolonization is not a metaphor ’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 : 1 – 40 . WorldCat © The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Announced but Not Enacted: Anti-Racist German Studies as Process
JF - Applied Linguistics
DO - 10.1093/applin/amz057
DA - 2003-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/announced-but-not-enacted-anti-racist-german-studies-as-process-Vrpjv8jBdh
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -