What words are for?
"Translations, even the best ones, are based on a false premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. … The fundamental mistake of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language is located, instead of allowing his language to be strongly influenced by the foreign language."
Pannwitz, Rudolf. 1917. Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur. Nürnberg: Hans Carl.
Imaginaries by Fatou Cisse
Gesture as Language
Language does not begin or end with words. A glance, a pause, a raised hand, a change of pitch—these gestures are not supplements to communication but its core. Meaning flows through bodies as much as through syntax. What we call “languages” are in fact repertoires of gestures, constantly expanded as they encounter others. The myth of purity collapses here because every performance of speech is already a mixture, an improvisation.
Imaginaries of Translanguaging as Gesture and Performance
Imperial languages once claimed universality by erasing the body, presenting knowledge as detached and “neutral.” The translanguaging imaginary brings the body back. Knowledge is not static truth but a performance repeated, varied, and transformed. Its credibility lies in resonance—whether a gesture carries across, whether a performance invites others to join. In this way, truth is not anchored in stasis but in the living rhythm of interaction.
The myths of the “mother tongue” and the “native speaker” are not neutral descriptors; they are instruments of power. They obscure the fluid realities of migration and everyday translanguaging, insisting on an origin, a purity, a fixed point of belonging that never truly existed. By reducing complex biographies to labels, these categories trivialize hybridity and disguise the violence of classification.
To name someone by their “mother tongue” is to demand a lineage, a single root, even when lived experience is a forest of entangled voices. To measure competence against the figure of the “native speaker” is to reinscribe hierarchy, legitimizing exclusion under the guise of linguistic authority. These myths work not only to simplify but to discipline: they tell us who counts as authentic and who will forever be marked as deficient.
Against this logic, translanguaging exposes what the myths deny—that all speech is hybrid, improvised, in motion. To dismantle the categories of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” is not merely an academic task; it is an anticolonial gesture, a refusal to let language be policed by fantasies of purity. It is to recognize the dignity of those whose lives are woven from many tongues, and to insist that belonging is not inherited, but enacted in the fluid, everyday practice of speaking otherwise.
To resist the supremacy of named languages is to embrace a practice of mutual transformation.
Learning as Rehearsal and Improvisation
Dismantling Linguistic Myths
Filiation as REhearsal and Improvsiation
The myths of the “mother tongue” and the “native speaker” are not neutral descriptors; they are instruments of power. They obscure the fluid realities of migration and everyday translanguaging, insisting on an origin, a purity, a fixed point of belonging that never truly existed. By reducing complex biographies to labels, these categories trivialize hybridity and disguise the violence of classification.
To name someone by their “mother tongue” is to demand a lineage, a single root, even when lived experience is a forest of entangled voices. To measure competence against the figure of the “native speaker” is to reinscribe hierarchy, legitimizing exclusion under the guise of linguistic authority. These myths work not only to simplify but to discipline: they tell us who counts as authentic and who will forever be marked as deficient.
Against this logic, translanguaging exposes what the myths deny—that all speech is hybrid, improvised, in motion. To dismantle the categories of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” is not merely an academic task; it is an anticolonial gesture, a refusal to let language be policed by fantasies of purity. It is to recognize the dignity of those whose lives are woven from many tongues, and to insist that belonging is not inherited, but enacted in the fluid, everyday practice of speaking otherwise.languages once claimed universality by erasing the body, presenting knowledge as detached and “neutral.” The translanguaging imaginary brings the body back. Knowledge is not static truth but a performance repeated, varied, and transformed. Its credibility lies in resonance—whether a gesture carries across, whether a performance invites others to join. In this way, truth is not anchored in stasis but in the living rhythm of interaction.
Fotos: René Prodell
René Wilhelm Landspersky
Art enables me and you to attend otherwise ...
