First, a digression: only after years of studying and being exposed to various Asian and Romance languages that I came to really think about the enormous European bias in the designations of languages/dialects. The former contains connotations of higher status or prestige, while the latter denotes something more local, less important. Languages are worthy of preservation, while dialects are not. Romance languages can be mutually intelligible and yet considered distinct “languages,” while Chinese “dialects” can be mutually unintelligible and yet never achieve the status of “language.” The main difference is perhaps that the distinct romance languages have distinct written texts (and yet so similar) while the distinct Chinese dialects share the same written text.
Diana Taylor’s article not only challenges the privileging the written over the spoken and points out its Eurocentric bias, but also further argues for a programme of “performance studies” that takes non-textual modes of communication, such as singing, dancing, and other modes of performances, as serious conduits of meaning. As Ann Stoler’s article argues, the written archive as a repository of meaning is not neutral, inert; history is not waiting in the archives to be discovered by historians. Neither the archive nor the “repertoire” of performance-based production of knowledge and meaning is neutral or inert. And yet the written archive has come to be the most dominant mode of communication of knowledge for its material properties make storage and retrieval possible for a very long time. Our claims to knowledge/our capacity to know, therefore, hinges on the materialities of the archive, all the way down to the techniques of language itself. Taylor is against the disciplinary divisions among dance, music, and theater, but it also appears that we should also re-incorporate these non-textual modes of communication back into the core curriculum of liberal arts education in general.
Thank you, Leila. I appreciate your two-level critique of the text-based archive; not only does it marginalize performative ways of knowing, but it also naturalizes particular linguistic conventions. Yet I wonder about your claim that languages are worthy of preservation, yet dialects are not. Is this your argument, or are you proposing that dismissal of the dialect is an unfortunate general tendency? You might be interested in various dialect collections, e.g., the Dictionary of American Regional English and George Mason University’s Speech Accent Archive.
No it’s not my argument, and yes I mean the dismissal of the dialect as something inferior, and the claim draws from my experience growing up in China where the regional dialect was banned in elementary schools in favor of Mandarin. The vocabularies and grammar and literary/theatrical productions peculiar to the regional dialect were also absent or disappearing.