Introduction translingual work.
The term translingual has entered the commons of discourse inhabiting College English as one possible entry point for work contesting the monolingualism that continues to dominate the teaching and study of college writing and reading in the United States and elsewhere. But like other terms proposed as alternatives to monolingualism for example, multilingual, plurilingual, translanguaging, code meshing translingual as a point of entry with no predefined, predetermined outcome is subject to competing inflections. And in fact, the 2011 essay that is arguably responsible for introducing the term to the pages of College English itself presents "a translingual approach" only as something "toward" which we might work, and its authors caution that "we are still at the beginning stages of our learning efforts in this project, which by definition will require the ideas and energy of many" (Horner et al. "Language Difference" 310).Since then, many have taken up just such efforts, in the pages of College English and elsewhere, in predictably diverse ways and with diverse results (see for example Arnold; Canagarajah, Literacy; Canagarajah, Translingual; DePalma and Ringer; Gonzales; Horner, Donahue, and NeCamp; Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe; Jordan; Kilfoil; Sohan; Lorimer Leonard; Lu and Horner; Lueck and Sharma; Marko et al. Massimo and Tomasso; M. Williams; Zawacki and Cox) Continuing what may be an emerging tradition of College English as a key site for such considerations, this symposium both reflects and builds on the efforts prompted by that 2011 College English essay.The symposium had its immediate genesis in a 2014 conversation among four of us Bruce Horner, Min Zhan Lu, Anis Bawarshi, and Juan Guerra in which we reflected, again, on the multifaceted differences and interconnections we kept noticing in our work. That conversation led us to begin entertaining the idea of a forum for folks with expertise in different pockets of composition studies to share their positions on a translingual approach in a more sustained manner that allowed for something closer to a roundtable format.We came up with a tentative list of potential participants, comprised of people fluent not only in the conversation of a particular pocket of the field but also in translating transforming languages or approaches and methods of knowledge making and teaching that are institutionally housed in different conferences, organizations, programs, and parts of the curriculum; people whose research and reputation officially have assigned them to a particular field for example, genre or media studies, writing assessment, composition historiography but who have deliberately situated themselves at the intersections of that field and various others. And for the letter inviting contributors to the forum, we agreed to use as a point of departure a list of bullet points Lu had developed when presenting her own position on the main tenets of translingual reading and writing practices "Metaphors" After several rounds of email exchange, the four of us agreed on the version of the invitation letter that Bawarshi and Guerra sent out. In that letter, we identified the following tenets for a "translingual" approach. A translingual approach to composition is concerned with how to treat: language (including varieties of Englishes, discourses, media, or modalities) as performative: not something we have but something we do; users of language as actively forming and transforming the very conventions we use and social historical contexts of use; communicative practices as not neutral or innocent but informed by and informing economic, geopolitical, social historical, cultural relations of asymmetrical power; decisions on language use as shaping as well as shaped by the contexts of utterance and the social positionings of the writers, and thus having material consequences on the life and world we live in; difference as the norm of all utterances, conceived of as acts of translation inter and intra languages, media, modality during seeming iterations of dominant conventions as well as deviations from the norm; deliberation over how to tinker with authorized contexts, perspectives, and conventions of meaning making as needed and desired by all users of language, those socially designated as mainstream or minority, native or first, second, foreign speakers, published or student writers; all communicative practices as mesopolitical acts, actively negotiating and constituting complex relations of power at the dynamic intersection of the social historical (macro) and the personal (micro) levels.