Addressing the Inequality of Languages: a proposal for teaching and writing British History from Latin America
- Laura Tavolacci
- Apr 29
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
This piece is the second in a series of essays on teaching British history outside the Anglophone academy, a topic that challenges our preconceptions of where British history is being taught and who it is for. As higher education in the US undergoes systematic attack by the federal government, this series also gives insight into how and under what circumstances it is possible for US-trained academics to find work elsewhere.
Any academic working outside the English-speaking world is intimately familiar with the act of translation. This applies not just to those whose research is in other languages, but also to those outside the Anglosphere who must learn English to publish their work, whether or not English is part of their research. At first glance, scholars in the discipline of British Studies/History within North America don’t need to engage in translation or consider other languages, but as a scholar working on British imperial history from Chile, I argue that such considerations will only strengthen the field.
We are all aware that the majority of academic journals and presses are in English, and that those in English tend to have higher impact scores. The cascading effects are multiple. Reading, writing, and speaking skills in English are often a necessity for university professors on top of all their other work. This dominance of the English language in the academic world compounds the inequality in academic rankings of colleges and universities. Walter Mignolo has referred to this as the “geopolitics of knowledge.”
The field of British Studies should wrestle with this most large and looming of issues: the inequality of languages. According to the anthropologist Talal Asad, we must take into consideration the institutionalized structures and practices that render some languages less powerful than others. According to Asad, the process of translation is politically charged, precisely because languages with less institutional power are more changed by these translations.
While Asad deals more with the inequalities between Europe and the “third world,” I would extend that argument to the Spanish-speaking world as well. Although Castilian Spanish clearly lays claim to the institutional power of a European language that is unavailable to Mapuzugun or Aymara (the two most widely spoken indigenous languages in Chile), its recent treatment as the language of the poor and of criminality tends to put it more in the camp of “third world languages” made by Asad. Likewise, in the academic world it is still often beholden to English. Working in Chile continues to force me to confront this inequality in new ways. I do not pretend to have found all the answers. Rather I find myself taking the ideas I’ve learned from South Asian history and British imperial studies, applying them in the Spanish-speaking world, and again re-applying what I’ve learned here both to my understanding of the history of the British Empire and to the ways that I teach that history. This is a sort of continuous stroke of translations, all impacting one another.
These sorts of translations are most obvious in the principal courses that I teach: early modern and modern world history. In Spanish, their titles are Historia moderna and Historia contemporánea. Whereas in the United States I became accustomed to teaching “modernity” through the lens of British and French imperialism, here, British history had to take more of a backseat to the Iberian empires. This sort of change has helped me appreciate even more how to make a truly global history course that de-centers Europe as the sole creator of modernity. Exchanges between Asian and Iberian empires between 1500 and 1800 help prevent our reading of European colonial domination backwards in time. And likewise, a deeper consideration of the British Empire before 1800 helps to dispel its association with disenchantment and science. Take for example, the influence of Iberian models of colonization as a religious quest on the British Atlantic. Or the ways that scholars have rethought the history of British Protestantism and its Reformation outside of the presumed march towards secularism and freedom.
I have also embarked on the ever-present quest of finding more readings available in Spanish. Even while some students have adequate English skills, I don’t want to contribute to the inequality of languages by forcing them to read English academic studies in order to obtain a good grade. This compounds the systemic disadvantages already faced by my students and favors those with private school education who tend to have better English-language training. I still present concepts from English-language academia in my class lectures, but in an atmosphere of free and open exchange where we discuss the contexts in which these concepts were born.
The work of Ishita Banerjee from Centro de Studios de Asia y África del Colegio de México has been instrumental for introducing students to themes in the history of British colonial India. Translations of newer works, like Cooper and Burbank’s Empires in World History, or more classic works like the writings of Eric Hobsbawm, subaltern studies tomes, and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, help to showcase British imperial history. But I’ve also learned to make further use of translations of primary sources, another avenue by which students can approach British history. Mary Graham Callcott’s travels to Chile, My Place (a memoir of rediscovering aboriginal family history in Australia by Sally Morgan), Orwell’s and Kipling’s novels, and writings by Friederich Engels, James Connolly, Virginia Woolf, Gandhi, and Nkrumah are all readily available in Spanish.
But to truly disrupt the inequality of languages, we need to do more than just artfully consider how to incorporate British imperial history into courses in the Spanish-speaking world. We should also consider how to let ideas, studies, literatures and experiences outside the Anglosphere impact how we write about British history itself. For example, Latin American concepts of transculturation and mestizaje predate and arguably have a strong influence on later ideas about cultural and linguistic mixing in the Anglosphere. In general, Latin American scholars continue to make creative analyses of the colonial experience which would enrich our understanding of Britain and its empire. Different forms of Marxist thought, or revolutionary experience—from Mariátegui in Peru, to the Cuban Revolution, and Allende’s Unidad Popular in Chile—can help us recognize the spectrum of leftist thought that is not solely determined in Europe. Latin American approaches to the history of feminism help us rethink the Global North-centered approach to feminist “waves.” Despite the inequality of languages, scholars from Latin America, along with South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa (amongst others) have and continue to have impact on academic ideas. By highlighting and uplifting these voices in our teaching and writing (always with the proper citations), we can help to weaken the disadvantages faced by certain languages and find new ways of viewing the world.
Laura Tavolacci is an Assistant Professor in the Departamento de Ciencias Histórica in the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. She specializes in South Asian history and the British Empire. Her book, Baptists, Bengalis, and the Construction of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in India, 1793-1840 is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
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