CELCE talk: Politics of Language, Politics of Death (by Dr Gerald Roche)

In this presentation Dr Gerald Roche (University of LaTrobe) introduces the concept of the necropolitics of language, which seeks to examine the connections between linguistic discrimination and physical, bodily death. The empirical impetus for thinking about these connections includes the existence of language martyrs (people who die to defend their language), the role that linguistic profiling plays in genocide, and the fact that language reclamation improves health and well-being. In seeking to explore how these issues might be linked, Dr Roche draws on theories of biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, and reworked in the early twenty-first century by Achille Mbembe into the concept of necropolitics - the politics of death. Within this theoretical framework, he draws on a variety of literature from linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and public health to show how linguistically marginalized populations are exposed to a ‘slow death’ that ultimately serves to promote their violent integration into the homogenizing state.

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