Nation Branding and Cosmopolitanism Nationalism: “Singularizing” Catalan Language and Culture for the Global and Local Market
Kathryn Woolard
University of California, San Diego
Kathryn Woolard is a linguistic anthropologist (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1983) and professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recent fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. Woolard has conducted fieldwork on the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia over more than 30 years, and has also published research on Spanish-English language politics in the U.S. and on language ideology in early modern Spain. She is author of, among other works, Double Talk; Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford 1989) and co-editor (with Bambi Schieffelin and Paul Kroskrity) of Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (Oxford, 1998) and (with Susan Gal) Language and Publics (St. Jerome 2001). More recently she co-edited (with Susan Frekko) a special issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (2013) on “Catalan in the 21st Century.”
Abstract
National branding is one of the motivating forces in the trend toward linguistic commodification that has been identified with the globalized economy. As a (currently) stateless nation attempting to win international... [ view full abstract ]
National branding is one of the motivating forces in the trend toward linguistic commodification that has been identified with the globalized economy. As a (currently) stateless nation attempting to win international visibility and approval as well as economic viability, Catalonia has participated in the branding phenomenon and has featured language strongly within it.
“Catalan culture” was the designated guest of honor for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007, raising the controversial question: is Catalan culture expressed in one language or two? Should Catalan authors who write in Castilian be included at Frankfurt? National branding emerged as key to political leaders’ arguments for emphasizing Catalan over Castilian-medium literature. In this case, although national motifs were ostensibly used to compete in an international market, the greater significance of the Catalan branding process was inverted. This was an opportunity not only for promoting Catalan industry internationally, but also for competing elites to prosecute competing agendas for Catalonia at home. Positively sanctioned in the contemporary global economy, national branding replaced arguments about linguistic authenticity that had become a political liability. Political and cultural agents took up a discourse circulating globally and revoiced it strategically to legitimize an understanding of the nationalist project as cosmopolitan. This vision of the nation and the discourses that support it continue to be significant in the contemporary sovereignty movement.
Session
PL-05 » Plenary lecture 5 - Kathryn Woolard (13:30 - Saturday, 6th June, Grand Hall)
