Refusing to Stay Silent

Abstract

In our post-social turn vision, the teaching of a foreign language can no longer be reduced to memorizing and translating vocabulary lists and completing structural exercises. In all the Swiss Universities of Teacher Education - and most likely in many similar institutions around the world - emphasis is placed on the performative aspects of the speech act: to speak is to interpret and act in and with the world; to learn a foreign language is to build and use a repertoire of language which allows us to construct reality across varied contexts and with multiple interlocutors.

In a world where a leader can claim "victory" over another nation at the very outset of a conflict, it is essential be explicit: language is not a neutral tool. It is laden with intentions, norms, and choices - sometimes difficult to see or invisible, but never inconsequential.

Within this framework, we wish to draw our readers' attention to a rather unsettling textbook excerpt. In a unit devoted to racial issues, two poems are placed side by side: on one side, we see a rich text full of imagery by Christina Rossetti, emblematic of a canonical literary tradition. On the other side, we see a text presented as "written by an African child," with deliberately simplified syntax, built on simplistic repetitions and a colour-based opposition supposedly denouncing racism. Yet this second text is, in reality, an impoverished adaptation of a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor, from which all stylistic, political, and poetic complexity has been erased.

The problem is not merely textual - it is profoundly pragmatic. What effect does this juxtaposition produce? What imaginaries does it build in the readers’ minds? We have on one hand, a language associated with sophistication and literary legitimacy and on the other hand, a voice that is attributed, anonymised, simplified — and, above all, a population implicitly rendered childlike.

If teaching is also a way of acting upon the world, then editing a journal such as Babylonia is, at times, an act of taking a stand. In this case, ours is clear: to refuse these dangerous implicit biases.

It is with this conviction - and the pleasure of thinking together - that we wish a pleasant and thought-provoking reading of this issue.