Stephanie Love | University of Pittsburgh (original) (raw)
Papers by Stephanie Love
American Ethnologist, 2024
How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of col... more How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of colonial and postcolonial violence? In Oran-Algeria's second-largest city-people find creative ways to speak without speaking about unspeakable pasts. They do this by creating poetic parallelism between urban forms-from skeletons of buildings to martyr images-in everyday speech and image-events. In poetics, parallelism deploys similar linguistic forms to suggest equivalence of meaning for certain effects. In everyday life, parallelism is emergent social action that brings new publics to life through its performance. This parallelism enables ordinary people to talk to each other across entrenched sociopolitical divides, especially in contexts of authoritarian censorship. Through poetic parallelism, Oranis revivify the martyrs of independence as agentive witnesses to their decaying city's housing crisis. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between the colonial past and postcolonial present.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2023
Through the concept of the echo, this article examines how postcolonial Algerians discursively lo... more Through the concept of the echo, this article examines how postcolonial Algerians discursively locate and orient themselves in relation to the materiality of “dead” colonialism, which I broadly define as the physical presence of objects, voices, and sensual qualities (accompanied by aesthetic, value, and moral judgments) that Algerians see as persisting from the colonial before. I argue that an echo in discourse hinges on a tripartite dialogic structure: the dynamic interplay of past voices/signs, present listeners, and the material surfaces that reflect these voices/signs with delay, distortion, and varied intensity. Through the narratives of three directors of three different iterations of a local newspaper in Oran, Algeria, I examine how past voices and sounds reverberate across the threshold of the colonial and postcolonial divide and create sociopolitical and interpersonal effects that often challenge the notion that colonialism is “dead and gone.” This article advances scholarship on language materiality by positing that the material world is more than just the setting in which material speech and social action occur; rather, the material world shapes how language is heard and stances are taken in concrete ways. I conclude that echoes are central to how people tell stories about their past that matter in the present.
City & Society, 2021
Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this ar... more Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this article examines why Algerians, after nearly sixty years of independence, continue to use French colonial-era placenames instead of the post-colonial names commemorating the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). I argue that vernacular place-naming, including the use of colonial-era names, should be understood as a component of what I call the “poetics of grievance,” whereby city dwellers simultaneously draw attention to linguistic and physical urban forms to express dissatisfaction with their post-colonial authoritarian state. By examining local taxi drivers’ detailed knowledge of vernacular placenames and the everyday talk that often accompanies them, this article demonstrates how the colonial past can become a powerful poetic resource for city dwellers, serving as a means to conceptualize the potential for grief and rage to bring about revolutionary change in post-colonial cities. [Algeria; Taxi Drivers; Post-Coloniality; Urbanism; Place-Naming; Memory]
Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2019
In the mid-20th century, as the global colonial order collapsed, language and education were two ... more In the mid-20th century, as the global colonial order collapsed, language and education were two of the most affectively, politically, and economically challen- ging domains of decolonization efforts. Parler Algérien (Speak Algerian), an experimental method for the teaching and learning of Darija (Algerian vernacular Arabic), created by Catholic clergymen and women in the early 1970s, provides an illustration of an attempt to decolonize language learning in postcolonial Algeria. The Catholic creators of Parler Algérien assumed a stance of solidarity with the independent nation, an alignment that translated into the entextualiza- tion of a number of linguistic and non-linguistic features in the textbook. This ethnography of a Darija classroom examines the shifting language ideologies that mediate the text’s interpretation in the 21st century. I argue that the inter- discursive residues of Parler Algérien’s postcolonial context of production shape its uptake in the 21st century classroom, but not in the ways that the authors intended.
Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 2016
Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 2016
Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with seco... more Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with second-generation bilingual students in the Arabic for Native Speakers/Heritage Learners course at one of City University of New York’s (CUNY) senior colleges, I investigate the interdiscursive connections between the students’ notion of “broken Arabic” and the concept of “incomplete acquisition and/or attrition” (Montrul, 2013) from SLA research on heritage speakers. This paper moves away from the concept of proficiency towards performativity in order to recognize and support diverse repertoires in motion.
The Works of Elena Ferrante, 2016
The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins , 2016
Chapter from edited volume by Grace Bullaro and Stephanie Love
The Works of Elena Ferrante, 2016
Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnationalism and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today, 2014
Current Issues in Language Planning
Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian langua... more Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian
language at the expense of all other linguistic varieties has dominated language and
education policy discourses. Today, as Italy has transformed from a country of mass
emigration to a country of mass immigration, the language learning of immigrants
and refugees has become highly politicized. This politicization was exemplified in
2009 and 2010 when Italian law mandated the passing of a mostly written A2 Italian
language test for the renewal of legal immigration documents. As a result, formal
language learning has become another potentially prohibitory challenge for the
already complicated legal status of many immigrants. This paper explores the
historical macro-level discourses and policies concerning multilingualism, education
and national identity in Italy from unification to the present context of immigration.
Then, it discusses the local-level challenges of providing adult immigrant language
and literacy education today. I argue that the politicization of immigrant language
learning, with its subtractive instead of additive approach to multilingualism, has
become a serious obstacle for the legal and educational outcomes of adult students
with little or limited formal education and literacy backgrounds.
International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2012
In this article, we use the framework of critical race theory (CRT) to show how race, language, a... more In this article, we use the framework of critical race theory (CRT) to show how race, language, and schooling have played out in the historical project of the Italian nation-state. We then demonstrate how this historic racialized identity construction is currently excluding immigrants from Italian national identity. Finally, we argue that CRT can be a valuable alternative to intercultural education in that it both addresses the educational needs of immigrant and minority students in Italian schools and challenges racist and anti-immigrant discourses circulating in the broader society.
American Ethnologist, 2024
How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of col... more How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of colonial and postcolonial violence? In Oran-Algeria's second-largest city-people find creative ways to speak without speaking about unspeakable pasts. They do this by creating poetic parallelism between urban forms-from skeletons of buildings to martyr images-in everyday speech and image-events. In poetics, parallelism deploys similar linguistic forms to suggest equivalence of meaning for certain effects. In everyday life, parallelism is emergent social action that brings new publics to life through its performance. This parallelism enables ordinary people to talk to each other across entrenched sociopolitical divides, especially in contexts of authoritarian censorship. Through poetic parallelism, Oranis revivify the martyrs of independence as agentive witnesses to their decaying city's housing crisis. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between the colonial past and postcolonial present.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2023
Through the concept of the echo, this article examines how postcolonial Algerians discursively lo... more Through the concept of the echo, this article examines how postcolonial Algerians discursively locate and orient themselves in relation to the materiality of “dead” colonialism, which I broadly define as the physical presence of objects, voices, and sensual qualities (accompanied by aesthetic, value, and moral judgments) that Algerians see as persisting from the colonial before. I argue that an echo in discourse hinges on a tripartite dialogic structure: the dynamic interplay of past voices/signs, present listeners, and the material surfaces that reflect these voices/signs with delay, distortion, and varied intensity. Through the narratives of three directors of three different iterations of a local newspaper in Oran, Algeria, I examine how past voices and sounds reverberate across the threshold of the colonial and postcolonial divide and create sociopolitical and interpersonal effects that often challenge the notion that colonialism is “dead and gone.” This article advances scholarship on language materiality by positing that the material world is more than just the setting in which material speech and social action occur; rather, the material world shapes how language is heard and stances are taken in concrete ways. I conclude that echoes are central to how people tell stories about their past that matter in the present.
City & Society, 2021
Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this ar... more Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this article examines why Algerians, after nearly sixty years of independence, continue to use French colonial-era placenames instead of the post-colonial names commemorating the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). I argue that vernacular place-naming, including the use of colonial-era names, should be understood as a component of what I call the “poetics of grievance,” whereby city dwellers simultaneously draw attention to linguistic and physical urban forms to express dissatisfaction with their post-colonial authoritarian state. By examining local taxi drivers’ detailed knowledge of vernacular placenames and the everyday talk that often accompanies them, this article demonstrates how the colonial past can become a powerful poetic resource for city dwellers, serving as a means to conceptualize the potential for grief and rage to bring about revolutionary change in post-colonial cities. [Algeria; Taxi Drivers; Post-Coloniality; Urbanism; Place-Naming; Memory]
Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2019
In the mid-20th century, as the global colonial order collapsed, language and education were two ... more In the mid-20th century, as the global colonial order collapsed, language and education were two of the most affectively, politically, and economically challen- ging domains of decolonization efforts. Parler Algérien (Speak Algerian), an experimental method for the teaching and learning of Darija (Algerian vernacular Arabic), created by Catholic clergymen and women in the early 1970s, provides an illustration of an attempt to decolonize language learning in postcolonial Algeria. The Catholic creators of Parler Algérien assumed a stance of solidarity with the independent nation, an alignment that translated into the entextualiza- tion of a number of linguistic and non-linguistic features in the textbook. This ethnography of a Darija classroom examines the shifting language ideologies that mediate the text’s interpretation in the 21st century. I argue that the inter- discursive residues of Parler Algérien’s postcolonial context of production shape its uptake in the 21st century classroom, but not in the ways that the authors intended.
Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 2016
Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 2016
Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with seco... more Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with second-generation bilingual students in the Arabic for Native Speakers/Heritage Learners course at one of City University of New York’s (CUNY) senior colleges, I investigate the interdiscursive connections between the students’ notion of “broken Arabic” and the concept of “incomplete acquisition and/or attrition” (Montrul, 2013) from SLA research on heritage speakers. This paper moves away from the concept of proficiency towards performativity in order to recognize and support diverse repertoires in motion.
The Works of Elena Ferrante, 2016
The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins , 2016
Chapter from edited volume by Grace Bullaro and Stephanie Love
The Works of Elena Ferrante, 2016
Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnationalism and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today, 2014
Current Issues in Language Planning
Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian langua... more Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian
language at the expense of all other linguistic varieties has dominated language and
education policy discourses. Today, as Italy has transformed from a country of mass
emigration to a country of mass immigration, the language learning of immigrants
and refugees has become highly politicized. This politicization was exemplified in
2009 and 2010 when Italian law mandated the passing of a mostly written A2 Italian
language test for the renewal of legal immigration documents. As a result, formal
language learning has become another potentially prohibitory challenge for the
already complicated legal status of many immigrants. This paper explores the
historical macro-level discourses and policies concerning multilingualism, education
and national identity in Italy from unification to the present context of immigration.
Then, it discusses the local-level challenges of providing adult immigrant language
and literacy education today. I argue that the politicization of immigrant language
learning, with its subtractive instead of additive approach to multilingualism, has
become a serious obstacle for the legal and educational outcomes of adult students
with little or limited formal education and literacy backgrounds.
International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2012
In this article, we use the framework of critical race theory (CRT) to show how race, language, a... more In this article, we use the framework of critical race theory (CRT) to show how race, language, and schooling have played out in the historical project of the Italian nation-state. We then demonstrate how this historic racialized identity construction is currently excluding immigrants from Italian national identity. Finally, we argue that CRT can be a valuable alternative to intercultural education in that it both addresses the educational needs of immigrant and minority students in Italian schools and challenges racist and anti-immigrant discourses circulating in the broader society.