Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/03/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The BYU Humanities Center welcomes Akshya Saxena, Vanderbilt University, as this week’s colloquium speaker on Thursday, April 3 at 3:00 PM in 4010 JFSB. Please join us for this reflective presentation on what happens when a language disappears and how language loss is connected to trauma and the natural world.
Title: Comparative Literature, Infrastructures of Loss, and the Promises of Multilingualism
What is lost when a language is lost? How does language loss haunt scholarly discussions of multilingualism in literary studies? How might we read lost languages? This talk explores these questions by juxtaposing two texts: Sulaiman Addonia’s 2018 English novel Silence is my Mother Tongue and Jacinta Kerketta’s 2016 Hindi/English poetry collection Angor (Embers). Addonia’s novel, set in an Eritrean refugee camp, and Kerketta’s poetry, rooted in India’s Saranda forests, both confront language loss and the silencing effects of trauma and linguistic erasure. These works challenge conventional notions of language, envisioning it in relation to the material and natural worlds. By exploring embodied and ecological mediations of meaning, this talk shows how language’s material history often rivals its literary and textual history. How we face language illuminates language infrastructurally, revealing connections not only between languages but between languaging and the human and non-human environment.
About our guest:
Akshya Saxena is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship appears in Comparative Literature, Cultural Critique, ariel, Interventions. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton UP, 2022), which won the MLA Prize for First Book, and the co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (U of California P, 2023), recipient of the Rene Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection.
