Is the Past a Foreign Country?: Time, Language Origins, and the Nation in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Theorists such as Benedict Anderson have associated the development of a historicized sense of time, in contrast to an atemporal messianic time, with epochal social changes, in particular the emergence of the nation. This article discovers the two contrasting senses of time in a 17th-century controversy over the origin of the Spanish language. The competing views of the past in the Spanish debate underpinned different visions not only of language but of humanity, progress, and nation. Anderson's claims about historicism and the origin of the nation construct are reconsidered in light of this case. It is argued that, pace Anderson, national consciousness was present in early modern Spain, and it rested on messianic as much as historicized time.The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.-L. P. Hartley, The Go-BetweenThe past is never dead. It's not even past.-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun T he two epigraphs that introduce this article reflect two contrasting conceptualizations of the past in relation to the present, and thus of history and of time itself. Such a dichotomy between distinct notions of time has repeatedly been invoked by scholars to characterize modernity in contrast to the premodern or nonmodern, and specifically to capture epochal changes in European art and literature, historiography, and social and political life. Benedict Anderson's influential book Imagined Communities (1991) provides an evocative summary of the recurrent contrast between these two conceptualizations of time. To explain the historical emergence of the idea of the nation, Anderson blended concepts from the work of Eric Auerbach (1952,1953) on the history of art and literature with the cryptic categories of time used by Walter Benjamin in his impassioned critical essay on the philosophy of history (1968). Anderson brought the two authors' contrast sets together in a brilliant sweeping gesture and cast a historicized sense of "homogeneous empty time" as a foundational condition whose emergence in the modern period made it possible to "think the nation" (1991:22).This article brings these concepts of history and the past to bear in the study of linguistic ideologies. It identifies two such contrasting views of the past specifically in relation to conceptualizations of language, in a conflict of linguistic ideologies in late 16th-and early 17th-century Spain that had far-reaching social and political

Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows

“…As Woolard (2004) notes, such work has shown that 'linguistic ideologies are never just about language, but rather also concern such fundamental social notions as community, nation, and humanity itself' (p. 58). For linguistic anthropologists, the problem was that the 'surgical removal of language from context produced an amputated "language" that was the preferred object of the language sciences for most of the twentieth century' (Kroskrity, 2000, p. 5).…”

Sociolinguistics in a languagised world: Introduction

“…It looks like the days of separate national languages will soon be over. However, and as sociolinguists' continuing criticism of "monoglot" ideologies exemplifies, large-scale evolutions never have clean ruptures between them (Woolard 2004) and this insight should alert us to competing conceptualisations of national languages. To be sure, whereas nation-states are currently experiencing erosion of their power, they are also in various ways reaffirming their presence, either through military action, intelligence gathering and economic policy or, more relevant for our purposes, by strengthening their supervision of civil society.…”

Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity

“…If we wish to understand language choice, therefore, we cannot do so without an appreciation of local language ideologies. And as Woolard (2004) notes, "linguistic ideologies are never just about language, but rather also concern such fundamental social notions as community, nation, and humanity itself" (p. 58).…”