The seclusion-or-universality dichotomy legitimizes linguistic domination

Evidence

“Live in seclusion or open up to the other”: this was supposedly the only alternative for any population demanding the right to speak its own language. It is how inherited premises of centuries-old dornination were given legitimacy. Either you speak a language that is “universal,” or on its way to being so, and pal’ticipate in the life of the world; or else you retreat into your particular idiom-quite unfit for sharing-in which case you eut yourself off fl’orn the world to wallow alone and sterile in your so-called identity. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Structural analogue of the reader’s strategic-essentialism bind: critique of the forced choice between dissolving into the universal and retreating into a pure particular — Glissant’s refusal of precisely the trap Spivak identifies with essentialism. — connects to: Defending any language requires defending all linguistic multiplicity. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 503; Dominant ideologies structure the range of encodings available rather than being deliberately imposed — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 921; Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609 (+7 more)
• ADDENDUM: The forced dichotomy between particular seclusion and universal dilution parallels the argument in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ about dress norms as identity/political signaling enforced through false alternatives.

Broader Connections

• Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609
• Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity #corroborates (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 386
• Dominant ideologies structure the range of encodings available rather than being deliberately imposed #complicates (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 921
• Linguistic philosophy suppresses what speech reveals about the society that speaks it #corroborates (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 652