Jensen Kugler
Staff Writer
On Monday, Feb. 16, Michel DeGraff, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, gave a talk titled “Liberatory Linguistics in A Time of Fascism.”
After an introduction by Laura Burch, professor of French and Francophone Studies at Wooster, DeGraff began his talk by teaching the audience a Creole greeting. He then touched on the role that language played in his childhood in Haiti, connecting his upbringing to his lifelong interest in the function and structure of language.
“I was born and raised there in a society where my mother tongue Creole was treated systematically as a lesser language, so-called ‘broken French,’” said DeGraff.
It took DeGraff many years to work through the colonial rhetoric of his youth, a process he calls “self-decolonization.” His forthcoming book, “Our Own Language,” explores this tension.
DeGraff’s analytical framework is based upon the work of several other scholars, including Jewish-Israeli academic Nurit Peled-Elhanan. Her concept of “mind infection,” which is a major element of DeGraff’s work, involves the systematic dispersion and institutional integration of prejudice. One example of this “mind infection” in practice is the design of Israeli schoolbooks. Peled-Elhanan’s close study of Israeli schoolbooks revealed that there are three primary groups of “other” presented: East European “feeble Jews,” “Non-European, imported Jews” and Arabs. In these instances of othering, the security and safety of one group is seen as the oppression of another.
Another major element of DeGraff’s analytical framework is Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s “mirror accusations,” which invert the roles of victim and perpetrator so that oppression can be rationalized as “defense.”
DeGraff touched on several other theorists and scholars during his talk, including Benjamin Lieberman, whose work discusses the ways in which hateful narratives create a cognitive dissonance in how people see each other.
After giving an overview of his grounding in theory, DeGraff discussed his experiences as a professor at MIT Linguistics. In July of 2024, his proposed “Special Topics” seminar, Language & Linguistics for Decolonization & Liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel, was rejected. However, in the fall 2024 semester, he was able to host 13 “Speaker Series” sessions on the same topic. All but one of these sessions was recorded, but the videos are embargoed, meaning that he cannot access or share them. DeGraff feels that despite these talks being consistent with the topics of his past teaching, he is being censored to this day.
“Now all of a sudden, these terms became disruptive, became concerns, and actually, even today, as we speak, I’m still struggling to get the word out” said DeGraff. “The focus was on these three items: language as a tool for Empire and also for liberation, and then what I call the colonial and post-colonial linguistics.”
DeGraff also discussed a suspended lawsuit in which he was accused of using dangerous and anti-Semitic language. The tweet that sparked this lawsuit used images from his seminar, in which he cited Peled-Elhanan’s concept of “mind infection.”
“I’m being accused of dangerous rhetoric for quoting an Israeli, Jewish scholar,” said DeGraff. “She is the one who looked at these books and used the term ‘mind infection.’ Fake outrage, as usual, but it didn’t matter. The facts do not matter.”
To wrap up his presentation, DeGraff proposed a model of liberatory linguistics with three main elements: “No language is structurally inferior. No people are disposable — epistemically or otherwise. No narrative is beyond scrutiny.” DeGraff believes that when “language becomes a weapon, linguistics must help disarm it.”
