thinking critically about critical language (without being too critical)

Last Thursday, both K+ and I found ourselves applying for the Critical Language Scholarship, funding for studying a "critical" language for two months.

Okay first of all, what the fuck is a "critical language" you might ask?

Well, these are languages that the U.S. government (funder of the scholarship) deems "critical." Examples include: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, and yes, even Turkish. I'm relatively uninformed about why these languages are "critical", but K+, who is laying on the bed next to me, says that they're languages of countries/regions that "pose problems for the U.S.'s military and economic domination." I think that's a good assessment.

But K+ really wants to study Arabic, and I really want to continue with Chinese. So we put our reservations aside, and we both applied. Oooh, that rhymes.

We both plowed through the three essay questions (300 words each), but when we both got to Number 4, our Wes-reflexes (Wesflexes?) sent us into seizures.

Here's the text:

"Essay Question #4: [300 word limit] The intensive language program will offer an exciting opportunity for students to be immersed in a foreign culture. The program will also offer many challenges. Please explain what experiences and unique personal qualities you would bring to program. Within your response, please include the following information:

a. Please describe any living/working experiences you have had, either overseas or in the US (such as in the classroom, in dormitories or residences, work or volunteer activities, etc.) where you have been required to interact with people from backgrounds different than your own.

b. Please describe how you have dealt with challenging living situations or different cultural situations, and how you plan to deal with experiences that may be quite different from those you may have encountered previously in the US.

c. Please describe the unique personal qualities you would bring to the group.

Problematic? Yes. Okay actually I hate the word problematic, by problematic, I mean it was a problem for me. And also K+. And also anyone who identifies as a post-modern liberal thinker.

"I mean, what two people come from the same background, really," says K+. "Every single person you meet in your life has had a different set of experiences than you."

Right. And reading through this question, I felt like it prompted a very set response. Something like, "My freshman year, my roommate was Arab!!!!111 At first I thought she was a terrorist!!@! But then I realized that Arabs are people too! And her headscarf was just a part of her CULTURE!!!!!111"

"I love the @ sign in there" -K+

I personally felt like the question worked to erase real differences and institutional inequities in U.S. society, creating an abstract ideal of a "normal" American (ie. white, hetero, U.S. born), in binary opposition to "people of different cultural backgrounds" (ie. people of color, people not born in the U.S., people of "different" religious backgrounds).

"My first thought was this question almost renders itself meaningless and impossible to answer in the space of 300 words." -K+

Agreed. So what did we do? We both got really stuck. I think the real issue here is that, as much as both K+ and I try to deny it at times, we both really do have ideals. And we both found it difficult to address the fundamental issues with this question and answer it in the same essay.

And I think this raises a bigger question about how the kind of critical thinking we employ to approach the world (Wesleyan-cultivated and otherwise) can impede engagement with "the real world."

What I mean here is, is it both possible to actively question the world we live in, while still living in it.

The answer? I don't know.

And the answer to the essay question? K+ wrote about how he "learned from experiences that are new and challenging" because he is "curious." I ended up writing about a disagreement about Taiwan's national status with my language partner in China because of our differences in "cultural background".

It took me three times as long to come up with the answer to this question compared to my other essays. And it kept K+ busy until seven minutes until the midnight application deadline.

We have until March to find out whether our answers were deemed satisfactory to the powers that be. And by "the powers that be," I mean the U.S. government. As the impending threat of doom called graduation approaches, we will definitely have many more opportunities to question. If our Wes-ucation has left us capable of functioning at all.

-Alizatron