When are research journals linguistically indifferent?

In the realm of research production, there is often a strange mismatch between the linguistic care with which scholars analyze cultural products (literary works and beyond) and the indifference to the language of so-called scholarly or academic writing. What would it look like to bring the same attention to the practices, instructions, and habits of publishing, peer-reviewing, and editing that many of us seek to bring to our research? In what follows, I invite readers to re-examine accepted prescriptions in academic writing in light of the critiques from scholars such as Jonathan Rosa who have drawn attention to the raciolinguistic and racist ideologies that undergird accepted norms for published research prose. These considerations initially emerged several years ago as my colleague and I undertook to revise the stylesheet for the journal Monatshefte after taking over the editorship. Focused on what we initially took to be merely mechanical matters, we discovered, first, that there is no mereness about such practices and, second, that our efforts to provide guidance to writers on language for and of identity and inclusiveness quickly ran into difficulties. These appeared particularly in questions of naming or citation practices, approaches to harmful language, and so-called academic style. The politics of citation broadly speaking are not neutral. Sara Ahmed discusses citation practices within her examination of white supremacist academic relational practices and asks us to consider that who is cited where and by whom remains circumscribed by the hierarchies of academia: “Citationality is another form of academic relationality. […] White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done; it is what they will do; what they teach each other to do when they teach each other.” (My co-editor and I have added a question on our peer review form asking reviewers to consider whether the author has included relevant work by people of color and women of all races. Most reviewers leave it blank or note women only.) Within the politics of citation, naming seems deceptively simple: A linguistically indifferent approach to citation assumes that names remain stably attached to individuals across the timespan of research careers. This assumption that name stands in for person is one way citation “is a process that disembodies knowledge” (Thieme and Saunders 89). But it does not hold for individuals who take different names through marriages (or the end of marriages) or for trans or gender non-conforming authors. Trans or gender non-conforming authors who change their names face the question of whether to continue the circulation of past or dead names or instead to undergo the invasive and potentially traumatizing process of requesting their name be changed on previous publications. Academic research citation practices can assume the cohesion of name and person because of who established them and for whom—the (implicitly cisgender) “white men” of Ahmed's blog post title. Taking a linguistically non-indifferent position on citation would entail interrogating not only who is cited but also practices of identification and the instability of naming. Beyond citation, there is the matter of reproducing harmful language—even in quotations or otherwise at a distance. Challenging linguistic indifference here entails asking what terms editors should ask which authors to modify—when and why? What words are unacceptable when and for whom? Surely it is not appropriate for an editor (especially, in my case, a white cisgender able-bodied editor) to demand that authors declare their identities, in order to say who has a “right” to what word? (Though, equally surely, it is important for authors working on topics where such language arises to be clear about their own positionalities and their limitations.) Furthermore, how much of a harmful word does one remove? Surely replacing a single letter with a single asterisk does not defang centuries of racist, homophobic, sexist violence—but then, why should three asterisks or four be adequate? Are there other modifications to language that indicate the presence of harm but critique or mitigate that harm effectively, such as strikethroughs? These lines of questioning suggest that any universal policy risks silencing minoritized scholars and that no policy can fully remove the possibility of harm or completely convey the author's intention. In asking authors to consider the substantial body of writing on the effects of reproducing racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist language on those whom that language has targeted; to reflect on their identities and positionalities; and to explain their reasons for choosing a citation practice, editors might help cultivate an attentive habitus toward language. Finally, there is the question of “style.” Monatshefte does not give specific direction on diction, sentence complexity, the use of personal or impersonal language, or other features often associated with academic writing, but peer reviewers comment not infrequently on the style of the articles they read—sometimes as being too impenetrable, dense, or convoluted, other times too informal, personal, or colloquial. Guided by Nelson Flores's critique of academic language, which notes that “academic language is not a list of empirical linguistic practices but rather a raciolinguistic ideology that frames the home language practices of racialized communities as inherently deficient” (Flores 24), we can note several ways socialization into academic writing practices codifies linguistic indifference. First, although fewer reviewers and authors refuse any use of first-person pronouns in academic texts, the idea that texts ought to be separable from their authors and that the positions or identities of authors should be irrelevant to texts remains prevalent—that is, that arguments and evidence should be universal. As writers from Charles W. Mills to Maisha Auma to Toni Morrison to Arnold Farr note, one of the primary ways contemporary disciplines and discourses enforce white racialized norms is by erasing race and whiteness, insisting on a “universality” that is, in fact, white (e.g., see Auma et al. 11; Farr 50; Mills 128; Morrison 46). Moreover, some speakers are forced to remain particularized and tied to their identities; indeed the entire collection Who Can Speak and Who is Heard/Hurt: Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany grapples with the question of whose voices appear, whose become silenced, whose marginalized in many of the disciplines that writers for Monatshefte occupy (especially, see Arghavan et al. 9−42). And in Monatshefte itself, Kyle Frackman and Ervin Malakaj have outlined the way heteronormative temporalities and spaces suppress queer relations to time and space—as do, I would suggest, argumentative structures and scholarly narrative temporalities (Frackman and Malakaj 356−58). These theoretical questions turn up in approaches to editing and reviewing articles in quite concrete ways. For example, a reviewer once complained that an author's style “revealed” the writer as a non-native speaker of the language they wrote in; the section editor responded with an appeal to Monatshefte's international readership and authorship, both on the grounds of acceptable idiosyncrasy and stylistic variety (“um die Zeitschrift stilistisch etwas abwechslungsreicher zu gestalten“). Moving from the sentence level to the level of the article as a unit of discourse, German and American academic writing, Germanistik and various other (sub-) disciplines, all operate with different codes for scholarly writing. Monatshefte’s download log shows readers in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, Canada, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, India, Israel, and “Other.” How can we help authors and reviewers acknowledge and implement the practices that will communicate effectively with their desired audiences? Several authors writing in English in recent years have requested to include English translations of German texts cited in the interest of communicating beyond German studies. Does including English translations reinforce the hegemony of English or challenge the insularity of Germanistik? How do we avoid closing off the journal to interested readers by deciding in advance who is or is not going to read it? These considerations suggest that challenging linguistic indifference in research production may be less a matter of policy or regulation than of invitation—inviting authors and reviewers to ask themselves at least some of the many questions I have asked above and continue to ask in my own writing, reviewing, and editing. Further, following the metaphor of invitation rather than regulation suggests that the antidote to linguistic indifference may not be non-indifference (which can easily become prescriptive) but rather linguistic hospitality. Although inhabiting such hospitality will surely be destabilizing—not only in its challenging of scholarly norms but also in the clash between the consideration and conversation it requires and the time pressures of academic labor—it might move not only journals but German studies in general toward more generous and flexible practices of citation, writing that deliberately activates or disrupts communicative expectations, capacious notions of disciplinary boundaries, and attentiveness to the politics of speaking. Thanks to all of those who have edited this piece (David Gramling, Chantelle Warner, Karin Schutjer and Hester Baer) for enacting practices of editorial hospitality. My thinking about academic prose and writing practices is deeply influenced by a reading group held by the collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum in the summer of 2021 on the topic of the diaspora and German studies. The works we read—Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Tiffany Florvil’s Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature—deliberately do not offer principles of academic prose style, but rather urge modes of writing that refuse the (white supremacist) academic uncoupling of the writer from the writing. I am grateful to all of the group members and especially its facilitators, Krsna Santos, Adrienne Merritt, and Ervin Malakaj, for discussions of what such refusal looks like for white academics and how to practice relational scholarship. This reflection was written on stolen Ho-Chunk land.

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