demont-heinrich bio page

revealing way to think about one's life, I think, is by way of the Sartrean notion of the "project." According to Sartre:

A primary impetus of the project is inevitable human contradiction and the never-ending attempt to transcend contradiction -- at both the individual and collective level. The individual engaged in his or her project is understood as standing in relation to the whole of human history while at the same time projecting himself/herself into the future. In other words, there exists a dialectical relationship between past, present, and future, a relationship that always already implies both individual and historical movement and dynamism.

The central force driving my "own" life project, that which I view as the most fundamental of my own set of contradictions, is the contradiction of language. I grew up largely unable to speak the mother-tongue language of my own father, who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1963. My family did make fairly frequent trips to Germany while I was child, and my younger brother, Thomas, and I did briefly attend an elementary school in Stuttgart, Germany. However, it wasn't until I went to college that I acquired a meaningful level of proficiency in the language that half of my relatives spoke (German was not offered at my high school). For a variety of reasons, my father did not pass on his linguistic heritage to his children. I, along with my siblings, thus became caught up in a widespread social phenomenon largely beyond our control: that of linguistic assimilation -- and language loss.

"The individual tragedies which are experienced in families where parents have different mother tongues and where the children learn only one of them, or none of them, are becoming more and more common."
--Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

I majored in German (with a minor in English) at Allegheny College, graduating in 1988. However, my best year "at" Allegheny was actually spent in Freiburg, Germany, where I studied as an American exchange student at Alberts-Ludwig Universität. It was during this year that I finally really began to master German.

I did not end up using my German professionally. Following graduation, I took up as a profession, something I'd been doing "on the side" at Allegheny: print journalism. (I'd worked for the The Campus the weekly Allegheny newspaper during my senior year). I spent eight years in newspapers. As do most entry-level/beginning journalists, I did just about everything: I wrote business stories, covered sports, did page layout and design, wrote headlines, worked as a morning desk copy editor, wrote editorials, shot photographs, and on occasion even went into the darkroom to develop my own film and photos. I worked very, very hard -- for very little money. In 1995, I decided I wanted to try something new (truth be told, I'd "burned out"). I applied to master's programs in English which would also allow me to become certified to teach high school. I applied only to universities in the West. I'd fallen in love with that part of the U.S. during a cross-country bike ride I did with my younger sister, Amanda, in the summer of 1994.

As a master's student, I decided I would rather teach on the university, rather than secondary level. After graduating from Colorado State University with an M.A. in English in December of 1998, I worked as an adjunct faculty member at Colorado State and at the University of Northern Colorado. During this time my wife, Christine, returned to college to earn a bachelor's degree in exercise and health science. I began my tenure as a doctoral student/candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the fall of 2000.

Two years into my program, I returned, perhaps somewhat by chance, but I do not think entirely so, to the life project I'd begun at Allegheny. A conversation I had with several of my German cousins -- whose English proficiency now outstripped my German ability -- in Germany in the winter of 2002 pulled me back in. They were highly fluent in English out of necessity: they had to use the language constantly for pressing professional purposes. As a speaker of "the" global language of power, I had no such pressing need. As they told me, in English (a language choice necessitated because of my brother's and sister's inability to communicate in German) about the inroads English had made in their workplaces, I became both fascinated, and a bit disheartened. I was intrigued by the ways in which their workplace linguistic practices might be set, and understood, against a global backdrop characterized by a particular linguistic configuration of power and a very particular linguistic division of labor.

I'd found my dissertation project, and, I believe, rediscovered my life project. There is a decided autobiographical dimension to my research interests (indeed the best and most inspired research is often driven by the autobiographical). There is, as well, a critical edge to my research interests in questions of language and power, and, more specifically, the question of "a" global language. Not all of us situated at the linguistic center of the global hegemony of English¹ are enamored with a global linguistic configuration of power in which "our" language comprises "the" dominant language in virtually every domain of power.

"There is nothing like being monolingual oneself to stiffen one's resolve that foreign languages are not important on the grounds of principle."
--Richard Lambert

I do not see an international order largely predicated on Anglo-American linguistic terms as inherently liberating.² I see it, as does the late Herbert Schiller, as potentially closing off, or, at the very least, as strongly discouraging avenues of linguistic and cultural possibility and opportunity for those of us who wear the dominant linguistic "uniform." I do not view my pseudo-monolingualism or pseudo-bilingualism -- depending on how one looks at it³ -- in English and German with the pride of an accomplished speaker and writer of "the" global language. In fact, I would say I have experienced a major downside of Anglo-American linguistic hegemony: the lack of any real (instrumental) motivation for me to become highly fluent⁴ in another language.⁵ And this, rightly or wrongly, I have experienced as a sort of fundamentally and life-perspective inspiring/altering closing off of possibility. One might say that I've even, to a degree, experienced it as a form of socially directed (though not imposed) oppression.⁶

In the end, my research interests are driven in large part by my desire to understand the social, political, economic, and, most centrally, the ideological conditions of (re)productive (im)possibility that have produced a global socio-linguistic order characterized by the hegemony of English. This hegemony is marked by a situation in which large numbers of powerfully situated speakers and writers who hail from the world's dominant fundamental linguistic group(s)⁷ are essentially monolingual. Indeed, my concern with hegemony and the complex dimensions of the multiple levels and layers of human social struggle for power, empowerment, and to (linguistically) understand, represent and experience "reality," is rooted firmly in the autobiographical. That is, a certain set of life experiences (only a few of which I have outlined here) have inspired me to ask particular sorts of questions. Perhaps the most central of these are: How is it that things come to be the way that they are?

Notes
¹ As an individual for whom a form of standard American English is a language of the home, school, higher education, as well as a local, national, regional, and international language of power, I consider myself to be at the center of this phenomenon. That is, in the vast majority of cases I do not need to alter my speech and/or writing in any substantial way in order to be gain entrance to key intra and inter-national domains of power.
² Clearly, there are some positive dimensions to this social phenomenon. For example, it does facilitate various forms of communication and knowledge production. However, simply because it does so (or, really, is made to do so by various human social actors) does not mean that the global rise of English is wholly "positive". Nor does it mean that there might not be alternative ways of thinking and living a global linguistic order that could accomplish precisely the same sort of communication and knowledge production, albeit in a decidedly different, and perhaps more egalitarian fashion.
³ I would estimate that I am "fluent" in German to an eighth-grade level of proficiency.
⁴ Linguistic fluency is a difficult term to definitively demarcate. Its meaning is heavily dependent on context. I raise the bar high when using the term fluency (with respect to language). In order to be considered truly fluent in a given language or dialect, one must have a very high degree of mastery over its formal, codified spoken and, in relevant cases, written form to the degree that one can effectively and efficiently communicate one's thoughts and to a degree that allows one to be accepted by so-called "native" speakers, and writers, of that language or dialect. A useful definition of fluency relevant to the particular socio-linguistic contexts with which I am chiefly concerned -- global domains of power such as international politics, technology, and higher education -- is one in which an individual is considered truly fluent if, and only if, he/she has achieved a high enough level of proficiency in a language -- usually English -- so that his/her speech and writing will be deemed acceptable by the hegemonic linguistic gatekeepers who patrol and "protect" the linguistic boundaries of these global domains.
⁵ This situation is perhaps shifting in the U.S. as fluency in Spanish is becoming an increasingly important skill in a variety of professions. Yet the fact remains that in many global domains of power, including higher education, I could, for example, engage in global social practices, for example, "global media studies" and jet around the world as an "academic globe runner" (Dendrinos), and never have to step outside of my monolingual English "uniform".
⁶ Clearly I could "choose" to improve my German capabilities. I have in fact recently chosen to do so, having taken an upper-level German course this spring (2004). Yet the fact remains that, professionally, it is not necessary for me to acquire high-level proficiency in German (and it is questionable how much more marketable such proficiency might make me in my field, despite the fact that I am interested in global media and communication) whereas the German academic has little choice but to acquire high-level proficiency in English. Not surprisingly then, I have not invested significant, long-term effort into acquiring high-level German proficiency: there is always some other (professional) task that is, due in large part to material, but also ideologically justified and (re)produced socio-linguistic conditions, always "more important," more "pressing," than becoming highly proficient in another language such as German.
⁷ Highly educated mother-tongue speakers/writers of British, Australian, Canadian, and other "centrally" located English varieties (McArthur, "English Around the World") would also fall into this category. Crystal has written that: "The continuing presence of standard written English, in the form of newspapers, textbooks, and other printed materials shows very little variation in the different English-speaking countries" (135).