English Summary of Tabouret-Keller’s Postface

Abstract

Tabouret-Keller situates our current debates about the political and ideological nature of thinking about bilingualism in a long history. She shows how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, we can already see public debates which alternately argue that bilingualism must be completely abstracted away from politics (the example she gives is an argument that bilingualism can be understood as a purely pedagogical question) or, on the contrary, that it must centrally be treated politically (in her example, bilingual education in central Europe is critiqued as assimilatory). That is, as long as we have talked about it, our own positions have led us either to mask or, on the contrary, to aim to reveal how bilingualism is caught up in relations of power. How that happens, and why, is a matter of conditions on the ground, that is, of the particular ways in which individuals and groups are situated with respect to the construction of nation-states and of their colonies.