Alumni English & American Studies: Guest lecture Robert L. Gunn and Marion C. Rohrleitner

Alumni were invited to join this double-lecture "Grammars of Empire and Practices of Resistance in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands" by Robert L. Gunn and Marion C. Rohrleitner (University of Texas at El Paso) which consists of two talks:

Marion C. Rohrleitner’s talk “Racial Profiling, Femicidio, and Practices of Resistance in the U.S. /Mexico Borderlands” focuses on literary and activist responses to anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, specifically the legalization of racial profiling in HB 1070, the abolition of highly successful Mexican-American Ethnic Studies Programs in Tucson as a result of SB 2281, and the ongoing murders of mostly indigenous, young women who work in maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez. Rather than silently accept practices that either criminalize immigrants and U.S. born Latina/os as well as their literary and cultural production in the Southwest or support impunity for those who commit femicidios across the border, many Chicana/o and Latina/o authors have become activists and use both fiction and non-fiction to combat the ongoing silencing and marginalization of their communities in Texas, Arizona, and Chihuahua.


Robert L. Gunn’s “Empire, Sign Languages, and the Long Expedition, 1819-1821” explores early written documentation of Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), a widely-practiced Native American linguistic system noted pervasively across 19th-Century literatures of encounter.  Misrecognized routinely as a form of sub-linguistic pantomime prior to the 1960s, and almost totally neglected in 19th-Century Americanist literary study to date, PISL yet represents a central mode of expressive discourse across the Great Plains with important implications for questions of language, embodiment, race, and politics across a range of critical horizons.  My attention to PISL highlights key shortcomings in developing theories of Indian languages, and identifies a unique semiotics of embodiment that transforms conventional understandings of Native political and communication networks across the Great Plains, racial theories of Indian oratory, and an emergent U.S. discourse on disability.  In this lecture, I emphasize the hidden or misrepresented linguistic content of a transnational expansionist literature that failed to recognize PISL for what it was and is: a rule-based grammatical language with important ritual, oratorical, and intertribal communication functions.  This discussion begins with a review the Long Expedition along the Red and Arkansas Rivers (1819-21), organized by the War Department to survey the new international boundary negotiated with Spain in the wake of the Adams-Ónis Treaty.  Outfitted with highly detailed philological instructions by the Literary and Historical Committee of the American Philosophical Society, the Long Expedition was intended to realize a concert of imperial and scientific interests.  What they found was a highly developed manual linguistic system that existing theories of Indian languages were ill-equipped to assess, but which demonstrated a largely unrecognized network of linguistic communication across the territorial horizons of the “Great American Desert” and beyond.