The theory of “cultural imperialism” was first proposed by communications scholar Herbert Schiller to describe how a wealthier Western country might be said to dominate another even without actually colonizing it or taking it over. The term became fairly popularly known because it resituates the older politics of anti-imperialism into the postwar context of an American-led world order. Of course, it’s true that America’s economic and soft power is enormously influential on people in other countries, often in negative ways. But it’s also an abuse of language to call it “cultural imperialism.”
What is so objectionable about historical imperialism is specifically the physical occupation and violent domination that, for example, Belgian or British colonialism involved. It’s quite a different thing to observe that experiencing U.S. exports such as Coca-Cola and Hollywood films change minds. So, “cultural imperialism” is an attempt to tie together two things that ought to be kept mentally separate.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the idea of American cultural imperialism while reading an article in the Hoya, Georgetown University’s student newspaper, about a call to “Develop Gender-Neutral Language in Arabic.” Most Arabic speakers believe that God writes in Arabic. But never mind that — the article claims Arabic needs an overhaul: “Gender-neutral pronouns are not widely taught in Arabic courses at Georgetown, likely because inclusive pronouns are still developing in the Arabic-speaking community. To aid the fight for gender inclusivity in the Arabic language, Georgetown students and instructors have the responsibility to work toward language that includes all gender identities, not just identities within the cisnormative male and female binary.”
What is important here is not to tee off on a college newspaper, but rather to observe how quickly many educated people now resort to claims of moral offense that are baseless and drag in words and language along the way. Even if you share the author’s concerns, gendered languages, as a matter of fact, simply do not exclude identities outside of the “cisnormative male and female binary” because the way grammar works is not a claim about the world.
The piece goes on to explain that “gendered language in Arabic is inescapable” because Arabic assigns genders to “all its pronouns aside from ‘we.’” This is a revealing claim that shows we are not really talking about Arabic here; we are imposing America’s cultural obsessions onto Arabic-speaking culture. See, in English, much of the social justice activism around words focuses on pronouns specifically because pronouns in English are some of our only inherently gendered words. In many or most other languages, the whole conversation doesn’t really apply since the gendered nature of words is not limited to pronouns.
A Spanish table, a “mesa,” is grammatically female, but nobody is calling it ladylike when they utter the word. In Arabic, some singular Arabic noun for a nonhuman object may take the male gender, but grammatically in the plural, it takes the singular feminine. A stone is male, but some stones have the female singular ending. Why? Because in Arabic, all nonhuman plural nouns are grammatically singular feminine. It’s just a grammar rule. To “develop a gender neutral” version of a language such as Arabic or Spanish or German (or, well, most other languages besides English) involves a misunderstanding of what is actually going on.
The Hoya article, though, blusteringly claims that Arabic has to change because a “more inclusive society begins with more inclusive language.” Of course, it actually works the other way. Unless we are imperialists, we should recognize that it is probably not desirable and definitely not possible to change the global “Arabic-speaking community” from Georgetown.
