Living Languages

Kate Foster discusses Surrealist mannequins, objects and the human. This research was presented at the Society for French Studies annual conference, held at Queen’s University Belfast, 27-29 June 2022.

Human beings have long surrounded themselves with objects. Whether it’s the clothes we wear, the books we keep on the shelf, or the pictures we hang on our walls, the objects we select and the way we curate them feed into our sense of self. In 1938, the Parisian Surrealists attempted to destabilize the relationship between object and human through the department store mannequin, itself a functional object which they restaged as art installation. At the International Exhibition of Surrealism, sixteen mannequins, borrowed from Maison PLEM, were lined up along a corridor at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts on the rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, each dressed by a different Surrealist. This was the most talked-about part of the exhibition at the time and, despite the Surrealists’ intentions, many visitors to the (deliberately poorly lit) space recalled afterwards the uncanny nature of these mannequin-women, which reminded them of waxworks from the Musée Grévin, Paris’s answer to Madame Tussauds.

While they may not have welcomed the association with waxworks, the Surrealists were undoubtedly playing on the resemblance between their mannequins and human women. This unrevolutionary concept – the clothing-display mannequin displayed without any clothes – was part of a broader Surrealist trope of the sexualization and objectification of women and their bodies. But if the obvious object-ness of the mannequin can highlight the sexual objectification and commodification of human women, at the 1938 Exhibition it was put into dialogue with other objects, as it was surrounded by paintings, photographs, posters and furniture.

Paintings by René Magritte (1898-1967) – such as The Therapist and The White Race (both 1937) – and Giorgio de Chirico’s (1888-1978) Two Heads (1918) seemed to speak to a similar sense of anonymity as the parade of sixteen mannequins, themselves distinguishable from each other only by the clothes and other objects attached to their bodies. Magritte’s works, although they are not images of mannequins, nevertheless echo a sense in many of the mannequins of the human body reconfigured and understood in a new way. De Chirico’s mannequins – part artist’s lay figure, part shop-window display model – seem to look back at us from eyeless wooden heads, simultaneously an inanimate object and a subject returning the viewer’s gaze. Meanwhile, Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée photographs suggested both the seriality evoked by the exhibition’s repetition of the mannequin figure, and other themes which circulated around many of the Surrealist mannequins on display at the exhibition, including nakedness, sexual fetishism and violence. Salvador Dalí, for his part, was the only artist who dressed his mannequin in an item of clothing which a viewer might be able to buy, a knitted Schiaparelli ski-mask. Aside from this, his mannequin installation brought together apparently random objects and Dalí’s own artworks, simultaneously creating a tableau for the mannequin-woman to inhabit and promoting his own brand.

Bringing the object and the mannequin together in striking fashion were items of mannequin-furniture. By dismembering mannequins and turning them into furniture, André Breton’s Coffre d’objets (a sideboard supported by four mannequin legs with two mannequin arms standing on either end like candlesticks), Kurt Seligmann’s Ultrameuble (a stool whose legs were taken from a mannequin and clad in pink tights and high-heeled shoes), and Oscar Dominguez’s Jamais (a gramophone with mannequin breasts as a turntable, mannequin arm in place of a needle, and a pair of mannequin legs protruding from its horn) seemed to ask which was the most objectified: the mannequin, or the woman she represented?

Kate Foster, IMLR Visiting Fellow 2021/22

Joseph Ford and Charles Burdett summarise the discussions at the 2022 AMLUK symposium held on 13 May 2022.

Promoting inclusivity is at the centre of the work of the IMLR. Together with the Institute of English Studies and the Institute of Classical Studies, it has recently appointed four fellows to help with the development of its programme of activities around Inclusion, Participation, and Engagement in research. The focus of the 2022 AMLUK symposium was to discuss how associations, schools, and university departments are approaching questions regarding inclusivity as it relates to the subject area of languages, cultures, and societies.

The first session centred on the work that subject associations are doing. Michael Tsang (Birkbeck) spoke about the challenges faced by East Asian Studies when it comes to decolonising initiatives. With curricula oriented towards aligning East Asian languages with geopolitical concerns specific to the region, he emphasised the need to balance the national and the regional with the global, for instance by identifying common and contrasting themes and imperatives in cultural production across global contexts. He spoke also of the need for East Asian Studies to examine its problematic disciplinary past and consider how broader structures, such as the REF, might restrict the kinds of research being done in this area. Zhu Hua (UCL) focused on the work of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) to develop a statement on equality, diversity, and inclusion. She conveyed how linguists are uniquely placed to bring a self-reflexive focus to terminologies deployed in our research and teaching. Developing a statement has been an opportunity to explore, question, and create space for alternative perspectives, but also to come up with concrete advice for colleagues across the disciplinary area, such as on the removal of problematic terms like ‘native speaker’ from job adverts and the provision of sign language interpreting at conferences. Claire Ross (Reading) and Iman Nick (Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics) spoke about the work they have done over the past year to survey the field of German Studies as part of the EDI working group of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS) and the Women in German Studies (WIGs) collective. Ross and Nick highlighted the ongoing work in these subject associations to grow inclusivity initiatives and reflected on the need for empirical surveys of the make-up and views of membership as a first step to bring about meaningful change.

The second session focused on inclusion work happening in schools, carried out by teachers and academics attempting to bridge the gap between university and school-based pedagogies, curricula, and recruitment strategies. Lisa Panford (St Mary’s University) spoke as co-chair of the Association for Language Learning (ALL) special interest group, ‘Decolonise Secondary MFL’. She reflected on the ongoing work of the group, particularly the collaboration with the publisher Pearson to create more inclusive resources as part of the ‘Amplifying Marginalised Voices Through Languages’ initiative available on Pearson’s website. Charlotte Ryland (Oxford) and Stacie Allan (Stephen Spender Trust) talked about the Trust’s work in running translation exchange programmes in UK secondary schools as a means of increasing languages take up at universities. They discussed how their work is premised on the fact that the languages curriculum has not capitalised on UK schools having become more and more multilingual and that languages can be more inclusive if they privilege culture and creativity over communication and function. Gitanjali Patel (Shadow Heroes/Birmingham) spoke about the work of Shadow Heroes, an organisation whose translation workshops challenge the Eurocentrism and monolingualism of language teaching in UK schools. She stressed how translation can be a tool to include the perspectives of multilingual students in the classroom but is crucially also a means of engaging critically with the hegemony of a language classroom that neglects non-European languages and ways of knowing. Lucy Jenkins (Cardiff University) reflected on the work of the MFL Mentoring project in Wales, which has succeeded in increasing uptake of languages at university by employing undergraduates to work with 11–14-year-olds unsure about whether they will take a GCSE in languages. The project has been trialled in the UK and the hope is that mentoring schemes will be expanded in years to come.

The final session of the day was an opportunity to hear about the work happening in universities and to reflect on a series of strategic interventions that could be made across the disciplinary field. Emanuelle Santos (Birmingham) spoke about the ‘Birmingham method for MLs’, which is working to align language teaching with core content modules, challenging traditional ways of language learning and helping to reconceptualise what language is altogether. She described how bringing together language teachers with researchers teaching cultural modules serves to break down the arbitrary and often discriminatory division of labour between language teachers and researchers whose work has traditionally been valued more within university structures. A key point here was that the work of inclusion must not simply mean introducing reform within pre-existing discriminatory and uneven structures. Giuliana Borea (Newcastle) brought the day’s presentations to a close by talking about decolonising initiatives in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, and particularly about the need to think beyond the recent spate of activity in decolonising the university and to truly embed the work of self-reflection among all members of the department. Examples of this work include an effort to work in a translingual and transnational way across language areas and to include vernacular languages as a fundamental part of our teaching.

In the final discussion, attendees and presenters reflected on questions raised throughout the day, upon currently occurring subject-wide consultative exercises, including subject benchmarking, the forthcoming report from the AHRC Future of Language Research fellows, and the future investment of the AHRC in languages research, and upon issues such as the term ‘Modern Languages’ and the role of the IMLR as a space in which to draw together the work on decolonisation and inclusivity going on across UK education in languages and cultures. Two core actions points emerging from the conversation were (a) the ongoing necessity of breaking down the barriers between language and content teaching and (b) the need to think more deeply about questions relating to class and languages and the ways class intersects with all the issues discussed throughout the day.

Dr Joseph Ford, Lecturer in French Studies, IMLR; and Professor Charles Burdett, Director IMLR

Charles Burdett, Director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, discusses the recent symposium held on 25 February 2022 and issues that the event raised.

The question at the heart of the workshop on 25 February 2022 (Future Directions in Modern Languages) that was organised by the IMLR together with AULC, the UCML, and Bilingualism Matters was how the disciplinary area, broadly defined as Modern Languages, can develop to ensure its relevance and purpose. The importance of thinking about future challenges was foregrounded at the beginning of the event with the presentation of the work of the AHRC Future of Language Research Fellows. This was followed by presentations from researchers of Bilingualism Matters on how thinking concerning ‘community’ languages can advance decolonising approaches to the study of language and culture. The latter part of the day focussed on how the work of the four OWRI projects can be integrated within the subject area and inform developments more generally.

Many questions concerning the future shape of the disciplinary area were raised by the conference and all of these questions require a great deal of further strategic thought and engagement. One can, nevertheless, point easily to three issues that were present in all discussions. The first is how we can successfully move beyond a distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘community’ languages. The stratification of language learning is increasingly difficult to justify and serves no one’s interests. It might well, therefore, be a good idea to dispense with the adjective ‘modern’ and to seek to construct a broad, but nevertheless definable, subject area that has different emphases and inflections, but which is connected by the integrated study of language, culture, and society; that is grounded in the multilingual and multicultural realities that we all inhabit; and in which there is a strong emphasis on cultural and linguistic mobility.

The second issue that all speakers addressed was the necessity of intense, joined-up, and inclusive thinking concerning the teaching of languages and cultures. If we think about language teaching as an important element in the way in which we expand the nature of our contact with societies around the world, then it is clearly important that what is taught in schools is strongly connected with the subject area as it is understood and practiced in Higher Education. Innovative approaches to teaching, to the interface with creative practice, and to inclusivity need to be shared across the education sector as a whole.

The third issue concerns the need to demonstrate the relevance and applicability of the analytical frameworks that are used within the disciplinary field. All of the papers of the conference showed the powerful impacts that can be made by the subject area and how it can engage in cross-disciplinary research of crucial importance. The engagement of teams of researchers in high-profile funding initiatives such as OWRI leads to innovation in teaching practice and to changes in public perception.

The conference, with short interventions focussing on issues of strategic significance to everyone within the sector, provides an excellent model for future events. The recording of the event is available here:

Charles Burdett, Director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research