Book Section
Jeffrey Champlin
‘I know you can cant’
Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten’s B Jenkins
This article reads Fred Moten’s collection B Jenkins as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler’s techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten’s detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the ‘cant’, slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our post-national age.
Keywords: Monolingualism; Derrida; Kittler; Globish; Palestine
| Title |
‘I know you can cant’
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| Subtitle |
Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten’s B Jenkins
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| Author(s) |
Jeffrey Champlin
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
This article reads Fred Moten’s collection B Jenkins as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler’s techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten’s detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the ‘cant’, slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our post-national age.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
4 September 2023
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| Subject |
Monolingualism
Derrida
Kittler
Globish
Palestine
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
155
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| page end |
163
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| Source |
Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 155–63
|
References
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Cite as:
Jeffrey Champlin, ‘“I know you can cant’: Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten”s B Jenkins’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 155-63 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_7>