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And the Word Was Made Flesh, or How to Narrate Histories

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Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks

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Abstract

This chapter immerses the reader in an Esperanto association in Paris, one of the key locations for this research, aiming to map out some aspects of the mise en discours of Esperanto. Understanding how Esperanto has been historically conveyed as timely requires revisiting the battle of artificial languages, through which the history of constructed languages became inseparable from the technologies and political agendas in place in late nineteenth-century Europe. In dialogue with the historical background that brought Esperanto into being, I retrace how Esperantists and scholars mobilise history, visual cues and personal narratives to convey certain images of the language. Ultimately, I argue that authority over knowledge production about a given political cause is fundamental to ensure that the latter will be conveyed as worth supporting.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    His name was Eugène Adam, and Lanti (a variation of l’anti, the against-person, in French) his pseudonym (Lins 2016: 168).

  2. 2.

    The hostility Esperanto suffered from totalitarian and dictatorial regimes went beyond the European continent. Esperantists were seen as subversive even in China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Brazil (Lins 2016: 44–46, 72–73, 144–145; Fians 2017: 38–39). It is interesting to note that, in Korea, the teaching of Esperanto and of the Korean language was forbidden by the Japanese government in the same year, 1937.

  3. 3.

    With the Holocaust, this situation was aggravated due to Zamenhof’s Jewish origin. Hitler himself alludes to it (1939: 240), depicting the language as part of a world domination plan designed by the Jews. As pointed out by Humphrey Tonkin (2011: 162), ‘Hitler was not entirely wrong when, in Mein Kampf, he described Esperanto as a language of Jews and communists’, since ‘the number of Jews and leftists associated with it, particularly in the inter-war years, was disproportionately high’.

  4. 4.

    In the 1920s and 1930s, SAT’s membership was largely affected by a dispute between SAT and the Sovetlanda Esperantista Unio (SEU, Soviet Esperantist Union) (SAT 1953; Lins 2016). Similarly, the neutral movement saw a split between UEA and the Internacia Esperanto-Ligo (IEL, International Esperanto League) in 1936, though IEL reunited with UEA eleven years later.

  5. 5.

    Regarding East Asia, Ulrich Lins (2008) and Ian Rapley (2013a) illustrate how the possibility of engaging with cross-border networks and the idea of resisting colonisation through modernisation were key for the promotion of Esperanto in China and Japan. At present, connections with internationalism elicit some resistance to this language in certain Middle Eastern and North African countries where Esperanto is seen as a Western import and, therefore, as something undesired.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Guilherme Fians

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Fians, G. (2021). And the Word Was Made Flesh, or How to Narrate Histories. In: Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7_2

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