Gerald Roche’s The politics of language oppression in Tibet explores the mechanisms of language oppression and its relationship with sovereign power and biopower in shaping the identities of Manegacha and Tibetan speakers, focusing on Manegacha speakers in Rebgong, Qinghai. Central to the analysis is a biopolitical approach to language oppression, defined as the ‘enforcement of language loss through physical, mental, social, and spiritual coercion’. Roche draws on Foucauldian biopolitics, which concerns the power to ‘make live and let die’, and state racialization, a key feature of the biopolitical state. The book examines how the state uses a four-step biopolitical process—‘define, slate, invest, and enforce’—to manage linguistic diversity and how linguistic purism among Tibetans contributes to the suppression of other regional languages. Roche analyzes historical power shifts and their impact on daily life to address the question: How do constrained choices drive language loss, and how can such trends be resisted?
Roche structures his discussion into three themes—erasure, suppression, and elimination—tracing the historical processes and contemporary manifestations of language oppression. Part 1, ‘Erasure’, explores how Manegacha and other minority languages are removed from public discourse and state policy. Roche first details multilingual practices in pre-PRC North-east Tibet, characterized by fragmentary enforcement of biosovereign power, focused on individuals, and allowed for by the maintenance of linguistic diversity through local authorities like monasteries. Roche then demonstrates how the biopolitical state replaced the local authorities, directing power at entire populations and utilizing linguistic-cultural schemes to differentiate between those ‘who must live’ (Tibetan) and those ‘who can be left to die’ (Manegacha). This differentiation is achieved through ‘discursive erasure’, denying rights and resources.
The second theme, ‘Suppression’, examines how resistance paradoxically contributes to oppression. Roche argues that Tibetan nationalism in the PRC is a political identity that, despite resisting the state, flattens diversity by promoting a single Tibetan language as the ‘soul of the nation’ (pakay) through linguistic purism, primarily ‘Sinophobic lexical purism’. Languages deemed ‘mixed’, such as Manegacha, are consequently targeted for elimination. Roche reveals how the global Tibet movement further amplifies state power. Such amplification occurs discursively by validating the idea of a single Tibetan language and materialized through funding and campaigns that support this homogenized view, ultimately contributing to the erasure of minoritized languages.
The third theme, ‘Elimination’, investigates how erasure manifests in the lives of Manegacha speakers. Roche illustrates how decades of state-building concretize racialization through the complete exclusion of Manegacha from public institutions. This ‘slow violence’ limits Manegacha speakers’ opportunities and coerces them away from their language. Roche also highlights how discursive and institutional erasure is reinforced by ‘banal violence’ from other Tibetans. This includes linguistic surveillance, disparagement humor, register shibboleths, and slurs, often carried out by ‘intimates’ who act as ‘petty sovereigns’, ‘outsourcing or delegating’ state power in everyday interactions to achieve biopolitical goals.
Roche concludes by emphasizing that, while individual choices are made about using Manegacha, they are profoundly constrained by a totalizing field of coercive forces, urging for wider solidarity to resist this systemic oppression.
