People, subalternity and language conflict from Benvenuto Terracini to Francisco René Santucho. Political dimensions of a migrant philology

Abstract

In this work we focus on the treatment of the problem of subalternity and linguistic heterogeneity in some texts written by migrant thinkers who participated in different ways in the field of philology and who, at different times, operated in Latin America. We refer, on the one hand, to the Italian Benvenuto Terracini, with university linguistic training who resided in Tucumán between 1941 and 1947 as a consequence of the implementation of racial laws in Italy in 1938. We especially deal with some passages of his book Conflicts of languages and culture, which emphasizes the problem of contact between languages as a clash of cultures and world conceptions. After establishing a dialogue between Terracini’s positions and that of other figures of political and philological thought contemporary to him such as Antonio Gramsci and Erich Auerbach, we consider some texts on languages by Francisco René Santucho, written during his exile in Peru and Bolivia at the beginning of the seventies. We establish a dialogue between Terracini’s and Santucho’s positions on the basis of a conflictive conception -eminently political- of the linguistic given that both raise.