New professor specializes in multicultural literature, language

Martha Cutter, who joined the English department this fall as an associate professor, brings to UConn her interest in ethnic and gender issues in language and literature.

She has a joint appointment with the Institute for African American Studies, and is also the new editor of MELUS, the journal of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.

MELUS has been based at UConn since 2000. The previous editor was Veronica Makowsky, professor of English and women's studies and vice provost for undergraduate education and regional campus administration.

"I've always been interested in language - how language creates certain kinds of cultural identities, how it empowers certain groups of people, and how women and ethnic writers intervene in that," says Cutter.

Her new book, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), explores some of these issues. Ethnic American writers are faced with considerations about what is lost and what is gained in translation, she says.

Julia Alvarez's novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, for example, was written in English and eventually translated into Spanish, although the author spent much of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, where her parents came from.

Some Mexican-American authors write in English and their works are translated into Spanish for Latinos living in the U.S. or in other countries. Others switch back and forth between languages, Cutter notes.

Multilingualism is considered an advantage in Europe, and it has been used to advantage by some in the U.S.

"Some of our greatest leaders have been empowered by their use of many languages," she says. Martin Luther King Jr., she notes, could call on standard English, black vernacular, and 'Biblical' speech.

At the same time, bilingual education and concerns about the U.S. official language are political controversies.

"The U.S. has always had a fear of multilingualism," she says.

While some immigrant groups have kept their mother tongue in addition to English, most give it up within two or three generations, she says.

"How they could learn English and maintain their mother tongue often is not even addressed."

Bilingual programs often emphasize immersion, and may alienate immigrant children from parents who are advised not to speak the native tongue at home, she adds.

A better way to teach bilingually would be to maintain the ethnic tongue and develop it, so that children learn to read and write in it, too, she says.