The Power of Language Week Committee is excited to announce that this year’s Power of Language Week has arrived! Held between Friday, February 16th to Friday, February 23rd, Power of Language Week is the perfect opportunity to highlight the growing community of multilingualism on campus. We strive to make Power of Language Week an opportunity to embrace all multilingual identities on campus through the exploration of our language community’s educational, personal, and cultural connections to language. Any event held during this week with the Power of Language Week Logo (right) on their promotional material is part of our official POL schedule. The dark green and red present in the logo represent the colors in the national flag of Bangladesh, whose language movement POL Week is celebrating. Please find more information on the Bengali Language Movement and International Mother Language Day in our Power of Language Week page.
The week is starting with our kickoff event, The Elephant is Very Like: A Staged Reading, which will be on February 15th at 7:30 pm in the Theater Department Studio. Playwright Ankita Raturi (pictured) wrote the one-act play, which narrates the story of a woman constrained to only speak words which have been spoken to her, and a man who tries to help her. Together, they delve into the realms of multilingual poetry, prose, and the South Asian dance forms of kathak and bharatanatyam in their quest for the woman’s own language. The Elephant Is Very Like will be presented by Wesleyan students in a staged reading under the direction of Aneesha Kudtarkar and produced by Malaika Fernandes ’23, with guidance from Assistant Professor of Theater Maria-Christina Oliveras and Professor Hari Krishnan, who specializes in Dance, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Global South Asian Studies. This event is sponsored by the Center for the Arts, the Fries Center for Global Studies, and Humanities in Action.
The Elephant is Very Like is just one of the very exciting events that seek to center language, learning, multilingualism, belonging, and preservation of one’s mother tongue. For a full schedule, please visit our Power of Language 2024 page.
