Mirko Casagranda

(edited by)

NAMES AND NAMING

IN THE POSTCOLONIAL
ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

21
Intersezioni/Intersections
Collana di anglistica
Mirko Casagranda (edited by)
Names and Naming in the Postcolonial English-Speaking World
Copyright © 2018 Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche
Gruppo Editoriale Tangram Srl
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Intersezioni/Intersections – Collana di anglistica – NIC 21

Prima edizione: dicembre 2018, Printed in EU

ISBN 978-88-6458-191-0

Direzione
Oriana Palusci

Comitato scientifico
Silvia Antosa, Università degli Studi di Enna Kore
Maria Teresa Chialant, Università degli Studi di Salerno
Rossella Ciocca, Università di Napoli L’Orientale
Lidia Curti, Università di Napoli L’Orientale
Laura Di Michele, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila
Bruna Di Sabato, Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli
Paola Faini, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Mirko Casagranda, Università della Calabria
Vita Fortunati, Università degli Studi di Bologna
Alba Graziano, Università della Tuscia, Viterbo
Gerhard Leitner Faha (Hon.), Freie Universität, Berlin
Carlo Pagetti, Università degli Studi di Milano
Biancamaria Rizzardi, Università degli Studi di Pisa

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: We Need New Postcolonial Names 7

Mirko Casagranda

«He Who Steals… My Name»: The Impropriety of the

Demonym Indian 15
Indira Karamcheti

The Linguistic Effects of Long-Term Colonialism:

False Welsh, False English in English and Neo-Welsh
Place-Naming in Wales 29
John B. Trumper

From Queenstown to An Cóbh/Cóbh: Naming and

Renaming in (Post)colonial Ireland 45
Mirko Casagranda

Welcome to Victorialand: Queen Victoria and the

Naming of Canada 61
Oriana Palusci

Qallunaat: Inuit (Re)naming White Folks 91

Anna Mongibello

Naming, Identity and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Wide

Sargasso Sea 101
C. Bruna Mancini

Caryl Phillips’s Cambrige: The Crisis of Englishness

through a (Re)named Slave 119
Carla Tempestoso
“Good Names” in Indian English: Name-Giving
Strategies and Symbolisms in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Novels 139
Esterino Adami

Mumbai is not Bombay: Bloggers’ Views 155

Luisa Caiazzo

“Thou Shall Be Middle Earth”: Practices of Renaming

and Film Tourism in New Zealand 173
Alessandra De Marco

Notes on Contributors 187

Qallunaat

Qallunaat: Inuit (Re)naming White Folks

Anna Mongibello

In his famous essay, Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Al-

thusser sets out to derive a general form for all the various and
varied mechanisms by which ideology «transforms individuals
into subjects» (1971: 152) through a ritual of recognition which
locates them as members of a social group in a hierarchical rela-
tionship to the power that prescribes identities. His conclusion is
that in all its historically specific manifestations, ideology works
its transformative effects by processes of what he calls «interpel-
lation», namely hailing or addressing individuals:

Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects

among the individuals (it recruits them all) or transforms individuals in-
to subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which
I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along
the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing:
‘Hey, you there!’ (ibid.: 163).

What I would like to add, here, is that interpellation also works as

a constant dialectics between positioning and being positioned. If
we consider that the interpellation of the subject into oppressed
positions produces contradiction and resistance to the logic of
domination, this obviously creates an opportunity for agency.
The contradiction is mainly marked by the tension between op-
posed forces in culture, and by a form of resistance to the logic of
domination that happens through language.
According to Bill Ashcroft, the interpellated subjects within the
supposed language of power are able to find ways of resistance
within the language itself, interpolating the illocutionary func-
tion of the speech act:

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Anna Mongibello

Rather than being swallowed up by the hegemony of empire, the ap-

parently dominated culture, and the “interpellated” subjects within it,
are quite able to interpolate the various modes of imperial discourse to
use it for different purposes, to counter its effects by transforming them
(2001: 14).

If we assume that the ‘Indigenous frame’ has been built in con-

trast with modern subjectivity and that what Tania Murray Li
called «the tribal slot»1 is a category whose meaning is created
within the dialectics of interpellation, it becomes clear that sub-
verting the processes of appellation primarily happens within
language and discourse. One relevant implication of Ashcroft’s
point is that the imperial language in which subjects are interpel-
lated and interpellation itself can be interrupted and subverted
by means of creativity and transformation.
On the basis of this premise, my intent is to investigate how,
in Canada, Inuit people have attempted to gain the roles of in-
dividuals rather than objects in the dialectics of interpellation in
order to re‑negotiate their power to name and to re‑define so-
cial relationships by means of inventiveness in language. I would
like to approach the core of my inquiry by outlining a very brief
history of naming Indigenous Peoples in Canada, turning, then,
to the history of naming the Inuit that is also a history of calling
them names.
The history of naming Indigenous Peoples in Canada is a long
one and mainly represents the first unfortunate case of misnaming
in the so-called ‘New World’. What I am referring to is, of course,
the naming of Indigenous Peoples in the American Continent as
Indians. Indian, as Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor states,

[…] is a nominal simulation, the absence, not the presence of natives in

the aesthetic ruins of simulations. The word Indian transposes the real,
a colonial coalescences of thousands of distinct native cultures and com-
munities in one misnomer (2007: 12).

1
In her essay “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and
the Tribal Slot” (2000), Tania Murray Li outlines a concise example of how identity,
ideology, structure, and practice are interwoven. The tribal slot exists within the
regime of representation as a preconfigured frame that is questioned via contesta-
tion. In other words, those who occupy the tribal slot have some room to manoeuvre,
being agents in a sphere that is continuously being worked and reworked.

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To create a nominal simulation, as Vizenor puts it, implies over-

writing ‘the real’ with pure generalization (i.e. simplification)
that ends up disciplinating ‘diversity’ into a domesticated nomi-
nal category. The effects of such an operation of misnaming are
still visible. As a matter of fact, the 1876 Indian Act is still the Ca-
nadian statute that officially disciplines registered Indians, their
bands and the system of Indian reserves in a country where In-
digenous Peoples have been renamed numerous times. Indig-
enous Peoples are officially and generally referred to with the
all-encompassing term Aboriginal Peoples, which covers First
Nations, Inuit and Métis people with no regard to their sepa-
rate origins and identities2. First Nations and First Peoples are
the most recent politically correct tags, but, despite being cho-
sen by representatives of several Indigenous Nations in Canada,
they still purposely ignore, while domesticating, the multitude
of names, histories, cultures and languages that complicate this
huge mosaic that we now call Canada3.
Inuit people have not been immune to such naming practices.
Formerly called Eskimo by the first explorers who challenged the
vastness of Canada’s inlands to reach its largest, northernmost
territory, they have undergone a series of increasingly traumatic
processes of re-nomination not only as a people but also as indi-
viduals. As a matter of fact, the name Inuit, itself, meaning “the
people” in the Inuktitut language, replaced Eskimo in the 1970s
as a result of the movement for the reclamation of Indigenous au-
thority in the naming process. Most importantly, what must be
stated as a fundamental premise to any possible argumentation
about Inuit naming systems is that, of course, naming is deeply

2
In “The Case of the Word Métis”, Oriana Palusci discusses the ways in which the
Indians have been named in the Canadian context: the term Indian, she argues,
«identifies both the language and a person in a collective way, as a comprehensive
umbrella term which, cramming together heterogeneous ethnic groups, inhabiting
an unidentified geographic space called America, simplifies the many‑faced univers-
es of Indian identities, languages and traditions» (2010: 61). In order to get a deep-
er insight into the mistranslation (and misinterpretation) of Indigenous names from
traditional languages into English, see also Mongibello (2013).
3
A parallel discussion about the naming of Canada as such could start here, but it
would transcend the main focus of this paper. For more details on this topic, see also
Casagranda (2013) and Rayburn (2001).

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embedded in culture and language, and for the Inuit, naming has
a strong social component. In fact, the soul-name is seen as the
symbol of the continuity of an individual’s social life on earth and
also the assurance of her/his immortality. The moment of nam-
ing represents the symbolic death of an ancestor and the begin-
ning of a new cycle for the name-soul.
In the 1920s Anglican, Catholic, Moravian and other religious
missionaries, completely ignoring the symbolic stance of Inuit
naming practices, imposed Christian names, which Inuit add-
ed to their existing Inuktitut names. In the 1930s the Canadian
government brought in ‘disc‑numbers’, which were identification
tags with numbers carved on small, flat, pressed‑fibre circles, say-
ing “Eskimo Identification Canada”, as part of a subtle project of
renaming and controlling that equated e-numbers with dog-tags
or prisoners’ numbers. In 1940 Major McKeand wrote that

[t]he suggestion that metal discs be worn either around the neck or wrist
has not met with favour because (a) Indians do not wear them (b) mis-
understandings might easily arise if Eskimos wore chains; and (c) so far
as we know, wards of other Dominions do not wear identification discs
(qtd. in Dyck and Waldram 1993: 53).

Between 1969 and 1971 Project Surname was planned to make

Inuit «like other Canadians», as a way of celebrating the 1970
centennial of the Northwest Territories. Although it was never
officially legislated, Project Surname introduced a new system of
naming in a context that had had its naming traditions for cen-
turies. Some kept their original names but adopted Christian
first names and used their original Inuktitut names as surnames.
Others were convinced to choose completely culturally foreign
names. Most people chose to be registered under their ancestors’
names, while the people in charge of the project also worked with
linguists and tried to use standardized spellings.
The project itself clearly shows the close ties binding inter-
pellation, renaming, colonial politics and policymaking. In two
years, all Inuit in Canada received new names on the basis of a
non-Inuit politics of surnaming which deliberately ignored the
connections between Inuit culture and names. As Helen Gilbert
and Joanne Tompkins point out:

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The naming and interpellative functions of the imperial language exac-

erbate the disempowerment of indigenous peoples/cultures. To name
people and places in English, replacing any earlier constructions of loca-
tion and identity, is to establish at least partial control over reality, ge-
ography, history, and subjectivity. Interpellation, or ascribing a subject
to the colonized subject, equally denies the existence of a previous sub-
ject or selfhood (1996: 165).

Of course, the process of naming and interpellation has always

taken the form of a fundamental misrecognition aiming at pro-
ducing class dominance relations. Such intent can be traced back
in the very strategy of naming Inuit people as Eskimo by the Eu-
ropeans in the eighteenth century. The term most certainly de-
rives from an Algonquian language of the Atlantic Ocean Coast
recalling the word askamiciw that means “eater of raw meat”
(Sturtevant 1978). There was nothing innocent in picking up a
local custom in order to label the people of the Northwest Terri-
tories. On the contrary, there was a clear intention of subduing
them and confining them to a non‑human level.
Along with the history of naming Indigenous and also Inuit
people in Canada, there is another history, never exhaustively
highlighted nor actually seen. It is a parallel history, happening
at the threshold of languages, in the third space of enunciation
where different codes interact and give rise to new modes of com-
munication. That is the history of how Inuit people have named
the Others back, as a way to destabilize naming hierarchies.
In 1978, Inuit writer Minnie Aodla Freeman, whose name clear-
ly shows the effects of the naming practices imposed by the Ca-
nadian Government together with the Christian Church on Inuit
people, published Life among the Qallunaat. The book tells the
story of a young Inuit girl who leaves her hometown in the North-
west Territories and moves to Ottawa. Her life is deeply affected
by this change as she realizes how cultural differences can make
her feel like an alien among white people. What is most interest-
ing about Freeman’s book is her use of the word qallunaat, that
she chooses as a keyword in the title, switching from Canadian
English to her first language. In fact, the word comes from Inuk-
titut and Freeman herself gives a definition in the epigraph to the
introduction: «Qallunaaq (singular), qallunaat (plural): literally

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Anna Mongibello

“people who pamper their eyebrows”, possibly an abbreviation of

qallunaaraaluit: powerful, avaricious, of materialistic habit, peo-
ple who tamper with nature» (1978: 1). Soon after giving the lit-
eral meaning of the term, in the incipit Freeman immediately in-
troduces its connotative implications, tying up the word qallu-
naat to “the white people”:

Whenever a white person meets me for the first time, he or she will al-
ways ask “How do you like the weather”. The weather is something I am
very aware of, just as I am aware of many things which the qallunaat, the
white people, take for granted (17).

By choosing to name white people as qallunaaq, the narrator

refuses to be the interpellated subject: although being the one
entering a community of strangers, she is claiming her role as
an individual who names, instead of being named by the oth-
ers. As she clearly states: «To me the word Eskimo means noth-
ing» (ibid.: 88). This implies that non-recognition can become
an effective weapon in the struggle for subverting linguistic hier-
archies of nomination in English.
Freeman’s use of the term was not an isolated case: in 1991, a
promotional activity was organized in the city of Iqaluit in order
to raise funds for the Elders’ Society. The activity featured the
presence of mock discs, numbers and registration certificates ad-
dressed to white people. The project, signed by Abe Okpik, the
Inuit who was originally hired to undertake Project Surname, was
named Q-number project, where “Q” stands for qallunaat. The
parodic tone of the project represented the sign of a new cultur-
al awareness. Since 1991, the term qallunaat has gained increas-
ing popularity, gradually becoming a common word used by Inuit
people when speaking Canadian English in its local varieties. Inuit
online magazines and newspapers provide numerous examples of
how qallunaat is used in English and French texts translated from
the Inuktitut language. In most of the cases, qallunaat designates
people who are not Inuit but come into contact with Inuit commu-
nities. From a study conducted on Tumivut: The Cultural Mag-
azine of the Nunavik Inuit, an Inuit magazine written in Inukti-
tut and translated into English and French, qallunaat/q is a re-
current term for “white people” in the stories orally transmitted

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by the elders in Inuktitut and then transcribed and translated in-

to Canada’s two official languages, as the following excerpt shows:

In the past, the only means of winter transportation was the dogteam.
Three men started on a trip by dogteam; a Qallunaaq [a white man], an
Inuk, and an Indian nicknamed “Qallunaaq” because he was half white,
half Naskapi (Inukpuk 1995: 22).

In this transcription/translation published in 1995, the term oc-

curs with a gloss in brackets, probably added by the editor, and
designates, here, a person who is neither Inuit nor “Indian”, or a
person of mixed origins that go back to a non-Indian, non-Inuit
culture. In fact, whereas in Inuktitut Inuit means “the people”,
qallunaaq is used to refer to those who are foreigners, both
marking cultural boundaries and superimposing Inuit epistem-
ic worldview.
Similar examples taken from the magazines Inuktitut and
NunatsiaqOnline, show how qallunaaq can cross linguistic
boundaries and hybridize the translations into both French and
English. In all cases, qallunaat is chosen over the two languages
of power and introduced as an independent, un-adapted element
that interrupts the Canadian English and French flow, following
Inuktitut syntactic rules. Although not necessarily presenting a
negative connotation (contrary to what Freeman implied when
using the term in her epigraph), qallunaat resists morpholog-
ical adaptation, signalling the speaker/writer’s attempt to con-
taminate hegemonic univocality in naming practices. Along with
grammatical deviations and sematic shifts, it unsettles the pri-
macy of Canadian English/French and is a key element in the re-
negotiation of the roles of name-giver and name-receiver.
Going backwards to the paper’s theoretical premise, I stat-
ed that inventiveness in language is one tool used to subvert in-
terpellative hierarchies, and that, following Ashcroft’s theories,
creativity and transformation play a crucial role in the process.
One last element that is worth mentioning is humour, a recurrent
feature in Indigenous writings that I would like to introduce as
an additional strategy to destabilize naming practices.
A clear example of how humour functions as a subversive weap-
on is provided by Zebedee Nungak, Director of the Inuktitut Lan-

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Anna Mongibello

guage Department of the Avataq Cultural Institute, and also writ-

er, musician and regular commentator in English and Inuktitut
on CBC North radio, who coined the word Qallunology mean-
ing «the study of white folks» (Nungak 2004). Qallunology is a
full set of parodic theories and ironic studies of non-Inuit cus-
toms Nungak further developed in his “Qallunaat 101”, as a re-
sponse to “Eskimology”, «a serious field of study by Qallunaat»
that, Nungak remarks, has «scores of museums and universities
all over the world […] devoted solely to the subject» (ibid.). Nun-
gak is not an expert in Qallunaat, but his commentaries on the
subject «are based on having eaten, slept, and breathed their life
for so many years, learning their language, and tumbling along in
their tidy-square thought processes» (ibid.). The study of white
folks could not leave out a mockery of the procedure of naming
among the Qallunaat:

The Qallunaat custom of abbreviating first names does not seem to follow
a standard formula. Robert can be Rob, Robbie, Bob, Bobby or Bert. Jo-
seph is Joe, James/Jim, Sidney/Sid, Arthur/Art, and Peter/Pete. Charles
is Charlie but can be Chuck. What sleight of hand makes a Henry a Hank?
And how does Richard become a Dick, if not a Rich or a Rick? Do you
see a B in William on its way to be a Bill? Don’t ever say Seen for Sean
(sh-AWN) or John for Jean, if the person is a francophone male (ibid.).

To conclude, through the examples provided above, this paper

has tried to highlight how interpolation and mockery can reverse
colonial naming strategies. In this sense, the sole word qallunaat
works as a powerful weapon that simultaneously defamiliarizes
Canadian English and undermines it to reconfigure naming hier-
archies in language across registers and genres.

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 Qallunaat

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Casagranda, Mirko, 2013, Procedure di naming nel paesaggio
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