- I've just had an editor refuse to publish a piece of writing they invited me to submit & I think it's fair to call it censorship. Pls read because I think the implications are important [long - skip to the end for implications]

In March 2019 I received an invitation to present at a conference to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA).

I submitted a proposal on 'Music & Multilingualism in Pre-Colonial Tibet.' I was unsure if my proposal would be accepted, because speaking about the Tibetan context as 'multilingual' is still not widely accepted.

[read here for more about that: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1662074]

On April 27th I emailed one of the other invited participants: "I'm still not sure that my application to talk at the TIPA conference will be accepted. My proposal explicitly focuses on multilingualism in Tibet, so I am not sure if it will be welcomed."

Nonetheless, the proposal was accepted, and the organizers, with funding from USAID, kindly paid for my travel to India.

I presented my paper at the conference, talking about how musical practices had been one of the ways in which linguistic minorities were integrated into a broader Tibetan cultural world in the pre-colonial era & how this is now changing. The volume editor was present at my talk.

While in Dharamsala I also gave a presentation on minoritized languages at the Tibet Policy Institute, and spoke about them on the local Tibetan TV station.

The organizers promised to send further information about the publication of the conference proceedings. I didn't receive any information, and so on February 11th this year, I messaged some of the other participants:

"Just curious - did any of you receive a follow up from TIPA about the publication? I never heard from them again." The reply came: "Yeah. I got a message with a styleguide and 31st March as deadline. Want me to forward it to you?"

To which I replied, "Dunno... I kind of think if they don't want me in the volume then that's their decision?"

However, I was contacted by the editor on March 26, when they offered everyone an extension due to pandemic that was starting to impact our lives at that point. My initial invitation to join the proceedings had gone astray, apparently. So I submitted my chapter at the end of May.

At this point, if you want to look at the chapter I submitted, here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ScQhvIn3F0K5SeesAri2CDG_d9DvRIhjQ8NB5sdz_zc/edit?usp=sharing

On August 27th I wrote to ask if there was any news regarding the publication, because I was compiling publication metrics for my job. On the 31st I received the following from the editor:

"I am sorry to inform you that I can not include your article in the forthcoming proceedings. To come directly to you, my reading is that your article has little relevance to the Tibetan music or songs. It is pure linguistic paper."

You can see from the chapter [link above] and from the excerpts below that this excuse to reject the chapter doesn't stack up.

Anyway, I wrote back to confirm that this decision was final, and said if I didn't hear back by the end of Friday I would assume that it was. I did not hear back.

As I had suspected throughout the whole process, the topic of multilingualism & the erasure of minoritized languages was unwelcome. And the refusal to publish the chapter fits a wider pattern of erasure that I have written about elsewhere.

To be clear - I'm not saying that all of this is important because I am 'being silenced' or any such thing. I will figure out a way to publish the article elsewhere.

I also want to note that I am not naming anyone involved because the issue I want to highlight is a structural, not a personal, issue.

So, why is this censorship important?

The refusal to publish the chapter is important because this specific venue, sponsored by an institution supported by the exile government, offered an important opportunity to attest to the existence of Tibet's minoritized languages & to legitimize their struggle to survive.

That opportunity has been refused.

To me, it is a clear sign that for TIPA & the institutions it is connected to, these languages don't matter, their struggle is unimportant, and there is no room in Tibetan nationalism for anything more than a single language.

People in Inner Mongolia are currently protesting to protect their language. They are protesting to protect something that speakers of Tibet's minoritized language have never had: a mother tongue education.

And at least part of reason there has never been any protest about the oppression of Tibet's minoritized languages is that no matter how much speakers of these languages suffer, nobody has ever stood in solidarity with them.

So, I wanted to write about this because the refusal displayed here makes me despair that no significant power bloc will ever take the cause of these languages seriously...

...and the Party-state will just continue grinding them down and all the people who use these languages will suffer and suffer until their languages have been taken away from them...

... and because so many people have worked so hard to erase these languages, there will hardly even be a record that these people and their struggles ever existed. /fin