Реферат: Global and worldly Englishes Discommunities and subcultural empires
It is crucial, I want to argue, to see the global spread of English in a complex relation to this imperial past. All too often, it is assumed that the current role of English is either a continuation of the colonial past, or a radically new effect of recent history. In fact, it is a much more complex history. It is important, first of all, to understand that British colonial language policy was not massively in favour of spreading English. Colonial language policies can be seen as constructed between four poles (for much greater detailed analysis, see Pennycook, 1998; 2000): First, the position of colonies within a capitalist empire and the need to produce docile and compliant workers and consumers to fuel capitalist expansion; second, the discourses of Anglicism and liberalism with their insistence on the European need to bring civilization to the world through English; third, local contingencies of class, ethnicity, race and economic conditions that dictated the distinctive development of each colony; and fourth, the discourses of Orientalism with its insistence on exotic histories, traditions and nations in decline. By and large, these competing discourses on the requirements for colonial education produced language policies broadly favouring education in local languages: Vernacular education was seen as the best means of educating a compliant workforce and of inculcating moral and political values that would make the colonial governance of large populations more possible. English was seen as a dangerous weapon, an unsafe thing, too much of which would lead to a discontented class of people who were not prepared to abide by the colonial system.
There are, of course ample examples of imperial rhetoric extolling the virtues of English, from Charles Grant’s argument in 1797 that “The first communication, and the instrument of introducing the rest, must be the English language; this is a key which will open to them a world of new ideas, and policy alone might have impelled us, long since, to put it into their hands" (Bureau of Education, 1920, p.83), through Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 1835, to Frederick Lugard’s views on the use of English at Hong Kong University in the early part of the 20th century: “I would emphasize the value of English as the medium of instruction. If we believe that British interests will be thus promoted, we believe equally firmly that graduates, by the mastery of English, will acquire the key to a great literature and the passport to a great trade (1910, p.4). These arguments, however, had more to do with the construction of English as a language with particular benefits, an issue that will be discussed below, than with the expansion of English beyond a narrow elite.
The weight of argument by colonial administrators was much more in favour of education in local languages. In the 1884 report on education (Straits Settlements), E. C. Hill, the Inspector of Schools for the colony, explained his reasons against increasing the provision of education in English: Apart from the costs and the difficulties in finding qualified teachers to teach English, there was the further problem that “as pupils who acquire a knowledge of English are invariably unwilling to earn their livelihood by manual labour, the immediate result of affording an English education to any large number of Malays would be the creation of a discontented class who might become a source of anxiety to the community" (p.171). This position was extremely common and is echoed, for example, by Frank Swettenham’s argument in the Perak Government Gazette (6 July, 1894): "I am not in favour of extending the number of `English' schools except where there is some palpable desire that English should be taught. Whilst we teach children to read and write and count in their own languages, or in Malay... we are safe " (emphasis in original). Thus, as Loh Fook Seng (1970) comments, "Modern English education for the Malay then is ruled out right from the beginning as an unsafe thing" (p.114).
In an article on vernacular education in the State of Perak, the Inspector of Schools, H. B. Collinge, explained the benefits of education in Malay as taking “thousands of our boys... away from idleness", helping them at the same time to ”acquire habits of industry, obedience, punctuality, order, neatness, cleanliness and general good behaviour" Thus, after a boy had attended school for a year or so, he was “found to be less lazy at home, less given to evil habits and mischievous adventure, more respectful and dutiful, much more willing to help his parents, and with sense enough not to entertain any ambition beyond following the humble home occupations he has been taught to respect". And not only does the school inculcate such habits of dutiful labour but it also helps colonial rule more generally since “if there is any lingering feeling of dislike of the `white man', the school tends greatly to remove it, for the people see that the Government has really their welfare at heart in providing them with this education, free, without compulsion, and with the greatest consideration for their mohammedan sympathies” (cited in Straits Settlements, 1894, p.177). Similarly in Hong Kong, E. J. Eitel, the Inspector of Schools, argued that by studying Chinese classics, students learn "a system of morality, not merely a doctrine, but a living system of ethics." Thus they learn "filial piety, respect for the aged, respect for authority, respect for the moral law". In the Government schools, by contrast, where English books are taught from which religious education is excluded, "no morality is implanted in the boys" (Report, 1882, p.70). Thus, the teaching of Chinese is "of higher advantage to the Government" and "boys strongly imbued with European civilization whilst cut away from the restraining influence of Confucian ethics lose the benefits of education, and the practical experience of Hongkong is that those who are thoroughly imbued with the foreign spirit, are bad in morals" (p.70).
We need to understand, therefore, the language effects of colonialism not only in terms of promotion of colonial languages but also in terms of the construction and use of vernacular languages for colonial purposes. Christian missionaries, for example, have played a crucial role not only in assisting past and current forms of colonialism and neocolonialism, not only in attacking and destroying other ways of being, but also in terms of the language effects their projects have engendered. The choices missionaries have made to use local or European languages have been far more than a mere choice of medium. On the one hand, missionary language projects continue to use and promote European languages, and particularly English, for Christian purposes. The use of English language teaching as a means to convert the unsuspecting English language learner raise profound moral and political questions about what is going on in English classrooms around the world. On the other hand, missionary linguists have played a particular role in the construction and invention of languages around the world. Of particular concern here are the ways in which language use, and understandings of language use, have been - and still are - profoundly affected by missionary projects. Bilingualism between indigenous languages and a metropolitan language, for example, was part of a conservative missionary agenda in which converting to Christianity was the inevitable process of being bilingual.
(see Pennycook and Coutand-Marin, 2003; Pennycook and Makoni, in press).
The implications of this understanding of colonial language policy are several: First, education in vernacular languages was promoted both as a means of colonial governance and as an Orientalist project for the maintenance of cultural formations. While this has many implications for an understanding of mother tongue education and modes of governance (see Pennycook, 2002), it is also significant for the role of English both before and after the formal ending of colonialism. The effects of Anglicist rhetoric did not produce widespread teaching of English but did produce widespread images of English as a superior language that could bestow immense benefits on its users, a topic to which I shall turn below. Meanhwile the language had been coveted and acquired by social and economic elites with whom the British were now negotiating independence. This was to have significant implications for the neocolonial development of English in the latter half of the 20th century.
One of the lasting effects of the spread of English under colonialism was the production of images of English and of its learners. Simply put, the point here is that English, like Britain, its empire and institutions, was massively promoted as the finest and greatest medium for arts, politics, trade and religion. At the same time, the learners of English were subjected to the imaginings of Orientalism, with its exoticised, static and derided Others. Thus, on the one hand, we have the cultural constructs of Orientalism - the cultures and characters of those who learn English - and on the other hand the cultural constructs of Occidentalism - the benefits and glories of the English language. As many writers on colonialism have argued (see for example, Singh, 1996, Mignolo, 2000), such discourses have continued long beyond the formal end of colonialism. Thus, not only can we see the current spread of English in terms of economic and political neocolonial relations, but also in terms of cultural neocolonial relations. As Bailey (1991) comments, "the linguistic ideas that evolved at the acme of empires led by Britain and the United States have not changed as economic colonialism has replaced the direct, political management of third world nations. English is still believed to be the inevitable world language" (p.121).
I have dealt with these at length elsewhere (1998), so I shall only draw attention here to particular aspects of this. First, the global spread of English, as a good and righteous event was seen as already well on its way in the 19th century. Guest (1838/1882), for example, argued that English was "rapidly becoming the great medium of civilization, the language of law and literature to the Hindoo, of commerce to the African, of religion to the scattered islands of the Pacific" (p.703). According to Read (1849, p.48, cited in Bailey, 1991, p.116), in a claim that already in the middle of the 19th century reflects Mignolo’s phases of colonial expansion: "Ours is the language of the arts and sciences, of trade and commerce, of civilization and religious liberty... It is a store-house of the varied knowledge which brings a nation within the pale of civilization and Christianity... Already it is the language of the Bible... So prevalent is this language already become, as to betoken that it may soon become the language of international communication for the world". And for others, this would clearly be at the expense of other languages: "Other languages will remain, but will remain only as the obscure Patois of the world, while English will become the grand medium for all the business of government, for commerce, for law, for science, for literature, for philosophy, and divinity. Thus it will really be a universal language for the great material and spiritual interests of mankind" (George, 1867, p6)
Such statements continue on through the 20th century, with a particular focus emerging on the suitability of English for its global role. In the 19th century George claimed that Britain had been "commissioned to teach a noble language embodying the richest scientific and literary treasures," asserted that: "As the mind grows, language grows, and adapts itself to the thinking of the people. Hence, a highly civilized race, will ever have, a highly accomplished language. The English tongue, is in all senses a very noble one. I apply the term noble with a rigorous exactness" (George, 1867, p4). In the 20th century many writers have insistently claimed that English has more words than any other language and thus is a better medium for expression or thought than any other. Claiborne (1983), for example, asserts that "For centuries, the English-speaking peoples have plundered the world for words, even as their military and industrial empire builders have plundered it for more tangible goods". This plundering has given English "the largest, most variegated and most expressive vocabulary in the world. The total number of English words lies somewhere between 400,000 - the number of current entries in the largest English dictionaries - and 600,000 - the largest figure that any expert is willing to be quoted on. By comparison, the biggest French dictionaries have only about 150,000 entries, the biggest Russian ones a mere 130,000" (p.3). The MacMillan dossier on International English (1989) reiterates the point, claiming that "There are more than 500,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Compare that with the vocabulary of German (about 200,000) and French (100,000)" (p.2). Claiborne (1983) goes on to explain the implications of this large vocabulary: "Like the wandering minstrel in The Mikado , with songs for any and every occasion, English has the right word for it - whetever 'it' may be". Thus, "It is the enormous and variegated lexicon of English, far more than the mere numbers and geographical spread of its speakers, that truly makes our native tongue marvellous - makes it, in fact, a medium for the precise, vivid and subtle expression of thought and emotion that has no equal, past or present. ” In case the implications of this are not clear, Claiborne goes on to claim that English is indeed "not merely a great language but the greatest" (p.4)
Globalization and worldliness
The emergence of English as a global language, then, needs to be understood in relation to this colonial history. There are several further implications of this understanding of English in relation to globalization. I have been trying to stake out a view of globalization and English that takes us beyond the dated and static theories of linguistic imperialism and world englishes. Understanding Englishes in the context of globalization suggests that various linguistic uses that used to be more localized are now occurring on a global scale; these global language uses are not determined by economic relations alone, but rather are part of complex networks of communication and cultural flows. In order to grasp such language use, we need to understand that we are dealing here with radically new conditions and theories. Such use of Other Englishes need to be understood both in terms of their historical continuity and in terms of historical disjuncture; they also need to be understood critically in terms of new forms of power, control and destruction, as well as new forms of resistance, change and appropriation.
The predominant paradigms through which we have come to look at English in the world have remained states-centric conceptualizations of English as a multinational language. Both the world Englishes framework, with its focus on emergent national standards, with speakers of English defined by national identity, and the imperialism and language rights frameworks with English imperialism defined according to the Americanization/ Englishization/ homogenization of the world (with language rights as a language-defined rearguard action) work with definitions of nations, languages, communities and constituences that fail to question the colonial origins of the terms with which they operate and lack a means to engage with current global relations.
Sonntag insightfully points out that the rights-based approach to support for linguistic diversity and opposition to the English-Only movement “has not fundamentally altered the American projection of its vision of global English…because a rights-based approach to promoting linguistic diversity reinforces the dominant liberal democratic project rather than dismantling it” (p.25). This is a crucial point because it points to a particular problem with the arguments against linguistic imperialism and for language rights: They are conducted in exactly the same frameworks as the politics they wish to oppose, or as Rajagopalan (1999) suggests, “the very charges being pressed against the hegemony of the English language and its putative imperialist pretensions themselves bear the imprint of a way of thinking about language moulded in an intellectual climate of excessive nationalist fervour and organized marauding of the wealth of alien nations―an intellectual climate where identities were invariably thought of in all-or-nothing terms" (p. 201) As Sonntag argues, “the willingness to use the language of human rights on the global level to frame local linguistic demands vis-à-vis global English may merely be affirming the global vision projected by American liberal democracy" (p.25).
And yet, we also need to understand that that the new conditions of globalization require and produce new strategies of resistance. Resistance and change is possible but it will not be achieved through nostalgic longing for old identities. As Mignolo suggests, there is another side to these global designs: there is always opposition, resistance and appropriation. Drawing on the distinction used by the Brazilian sociologist and cultural critic, Renato Ortiz, and the Martinican philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant, between globalizaçaõ / globalization and mundializaçaõ/ mondialization, Mignolo suggests that the first may be used to refer to these global designs, while the second term, which I am here translating as worldliness[1] , may be seen in terms of “local histories in which global histories are enacted or where they have to be adapted, adopted, transformed, and rearticulated" (Mignolo, p.278). This, then, is the site of resistance, change, adaptation and reformulation. It is akin to what Canagarajah (1999a) in his discussion of resistance to the global spread of English describes as a ‘resistance perspective’, highlighting the ways in which postcolonial subjects “may find ways to negotiate, alter and oppose political structures, and reconstruct their languages, cultures and identities to their advantage. The intention is not to reject English, but to reconstitute it in more inclusive, ethical, and democratic terms" (p.2). From this point of view, then, there is always a response to the designs of empire, processes of resistance, rearticulation, reconstitution.
Shifting how we think about English (or language more generally) opens up several new perspectives: As Williams (1992) and Cameron (1995, 1997) have observed, sociolinguistics has operated all too often with fixed and static categories of class, gender and identity membership as if these were transparent givens onto which language can be mapped. Cameron argues that a more critical account suggests that “language is one of the things that constitutes my identity as a particular kind of subject" (1995, p.16). Instead of focusing on a ‘linguistics of community,’ (which is often based on a circularity of argument that suggests that a speaker of x community speaks language y because they belong to x, and the fact that they speak y proves they are a member of x), new work is starting to focus on a ‘linguistics of contact’ (cf Pratt 1987), “looking instead at the intricate ways in which people use language to index social group affiliations in situations where the acceptability and legitimacy of their doing so is open to question, incontrovertibly guaranteed neither by ties of inheritance, ingroup socialisation, nor by any other language ideology” (Rampton 1999, p 422). As Hill suggests, the “kaleidoscopic, ludic, open flavor” of language use in domains of popular culture profoundly challenges the methods of mainstream sociolinguistics “by transgressing fundamental ideas of ‘speakerhood’” (1999, pp 550-1).
These more recent approaches to language, identity and speakerhood open up for further question the very notion of whether languages exist in any useful sense of the word, and what indeed we are engaged in when we use language (Pennycook, 2004; Reagan, 2004). As Hill goes on to suggest, we need to get beyond the localized concept of ‘speech community’ or ‘field site,’ located as they are in modernist concepts of identity and location, and instead “attack the problem of the precise situatedness of such phenomena in the flow of meaning with macro-analytic theoretical tools" (1999, p.543).
To Appadurai’s (1996) picture of ‘global cultural flows’ - ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes - it may be worth adding linguascapes , in order to capture the relationship between the ways in which some languages are no longer tied to locality or community, but rather operate globally in conjunction with these other scapes. As Kandiah (1998, p 100) argues, most approaches to the new Englishes miss the crucial point that these Englishes “fundamentally involve a radical act of semiotic reconstruction and reconstitution which of itself confers native userhood on the subjects involved in the act. ” The crucial point here, then, is that it is not so much whether or not one is born in a particular type of community but rather what one does with the language. At the point of semiotic reconstruction, English users become native speakers of a new semiotic construction of language that cannot be predefined as a first, second or foreign language.
While the boundaries of sociolinguistic thought have thus been usefully traversed in some domains - questioning ways in which language, culture, nation and identity have been mapped onto each other - most work in the area of world Englishes has failed to develop any complex understanding of current global conditions, continuing to operate with states-centric models of language analysis while excluding divergent Other Englishes. All too often we see the ‘multicultural character of English’ reduced to monolithic national cultures as represented through the ‘high culture’ activities of English language writers. World Englishes is in some ways akin to what Hutnyk (2000) calls the “liberal exoticist enthusiasm” (p 12) for hybridity in World Music, the “global sampling” (22) of WOMAD festivals. My point here, of course, is not to discount postcolonial writing in English and the questions it raises for the ownership of English, but to seek a more complex, contemporary understanding of cultural production in relationship to English, nations, culture, representation and the world. As Scott (1999, p 215) argues, the “real question before us is whether or not we take the vernacular voices of the popular and their modes of self-fashioning seriously, and if we do, how we think through their implications."
If we take a domain such as hip-hop (see Pennycook 2003), we can start to see both different ways of using and mixing languages, and different circuits of influence. Hawaiian hip-hoppers Sudden Rush, for example, who “have borrowed hip hop as a counter-hegemonic transcript that challenges tourism and Western imperialism" (Akindes, 2001, p95), have been influenced not only by US rap but also by other Pacific Islander and Aotearoa-New Zealand hip-hop that constitutes a “Pacific Island hip-hop diaspora” and a “pan-Pacific hip-hop network that has bypassed the borders and restrictions of the popular music distribution industry” (Mitchell 2001, p 31). Thus, not only is there “now scarcely a country in the world that does not feature some form or mutation of rap music, from the venerable and sophisticated hip-hop and rap scenes of France, to the ‘swa-rap’ of Tanzania and Surinamese rap of Holland" (Krims, 2000, p.5), but many of these local scenes participate in complex orbits of inluence.
Alongisde English, one of the most influential is French, producing an intricate flow of influences between the vibrant music scenes in Paris and Marseille in France; Dakar, Abidjan, and Libreville in West Africa, and Montreal in Quebec. And like many urban popular cultures, French language rap is also mixed with many other languages and influences; thus the urban French rap scene is infused with Caribbean and North African languages and cultures; in Quebec, as Sarkar, Winer and Sarkar (2003) show, rappers draw on standard and non-standard English and French, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and Arabic to make statements about ethnic, racial and linguistic identity, using multilingual code-switching to produce new, hybrid identities: “Tout moune qui talk trash kiss mon black ass du nord." And in Libreville, Gabon, rappers use “relexified French” including “borrowings from Gabonese languages, languages of migration, and English (standard and non-standard, but especially slang) ” as well as verlan[2] and “Libreville popular speech and neologisms” (p.116),so that they are “inserted into large networks of communication that confer on them a plurality of identities” using a wide “diversity of languages with their variants, along with their functioning as markers of identity (of being Gabonese, African, or an urbanite) ” (Auzanneau, 2002, p.120):
And across East/Southeast Asia, numerous cross-influences and collaborations are also emerging, mixing English and local languages. Thus Hong Kong DJ Tommy’s compilation, ‘Respect for Da Chopstick Hip Hop’ - the title itself, of course, a play on global (Respect/ Da) and local (Chopstick Hip Hop) elements - features MC Yan from Hong Kong, K-One, MC Ill and Jaguar from Japan, and Meta and Joosuc from Korea, with tracks sung in English, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. Too Phat’s collaborative track, 6 Mcs, on their CD 360°, includes tracks from Joe Flizzow and Malique from Malaysia, Weapon X from Australia, Freestyle (US), Vandal (Canada) and Promoe (Sweden). These are some of the circuits of language use, play and invention that are the new language communities, subcultural empires that identify across national and linguistic boundaries, that borrow, shift, mix and remake language in a new state of flow and flux.
Bibliography
1. Akindes, Fay Yokomizo. 2001. Sudden rush: Na Mele Paleoleo (Hawaiian Rap) as liberatory discourse. Discourse 23 (1) 82-98.
2. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3. Auzanneau, M (2002) Rap in Libreville, Gabon: An urban sociolinguistic space. In. A-P Durand (Ed) Black, Blanc, Beur : Rap music and hip-hop culture in the Francophone world . Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press. (pp 106-123).
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5. Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene . London: Routledge.
6. Canagarajah, Suresh. 1999a. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. Canagarajah, Suresh. 1999b On EFL teachers, awareness and agency. ELT Journal 53 (3) 207-214.
8. Claiborne, R. (1983). The life and times of the English language: The history of our marvellous tongue . London: Bloomsbury.