Celebrating Local Knowledge on Language and Education (A Special Issue of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education)

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 243–259 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Reconstructing Local Knowledge Suresh Canagarajah Baruch College of the City University of New York It is when a discourse forgets that it is placed that it tries to speak for everybody else. (Stuart Hall, 1997, p. 36)

The term “local knowledge” has been with us for some time, its more conspicuous example being the title of Geertz’s (1983) book. But it has acquired its critical edge only in the last decade or so, with the scholarship of movements such as cultural studies and postcolonialism. Though I will problematize this term in the following discussion to grapple with its complexity, it is good to start with some familiar assumptions. The term has acquired different currency in diverse domains of discourse: • In the anthropological sense, it refers to the beliefs and orientations emerging from the social practices of a community through its history (see Geertz, 1983). These beliefs have their own rationale and validity, though they may differ from the knowledge forms valued at the global level. • In the social sense, it contrasts with the official knowledge informing the policies and procedures of various institutions (legal, fiscal, political). People generally develop extra-institutional (or “vernacular”) discourses in their everyday life about how to negotiate these relations in their own terms (see Barton & Hamilton, 1998). • In the academic sense, it refers to knowledge that diverges from what is established or legitimized in the disciplines (see Foucault, 1972). The beliefs that do not fall within the established paradigms continue to circulate unofficially at the local level among smaller groups. • In the professional sense, practitioners develop a knowledge of accomplishing their work in ways that are not acknowledged or recommended by the authorities/experts. Perhaps this is how we in language teaching know this term best. The knowledge generated in our daily contexts of work about effective strategies of Requests for reprints should be sent to Suresh Canagarajah, Baruch College of the City University of New York, English Department, 11 Lexington Circle, Matawan, NJ 07747. E-mail: [email protected]

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language learning and teaching may not enjoy professional or scholarly recognition (see, for example, Canagarajah, 1993; Pennycook, 1989). In all these domains, there are certain common assumptions that characterize the term. Local knowledge is context bound, community specific, and nonsystematic because it is generated ground up through social practice in everyday life.

A STORY OF DENIGRATION Despite recent efforts to perceive local knowledge in nonpejorative terms, in many circles it is still treated as received wisdom and unexamined beliefs that are parochial, irrational, or backward. Even the sometimes romanticized orientations to local knowledge—such as magic, folklore, and/or myth—show a subtle inequality with scientific knowledge. What has led to this low estimation? Perhaps there is something fundamental in processes of knowledge construction that explains this bias. Generalization, systematization, and model building involve a certain amount of abstraction that filters out the variability of experience in diverse contexts. The more we move beyond the surface level contingencies of performance, the closer we are supposed to be in defining the invariable deep structures of competence (as we know well in our own field of linguistics). Eventually, the phenomenon we are describing is removed from its locality, the structure is reduced of its social and cultural “thickness,” and the particularity of experience informing the model is suppressed as unruly or insignificant. Furthermore, such activities of knowledge formation are not innocent, nonpartisan, or value-free. There is the question as to whose perspectives shape interpretation and analysis. The establishment of operative knowledge in any society always involves contestation. What is left out is the local knowledge that constitutes the perspectives and practices of the disempowered. At any rate, the orthodoxy will itself generate opposition and deviation at the local level through the sheer process of subjects attempting to define their independence. Thus we find pockets of local knowledge that characterize the beliefs and practices of minority communities in different historical periods. In precolonial Asia, for example, we can identify the hidden oppositional discourses of the untouchables against the upper castes, the lay against the priestly circles, and the vassals against the landowners (see Adas, 1992; Khare, 1984; Scott, 1990). These are just a few manifestations of the interconnection between knowledge and power in human history. But the most systematic and concerted campaign to denigrate local knowledge at the global level begins with the movement of modernism. Inspired by the values of enlightenment and resulting in empirical science, this movement has led to the suppression of diversity. The values that were important for this movement were universality, standardization, and systematicity, all for the end of predictability, ef-

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ficiency, and, eventually, progress (see Dussel, 1998). From this perspective, variability, contingency, and difference were a problem. As modernism establishes geopolitical networks and a world economy that foster its vision of life, all communities are pressed into a uniform march to attain progress. Those who stubbornly insist on maintaining their own vision of “progress” or “reason” face the danger of being isolated, impoverished, and discriminated against. Some read in this history a process of time conquering place (see Bhabha, 1994, pp. 212–235; Kaplan, 1996; Mignolo, 2000). Constructs such as worldview, reason, and culture are measured according to their “maturity” in time. The distinction between being civilized and primitive is based on time. Localities are ranked hierarchically according to the phases they have to pass through to reach the advanced stage representing modernity. All that a community has to do is jettison the idiosyncrasies associated with its locale—the vestiges of one’s stubborn backwardness—and adopt the values that define progress. The parallel movement of colonialism may be considered to have spread the values of modernism beyond Europe in a more direct and invasive fashion. The local knowledge of colonized communities began to be suppressed with missionary zeal in the name of civilization. In spreading the enlightenment values, European powers set up their institutions of governance, jurisprudence, health, and education, which systematically suppressed local knowledge in diverse domains. In what has come to be labeled “a denial of coevalness,” European nations refused to acknowledge that the divergent cultural practices of other communities could have a parallel life of equal validity (see Mignolo, 2000). There are recorded instances of public debates between British educators and local Hindu pundits in my hometown of Sri Lanka, where the former attempted to prove the error in local knowledge in fields such as astronomy, geography, and medicine (see Chelliah, 1922). There was no effort made to understand that the local Ayurvedic medical tradition, for example, was based on different values and principles, and that there was no common point of reference to compare it with the Western allopathic system. By default, the comparison was done in the terms of the powerful, and local knowledge was made to appear silly. It should be clear at this point that the science of modernism is not a value-free, culture-neutral, pure rationality that is of universal relevance. This orientation to knowledge in objective and impersonal terms draws from certain specific cultural traditions (i.e., Judeo-Christian, Renaissance; see Huff, 1993; Merton, 1970). The reason why this form of science developed in Europe at this time can also be accounted for in terms of 17th-century sociohistoric conditions (see Hessen, 1971; Jacob, 1976). Modernist knowledge is therefore a form of local knowledge—local to communities in Europe. It is not hard to understand this paradox of a global knowledge that is in fact local to a specific community. If we acknowledge that all knowledge-producing activities are context bound and collaborative, scientific knowledge also had to have a shaping influence from its locality of production. But

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enlightenment is one of the most ambitious attempts of a local knowledge to extend its dominion in global proportions. Its modus operandi was to absorb other forms of knowledge on its way as it presented itself as valid for everyone (see Hall, 1997). To the extent that this strategy of hegemony is successful, we fail to recognize its local, contextualized character. We accept it as ours. It may sound surprising, then, that the challenge for local knowledge is not from global knowledge, universal knowledge, or transcendental knowledge. It is simply from another form of local knowledge, that is, that which belongs to the more powerful communities. It is precisely for this reason that the inequality between intellectual traditions has to be interrogated without presumptions about the universal validity or legitimacy of any single form of knowledge. There is something unethical about one tradition of local knowledge lording it over other forms of local knowledge.

THE RISE OF THE LOCAL? Has all this changed in the postmodern conditions of present time? After all, is not postmodernism essentially anti-enlightenment in values? Do not celebrated contemporary notions such as hybridity, pluralism, and multiculturalism provide a space for the local from diverse backgrounds? It is an interesting irony that the success of modernism in integrating all communities into the global whole has created greater visibility for the local. Technological advances have brought the world closer, developing a keener awareness of previously remote communities. The advances of media have channeled the voices and images from localities far and wide into one’s very home. Internet and other modalities of communication fuse diverse codes and discourses from different localities. The industrial work space has been decentered to include a network of communities that provide labor, expertise, and resources for production. The need for expanded business opportunities has sent multinationals scurrying to previously unknown localities to market their products with sophisticated cultural understanding. Even the nation-building agendas and border-drawing activities undertaken during colonialism to suit Eurocentric norms and interests have led to uprooting many communities (some of which were already transplanted for reasons of labor, trade, and slavery), leading to diasporas, which pluralize life everywhere. We live in a world where languages and cultures jostle against each other and mix fluidly, irrespective of which locality they come from. Can we then say that space is gaining over time—in a reversal of the dialectic unleashed by modernism? But we have to be careful not to exaggerate these changes. We have to treat postmodern globalism as not representing a revolutionary shift from earlier conditions, but rather a revised continuation of the modernist project of globalization. Whether its origins are 30 years ago (Harvey, 1990) or 300 years ago (Giddens, 1990), or even from pre-Modern times (Robertson, 1992), globalization has

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worked to the disadvantage of local knowledge. The contemporary postmodernist movement simply adopts a different strategy to carry out the interests of the status quo. If modernist globalization tried to eradicate local knowledge, postmodern globalization incorporates it in its own terms. If modernism suppressed difference, postmodern globalization works through localities by appropriating difference. This strategy of accommodating local knowledge is necessitated partly because of the consequences of modernity—which, as we saw earlier, did create a space for the local. In addition, the resistance generated against modernism by different localities has to be managed strategically with a different modus operandi if the status quo is to be maintained. Therefore, what we now see are more complex relationships between time and space. We see interesting paradoxes where some parts of the East appear to be practicing the modernist vision of technological progress more successfully than the West. However, power is still not shared equally in the new dispensation. The nations and institutions that orchestrate local resources are still merely a handful, not very different from the powers of the colonial period (see Amsden, 2002). Despite the myriad symbols that pluralize contemporary cultural and communicative life, economy still shows sharp disparities between the rich and the poor (see Jameson, 1998; Miyoshi, 1998). Therefore, the local finds representation only according to the purposes and forms permitted by the powerful. Consider, for example, the way fashionable postmodernist discourses of pluralism work these days. Although the notion of hybridity gives life to the local with one hand, it takes away its radical potential by hyphenating it with other Western or global cultural constructs. The specificity and particularity of the local is lost in being fused or recycled with other elements from Western society. Furthermore, postmodern discourses such as multiple subject positions (in describing identity), heteroglossia (in describing codes), and multiculturalism (in describing community) complicate and muddle differences, defining these social constructs in less materially grounded terms. Scholars from non-Western communities point to the irony that just when they gain hope that there is going to be an appreciation of their identity and values, they feel cheated to find that the currently popular discourses reduce the significance of their particularity (see Moya, 1997). In fact, even current forms of postcolonialism in the West are treated by many periphery scholars as blunting the critical edge of local knowledge (see Bahri, 1997). Postcolonial cultural and literary products that are celebrated in academic and popular discourses are picked according to the interests of the dominant communities in a way that does not disturb their hegemony. This is not to say that we don’t enjoy greater opportunities today for the celebration of the local. The fact that we can have a special topic of this nature in this journal is due to the heightened awareness of the local in contemporary academic discourses. However, we cannot be complacent that postmodern globalization truly liberates the local by virtue of the cultural and technological changes we see

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around us. In a recent issue of TESOL Quarterly, which explores the implications of globalization for language teaching, some of the authors consider the Internet and computer-mediated communication as validating periphery Englishes, empowering non-native students, and democratizing social relations (see Murray, 2000; Warschauer, 2000). Though these scholars do make some obligatory qualifications, they are largely enthusiastic about the possibilities of revolutionary learning and communication. But we have to critically engage with postmodern conditions to make a space for local knowledge in terms of disempowered communities. There is work to be done in developing transformative pedagogies that would help construct more egalitarian relationships in education and society.

REDISCOVERING THE LOCAL Despite the designs of the global in the past centuries, we can take heart in the fact that local knowledge has not been totally eradicated. The local has negotiated, modified, and absorbed the global in a unique way. As Appadurai (1996) pointed out, the local realizations of the global have not always followed the expectations of the metropole. Dominant discourses have been taken over selectively and, sometimes, superficially to facilitate a convenient coexistence with local cultures. I have described elsewhere how successive orthodoxies in our field, such as communicative approaches and task-oriented pedagogies, have been translated by local teachers and students in Sri Lankan classrooms to suit the styles of teacher-fronted instruction practiced from precolonial times (see Canagarajah, 1999). English language teaching (ELT) professional discourse in local communities represents a fascinating mix of the center and periphery, the new and the old. This realization presents both good news and bad news for our project of recovering the local. Although local knowledge has not completely died, it is also not pure. Local knowledge has not been waiting undistorted and whole for scholars to come and discover it. It has been going through many locally initiated and globally enforced changes all this time. For example, the local has been changing its positionality in relation to the changing practices of the global. It has done so partly to resist the global, partly for its own survival. Furthermore, after the long history of globalization, almost no community can claim today that it is not integrated into the global network of communication, travel, or trade, and transformed in the process. It is but realistic to adopt the position that the local is a relational and fluid construct. We have to identify the many changes the local has been going through if we are to develop a suitable project to reconstruct it for our purposes. Paralleling the appropriation of the global by the local, the global has absorbed local knowledge and resources for its own purposes. If the former is a mixing initiated from the ground up, the latter works top-down. Consider the claim by Ra’ad (2001) that the first Greek and then Latin civilizations absorbed the linguistic re-

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sources of Etruscan and Canaanite communities, eventually leaving no trace of the latter cultures. The provocative thesis by Bernal (1987) regarding the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical culture points to another example of how the local has been taken over by the more powerful without proper acknowledgment. In fact, the residue left after the looting by the global is increasingly hard to recover. Rather than proceeding further into local communities to recover local knowledge, paradoxically, we have to sometimes burrow deeper into the global to extricate recycled bits of the local. More problematic is the possibility that the very geographical ground of the local has been shifting during globalization. With communities uprooted for many reasons, or willingly crossing their traditional borders, their shared culture and history have become transnational. Diaspora communities do not have a consolidated physical locality on which to build their local knowledge. In the case of quintessential diasporas—such as the Kurdish or Sikh communities, which do not have an autonomous traditional homeland (see Cohen, 1997)—their locality is paradoxically translocal. The local knowledge of these communities is at best a shared intersubjective reality, constituted by commonly cherished discourses and practices. More recent exiles—such as my own Sri Lankan Tamil community, with more members living in cities such as Toronto and London than in their homeland of Jaffna, for which a separatist struggle is being waged—are also constructing new, expanded, mediated forms of locality through literature, news media, and the arts. As Appadurai (1996) put it, “The many displaced, deterritorialized, and transient populations that constitute today’s ethnoscapes are engaged in the construction of locality, as a structure of feeling, often in the face of the erosion, dispersal, and implosion of neighborhoods as coherent social formations” (p. 199). If we can grant the possibility that the local is still being “constructed” (as Appadurai puts it)—that it is not something of the past, preexisting and rooted in a specific geographical domain—we can also consider the local knowledge constructed by many virtual or invisible communities in the cyberspace and other media of contemporary communication. In fact, many exile communities such as the Tibetans and Tamils enjoy a stronger sense of identity and richer knowledge base through the Internet. Consider also other subcultural groups and special interest circles (of alternative lifestyle or eccentric social causes) who are developing their “virtual neighborhoods” and shared knowledge in cyberspace. In such novel domains of postmodern communication, we will readily acknowledge that locality is a discourse. But even for other more geographically rooted traditional communities, the local is largely discursive. Both insiders and outsiders to the community have formed notions, values, and attitudes about the “local,” which now become part of local knowledge. The sediments of texts, talk, poetry, art, memory, desire, dreams, and many unstated assumptions that people have developed through history about their community define the local. I marvel at the different apologetic traditions local scholars in my Tamil community have developed from time to time to

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resist the thrusts of modernism. They have argued that local intellectual traditions are a precursor to the values of enlightenment thinking and anticipate it, that they transcend modernism and have the answers for the problems created in the West, and that they operate on a totally different rationale and do not relate to modernism in any way (see Canagarajah, 2002). Such theorizations show how the discourse on local knowledge is relational—defined in relation to global knowledge, perhaps based on what is strategic for local interests at different periods. How do we work through these periodic layers of interpretation in history to understand local knowledge? Is there any possibility of ever reaching an “authentic” indigenous knowledge as we work through these interpretations of an interpretation? We must not think of local knowledge as transparent or grounded, which can be unproblematically recovered without interpretive effort from a foundational source. Moreover, as the global holds sway among all communities in the world, we have lost any neutral or objective position from which to perceive the local. We are increasingly interpreting the local through global theoretical lenses. This is inescapable if we grant the epistemological dominance Western intellectual paradigms have held for centuries. As we conduct knowledge worldwide largely in terms of enlightenment values, even local scholars (often trained in Western academic institutions) have to use the dominant tools in their field for celebrating the local. The local can be defined, once again, only in relation to global knowledge, as the apologists of earlier times did. We can understand the superhuman interpretive effort it would take to work against the dominant paradigms that cast local knowledge in a negative light. One has to break the available hermeneutic molds in order to empower local knowledge. An additional challenge in reconstructing local knowledge for contemporary purposes is that it has remained for centuries in an undertheorized state, in the form of unreflected assumptions or everyday practices. In fact, since many traditional communities are largely oral (even when they have had a written tradition like my Tamil community), valuable stocks of local knowledge are lost even for the local people. Getting passed on from mouth to mouth through successive generations places constraints on the extent to which local knowledge can be developed in a sustained and critical manner. Remember, also, that these marginalized communities have not always enjoyed the material resources to develop or even preserve their knowledge in formal terms. Given the fluid and relational character of local knowledge as articulated previously, it should be easy to understand that it is not a unitary or homogenous construct. The local is as diverse as global knowledge (as evident from the modernist and postmodernist versions described earlier). There are diverse practices, discourses, and ideological tendencies that constitute local knowledge. Even in precolonial education, for example, the Tamil community has featured different pedagogical traditions (Jeyasuriya, n.d.). Yes, we did have a product-oriented guru-shishya method, which featured some of the rigid forms of teacher-fronted

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education. But we also had the nonformal apprentice system of education that now resonates well with such fashionable pedagogies as the legitimate peripheral participation of Lave and Wenger (1991). This diversity is similar to the gurukkal and pathsala traditions in the Hindu Indian culture and the madrasseh and makkab traditions of the Islamic world. It is not surprising, then, that the local can contain chauvinistic tendencies. In fact, the onslaught of the global has been forcing the local to retreat further into more stubborn and unreasonable positions in a desperate attempt to maintain its independence. The educational enterprises of fundamentalist circles in the Islamic world today of developing controlled forms of religious schooling in their madrassehs, result in suppressing secular and critical thinking. Understandably, this is done in order to safeguard traditional values and protect students from encounters with other threatening intellectual traditions. Unfortunately, this strategy leads to an extreme form of localism. Celebrating local knowledge, therefore, does not mean holding up a mythical form of classical knowledge as possessing the answers to all contemporary questions or representing resources that are always progressive and radical. Local knowledge has to be veritably reconstructed—through an ongoing process of critical reinterpretation, counter-discursive negotiation, and imaginative application.

TOWARD A PRACTICE OF LOCALIZING KNOWLEDGE It should be clear from the previous characterization that what we mean by local knowledge is not a philosophical paradigm or a body of ideas (these are not unproblematically available for us now). Celebrating local knowledge refers to adopting a practice. We treat our location (in all its relevant senses: geographical, social, geopolitical) as the ground on which to begin our thinking. Local knowledge is not a product constituted by the beliefs and practices of the past. Local knowledge is a process—a process of negotiating dominant discourses and engaging in an ongoing construction of relevant knowledge in the context of our history and social practice. What is important is the angle from which we conduct this practice—that is, from the locality that shapes our social and intellectual practice. This is nothing new. As we discussed above, all knowledge is local. We can interpret other knowledge constructs and social formations only from our local positionality. This is our hermeneutic bias. The difference is that while we previously adopted a positionality based on Western or modernist paradigms that were imposed on everybody, we are now going to think from the alternate position of our own locality, which is more relevant for our community life and speaks to our interests. Ideally, this epistemological practice envisions not just changing the content of knowledge, but the terms of knowledge construction. Rather than merely replacing one set of constructs with another, this practice aims to relentlessly critique and democratize knowledge construction.

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In some ways, what I (and the other authors in this issue) have developed is an amplification of what has already been put forward by minority scholars in regard to oppositional discourse practices. Remember the politics of location articulated by feminist scholars, borrowing a metaphor from Adrienne Rich (1986). Being sensitive to the situatednesss of one’s own subjectivity compels one to sympathetically understand the struggles experienced by others in other contexts, while also appreciating the differences (see Kaplan, 1998). Standpoint epistemology is another articulation in feminist circles of the importance of knowledge making from one’s locality (Hartsock, 1990). The power of location is widely appreciated by minority ethnic scholars as well. bell hooks’s (1989) imploration to “talk back” to dominant discourses with an awareness of one’s roots is one such articulation. In more recent scholarship, especially in heavy-duty philosophical discourse, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (1994) and Walter Mignolo (2000) speak of the locus of enunciation. To exemplify the difference location will spell for scholarly discourse, we might say that although postmodernism is a critique of enlightenment from a Eurocentric positionality (and may have its own usefulness), a more radical critique informed by colonialism, race, and geopolitics (as articulated in this article) can be expected to arise from the standpoint of colonized communities. This practice of localized knowledge construction involves several important components. I will describe them as forming a deconstructive and reconstructive project. These two projects inform each other. They constitute an ongoing engagement with knowledge that must deal reflexively with the new questions raised by their own activity. Such a practice involves the following: • Deconstructing dominant or established knowledge to understand its local shaping. Our own local positionality provides a demystifying perspective from which to conduct this critique. This activity involves much more than showing that the dominant constructs are biased toward the culture and history of Western communities. Appreciating the rationale and validity of dominant constructs in their contexts of origins, we are able to translate the features that are useful for other localities with greater insight. Thus, this involves a reconstructive activity as well. We must interpret established knowledge for local needs and interests. Although this process of appropriation has occurred somewhat unconsciously in the past, we will now undertake this enterprise more reflectively. • Reconstructing local knowledge for contemporary needs. Any knowledge construct has to be constantly reinterpreted to speak to changing conditions. As new questions emerge in the social and geopolitical domains, we have to consider how local knowledge would answer them. Similarly, this reconstructive process can creatively redefine the disciplinary paradigms of the mainstream. We should not underestimate local knowledge to be of relevance only for local needs. However, this reinterpretation is effective when it is accompanied by a deconstructive project as well. We have to critique traditional knowledge to unravel the limiting

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influences from feudal, caste, religious, and other chauvinistic contexts of production. Of course, the ways in which colonialism has distorted its character also needs to be critically addressed. We must note that this reflexive practice is well served by the “double vision” or “in-betweenness” that postcolonial people are gifted with (Bhabha, 1994). Compelled to become aware of nonlocal discourses from the history of colonization, while also enjoying a local subjectivity, we have a dual consciousness that provides a critical vantage point for this intercultural engagement. This consciousness also enables us to move beyond the myopic entrapment of the local. Celebrating local knowledge should not lead to ghettoizing minority communities or forcing them into an ostrich-like intellectual existence. A clear grounding in our location gives us the confidence to engage with knowledge from other locations as we deconstruct and reconstruct them for our purposes. This engagement should extend to a sympathetic understanding of suppressed knowledge traditions from other colonized communities as well. In a sense, such an epistemological practice would lead us beyond the global and local dichotomy. We cannot indulge in an easy reversal of former hierarchies to posit one tradition of local knowledge as superior to others. Though we start from an awareness of geopolitical inequalities (which are historically real), our intellectual practice leads to translocal engagement of wider relevance. Before I illustrate this project from the articles published in this issue, I must point out that scholars from different postcolonial regions are theorizing such localized epistemological practices under different labels and metaphors these days. Ioan Davies (1998), working from the African context, uses the metaphor of fetishization: “an alternate reading of fetish is not that of fake, but of a double meaning. … By living in the slippage between the dominance and the subordination of the surface, a mutation is being created with new languages and new possibilities” (pp. 140–141). This description may serve as a rough gloss for what Bhabha calls “in-betweenness” as he works from the Indian context. Hannerz’s (1997) notion of creolization, borrowed from the linguistic process whereby colonial languages are transformed in the shape of the vernacular, is employed by Caribbean scholars to describe local appropriations of dominant knowledge (see Glissant, 1997). Moreiras (1998), theorizing from the Hispanic context, uses the label “Second Latin Americanism” (to distinguish it from previous colonial discourses on the region) for “a kind of contingent epistemic performativity … an epistemic social practice of solidarity, with singular claims originating within whatever in Latin American societies still remains in a position of vestigial or residual exteriority, that is, whatever actively refuses to interiorize its subalternatization with respect to the global system” (p. 97). We can discern in Moreiras’s prose the struggle to capture the local that eludes the all-embracing grasp of the global. Mignolo (2000) comes up with a huge collection of neolo-

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gisms to capture localized epistemic practices by reviewing a range of postcolonial scholars: that is, border thinking, double critique, transculturation, pluritopic thinking, new mestiza consciousness, and even barbarian theorizing.

ACADEMIC PUBLISHING AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE Though there is a burgeoning interest in local knowledge in diverse academic circles in the West, publishing practices present a major barrier to its representation. As we know well, academic publishing is a gatekeeping activity that legitimizes what passes for established knowledge. Due to a variety of material and discursive reasons, academic journals end up representing the knowledge of a narrow circle of Western scholars. The prestigious journals in almost every discipline are published in the English language and from Western locations (see Canagarajah, 2002, for a range of recent statistics). Needless to say, editorial committees, reviewers, and authors come predominantly from Euro-American scholarly centers. In such a situation, there are insurmountable problems facing periphery scholars in representing their knowledge in scholarly fora. They do not enjoy the resources (time, funds, writing or printing facilities), support networks (seasoned peer reviewers, collaborators, and mentors), and access (information about suitable journals and their publishing conventions, news about recent publications or research) to compete for space in mainstream journals. If those are some of the nondiscursive problems facing them, they also find the accepted discourse conventions of center-based journals alien to and ideologically uncongenial for their purposes. Despite new writing styles being increasingly represented in mainstream journals, the discourse is still overwhelmingly transparent, rationalistic, and detached, following enlightenment values of knowledge construction. All this leads to the local knowledge of the West gaining established status in many disciplines. At best, knowledge from other locations may find representation according to the perspectives and purposes of Western scholars. Publishing is thus an important mechanism by which the intellectual hegemony of the West is maintained in a global scale today. As we provide space for local knowledge in this issue, we realize that tackling the nondiscursive (or infrastructural) bases of publishing inequality is a more difficult, long-term project. Published in the United States, and drawing heavily from the expertise of scholars in Western academic institutions, this journal is itself caught in the nexus of intellectual geopolitics. Despite widely publicizing our Call for Papers, we have not been able to reach many far-flung communities that have limited access to the Internet, telecommunication, and foreign publications. In fact, as we go to print, I continue to receive inquiries from scholars who have just seen our Call in their locations. The best we have been able to do is to attract the attention of local scholars with relatively better access to mainstream publishing and academic networks. Thus we bring knowledge and practices from western Brazil, Iran, China, Hong Kong, and Ja-

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pan, in addition to the Dominican Republic and Louisiana. This issue can only demonstrate how local knowledge can productively complicate a few representative fields in our discipline—that is, literacy practices (de Souza), sociolinguistics and language death studies (Ryon), English-language teaching (Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, and Riazi), and bilingual education (Pita and Utakis). Attracting local scholars and scholarship is only half the problem. To negotiate the established conventions of research writing, our contributors have had to adopt creative modes of presentation. Theorizing the new imperatives in teaching English globally from the personal knowledge of their learning experience in their communities, Lin and her collaborators adopt a narrative mode of presentation. Their discourse is also reflexive as they consider how their multiple subjectivities (constructed through English and their local languages, at home and in the West) inform their theorizing. Ryon has to tap local knowledge on Cajun French from stories, songs, and poems, as dominant publishing media do not represent the aspirations of this community. Mary Curran, in her review of books that resist “linguistic genocide,” talks about the unconventional forms of writing adopted by Skuttnab-Kangas, Khubchandani, and Krishnaswamy and Burde to disturb the complacency of academic discourse. de Souza would have liked to include colorful pictures from Kashinawá writers, as befitting their multimodal literacy, but considering the constraints in production and space in our graphocentric media, he has desisted from doing so. The studies in this issue display that locality is indeed relational, as each author adopts a stance relevant to her or his own context. Though de Souza’s article displays local knowledge in its classic anthropological sense, as he considers the literacy practices and interpretive strategies developed from precolonial times by the Kashinawá people, he is conscious of this knowledge being marginalized by different domains of globalization—that is, the Brazilian state and its educational practices, the graphocentric tradition from modernity, and academic theorizations of literacy. For Lin and her colleagues, local knowledge translates as their personal learning experience in the context of pedagogical practices at home in East and West Asia. But this is already a glocal knowledge (an increasingly popular term to refer to the local manifestations of the global), because the language in question is English, and the pedagogical practices display a mix of traditions. Ryon’s articulation of local knowledge may seem odd as it comes from a community within the recesses of the geopolitical center. But the Cajun community experiences its own challenges from the hegemony of English and globalization, perhaps more intensely than communities that are geographically distant from the United States. Finally, the most paradoxical form of local knowledge is articulated by Pita and Utakis, as their locality is that of the translocal Dominican community. But, as I argued earlier, diasporic and migrant communities today are constructing virtual localities that are of increasing significance. We have to take seriously their aspirations for a transnational community and identity as we construct suitable policies of bilingual education.

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As these scholars negotiate the global and local, adopting the interests of marginalized communities, we see how they gain critical insights into the limitations of dominant knowledge. de Souza critiques long-established literacy assumptions of the West to reveal their word-based bias; Ryon reveals the ideological slant in language death studies that ignore community resistance and enforce assimilation; Lin and her coauthors question the dichotomized, hierarchical constructs that categorize speakers and communities unequally in ELT; and Pita and Utakis expose the bias toward monolingual competence in the terms of the host community in the prevalent models of bilingual education. The damages from using these limited constructs are very clear. When graphocentric literacies are enforced by modern schooling on the Kashinawá, they not only lose their literacy practices but also the ways of representing themselves and their worldview embodied by their texts. Positivistic sociolinguistic scholarship not only fails to deploy its resources to foster the community aspiration of maintaining Cajun French, but may in fact exacerbate the reproduction of homogeneity in a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. “Native speaker” norms of identity and proficiency disempower learners with a sense of inadequacy, preventing local communities from developing their pedagogical and linguistic resources in their own terms. Biased models of bilingual schooling make Dominican students unfit for education at both home and abroad, while constructing identities that are unsuitable for their transnational life. Such ramifications should serve to convince us that there are serious social motivations behind localizing our disciplinary constructs. Celebrating local knowledge is not for the purpose of adopting an intellectual affirmative action or joining the academic bandwagon of multiculturalism. As these scholars strive to make a space for their chosen communities in our discipline, we see how this intellectual practice paradoxically transcends its location to address pressing concerns elsewhere. The multimodal literacy of the Kashinawá provides interpretive models to understand the fashionable multiliteracies emergent in postmodern communication (fusing texts, graphics, and sound in the Internet, for example). Ryon’s exploration goes to the heart of research in sociolinguistics, showing the importance of addressing issues of power and representation in our studies as we struggle to revitalize marginalized languages everywhere. Pita and Utakis go beyond New York City schools to speak to educational concerns of multilingual communities in Asia and Africa, who are still struggling to develop more egalitarian policies of literacy. Lin and her coauthors develop more complex definitions of identity and competence for the new mission of teaching English as a global language. Thus the practice of localizing knowledge moves beyond the deconstructive project of exposing the biases and limitations of disciplinary constructs to reconstruct paradigms that are meaningful for global as well as local life.

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CONCLUSION If even the few studies represented in this issue succeed in showing the critical and transformative power of local knowledge, this should convince us of the value of providing space for other localities in academic knowledge construction. We hope that the issue serves to prove the importance of maintaining an ongoing conversation with forms of local knowledge—if not to respect the aspirations and independence of marginalized communities, then at least for our common academic pursuit of developing valid knowledge constructs. The local will always have a questioning effect on established paradigms, deriving from the nonsystematized, unorthodox, and simply messy features of its existential practice. Already, situated scholarship has exposed how fields central to our interest have had a questionable formation: The orientation to language and teaching as a value-free, instrumental, pragmatic activity in ELT is rooted in the history of teaching English to colonized communities (see Pennycook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992); the narrow literary canons now being questioned were formed for the purpose of teaching English in colonies such as India and forming a docile citizenry (see Viswanathan, 1989). Similar imperialistic motivations have been uncovered in fields such as anthropology (see Asad, 1973) and area studies (Moreiras, 1998). As many disciplines are redefining their orientation these days, especially under the changes initiated by postmodern globalization (see Appadurai, 2000, for anthropology; Jay, 2001, for literary studies; and Robertson, 1997, for sociology), it is important to consider how knowledge from diverse localities can inform new epistemological practices. Ironically, the benefits of this negotiation are clearer for the “hard” sciences. Research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (Stolberg, 2001), Centers for Disease Control (Hitt, 2001), and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Rosenthal, 2001) are now experimenting with folk medical practices from other cultures to tap their resources for purposes in the West. Paradoxically, local knowledge can motivate conversations between different localities, answering questions that transcend one’s own borders. It is when we acknowledge the localness of our own knowledge that we have the proper humility to engage productively with other knowledge traditions. The assumption that one’s knowledge is of sole universal relevance does not encourage conversation. It is possible to develop a pluralistic mode of thinking through which we celebrate different cultures and identities, and yet engage in projects common to our shared humanity. Breaking away from the history of constructing a globalized totality with uniform knowledge and hierarchical community, we should envision building networks of multiple centers that develop diversity as a universal project and encourage an actively negotiated epistemological tradition.

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REFERENCES Adas, M. (1992). From avoidance to confrontation: Peasant protest in precolonial and colonial Southeast Asia. In N. Dirks (Ed.), Colonialism and culture (pp. 89–126). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Amsden, A. H. (2002, January 31). Why are globalizers so provincial? The New York Times, p. A25. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (2000). Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture, 12(1), 1–20. Asad, T. (Ed.). (1973). Anthropology and the colonial encounter. London: Ithaca. Bahri, D. (1997). Marginally off-center: Postcolonialism in the teaching machine. College English, 59(3), 277–298. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London & New York: Routledge. Bernal, M. (1987). The fabrication of ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (Vol. 1 of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (1993). Up the garden path: Second language writing approaches, local knowledge, and pluralism. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 301–306. Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chelliah, J. V. (1922). A century of English education. Vaddukoddai: Jaffna College. Cohen, R. (1997). Global diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Davies, I. (1998). Negotiating African culture: Toward a decolonization of the Fetish. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 125–145). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dussel, E. (1998). Beyond Eurocentrism: The world system and the limits of modernity. In F. Miyoshi & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 3–31). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The discourse on language. In M. Foucault (Ed.), The archeology of knowledge (pp. 215–237). New York: Pantheon. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. London: Polity. Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of relation. (B. Wing, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hall, S. (1997). The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization, and the world system (pp. 19–40). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hannerz, U. (1997). Scenarios for peripheral cultures. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization, and the world system (pp. 107–128). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartsock, N. (1990). Rethinking modernism: Minority vs. majority theories. In A. R. J. Mohamed & D. Lloyd (Eds.), The nature and the context of minority discourse (pp. 17–36). New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, England: Blackwell. Hessen, B. (1971). The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia. New York: Howard Fertig. Hitt, J. (2001, May 6). Building a better blood sucker. The New York Times Magazine, 92–96. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press. Huff, T. (1993). The rise of early modern science: Islam, China, and the West. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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Jacob, M. (1976). The Newtonians and the English revolution: 1689–1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, F. (1998). Notes on globalization as a philosophical issue. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 54–80). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jay, P. (2001). Beyond discipline? Globalization and the future of English. PMLA, 116(1), 32–47. Jeyasuriya, J. E. (n.d.). The indigenous religious traditions in education. In Educational policies and progress during British rule in Ceylon (pp. 4–23). Colombo, Sri Lanka: Associated Educational Publishers. Kaplan, C. (1996). Questions of travel: Postmodern discourses of displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Khare, R. S. (1984). The untouchable as himself: Ideology, identity, and pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Merton, R. (1970). Science, technology, and society in seventeenth-century England. New York: Howard Fertig. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miyoshi, M. (1998). “Globalization,” culture, and the university. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 247–273). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moreiras, A. (1998). Global fragments: A second Latin Americanism. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 81–102). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moya, P. (1997). Postmodernism, realism, and the politics of identity: Cherrie Moraga and Chicana feminism. In C. T. Mohanty & M. J. Alexander (Eds.), Feminist geneologies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (pp. 125–150). New York: Routledge. Murray, D. (2000). Protean communication: The language of computer-mediated communication. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 397–422. Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of “method,” interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 589–618. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Ra’ad, B. L. (2001). Primal scenes of globalization: Legacies of Canaan and Etruria. PMLA, 116(1), 89–110. Rich, A. (1986). Blood, bread, and poetry: Selected prose, 1979–1985. New York: Norton. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization. London: Sage. Robertson, R. (1997). Social theory, cultural relativity, and the problem of globality. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization, and the world system (pp. 69–90). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenthal, E. (2001, May 6). Chairman Mao’s cure for cancer. The New York Times Magazine, 70–73. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stolberg, S. G. (2001, May 6). The estrogen alternative. The New York Times Magazine, 108–110. Viswanathan, G. (1989). Masks of conquest. New York: Columbia University Press. Warschauer, M. (2000). The changing global economy and the future of English teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 511–536.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 261–278 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

A Case Among Cases, A World Among Worlds: The Ecology of Writing Among the Kashinawá in Brazil Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza University of São Paulo

This article discusses the conflict between local knowledges and global knowledges in the specific case of indigenous literacy in northwestern Brazil, where global knowledges are represented by the “ideological” (Street, 1984) theories of literacy and “utilitarian” models of writing (Scollon & Scollon, 1995), and local knowledges are represented by the multimodal texts produced by the Kashinawá indigenous community. Whereas “ideological” theories of literacy purport to take into account local knowledges and practices, they are in this case incapable of understanding indigenous multimodality due to what I call a graphocentric habitus. I read this as an indication of the extent to which prevailing literacy theories are not sufficiently aware of their localness; this may be due to their insertion within the colonial difference (Mignolo, 2000) power and knowledge collusion, which tends to “universalize” dominant knowledges and subalternize local knowledges. Key words: literacy, writing, indigenous education, multimodality

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes. (Clifford Geertz, 1983, p. 16)

In this article, I focus my research on Brazilian indigenous writing practices, more specifically on those of the Kashinawá indigenous community, which inhabits the Requests for reprints should be sent to Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, University of São Paulo, Alameda Badejo, 392, Alphaville 11, 06500.000 Santana de Parnaiba SP, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]

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western Amazon region of Brazil and Peru, numbering little more than 4,000, of which 1,200 occupy the Brazilian side of the border in the state of Acre (Aquino & Iglesias, 1994; Monte, n.d., 1996). What most characterizes the written production1 of the Kashinawá, both in Portuguese and in Kashinawá, is the profusion of highly colored visual texts, which accompany their alphabetic writing. In spite of recognizing a possible connection between these texts and the local culture of the Kashinawá (Monte, 1996), the nonindigenous disseminators of literacy and writing in this community do not seem to understand how these multimodal2 texts interact with their local cultural practices. What seems to predominate is the view—prevalent in written cultures—that visual texts are supplementary to and only illustrate a written, alphabetic text. However, if seen as a mere paraphrase of an alphabetic text, the visual text, the resulting multimodality, and the variability and heterogeneity of writing practices in such a culture may be lost. To avoid this, I posit the need for a reappraisal of the status of local indigenous knowledges and their interaction with what are considered to be nonlocal (universal?) theories of literacy and writing on which policies of indigenous education may be unsuspectingly, and therefore, uncritically, based. This is unfortunate in the context of recent proclamation of official recognition of the rights of indigenous communities to establish and run their own schools with their own curricula (see Silva, 1994; Veiga, 1997).3 As such, I propose in this article to read the present situation as one of two conflicting traditions of “local”4 knowledges, the “indigenous” (Kashinawá), and the “universal,” where the latter refers to contemporary theories of literacy and writing wielded by members of academic institutions of the Brazilian urban industrialized and Eurocentric Southeast. This “universal” body often unintentionally has the effect of subalternizing local indigenous knowledges and runs the risk of perpetuating centuries of subjugation of indigenous peoples, in blatant contradiction to the declared objectives of indigenous education. I shall attempt to provincialize (i.e., relocalize; see Chakrabarty, 1992) both conflicting bodies of knowledge, from what Mignolo (2000, p. 18) calls a pluritopic perspective. That is, a perspective located in the interstices of conflicts between “different knowledges and memories”; as such, both bodies may be seen as mutually constitutive as heterogeneous hybrids rather than substantive homogeneous totalities. This is an attempt to alert the disseminators of literacy and writing among indigenous communities against the dangers of “common sense” approaches; it is especially relevant at this time when, as a result of the official recognition of indigenous schools, a spurt of publications of indigenous writing has appeared, largely tutored by well-meaning nonindigenous persons.5 These publications (in Portuguese) are aimed at the reading public of indigenous schools all over the country, and many of them become, in fact, textbooks or models of writing for other indigenous communities. If these books continue unthinkingly to reproduce nonindigenous delocalized models of writing, the proposed objective of

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the indigenous school as a place for the dissemination of local indigenous knowledges will be at risk. “Provinciality” (Chakrabarty, 1992) is present in the theories of literacy built on the oral and written dichotomy in the sense that the dichotomy is a product of a perception based on the local characteristics of the culture(s) of its proponents rather than being a feature of nonliterate cultures themselves; this local perception of literacy, through a knowledge and power collusion, then presents itself as “universal.” In academic discourse, there exists the tradition of criticizing prevailing theories in order to substitute them with others considered more representative or authentic in relation to the data at hand; the discursive mechanism involved in this strategy is that of substituting one set of affirmations with another, as if meaning or value naturally and transparently lies in the affirmations themselves (Fairclough, 1999). To redress this attitude, it becomes necessary to perceive the sociocultural and ideological conditions under which affirmations are produced and meanings constructed. It is with this in mind that analysts such as Bhabha (1994) and Mignolo (2000) emphasize the need to focus on the locus or site of enunciation. In the field of social anthropology, Geertz (1983), referring to the local conditions of the production of meaning as “instruments and encasements,” identified the same need: To an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of distant ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements. One may veil this fact with ecumenical rhetoric or blur it with strenuous theory, but one cannot really make it go away. (p. 4)

This restoration of location, as Bhabha, Mignolo, and Geertz indicate, helps to make audible the silences normally left undisturbed in academic discourses. The restoration of location is necessary as an attempt to restrict or invert the traditional and prevalent drive to universalize in academic knowledge production; with this in mind, my own locus of enunciation lies within a Brazilian academic institution, and across the disciplines of applied linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and postcolonial discourse.6

LOCAL HISTORIES, GLOBAL DESIGNS Mignolo (2000) posits a highly revealing and denunciatory theory of colonial discourse and knowledge production from a Latin American perspective, connecting coloniality to the concept of modernity, and hence to the development of science, modernization, and technology. This process for Mignolo is characterized by the “work” of a historically devastating discursive and ideological mechanism, which he calls “the coloniality of power and the articulation of the colonial difference” (p. 6).

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This mechanism—the cultural basis of European colonization since the 16th century—seeks to subordinate the equal epistemological potentials of various knowledge-producing traditions of those cultures with which the colonial power(s) came into contact. These epistemologies were and are subordinated to the epistemology of the colonizing culture that located them on a lower scale of civilization and progress through what Mignolo (2000) calls the strategies of the denial of coevalness (pp. 283–285) and colonial difference (p. 13). The result of this is that cultural differences have been translated into differences of value, inaugurating a conflict of knowledges and structures of power; this then becomes the basis for legitimizing the subalternization of knowledges and the subjugation of peoples (Mignolo, 2000, p. 16). In the conflict of knowledges and the structures of power, the normal procedure has been to “delocalize” concepts of the hegemonic culture(s), universalizing them by detaching them from their local histories and loci of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000, p. 41); this will to universalization is what Mignolo identifies as the global design of colonial discourse. Thus European history became “universal” history, European cosmology became “science,” and European technology became “modernity.” European culture in a similar vein became “civilization.” In contrast, the nonuniversalized local knowledges of the subjugated communities remained “local” and are often disparagingly referred to respectively as “memory,” “cosmology,” “craftsmanship,” and “tradition.” Transforming its own local values into universalized “civilization” and “modernity,” European colonization then read the local cultures it subjugated through what Mignolo calls narratives of transition, attributing to these cultures and their knowledges varying (delayed) stages on a linear evolutionary map of putative “progress” and “modernity”; it also denied them (through the accompanying strategy of the denial of coevalness) the possibility of attaining the status of “civilization,” and hence, equality. In short, colonial discourse has basically consisted of what were and are local histories (of Europe, or the Eurocentric “North”), becoming universal through global designs. It is important to note however that, in spite of the colonial narratives of transition, those cultures that remained local were never totally isolated from, impervious to, or obscured by the hegemonic “universal civilization”; on the contrary, they interacted with it to varying degrees producing what Mignolo (2000) terms “cultures of transience” (p. 301). The hybridity resulting from the local and global interactions within these cultures of transience is for Mignolo, like Bhabha (1994), not to be rejected as sterile “cross-breed” or “half-caste,” nor celebrated as a Hegelian synthesis; for both, hybridity, more than a characteristic of an object, is a characteristic of the loci of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000, p. 41) in which these objects (here, cultures of transience) occur. In this sense, Mignolo prefers the dynamic concept of transculturation to the apparent stasis of the vitiated term “hybrid.”

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It is important to note that from Mignolo’s perspective, the local and global dynamic, though connected to and as the basis of colonial difference, does not restrict to a putative colonial center the prerogative of being the sole source of global designs.7 In the present perspective of globalization, the local and global dynamic has become a complex network through which cultures and discourses react to and interact with each other. Brazil, for example, like most of Latin America, has historically been subjected to universalizing Eurocentric cultures and discourses, and may be said to be located on the global periphery; however, the hegemonic Eurocentric urban culture of the Brazilian Southeast has global designs in relation to the various indigenous cultures in the rest of the country that it seeks to subjugate. Given then the hybridity of the loci of enunciation of the cultures of transience, transculturation may be seen as the rearticulation of global designs from the perspective of local communities; in other words, through transculturation, the “local” is transformed by, and itself transforms, the “universal” of colonial difference. It becomes clear then that the locus of enunciation of colonial difference is traversed by the unequal coexistence of conflicting (hegemonic and nonhegemonic) ideologies, cultures, and disciplines. For Mignolo, in short, to perceive the epistemological dimension of the colonial difference is the first vital step toward transforming it. How can this be perceived and what is the connection between the local and global dynamic, cultures of transience, narratives of transition, the power and knowledge collusion, and theories of literacy and writing?

LITERACY AND WRITING AS LOCAL KNOWLEDGE WITH GLOBAL DESIGNS Much has been written about the “great divide” between the written and the oral and the subsequent discussions about autonomous and ideological theories of writing. Although “autonomous” theories conceive writing as a product or technology with intrinsic benefits independent of any given language or culture, “ideological” theories see writing as a representational system that interacts with the language it purports to represent and the sociocultural values of the community of that language (Gee, 1990; Street, 1984); hence “ideological” theories see writing as closely dependent on local knowledges. In Brazil, specifically, with the Freirean heritage implicitly overshadowing minority educational policies such as those of indigenous education and the dissemination of literacy (Freire, 1972), the “ideological” nonautonomous perspective has been long present and has stimulated subsequent interests among disseminators of literacy in the more recent “ideological” proposals such as those of Street (1984) and Barton (1994).8 Ong’s (1982) influential study of orality and literacy may be read as an example of a narrative of transition, describing the introduction of writing into oral cultures, and positing oral cultures on an earlier stage of historical development in re-

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lation to written cultures. However, Ong’s narrative is untypical of autonomous theories and narratives of transition in that it generously allows for moments of nonlinearity, exemplified by his concept of secondary orality; this refers to cultures in which orality has not been totally eliminated by writing, but coexists with it. In this sense, Ong’s narrative of transition also allows for transculturation to be perceived. Barton’s (1994) study of literacy, based mostly on research carried out within regional (hence “local”) communities in Britain, is more sensitive to the local and global dynamic and the power and knowledge collusion; this permits him to be more aware of the pitfalls of narratives of transition and hence to avoid postulating orality as necessarily anterior to (and more primitive than) writing. Instead, Barton considers writing as a symbolic system that interacts not only cognitively but also culturally with a particular community; as such, he reduces the hitherto predominant accent on writing as a representational system and shows that writing within a given sociocultural context interacts with and is integrated into various and heterogeneous (involving varying degrees of orality) events and practices: As well as communicating—representing the world to others—literacy is important in representing the world to ourselves. It is part of our thinking; it is part of the technology of thought. Language and literacy are used to define reality, and not only to others, but also to ourselves. Literacy, then, has a role in the ecology of the mind. (1994, p. 45)

Apart from the nonautonomous theories of literacy, the model of writing that prevails in Brazil, and is hence uncritically extended to indigenous schools, is that defined by Scollon and Scollon (1995) as the essayist utilitarian model with its demands for “clarity,” “brevity,” and “sincerity.” In spite of the claims for the universal validity of such a model of writing, the Scollon and Scollon (1995, p. 99) clearly locate the origins and ideology of such a model of writing as Eurocentric. The variability and heterogeneity of local writing practices, such as multimodality, may be lost when the utilitarian model is universalized and becomes synonymous with writing itself; a manifestation of this is when the presence of visual texts are seen as decorative, excessive, and are deemed to detract from the three desirable qualities of so-called good writing. Whereas the disseminators of literacy seem to be aware of the localness of their theories, the same may not be said of the disseminators of the essayist utilitarian model of writing, who insist on its universality and naturalness; in many cases the disseminators of literacy also unwittingly disseminate the utilitarian model of writing. Thus, from the perspective I occupy, literacy and writing are deeply connected to local cultural habits and to the processes of naturalization of a given sociocultural world available in a given community. As it stands, the “ideological” Freirean perspective largely seems to reveal its respect for the local. However, cau-

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tion is required, as may be seen when Kress (1997)—in an attempt to recover the complexity of orality often suppressed when seen from the perspective of the oral and written dichotomy prevalent in written cultures—calls attention to the importance of synaesthesia in human communication in the following terms: Different ways of making meaning involve different kinds of bodily engagement with the world—that is, not just sight as with writing, or hearing as with speech, but touch, smell, taste, feel. … If we concede that speech and writing give rise to particular forms of thinking, then we should at least ask whether touch, taste, smell, feel, also give rise to their specific forms of thinking. … In our thinking, subconsciously or consciously in our feelings, we constantly translate from one medium to another. This ability, and this fact of synaesthesia, are essential for humans to understand the world. (p. xvii)

Though it may be apparent that contemporary, “ideological” theories of writing and literacy may often be, at times even self-consciously, local, it is with the “suppressing” and the “forgetting” of the synaesthetic wealth of communication that it becomes clear that such (local) views of writing and orality acquire global designs in Mignolo’s (2000) sense. As such, for an uncritical observer of a written culture,9 possibly even one aware of the localness of his or her perspective, only those characteristics of human communication representable in writing are readily perceptible or visible in an act of nonwritten verbal communication, which is then defined as “oral.” By perceiving and judging oral cultures from this angle, written cultures universalize or globalize their localness and transform, in Mignolo’s terms, their local perspectives into global designs. This is the genesis of what I shall call a graphocentric10 view of orality and writing. A rereading of the theories of writing and literacy,11 which I have examined above, reveals the often taken-for-granted fact that the locus of enunciation of these theorists of literacy lies within written cultures and constitutes their graphocentric bias toward the cultural practices defined as “oral.” In other words, as Kress (1997) implicitly warns, theorists and disseminators of literacy run the risk of observing the “oral” practices of a given community essentially as lacking writing; that is, those aspects of oral communication (such as its synaesthetic complexity) not representable in and through writing may not be visible to these theorists. Moreover, they may not see in nonliterate cultures (that is, they may see the lack of) the communicative practices and events they are familiar with in their own written cultures; this blindness12 may hinder their perception of the complex cultural heterogeneity that exists in these cultures, and where writing as they know it is apparently absent.13 As an articulation of the colonial difference in Mignolo’s terms, what is clearly at play here are once again the global designs of the local, or the denial of coevalness; in other words, the local practices of a written culture (in this case the

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roles of writing and literacy from a graphocentric perspective) are universalized, values are attributed (positive to writing and being literate, negative to orality and being nonliterate), and the communities without these written (but with other, unseen) practices may be—and often are—seen as deficiently oral. A patent manifestation of this graphocentrism and the global designs of theorists and disseminators of literacy and writing is the difficulty in perceiving and understanding as meaningful the multimodal texts such as those of the Kashinawá, even though these same theorists and disseminators may be privy to the “ideological” and Freirean views and hence aware of the localness of literacy. This graphocentrism is explainable through Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of the habitus, defined as a set of dispositions that lead social agents to act and react in certain ways; as such, these dispositions establish practices, perceptions, and attitudes that repeat themselves unconsciously. An unsuspecting theorist or disseminator with a locus of enunciation in a hegemonic, Eurocentric, written culture—and therefore with a habitus of a written culture, accustomed to seeing writing as a representation, albeit local, of speech—would thus risk seeing nonalphabetic communication from a graphocentric globalizing perspective as meaningless or deficient. For my present purposes, it is important to bear in mind at this stage that this same locus of enunciation from which theorists and disseminators of literacy speak is also (i.e., besides the graphocentric habitus) traversed by the colonial difference and its attendant denial of coevalness. In order to avert symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1990), a change in the graphocentric habitus may be necessary before the hegemonic culture becomes capable of understanding the communicative cultural practices of cultures in which alphabetic literacy is not prevalent; this of course necessarily involves an attendant transformation of the colonial difference. Heath (1982) and Scollon and Scollon (1981) in their analyses of literacy in local peripheral communities—albeit within the “First World”—show examples of how sociocultural harm is wreaked when writing is considered only from a graphocentric representational perspective. In the communities they studied, they identified the symbolic violence and its resulting social damage with the view that writing was merely a homogeneous unifying technology, a necessity for “education” and “progress.” The complex cultural practices existent in these communities were invisible to the defenders of the graphocentric stance. Alphabetic writing, as the local practice of a hegemonic group, once inscribed in the power and knowledge collusion and ensconced within the colonial difference, all too easily becomes delocalized, acquires global designs and seeks to deny coevalness to other, competing, local knowledges and modes of communication. Another manifestation of the global design of a delocalized graphocentrism is the view that it is only through writing that local communities can have access to “progress” and “culture.” Given the graphocentric double-bind, one wonders whether this view is the cause or the consequence of the acquisition of writing. Literacy and writing then,

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though self-consciously not ideologically neutral, require on the part of their disseminators an acute critical awareness. KASHINAWÁ LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE MULTIMODAL TEXT The visual texts produced by the Kashinawá consist of two basic types of drawing: the first type, a set of highly codified multicolored or monochromatic geometric patterns, called kene, may appear on their own on the cover page of an exercise book, in miniature form in a corner of a page (see Figure 1, number 3), or as a right-angled frame on one, two, and sometimes three sides of a page (see Figure 1, numbers 2 and 4), or even as part of a multimodal set containing alphabetic text and dami drawings (see Figure 1, numbers 6–8); kene drawings may also cover, like tattoos, dami figures. Kene patterns also appear on basketry, woven into textiles, decorating ceramics and pottery, and in ceremonial bodily tattoos. With the advent of writing in the community, kene began to appear on paper. The second type of drawing, called dami, is a soft figurative line drawing, not necessarily in color, depicting plants, animals, or humans. There is no preoccupation in using perspective. This type of drawing rarely consists of only one figure, and generally

FIGURE 1 Possible combinations of kene, dami, and alphabetic text in Kashinawá multimodal writing.

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the figures contained are organized in a scene or in narrative form. Dami may appear alone or together with alphabetic text or with both alphabetic text and kene graphics (see Figure 1, numbers 5–8). In order to understand the meaning of Kashinawá multimodality from a pluritopic perspective14 and avert the possibility of the symbolic violence that accompanies the colonial difference, there is a need to understand aspects of Kashinawá cosmology and its attendant concepts of identity, otherness, and transformation. It is known that in Amazonian cultures in general, the local forms and concepts of social, political, cultural, and cosmological spheres are intrinsically interconnected (Carneiro da Cunha, 1999; Turner, 1988). In view of this interconnectedness, and considering that writing on paper as such is a form of material production, one needs to understand, from the perspective of local knowledge, the connection between multimodal writing and Kashinawá cosmology, politics, and sociocultural organization. In short, Kashinawá multimodal writing, far from being a random phenomenon, is a cultural practice and an integrated part of local knowledge. In her ethnographic study of the Kashinawá, Lagrou (1996, 1998) defines their concept of identity as a scale between the pole of the I and the pole of the Radical Other. This cosmological ideology apprehends Radical Otherness as dangerous, but at the same time desirable, representing an insoluble and irresistible paradox where there is no other solution but to allow oneself to become Other. This is a strategy of survival seen as permissible only in the face of potential death, a means toward regeneration after death. The value given to this transformation and to the (albeit dangerous) need for the Radical Other is symbolized in Kashinawá culture by the figure of the anaconda, which periodically changes skin and is seen to survive because of its capacity of constant mutation. The anaconda is also the mythical goddess figure, which brings wisdom, knowledge, and culture. In Kashinawá multimodal texts, the geometric abstract shapes of the kene graphics are seen to metonymically represent the patterns on the skin of the mythical anaconda. As such, kene is seen to be an indication of the presence of the anaconda, indicating the path toward the potentiality or process of transformation, and therefore, survival. There is profound respect for the anaconda figure as a manifestation of the inapprehensible power of the Radical Other (it can never be seen in its totality, only partially, metonymically, and through partial visions of the pattern of its skin); this respect appears in the highly codified geometric kene graphics and in the great cultural value attributed to these graphics, which paradoxically represent simultaneously a superhuman force, death, and survival. On the other hand, the uncodified and freer drawings of the dami figures are seen to represent the product of the transformation process indicated by kene. While kene incorporates the almost unrepresentable (hence abstract) power of transformation itself, dami is seen as representation. As representation, dami stands in the place of, or represents something absent—the force of mimesis. On the other hand, kene does not repre-

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sent; it just is, indicating the performative, potential, dynamic value of “becoming,” or poiesis. Curiously, in the Kashinawá language, the word for writing is kene. The Western and graphocentric view of writing as a system of secondary representation (supposedly of speech) would seem to equate writing in this sense to the Kashinawá dami. However, by equating writing with kene, the Kashinawá demonstrate how in their local knowledge they attribute to writing an inapprehensible force, seeing it as a path toward transformation, with a value nearer to the performative poiesis than to the representative mimesis. A second, interconnected aspect of Kashinawá local knowledge necessary to understand the phenomenon of multimodal writing, is that of the nishi-pae ritual. In this ritual, consisting of the ingestion of ayahuasca (known in delocalized universal knowledge as a “hallucinogenic” concoction; Langdon, 1996), synaesthesia attains a peak value. Through the nishi-pae ritual, the Kashinawá believe they gain access to the higher cosmological realms where, through contact with the anaconda, they can acquire the knowledge they seek and thus synaesthetically implement a “translation” of the knowledge gained from the higher realms to the everyday. The consumption of ayahuasca provokes a vision consisting of two phases: The first phase is marked by the vision of geometric kene shapes seen to be indicators of initial contact with the anaconda. This ritual, considered to be a performance of Kashinawá cosmology, enacts the contact with the anaconda and hence the paradoxical contact with the simultaneously feared and revered Radical Other, resulting in the dissolution of the I. This first phase of the ayahuasca vision performatively enacts this poiesis; no message is received; it is a phase of pure becoming. Once contact has been established with the anaconda, the second phase of the vision begins. At this point the vision becomes populated with dami figures and a visual narrative unfolds in a dream-like sequential form. The vision is considered to be the message, knowledge, or wisdom acquired from or delivered by the anaconda. Whereas the first phase indicates the presence of the forces of transformation and the dissolution of the I, the second phase carries out the transformation itself, in which the message or knowledge acquired through the visual narrative transforms the previous I into another, new I, now strengthened and renewed. Thus, whereas the first phase of the vision indicates the presence of the messenger (the anaconda), the second phase indicates the message itself. Where the first phase indicates the process of transformation, the second phase indicates the product of the transformation; in other words, the first phase is experience whereas the second phase brings the expression of the event (see Table 1). For Lagrou (1996, p. 206), the nishi-pae ritual performs another aspect of Kashinawá ideology and connects yet another cultural intertext with multimodal writing. This has to do with the acquisition of new knowledge or new external objects or elements of food; everything that comes from outside the zone immediately adjacent to the home must be cooked. In other words, before being

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TABLE 1 Significance of the Appearance of Kene and Dami Figures in the Kashinawá Visionary Experience Kene Geometric Dissolution of I Process Messenger Presence Experience Poiesis

Dami Figurative New I Product Message Absence/re-presentation Expression Mimesis

brought home, external elements should be transformed or domesticated. Whereas women are not permitted contact with the Radical Other, located beyond this zone, in this case seen as the “foreigner” or nonindigenous member of the dominant Eurocentric culture, it is expected that men penetrate deeper into the external reality. This ideology establishes that in the process of contact with the external, the male, once in the external world, isolated and distant from home, should allow himself to be transformed into the Other. Once transformed, he now in turn transforms what he has acquired from the external Other; once this acquired alterity has been domesticated and transformed, the man can now safely take it with him and return home for others to enjoy its benefits. One thus sees in Kashinawá local knowledge the presence of a dialectics of otherness where the subject is transformed into the object (Other) and back into the subject, though now constituting a new subject. Given all these cultural intertexts present in Kashinawá local knowledge, how is one to understand their multimodal texts as a manifestation of the interaction between the previously mentioned aspects of local knowledge and writing? Having analyzed the compositional aspects of published and unpublished multimodal Kashinawá texts on paper, based on texts gathered ethnographically from this community over the past three years, on interviews with members of the community, and on other available ethnographies of the Kashinawá, in Table 2, I summarize the values attributed by local knowledge to kene and dami and then propose paths toward an understanding of the various multimodal combinations possible between alphabetic script, kene and dami: I posit the following readings of six possible combinations available in Kashinawá multimodal texts (see Figure 1): 1. kene + f: The text following the graphics has maximal knowledge value (see Figure 1, number 1). 2. kene + alphabetic text: The multimodal textual unit has maximal knowledge value (see Figure 1, numbers 2, 3, and 4).

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TABLE 2 Significance of Kene and Dami Figures on Paper in Kashinawá Mulitmodal Writing Kene

Dami

Experience Emphasis on presence of messenger Indicates maximal knowledge value Indicates container of something with potential for transformation Reinforces the value of the alphabetic text

Expression Emphasis on message No knowledge value Indicates content already transformed Repeats/illustrates something in the alphabetic text or something already known

3. dami + f: The text has no knowledge value: “art for art’s sake” (see Figure 1, number 5). 4. dami + alphabetic text: The visual text repeats, paraphrases, or illustrates the alphabetic text; the multimodal unit has no special knowledge value (see Figure 1, number 6). 5. kene + dami: The text contains a message recognized by the (Kashinawá) reader as having maximal knowledge value (see Figure 1, number 7). 6. kene + dami + alphabetic script: The text contains a message recognized by the (Kashinawá) reader as having maximal knowledge value (see Figure 1, number 8). One may thus conclude that, for the Kashinawá, a text with only alphabetic writing, with neither of the two types of drawing, cannot be considered a text per se (that is, considering “text” as a container of information or knowledge or meaning). This is because, if alphabetic writing appears on its own on paper, it would acquire the value of kene (remembering that the word means “writing” in Kashinawá); as such, the merely alphabetic text would indicate only an “experience,” or the “possibility of expression,” with no “message” present. Hence the necessity for the Kashinawá to add figures or sets of figures to an alphabetic text. These uses of kene and dami in its multimodal writing demonstrate that, true to its local knowledge, this community did not simply and passively acquire writing as a mere technology of representation; on the contrary, as it does with everything that comes from outside, it allowed itself momentarily to be transformed by writing (at the learning stage), but soon appropriated and transformed the very writing itself, adapting it to its (the community’s) own cultural needs and local knowledge, producing a transcultural, hybrid phenomenon. However, the Kashinawá multimodal texts should not be read as static hybrids in the sense Mignolo rejected previously. Considering that writing is an indication of the presence of, and the contact with, the hegemonic delocalized nonindigenous Eurocentric Brazilian culture, hybridity as transculturation is present in the Kashinawá locus of enunciation

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itself, and not just in the written objects (multimodal texts) it produces. This process of transculturation, which produces the multimodal text, is dynamic and productive, unlike the stasis of a sterile hybrid. Contrary to Gee (1990), according to whom the force of writing as a secondary delocalized public discourse is capable of transforming a primary local discourse, we here see a case of a local primary discourse (Kashinawá local knowledge and its preliterate concepts of kene and dami) transforming the apparently delocalized and, hence, secondary discourse of alphabetic writing.15 This then is the dynamic of transculturation (rather than mere convivial contact between proximate parties), where each subjects the other to processes of transformation, and neither leaves unscathed; in this case neither the local knowledge present in literacy and writing on one hand nor in the Kashinawá community on the other hand leave the context of contact unscathed. More specifically, the multimodal Kashinawá texts exemplify Mignolo’s (2000) strategy of the denial of the denial of coevalness (p. 287) and demonstrate that local knowledges apparently disqualified by hegemonic knowledges (represented here by the graphocentric stance) with global designs do not passively succumb but undergo a process of translation or transculturation (represented here by the extension of the significance of kene and dami from weaving, basketry, tattoos, visions, and paper). In this process of transcultural translation the hegemonic knowledge is also itself transformed (as happens with writing in its contact with Kashinawá local knowledge). In the case of the Kashinawá, their cosmology and ideologies help in this process; like the anaconda, they see the path to survival as one that requires constant changes of skin. They also see the necessity to undergo radical change in the face of death, where the change effects a transformation or translation through which survival and an afterlife become possible. The death they perceive themselves to be in the face of (hence the need to undergo radical change) may metaphorically be the death represented by manifestations of Eurocentric hegemonic culture and its consequences: destruction and invasion of their environment, deforestation, and so on. It is thanks to this dialectic of otherness16 (with no desire for global designs) present in their local knowledge that the Kashinawá have survived the consequences of the delocalized “common sense” (D’Angelis & Veiga, 1997) originating in the so-called “natural attitude” (Fairclough, 1999) and the global designs of nonindigenous disseminators of literacy and writing. Resisting the simple reproduction of graphocentric views of literacy and utilitarian models of writing, the multimodal texts of the Kashinawá bear testimony to the possibilities of local knowledges of resisting but not rejecting external, dominant influences in a way different to those of the communities described by Scollon and Scollon (1981) and Heath (1982) in North America. Unlike the Kashinawá, these communities did not seem to have the benefit of the same dialectic in their local knowledges; an aware-

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ness of these possibilities of local knowledges is even more urgent today in Brazil where indigenous education is back on the agenda. In my analysis I have attempted to undertake what Mignolo (2000, p. 85) called a strategy of border thinking, which he considers fundamental to “de-subalternize” local knowledges and release them from the mechanisms of colonial differences. Border thinking consists of thinking from dichotomous concepts rather than ordering the world in dichotomies. As such, rather than an us and them, colonizer and colonized, master and slave perspective of looking at the world in dichotomies, I have sought to think from these dichotomous concepts, in which depending where one is located and where one’s locus of enunciation is, the dichotomous distinctions between the local and the delocalized become blurred and are redeployed (but are no less pernicious nor do they cease to exist). Border thinking is only possible from within, that is, from a location traversed by the various discourses in conflict; in my specific case as an academic disseminator and theorist of literacy and writing, before my contact with the Kashinawá and their writing practices, I too shared in the graphocentric stance of literacy and writing theories, located within the colonial difference and its power and knowledge collusion. However, struck as I was and contaminated by the evidence of multimodality in my contact with Kashinawá writing, I did not remain unscathed. But first I had to want to understand these texts, and not simply reject them. I had to adopt an ethnographic stance unfamiliar to me as an applied linguist at the time. Like Geertz (1983, p. 16), I had to be prepared to see myself as a form of local—and not universal—knowledge confronting contrasting forms of other local knowledges; I had to be aware that “the shapes of knowledge [including my own] are ineluctably local” (Geertz, 1983, p. 4). Although, as an applied linguist—privy to the “ideological” literacy stance—I was aware that language and literacy are used to define reality (Barton, 1994, p. 45), and I was less aware this referred not only to the reality of others, but also to my own reality. I had to implicate myself within a dialectic of otherness, to allow myself to be transformed by a Radical Other and be translated before I was able to translate. In other words, I had to deconstruct the power and knowledge collusion of the colonial difference and deny its accompanying denial of coevalness before I could perceive the localness—the “ecology of the mind” (Barton, 1994, p. 4)—of my own theories and valorize, not eradicate, the localness and ecology of the mind of Kashinawá multimodality. Finally, Mignolo (2000) may sound idealistic when he says “The transcending of the colonial difference can only be done from the perspective of subalternity, from decolonization, and therefore from a new epistemological terrain where border thinking works” (p. 45). However, through border thinking, decolonization starts from within, and the possibility becomes real and apparent as exemplified by the Kashinawá community’s quietly defiant use of multimodality, reaping benefit from the colonial difference, more than simply a case among cases, a world among worlds.

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ENDNOTES 1My focus here is on Kashinawá writing produced by adults, in general males, and in the indigenous teacher development courses organized by the CPI do Acre in northwestern Brazil. My material includes manuscripts and printed materials and interviews with the producers of this material. 2Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, p. 183) define a multimodal text as one that communicates through more than one semiotic code. 3Indigenous schools had previously existed in Brazil, run mainly by missionaries, but they were officially obliged to follow the Brazilian national curriculum. Local indigenous knowledges were not permitted in the curricula of these schools. 4My analysis of local knowledge is different from that of Sillitoe (1998) who also calls for an acceptance of local indigenous knowledges; Sillitoe speaks from a different locus of enunciation, from within the “First World,” and presupposes the distinction between the “west and the rest.” 5It is important to note the pernicious effect that publishing has on Kashinawá multimodal texts. The original constitutions of multimodality are generally lost in the editorial process. Authorship of the published texts is attributed, however, to the indigenous writers. 6I adopt here a transdisciplinary perspective that involves blurring disciplinary boundaries (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. 287), requiring disciplines to acquire new histories and new means of representation, thus “creating a new object which belongs to no one” (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. 6). This new object is itself created by asking new questions, by changing the problems previously focused on in a particular discipline, and not blindly and habitually repeating established methods (see Mignolo, 2000, p. 306). This also involves assuming a transcultural (Mignolo 2000; Mirzoeff, 1998; see below) perspective across (hence trans) disciplines, conscious of how one’s own locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000) is dichotomously or multiply traversed by a multiplicity of disciplines and histories. 7In fact, Mignolo (2000) shows how the colonial center itself was (although unknowingly) transformed by local cultures in this complex network. 8For more on the topic see Signorini (2001). 9For a criticism of writing originating in an oral culture, see Plato, who seems to fear the power of synaesthesia in oral culture as mere distraction and diversion; Plato fears that these qualities may pass unimpeded into writing, which could thus become a potentially pernicious form of communication. (see Burke, 1995). 10For further discussion of graphocentrism see Menezes de Souza (2000, 2001). 11See also, for the “autonomous” perspective, Goody (1977), Goody and Watt (1968), Havelock (1986), and Olson (1977). 12See Finnegan (1970) for a discussion of how oral poetry in Africa was always seen by observers from what I have referred to previously as a locus of enunciation positioned within a written culture in which the categories of written poetry predominated. 13See Boone and Mignolo (1994) for examples of this in pre-Columbian America. 14See Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, p. 183) for an emphasis on a transdisciplinary analysis to understand the integrative nature of the multiple codes of meaning in a multimodal text. 15I have yet to conclude my analysis on the specific effects of the interaction between Kashinawá local knowledge and the essayist utilitarian model of writing. 16See Viveiros de Castro (1992) for how this strategy has characterized Amazonian cultures.

REFERENCES Aquino, T., & Iglesias, M. (1994). Kaxinawá do Rio Jordão—História, território, economia e desenvolvimento sustentado. Rio Branco, Brazil: CPI do Acre.

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Barton, D. (1994). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Boone, E. H., & Mignolo, W. (1994). Writing without words: Alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, England: Polity. Burke, S. (1995). Authorship: From Plato to the postmodern. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Carneiro da Cunha, M. (1999). Xamanismo e Tradução. In A. Novaes (Ed.), A outra margem do ocidente. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras. Chakrabarty, D. (1992). Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for “Indian” pasts? Representations 37, 1–26. D’Angelis, W., & Veiga, J. (Eds.). (1997). Leitura e escrita em escolas indígenas. Campinas, Brazil: Mercado de Letras. Fairclough, N. (1999). Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis. In A. Jaworski & N. Coupland (Eds.), The discourse reader. London: Routledge. Finnegan, R. (1970). Oral literature in Africa. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Freire. P. (1972). Pedagogia do Oprimido. Oporto, Portugal: Afrontamento. Gee, J. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse. London: Falmer Press. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. San Francisco: Basic Books. Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1968). The consequences of literacy. In J. Goody (Ed.), Literacy in traditional societies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Havelock, E. (1986). The Muse learns to write. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heath, S. B. (1982). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. New York: Routledge. Lagrou, E. M. (1996). Xamanismo e representação entre os Kaxinawá. In E. J. M. Langdon (Ed.), Xamanismo no Brasil: Novas perspectivas. Florianópolis, Brazil: Editora da UFSC. Lagrou, E. M. (1998). Caminhos, duplos e corpos: Uma abordagem perspectivista da identidade e alteridade entre os kaxinawá. Unpublished dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. Langdon, E. J. M. (Ed.). (1996). Xamanismo no Brasil: Novas perspectivas. Florianópolis, Brazil: Editora da UFSC. Menezes de Souza, L. M. (2000, June). Surviving on paper: Recent indigenous writing in Brazil. ABEI Journal No. 2, 177–184. Menezes de Souza, L. M. (2001). Para uma ecologia da escrita indigena: A escrita multimodal kashinawá. In I. Signorini (Ed.), Investigando a relação oral/escrito. Campinas, Brazil: Mercado de Letras. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mirzoeff, N. (Ed.). (1998). Visual culture reader. London: Routledge. Monte, N. (Ed.). (n. d.). Quem são os Kaxinawá? In Shenipabu Miyui: Història dos antigos. Rio Branco, Brazil: Comissão Pró Índio do Acre. Monte, N. L. (1996). Escolas da floresta: Entre o passado oral e o presente letrado. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Multiletra. Olson, D. R. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Education Review, 47, 257–281.

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Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy. London: Methuen. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (1981). Narrative, literacy and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (1995). Intercultural communication. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Signorini, I. (Ed.). (2001). Investigando a relação oral/escrito. Campinas, Brazil: Mercado de Letras. Sillitoe, P. (1998). The development of indigenous knowledge: A new applied anthropology. Current Anthropology, 39(2). Silva, M. (1994). A conquista da escola: Educação escolar e movimento de professores indígenas no Brasil. In Em Aberto (Ed.), Educação escolar Indígena (no. 63). Brasilia, Brazil: INEP. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Turner, T. (1988). Ethno-history: Myth and history in native South American representations of contact with Western society. In J. D. Hill & R. Wright (Eds.), Rethinking history and myth. Indigenous South American perspectives on the past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1992). O mármore e a murta: Sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem. Revista de Antropologia, 35, 21–74.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 279–293 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Cajun French, Sociolinguistic Knowledge, and Language Loss in Louisiana Dominique Ryon University of Louisiana at Lafayette

This study uses Foucault’s work on knowledge and power to show that the politics of language and the politics of researching it are closely related. As a discipline, sociolinguistics has barely begun to investigate the relationship between academia and issues of power and the different ways it ultimately may reinforce the interests of a dominant linguistic group. Language loss studies tend to emphasize demographic and economic factors over other social issues. This study about Cajun French, a fast-eroding French dialect still spoken by around 250,000 people in Louisiana, argues that language loss is a social as well as a discursive process and that academic knowledge and discourse both play a significant role in language politics. The study advocates the use of local knowledge to enhance our understanding of sociolinguistic issues involving unequal power relationships. Key words: Cajun French, academic knowledge, linguistic assimilation, language loss, power relationships We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. (Gaston Bachelard, quoted by McGrane, 1989, p. IX)

Most linguistic studies on French in Louisiana tend to be descriptive analyses of the language (Conwell & Juilland, 1963; Klingler, 1996; Valdman, 1997) or to examine the situation of this linguistic minority within the context of what has come to be known as “language death studies” (Rottet, 1996, 2001). This emerging subfield of research is increasingly popular among sociolinguists. Nancy Dorian (1989) stresses “the recent and current growth of the literature” (p. 6) on the subject and the activities of the researchers at sharing and disseminating methodoloRequests for reprints should be sent to Dominique Ryon, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Department of Modern Languages, P.O. Box 43331, Lafayette, LA 70504–3331. E-mail: [email protected]

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gies, data, and ideas. Why are “language death studies” rather than “language revival studies” more popular among linguists working on endangered languages? Are death studies scientifically more relevant than revival studies? Or could the scientific discourse be in any way biased by broader issues of power and social control (Ryon, 1999, pp. 246–247)? Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and power, Bourdieu’s analysis on social and linguistic representations as well as symbolic power, the “empowering research” model designed by the Lancaster group of researchers (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992), Catalan and Occitanist sociolinguistic theory of language conflict (Boyer, 1991; Lafont, 1997), and the recent textual turn in anthropology that emphasizes the role of discourse in science and the representation of culture (Mangano, 1990) have provided the main conceptual and critical tools in this investigation of the relationship between academic knowledge, power, and language loss in Louisiana. If institutional knowledge tends to ignore the significance of this relationship, local knowledge offers substantial evidence of the relevance of such a link. In the context of this study, local knowledge refers to native representations and discourse on linguistic issues, especially linguistic assimilation. The originality of local knowledge, expressed most clearly in the new Cajun literature and popular songs, is to bring to the fore the sociopolitical nature of linguistic assimilation and the essentially conflictual nature of cultural and linguistic contact. By contrast, the acknowledgment of the political and conflictual nature of the process of language loss is completely absent from theoretical paradigms used in academic knowledge about language loss and social change in Louisiana. The objective of this study is twofold. The first objective is to highlight the social and discursive nature of academic knowledge, especially sociolinguistic knowledge, and its implications for sociolinguistic situations involving unequal power relationships. The second objective is to promote local knowledge (which is, of course, also socially defined) as a valid, necessary, and complementary resource for academic research. Language loss in Louisiana and its scientific investigation will be used as a case study.

SELECTION AND CLASSIFICATION: THE POLITICS OF WHAT IS SAID AND WHAT IS NOT SAID The fact that social and linguistic research is inspired by the need to understand problems and to contain them has been persuasively demonstrated by Michel Foucault. Foucault observes that knowledge is power, that citizens of modern democracies are controlled less by the army, police, economic power, or a centralized, visible state apparatus, than by pronouncements of expert discourse, which he calls “regime of truth.” According to him, expert discourse has a powerful impact on society as much through what it says as by what it does not say, as much by what is constructed as an

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object of investigation as by what is rejected as insignificant and then left beyond representation. Foucault argues that “no power can be exercised without the extraction, appropriation, distribution or retention of knowledge” (1971b, p. 283). In other words, there is no power relation “without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (1975, p. 32). He then turns his attention to the development of “disciplines,” which he views as a procedure to limit and control discourse. The emergence of disciplines is usually regarded as a positive step, as it provides resources for new discourses, but Foucault invites us to also consider “their restrictive” and “constraining function” (1971a, p. 38). Similarly, the development of a subfield such as language death studies could be viewed as a restrictive and constraining process in the building of sociolinguistic knowledge. This paradigm does not disqualify the scientific value of knowledge produced within the field of language death study; it simply points out that much can also be learned from the acknowledgment of what is not taken into account by these disciplines, subfields, and their theoretical and conceptual apparatus. This interplay of power and knowledge poses a special challenge to minorities, who are not only facing linguistic, economic, and social pressures, but also a distorted, unilateral, and fragmented representation of their lived experience through expert discourse. Foucault shows how power is organized and manifested through knowledge and through practices such as surveillance, imprisonment, and classification, especially classification of mad people in his study Madness and Civilization (1972a). Pierre Bourdieu (1982) also stresses the purpose of classification, which he sees as “always subordinated to practical means and oriented towards the production of social effects” (p. 135). Could the current trend in academic discourse of classifying linguistic minorities as dying (instead of resisting or struggling, for example) be part of a similar process? One of the social effects of the wide use of such a classification and representation of the Cajun linguistic community is obviously the reluctance of the educational system to provide linguistic instruction in Cajun French. If a language is considered dying and if the process is widely assumed irreversible, then it is logical to consider both the production of pedagogical material in that language and the training of teachers to teach it, as a waste of time and money. On the contrary, if the community is widely perceived (and perceives itself) as resisting linguistic assimilation, then it becomes rational to develop practical means, such as linguistic instruction in the minority language, either to reverse the language shift or to prevent its total extinction.1 In the case of the Cajun linguistic community, most experts agree to declare it a dying linguistic community. Jerah Johnson (1976) has even attempted to predict the exact time of the disappearance of the language as 2010. Based on data from both the census and the study of Bertrand and Beale (1965), he projected that the decline in the use of French would proceed in a simple arithmetic evolution of 10% per decade. When applied to the number of French-speaking Cajun households ex-

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istent in 1970, this formula showed that the number of French-speaking native families would be zero by the end of the first decade of the 21st century. We are now much closer to the deadline, and it is already clear that Johnson’s assumptions were wrong. They were wrong because Johnson’s premises were wrong. His tendency to consider languages as autonomous and natural products (thus usable in arithmetic models), separate from any social change or event, prevented him from foreseeing the development of immersion programs in Acadiana in the early 1980s. In 1999–2000, there were around 2,200 students enrolled in 27 schools of the eight Louisiana parishes offering French immersion programs. These programs are not currently reversing language shift in Louisiana, but they are playing a decisive role in maintaining the language in households where it would not otherwise have been maintained. This fact is especially observable in strong Cajun-French speaking communities, but much less elsewhere, where immersion programs are used less as linguistic preservation programs for the benefit of children from Cajun families than as enrichment programs for children from English-speaking families (Tornquist, 2000). The role played by immersion programs at the community level still needs to be empirically investigated, but the lack both of data on and interest by researchers in some issues, this one for example, is precisely one of the problems raised in this study. Recent empirical studies in the field of language attitudes also offer additional examples of how linguistic research seems to be programmed to only document facts of linguistic loss and not of linguistic recovery. Different empirical studies have shown the shift in language attitudes of young people less than 30 years of age toward Cajun French (Dubois, 1997; Ryon, 1997). In sharp contrast to the older generation of fluent Cajun-French speakers, younger people now express positive feelings toward the French vernacular. Dubois (1997) observes “that it is the youngest members of these communities who seem the most open to learning Cajun French” (p. 61). However, no further attention is given to that fact because only an increase in the number of Cajun-French speakers can be considered as evidence of a linguistic revival (p. 69). The rationale behind this selection of what is valuable as an object of scientific inquiry and what is not is that only facts within the paradigm of language loss are given scientific relevance and carefully examined. As seen in the previous example, the significance of facts highly depends on the theoretical framework in use. The scientific value of the very same fact changes substantially when the paradigm of language revival is applied rather than that of the perspective of the dominant language. Occitanist sociolinguistic theory and Bourdieu’s works both investigate the importance of representations in the study of sociolinguistic behaviour. Whereas Boyer (1991, p. 44) stresses the role of representations in the linguistic aspects of intercultural conflicts, all of them emphasize the social power of representation and its repressive as well as liberating potential (Bourdieu, 1982, pp. 140–142; Boyer, 1991, pp. 39–52). Robert Lafont (1997, pp. 90–122) explains how linguistic revital-

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ization starts first at the psycholinguistic level, that is to say at the level of linguistic representations, for speakers (or semispeakers or passive speakers), language experts, and educators. In that light, the shift of language attitudes of young Cajuns is highly significant because it indicates that one necessary (but not sufficient) condition is now fulfilled for linguistic revival. What is done with this fact is then the responsibility of the scientific community and, of course, of the Cajun community itself. But the role played by experts is quite important because by acknowledging it, by investigating it closely, by making it public, scientific discourse will socially legitimize it. It will raise the level of linguistic awareness of the community as well as its level of confidence in the possibility of a linguistic reversal. As shown in the previous example, the positive impulse toward language revival is immediately discredited by academic discourse. What if, on the contrary, one decides to study the recent shift of language attitudes? Then a chain reaction is immediately engaged in a reverse direction. Pierre Bourdieu (1982, p. 140) states that just the fact of talking about something, of objectifying it through discourse, produces social effects. Knowledge is intimately linked to discursive practices, such as the formation of conceptual apparatus, methods of work, and internal controversies, which in turn provide resources and legitimacy for social action. Such resources are significantly lacking in Louisiana as educators and parents are currently wondering whether the introduction of the teaching of Cajun French is a reasonable initiative as well as a feasible one (Ancelet, 1988). For this reason, what has been called the “Louisianification” movement of the teaching of French in Louisiana, promoted by Cajun and Creole activists, has progressed very slowly since its inception in the 1980s. But the reserved attitude of the community at large is well understandable given the lack of sustained support from “officially qualified speaking subjects,” as well as the overall pessimistic tone about the future of the language. Why should anyone bother to save a language condemned to die? Why save the language if one can claim being Cajun without speaking French? As I have argued in a previous study, social theories promoting the separation of the linguistic component in cultural identities are on the rise nowadays and may, as an ideological and social effect, play some role in the linguistic resignation of some ethnic minorities (Ryon, 2000a). Academic discourse is, of course, not the only factor involved in the process of language revival, but what language experts say and do not say seems to have significant consequences and should be as carefully examined as other social and economic factors.

LINGUISTIC LOSS, TEXTUAL PLAY, AND METAPHORS SOCIOLINGUISTICS LIVES BY Claiming the “death” of a traditional culture or ethnic community was common practice in early anthropological writings and modernist ethnographies. Anthro-

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pologists gained professional reputations and added substantial drama to their narratives by claiming to be the last witnesses of vanishing worlds! Today, it would be considered highly inappropriate and ideologically questionable to do so within the context of this discipline. Moreover, postmodern anthropological criticism has shown how rhetoric and its figures have shaped anthropological written accounts of this period (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988). Discursive practices and the relationship between oral and written accounts were brought under close scrutiny as the link between “the appropriation of Other and the discursive forms that contain the act of appropriation” (Mangano, 1990, p. 3) was progressively unveiled. Ideologies claiming transparency of representation and of the linguistic medium were seriously discussed, as was the relationship between discursive boundaries and ethnocentric representation. Slowly, scholars’ attention was displaced from fieldwork to texts, and the whole discipline gained a new awareness of its own global implications. Sociolinguistic representations are also inseparable from discursive, rhetoric, and narrative processes. First, research involves not only fieldwork but also text making. Second, our language about language draws widely on what Nietzsche calls an “army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms” (quoted by Mangano, 1999, p.17). Language “erosion,” “death,” and “loss” are metaphorical concepts that partially structure the understanding of the “object” being studied. As George Lakoff states, “a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 10). From the vantage points of literariness, textual play, and cultural representations, sociolinguistic writings on Cajuns and their language provide interesting data. Consider the sentence quoted in French and Creole in Louisiana (Blyth, 1997), which expresses the hope that linguists now “equipped with the scientific attitudes and rigorous techniques of structuralism will return to the bayou country to continue the urgent harvest of the vestiges of French speech in that part of the New World” (p. 2). Rhetorical figures abound in this short passage which, on the one hand, clearly shows the textual and rhetorical operations at work in linguistic accounts, and on the other hand, the ideological implications of their use. The use of the figure of speech “bayou country” to refer to the place where Cajun French is spoken is questionable on two accounts: First, it fails to convey accurate information on where the language is actually spoken in Louisiana (which extends far beyond the region of the bayous); second, it reinforces cultural stereotypes about Cajun speakers who are endlessly portrayed as people living in that kind of exotic environment. The metaphor of the “harvest,” on the other hand, offers an interesting new insight on linguistic fieldwork since its reclassification of the collection of linguistic data as an economic rather than a mere technical procedure, emphasizes as well as it unveils the economic nature of the process involved in the exchange of knowledge between dominant and minority groups. As to the “vestiges” of French speech, the metaphor indicates the overall aesthetic concep-

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tion of the language as well as the fact that its structural architecture is ruined and beyond all repair. Finally, the fact of using the expression “New World,” a colonial period term, to refer to Louisiana does not require further explanation. Geertz’s suggestion that ethnographic texts ought to be “looked at as well as through” (1988, p. 138) could also be applied to sociolinguistic texts, because, as we have seen, they are not immune to linguistic and literary processes.

LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS Robert Lafont, one of the main theorists of occitanist sociolinguistics, also commonly called “sociolinguistique de la périphérie” (sociolinguistics from the periphery), questions the objectivity of the discourse about diglossia coming from dominant groups in dominant languages. He observes that these studies invariably suggest the end of minorities’ linguistic problems through their successful integration to the dominant group (1997, p. 91). Georg Kremnitz (1981, p. 65) stresses “the descriptive and static terminology used in North American sociolinguistics,” which largely fails to acknowledge the political dimension involved in the process of language loss. Henry Boyer (1991, p. 10) explains how concepts such as “diglossia,” “language contact,” or “bilingualism” tend to present linguistic shift in terms of a “peaceful coexistence” instead of a violent, political, and conflictual process. Language loss in Louisiana has never been studied as the result of cultural and political conflicts (Ryon, 2000b). On the contrary, academic discourse tends to emphasize the voluntary decision of this linguistic community to abandon its language. Kevin Rottet states “since English is the language of the dominant American society, members of ethnic communities who (emphasis added) want to advance outside the local community often assimilate, partially or totally, into that society” (1996, p. 119). This account of the assimilation process is misleading in two ways. First, it problematically gives the active role in the assimilation process to the ethnic community itself and not to the dominant group. Second, it also implies that they have the choice to control the degree of their assimilation. Such accounts definitely promote an idyllic and nonviolent version of linguistic assimilation. Since assimilation is such a natural, ineluctable, and peaceful process, decades of repressive measures, institutional intimidation (especially through schooling), and procedures of humiliation have left assimilationist mechanisms and strategies largely unaccounted for and undocumented in sociolinguistic knowledge. Once again, Foucault’s reading is enlightening: “If power is properly speaking the way in which relations of forces are deployed and given concrete expression, rather than analyzing it in terms of cession, contract or alienation, or functionally in terms of its maintenance of the relations of production, should we not analyze it pri-

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marily in terms of struggle, conflict and war?” (1980, p. 90). To get that version of the story in Louisiana, though, one must turn to local knowledge.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE ON LANGUAGE LOSS: A DIFFERENT STORY Local knowledge constitutes a significant resource for studying fields of human experiences forgotten, censored, or excluded from expert discourse. As a “non-centralized kind of theoretical production whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established régimes of thought” (Foucault, 1980, p. 81), local knowledge (or “subjugated knowledge”) retains memories of struggles and conflicts. It allows us to discover “the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematizing thought is designed to mask” (p. 82). Local knowledge on language loss in Louisiana is accessible primarily through recent creative texts written in Cajun French, as well as popular songs. The emergence of a written literature within the context of a traditionally oral culture is in itself a significant sign of resistance and of a struggle to survive. The 1980 publication of Cris sur le bayou (Cries on the bayou), with its evocative title, is usually considered the manifesto of the birth of Cajun literature. It is also one of the first attempts to give a written form to the Louisiana French vernacular. Since its publication, the Cajun literary corpus has grown to include texts such as C’est p’us pareil (1982), by Richard Guidry; the anthology Acadie tropicale (1983), La Charrue (1982), by Carol Doucet; Trois saisons (1988), by Antoine Bourque; Je suis Cadien (1994), by Jean Arceneaux; Faire récolte (1997), by the famous Cajun songwriter and musician Zachary Richard; Lait à mère (1997), by David Cheramie; a collection of plays from the company Le Théatre Cadien, edited by May Waggoner (1999); and texts regularly published in literary magazines such as Feux Follets in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Éloizes in New Brunswick, Canada. The birth of Cajun literature offers a new medium of expression for native discourse on a wide range of topics, but especially on the language itself and its loss. These creative texts can still be considered a valid testimony of unregulated and unofficial forms of knowledge and discourse given the general conditions of their production and distribution. Most of them indeed are printed in a limited number of copies (200 copies for C’est p’us pareil) and distributed locally mainly through cultural centers, museums, and small bookstores. It is revealing that none of them are currently available at the local Barnes and Noble. This situation might change quickly, though, and Cajun literature might reach a broader audience and soon get some economic value in the publishing market, as Cajun music and Cajun food have in the last two decades. For example, Zachary Richard’s last book, Faire récolte, including its CD-ROM, was on display in a major bookstore in Montreal last September, and a Cajun poem was included in the last edition of the French language

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textbook Chez Nous: Branché sur le Monde Francophone, edited by Valdman, Pons, Scullen, and Jourdain (2002, p. 70). This body of texts provides a unique resource and testimony on the reality of linguistic assimilation, as it is experienced by the native population. They constitute unique “documents” as life takes over theory in the depiction of what linguistic assimilation is. Contrary to what is suggested elsewhere, language loss is not portrayed as a mellow process, but as a painful, humiliating, confusing experience; one that brings both despair and anger. These texts especially bear witness to the psycholinguistic methods involved in the assimilationist process and the emotional and mental violence involved in the formation of a new “linguistic habitus.” In his famous poem Schizophrénie linguistique (Linguistic schizophrenia), Jean Arceneaux (published in Cris sur le bayou, 1980, p. 16) offers an expressive testimony of this undocumented side of linguistic assimilation: I will not speak French on the school grounds. I will not speak French on the school grounds. I will not speak French … I will not speak French … I will not speak French … Hé! ils sont pas bêtes, ces salauds. Après mille fois, ça commence à pénétrer Dans n’importe quel esprit. Ça fait mal; ça fait honte; Puis là, ça fait plus mal. Ça devient automatique, Et on speak pas French on the school grounds Et anywhere else non plus. [Well, they are not stupid, those bastards. After one hundred times, it begins to penetrate In anyone’s mind. It hurts, it brings shame; And suddenly, it does not hurt anymore. It is almost natural, And we don’t speak French on the school grounds And anywhere else either.]

We are far from the analysis of language shift in terms of social necessity and economic advancement of the ethnic community or in terms of grammatical erosion and statistical speculation. This text, like so many others, tells a different story about linguistic assimilation, one that emphasizes authoritarian methods of linguistic enforcement, through affective and emotional intimidation. Psycholinguistic aspects of linguistic assimilation are still the “dark continent” of sociolinguistic research on

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linguistic minorities, but their study would certainly provide decisive insights on mechanisms of social and linguistic control as well as social and linguistic emancipation. David Cheramie, one of the most promising “Néo-Cadien”2 (New Cajun) poets, also clearly reminds us that intercultural relationships in situations characterized by inequality are inherently violent. In the early 1990s, while ethnic cleansing was ravaging former Yugoslavia, Cheramie (published in Éloizes, 1994, p. 39) stressed the relationship between this devastating civil war in Europe and the apparently peaceful ethnic and linguistic assimilation process in Louisiana: Comme Sarajevo l’Amérique veut pas savoir qui sont ses bâtards [Like Sarajevo America does not want to know who its illegitimate children are]

His book, Lait à mère (1997),3 bears in epigraph the following quotations from Herman Hesse and André d’Allemagne respectively: “true suffering only exists when two civilizations meet” and “colonialism reduces the culture of the dominated people to mere folklore and propaganda.” Therefore, Cheramie exposes the deception in the traditional representation of the Cajun “joie de vivre” widely promoted by commercial propaganda, cultural tourism, and the media (p. 15): Asteur, les bons temps ne sont plus après te tuer demain encore on fera bouillir les crabes fraîchir la bière pour tromper ta mémoire, vieux violoneux pour faire des accroires au monde qu’un Cadien est toujours heureux. [Right now, good times are not killing you anymore tomorrow again crabs will be boiled beer will be fresh to fool your memory, old fiddler to make people believe that a Cajun is always happy.]

Charles Larroque, a Louisiana native and currently a teacher of French in an immersion program, also eloquently expresses the repressive and threatening context

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of assimilation through the use of powerful military and farming metaphorical figures in his poem Route d’évacuation (Evacuation road) published in Éloizes in 1994. However, it is in Zachary Richard’s songs and poetry that the most expressive poetic statements of indignation, anger, and despair about linguistic assimilation can be found. His song, Réveille! (Wake up!), is well known across the French-speaking world, whereas his poetry bitterly exposes the state of powerlessness in which his community is maintained. In his poem, La vérité va peut-être te faire du mal (The truth might hurt you), he blames not only materialism introduced by “the Americans” and the Catholic religion with its “Complex of Sacred Persecution,” but above all, the linguistic resignation of the Cajun community itself (Éloizes, 1994, pp. 30–31). These texts on linguistic assimilation definitely offer a different perspective compared to texts coming from academic circles. They eloquently and unequivocally “document” linguistic assimilation as a cultural struggle and painful conflict and, just as importantly, as a struggle not yet over. Positivist scholars would probably challenge the use of literature and poetry as a valid source of data for sociolinguistic research and sociolinguistic criticism. The purpose of social studies should, however, go beyond stating regularities, predicting outcomes, presenting data in tables, providing statistics, and describing observable phenomena in law-like general terms. It should also be open to various forms of epistemological criticism and be receptive to its results. But important philosophical issues are also at stake in this discussion. As the editors of Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method (Cameron et al., 1992, p. 5) state, if these philosophical issues “are not always discussed explicitly, they are fundamental to all empirical research.” Epistemological assumptions “determine the way in which a researcher interacts with the researched: thus they influence methods and indeed research finding” (p. 5). Similarly, epistemological assumptions have also determined the way in which various forms of cultural and material evidence were gathered and used in this study. Even the most positivist scholar should see the potential scientific significance of the identification of the discrepancy between the academic and the native versions of linguistic assimilation, and should somehow wonder why it was not unveiled or noticed before by “hard” methods for eliciting data. Scientific discourse, in general, tends to ignore or disqualify local knowledge, particularly when it revolves around sensitive social issues. Foucault (1980) states that the strength of this form of unofficial discourse lies precisely on the “harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it,” and he adds that it is precisely through the appearance (or reappearance) of this disqualified knowledge that “criticism performs its work” (p. 82). Robert Lafont (1997, p. 28) offers a sociolinguistic application of this idea when he stresses the necessity to reinterpret the history of diglossia or assimilation by promoting native militant literature, popular songs, and the teaching of the minority language (in his case, the Occitan language).

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Foucault pointed out that it is not institutional knowledge, such as a semiology of the life of the asylum or even a sociology of delinquency, which produced the most effective tool to understand the asylum and the prison systems, but rather what people caught up and subjugated by such systems had to say or had said about it. Likewise, the whole issue of language loss in Louisiana (and of language loss everywhere) will certainly be better understood if what the linguistic community says about it is fully acknowledged, in a theoretical rather than a condescending way, by academic discourse and practices. Foucault’s concept of genealogy, which he defines as the association between erudite knowledge and local memories in order “to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today” (1980, p. 83), is particularly valuable and helpful in this regard. A turn in this direction has already taken place in some sociolinguistic circles, though it is still a marginal trend, as shown for example by the expression “sociolinguistic from the periphery.” Similar theoretical and methodological interests can also be found among the Lancaster group of researchers who advocate “empowering research” (Cameron et al., 1992). They define this concept as a “research on, for and with” members of the minority communities. “Empowering research” adopts the following principles: first, the use of interactive and dialogic research methods; second, the importance of subjects’ own agendas; and third, the question of the “feedback” and sharing of knowledge (p. 23). Cooperation between experts and community members should not be understood as the traditional use of community members as informants or auxiliary consultants, but as an active participation at all levels of the research process. William Labov’s work brought some attention to power and social issues involved in sociolinguistic methods, but this mainly led him to systematically examine the social conditioning of linguistic variables but not the social conditioning of sociolinguistic research itself and all its implications. This new field of research in sociolinguistics is still at an exploratory stage, but it seems to announce that some long overdue changes and questionings are finally taking place within the discipline. An ongoing research project led by Albert Valdman (Indiana University) in Louisiana seems promising in that regard, because a collaborative team of four linguists and two community members are equally involved in the process of producing a comprehensive dictionary of Cajun French. This collaborative effort has already generated positive and unusual results, as a special edition of the dictionary will be released before the scientific version for the benefit of the community.

CONCLUSION This article has shown the value of sociopolitical and sociohistorical forms of criticism mainly applied to sociolinguistic scholarship. It has used indiscriminately,

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and as a necessity, a wide range of data coming from inside as well as from outside academia. The discrepancy between the two versions of linguistic assimilation, one version coming from the victor or dominant group, and the other version from the defeated or linguistic minority, should be given a close examination. It also should raise some questions about the failure of more empirical, positivist, and supposedly more “scientific” methods to see and investigate that fact. But as long as sociolinguistics will be committed to the obviousness and unproblematic status of what we can observe, it will stay blind to facts and issues, most of them of critical importance for linguistic minorities.

ENDNOTES 1The Diwan school system, which provides full education in Breton (a Celtic language still spoken in Brittany, France) from kindergarten to high school, is also a good illustration of the relationship between classification, practical means, and social effects. In 2001–2002, 2,613 students are enrolled in one of the 37 Diwan schools (Information retrieved December 12, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.diwanbreizh.org). The existence of such schools is a direct consequence of local activism and political awareness of some members of the Breton community. It is interesting to note that Lois Kuter does not even mention the existence of these schools and this movement in his article on the Breton language published in Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death, edited by Nancy Dorian (1989, pp. 75–89). 2In a previous study (Ryon, 2000a, p. 177), I have defined as “Néo Cadiens” (New Cajuns) the “new generation of French speakers in Louisiana who mainly have been educated in French through schooling.” Typically, they have learned French as a second language and are fluent speakers of Standard French rather than Cajun French, but many of them, such as the poet David Cheramie, come from families who still speak Cajun French at home and value the vernacular language that they try to rehabilitate in their creative writing as well as through social and educational activism. 3The title “Lait à mère” means “mother’s milk” but can also be read as “bitter milk” by homophony with “lait amer.”

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Ryon, D. (1999). Review of the book French and Creole in Louisiana. Études Francophones, 14, 244–248. Ryon, D. (2000a). Conflit, assimilation et revendication de l’identité ethnolinguistique en Louisiane francophone. Études Francophones, 15, 171–190. Ryon, D. (2000b). Logique d’État et aménagement linguistique du français en Louisiane. La Revue Française, 9, 7–20. Tornquist, L. (2000). Attitudes linguistiques vis-à-vis du vernaculaire franco-louisianais dans les programmes d’immersion en Louisiane. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Valdman, A. (Ed.). (1997). French and Creole in Louisiana. New York: Plenum. Valdman, A., Pons, C., Scullen, M. E., & Jourdain, S. (2002). Chez Nous: Branché sur le monde francophone (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Waggoner, M. (1999). Une fantaisie collective: Anthologie du drame louisianais cadien. Lafayette, LA: Centre d’Études Louisianaises.

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Appropriating English, Expanding Identities, and Re-Visioning the Field: From TESOL to Teaching English for Glocalized Communication (TEGCOM) Angel Lin City University of Hong Kong

Wendy Wang Eastern Michigan University

Nobuhiko Akamatsu Doshisha University

A. Mehdi Riazi Shiraz University

In this article we critically analyse our own autobiographical narratives and use the collective story as a format to tell our stories of learning and teaching English in different sociocultural contexts. We discuss how this local, socioculturally situated knowledge can contribute to the knowledge of the discipline and a re-visioning of the field. Key words: critical applied linguistics, identity, Othering, global English, language learning, English language teaching English is now a heteroglossic language that has become pluralized. … We can point to the creative communicative strategies adopted by people from their own communities from way back in history to acquire and use English in their own terms. (Canagarajah, 2000, pp. 130–131)

Requests for reprints should be sent to Angel Lin, Department of English and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kln., Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]

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The world is not owned by English; English is owned by the world. (Chan Yuen-ying;1 Wang, 2001, p. 23; original in Chinese)

Can one use the “master’s tools” to deconstruct the “master’s house”? Writing in an appropriated2 language from the “margins” or “periphery” of the academic field, while at the same time trying to destabilize the very dichotomies that saturate the language in which we write (e.g., “center-periphery”), we almost overly stretch the use of scare quotes, short of a better way of distancing our positions from the binary points of view embedded in the very language we use to write about these issues in applied linguistics. Our consciousness has been dichotomized by long-standing discursive practices of Othering (Kubota, 2001), and the hierarchy of forms of representation and knowledge in academia has long been constituted by the interests, desires, and ideologies of historically dominant groups (Richardson, 1997). Writing from the “margins” while simultaneously trying to overcome the “center-margins” dichotomy constitutes both an intellectual and discursive challenge. It is with apprehension and yet determination that we set out to meet this challenge. We have been encouraged by the recent writings of scholars and researchers working in this area (Braine, 1999; Canagarajah, 1999a, 1999b, 2000; Graddol, 1999; Norton, 1997, 2000; Pennycook, 2000a, 2000b). We also explore different forms of representation and writing, as hitherto remote voices, attempting to negotiate identities and subject positions other than those traditionally constructed for us. Personal and biographical, yet sociological and political, our accounts are both reflexive and performative—we want to analyse our encounters and experiences with English in our own life trajectories just as we are constructing them and performing through them new voices, expanding identities, and alternative subject positions (Gee, Allen, & Clinton, 2001). This article is divided into four main parts. In Part I, we describe an example of discursive and institutional processes of Othering—the dichotomizing, essentializing, and hierarchicalizing of “scientific” and “literary” writing genres in Western thought and academic traditions. In Part II, we critically analyse our own autobiographic narratives and use the collective story (Richardson, 1985, 1997) as a format to tell our stories of learning and teaching English in different sociocultural contexts. In Part III, we engage in discussions that aim at contributing to the disciplinary knowledge and discourse of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and applied linguistics by illustrating both how English is seen, learned, and appropriated in different ways in diverse sociocultural contexts, and how this local, socioculturally situated knowledge can contribute to the knowledge of the discipline. In Part IV, we problematize the discursive and institutional practices of Othering by deconstructing and destabilizing the dichotic categories of “native” and “non-native” speakers of English and propose a paradigm shift from doing TESOL to doing teaching English for glocalized3 communication (TEGCOM).

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PART I: DISCURSIVE AND INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES OF OTHERING: DICHOTOMIZING, ESSENTIALIZING, AND HIERARCHICALIZING WRITING GENRES We are restrained and limited by the kinds of cultural stories available to us. Academics are given the “storyline” that “I” should be suppressed in their writing, that they should accept homogenization and adopt the all-knowing, all-powerful voice of the academy. But contemporary philosophical thought raises problems that exceed and undermine the academic storyline. We are always present in our texts, no matter how we try to suppress ourselves. … How, then, do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity? How do we nurture our own voices, our own individualities, and at the same time lay claim to “knowing” something? (Richardson, 1997, p. 2)

It is interesting to read Richardson’s (1997) analysis of 19th-century academic writing canons that were privileged by university and disciplinary institutions, with the power of these canons still being carried on into the 21st century. In Richardson’s analysis of the historical separation of science and literature in academic institutions since the 17th century, we see an example of the processes of Othering, of dichotomizing, essentializing, and hierarchicalizing through discursive and institutional practices. Literary, metaphorical writing styles and scientific, “plain,” factual writing styles have been constructed as dichotomous, essentialized categories, with the latter privileged and legitimated as the proper medium for the representation of truth and knowledge. However, “a plethora of disciplines—communications, linguistics, English criticism, anthropology, folklore, women’s studies, as well as the sociology of knowledge, science, and culture—has been engaged in reconstructive analyses,” showing that “literary devices appear in all writing, including scientific writing,” and “all works use such rhetorical devices as metaphor, image, and narrative” (Richardson, 1997, p. 16). In these analyses, we see the pervasive and continuous workings of processes of Othering, of the historical construction of essentialized, dichotomized notions and storylines of Self and Other, from the 17th century to the 19th century and to the present day. There is an intimate relation between these discursive and institutional practices of Othering and technologies of power (Foucault, 1972, 1980, 1988) that permeate not only the “master-primitive” colonial relations but also other forms of hierarchical social relations found in many societies: that is, man–woman, literate–illiterate, researcher–researched. As Canagarajah (1996) has shown, present day applied linguists’ “objective” writing is but another example of how unequal power relations between the allegedly rational objective researcher (Self), who is constructed as capable of conducting meta-analysis and rational theorizing on the allegedly subjective researched (Other), who are often reported in ways that suggest that they are doing what they do without the ability to reflexively meta-analyse or theorize about what they do.

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The previous discussion leads us to the consideration of the following important reflexive question: How should we position ourselves as we are writing this article and/or how do we get positioned by what we write and how we write about it; what kind of voice do we speak in? In positioning ourselves, we can draw on or choose from different cultural storylines available to us (Harre & van Langenhove, 1998). For instance, we can reproduce the pervasive storyline in academic disciplines, adopt (or borrow) the voice of the “objective” researcher, and write in a style that upholds the canons of scientific writing practices (Richardson, 1997). We can, alternatively, choose the other side of the coin, that is, discursively constructing an “authentic cultural voice” characterized by a literary, metaphorical, rhetorical style. In both cases, however, we would only be reproducing the dichotomizing and essentializing colonial storyline of Self and Other (with the “mainstream” being the Self and “us” being the Other). We therefore choose to evade this trap by deconstructing the dichotomous and essentialized storyline. We want to show that these dichotic, essentialized categories (i.e., “mainstream voice” and “indigenous, authentic cultural voice”) cannot capture the complexities of the subject positions that we envision for ourselves—we are both “mainstream” and “indigenous,” or we are neither “essentially mainstream” nor “essentially indigenous.” To cross these dichotic boundaries, we draw on Richardson’s (1997) hybridized genre, “the collective story,” as a way of writing ourselves into the text—writing individual personal stories that have theoretical, sociological, and political implications. In the next section we introduce this genre and present our “collective story.”

PART II: THE COLLECTIVE STORY—WHERE THE PERSONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL INTERSECT Richardson (1985) intertwines narrative writing with sociological analytic writing in a research-reporting genre that she calls “the collective story.” The collective story “gives voice to those who are silenced or marginalized” and “displays an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs” (Richardson, 1997, p. 22). To Richardson, the collective story is not just about the protagonists’ past but also about his or her future: Transformative possibilities of the collective story also exist at the sociocultural level. … By emotionally binding people together who have had the same experiences, … the collective story overcomes some of the isolation and alienation of contemporary life. It provides a sociological community, the linking of separate individuals into a shared consciousness. Once linked, the possibility for social action on

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behalf of the collective is present, and therewith, the possibility of societal transformation. (Richardson, 1997, p. 33)

Although Richardson emphasizes in the previous excerpt the similarity of experiences of “members” of a certain “social category” (identified according to certain similar conditions or experiences; e.g., cancer survivors, battered women), we want to emphasize the fluidity and nonessentialized nature of such social categories and how the rhetorical decisions made in the writing of the collective story contribute to the foregrounding of similarities of experiences, while de-emphasizing dissimilarities. On the one hand, we want to show in our collective story our uniqueness as individuals, each having a “unique trajectory that each person carves out in space and time” (Harre, 1998, p. 8). On the other hand, we want to show in our collective story how the “narrated experiences” of each of us are not isolated, idiosyncratic events, but “are linked to larger social structures, linking the personal to the public” and the biographical to the political (Richardson, 1997, p. 30). Those similarities of experiences and social conditions that each of us found ourselves in motivated our joining together to embark on the writing of this article in the first place. Resonating with Richardson’s notion of using the collective story as a form of social action with transformative possibilities, we want to use our autobiographic narratives not only to report and interpret action, but also to shape future action, stressing “the prospective aspect of autobiographies” (Harre, 1998, p. 143). Recent works in applied linguistics that drew on narrative analysis and autobiographical data (e.g., Kramsch & Lam, 1999; Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko, 1998, 2001; Young, 1999) as well as the endorsement of narrative and autobiographic research as legitimate approaches in recent research methodology discourses (e.g., Casey, 1995; Ellis & Bochner, 2000) have created in applied linguistics a much welcomed niche, an opening, a legitimate discursive space for us to explore ways of presenting our experiences with English as “English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners” in different Asian contexts. In presenting these narrated experiences, we are also paving the way to create subject positions more complex than and alternative to those traditionally created for us in EFL learning and teaching discourses (e.g., the stereotype of the quiet, passive, Asian classroom learner of English). Our Collective Story The four authors of this article have learned and used English since childhood in different parts of Asia—Mainland China, colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, Japan, and Iran, respectively. We crossed one another’s pathways when we went to Canada to do our doctoral studies in English language education in the early 1990s. We parted upon graduation and each went into different career paths under different sociocultural and institutional structures. We decided to present our voices as language learners from different parts of the world to the “mainstream”

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audience by forming a panel, writing up our autobiographies of our experiences with English, and presenting them at the TESOL convention in 2001 (Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, & Riazi, 2001). Now we want to make deeper sense of what we have written by reflexively analysing our experiences, linking them to current discourses of language learning and identity and of local production of disciplinary knowledge in applied linguistics (e.g., Canagarajah, 2000; Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997; Norton, 1997, 2000; Toohey, 2000). When we reflexively analyse our own autobiographies, we find a comparable storyline underlying our different stories. Due to limited space, we shall present excerpts from our narratives to illustrate the storyline, followed by a critical analysis to answer the following questions: Can we reposition ourselves by reimagining the storyline, and how can our stories contribute to the knowledge and discourse of the discipline?

Learning English in contexts where English is not a daily life language. First of all, the four learners were situated in a similar set of sociolinguistic conditions with respect to learning English. In their sociocultural contexts, English—not being a language for daily communication within their families or communities—was mainly encountered as an academic subject in school: How did I get interested in the English language in a non-English speaking country like China? My parents didn’t speak a word of English. My first encounter with English was when I was in the 3rd grade and English was a school subject. In the isolated China in the early 70s, many Chinese kids considered English to be too foreign and irrelevant to their lives; so there was lack of interest in the English subject. (Excerpt from Wendy’s story) I grew up in a small town in Fars province, where English was not popular and was taught as a school subject only from grade seven. There weren’t any private institutions to teach English either. Moreover, the socio-economic condition of families did not allow for a full-fledged schooling of their children, let alone for extra curricular subjects such as English. Therefore, chances for learning English in families or formal education were very low for us. (Excerpt from Mehdi’s story) I grew up in a home and community where few had the linguistic resources to use English at all, and even if anyone had, she/he would find it extremely socially inappropriate (e.g., sounding pompous) to speak English. My chances for learning and using English hinged entirely on the school. However, I lived in a poor government-subsidized apartment building complex in the rural area in Hong Kong, where schools were mostly newly put up in the 1960s and they neither had adequate English resources (e.g., staff

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well-versed in spoken English) nor a well-established English-speaking culture. (Excerpt from Angel’s story) I was good at math and science, and English was also my favorite subject. I felt that English was the easiest subject of all, in terms of getting good marks. … In my third year in junior high school (Grade 9), I decided to try to enter the most prestigious high school, which my brother attended. In spite of all my efforts, however, I failed the entrance examination for the high school and had to go to another school. I thought that my life was over. … I was unhappy about everything around me. … It was one of those days when I met Mr. Okuhara. (Excerpt from Nobu’s story)

Appropriating English to expand our horizons and identities. Given the situation that English is mainly learned as a school subject for academic grades, one will normally not expect the learner to have developed a high level of communicative competence in English. However, our stories illustrate how some teachers helped us appropriate English and engage in practices that expanded our horizons and identities. Those moments were experienced as self-transforming, culturally enriching, and also at times psychologically liberating (resonating with the emphasis of recent works on the intimate relationships between identity and language learning; e.g., Norton, 1997, 2000; Toohey, 2000). For instance, the hierarchical schooling system in Japan imposed a failure identity on Nobu when he failed to enter a prestigious high school; his meeting with a very special English tutor, Mr. Okuhara, had created a new, expanding identity for Nobu and had turned his life around—he wanted to become an English teacher, like Mr. Okuhara: My first meeting with Mr. Okuhara was very brief; he just read through the textbook and reference books (i.e., grammar books) I was using in my high school and made a few comments on them. He then handed me another book to read. Boy, it was so difficult! There were a lot of words I didn’t know, and some sentence structures were also complex. I could read only three pages or so in a week. … I studied English with Mr. Okuhara for four years. In those four years, I read a variety of English books with him, such as autobiography, mystery, adventure, and philosophy. My reading ability in English improved so much and I learned many things from the English books. … However, it is the time I spent with him after each lesson that I appreciated more. He used to tell me about his youth and his teaching experiences … Mr. Okuhara was a very special person who influenced me most in my teenage. I realized that I would like to be an English teacher like Mr. Okuhara. (Excerpt from Nobu’s story)

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Learning English in China in the 1970s should have also proved to be a lonely enterprise. However, there were two significant events in Wendy’s early learning experience: (a) Wendy’s parents wanted their daughter to take up the future identity of an interpreter, who would serve as a bridge between the Western world and their own world, and (b) Wendy’s meeting with a special teacher, Mr. Qi, who had opened up a bilingual discursive space for her to feel secure enough to explore a new world and a new identity in English: My parents passed on to me their beliefs and interest in the Western world. They strongly believed that the future of China was to be open to the Western world and English language is the key for communication. … My parents believed that I had language talent and could become an interpreter one day. So they seized the opportunity for me by signing me up for a language aptitude test when the Tianjin Foreign Languages School reopened the year after President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. I passed the language aptitude test and was admitted into an intensive English program in 1973. Getting into the English program changed the path of my life forever. … I enjoyed practicing speaking English with peers and teachers. All the teachers were fluent speakers of English, though not native speakers. The classes were small, with no more than 12 students in each class. I enjoyed going to English classes, particularly the English conversation class. Our teacher, Mr. Qi, liked to code-switch between English and Chinese. This shaped the way we communicated with each other both in and out of class. In switching between the two languages, we learned to relate to each other and communicate in the world we created. The use of both languages signified a sense of belonging to that world. … Chinese was the language to represent ourselves and English was the language we used to expand who we were and who we wanted to be. To this end, English became a language of dream and a language of freedom. (Excerpts from Wendy’s story; italics added) Likewise, English later became much more than a school subject to Angel. It became a tool for her to enrich and expand her sociocultural horizons, and a space for her to negotiate her “innermost self”: I had pen-pals from all over the world. … In my circle of girl-friends, having pen-pals had become a topic and practice of common interest and we would talk about our pen-pals and share our excitement about trading letters, postcards, photos, and small gifts with our pen-pals; we’d also show one another pictures of our pen-pals. … It’s a spontaneous “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) that had emerged from our own activities and interests. … I also started to write my own private diary in English every day about that time. … Although I had started off this habit mainly to improve

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my English, later on I found that I could write my diary faster in English than in Chinese … I felt that I could write my feelings freely when I wrote in English—less inhibition and reservation—I seemed to have found a tool that gave me more freedom to express my innermost fears, worries, anger, conflicts or excitement, hopes, expectations, likes and dislikes, as if this foreign language had opened up a new, personal space (a “third space,” Bhabha, 1994) for me to more freely express all those difficult emotions and experiences (typical?) of an adolescent growing up, without feeling the sanctions of the adult world. (Excerpts from Angel’s story) Mehdi’s location in a tourist spot and his identity as one of the few tourist guides in the community gave him an impetus to learn English. Later, English came to be an important tool for him to acquire a socially upward, professional identity: My first encounter with English language was in the form of facing foreign tourists coming to our historical town to visit the historical traces of the past dynasties. This created in me an impetus to learn English. … In grade seven, I had my first formal exposure to English language as a school subject. … Having finished my high school, I entered into a two-year college program in electronics. Students in this college were required to spend their first quarter totally learning English as all the textbooks were in English and even the language of instruction in some courses was also English. … This college program helped me a lot in changing my subject and field of study (from electronics to English) both in entering the field (English program) and later on in fulfilling the requirements of different levels of the English language program. (Excerpt from Mehdi’s story)

Anticlimax: Experiences of being positioned as an inferior copy of “The Master’s Voice.” Our storyline has so far been one of a successful journey of learning and mastering English for our own purposes. Two of the stories (Wendy’s and Angel’s), however, have an anticlimax, a difficult situation that destroyed most of their previously built-up confidence about themselves and their English. Positioned as an inferior (or “accented or not-competent” English speaker) by her Anglo classmates, Wendy was made to live with an imposed Otherness. She both missed and had to hide her bilingual, code-switching, confident, hybrid self (cf. Trinh, 1990) that she once enjoyed before going to Canada: When I went to Canada in the late 1980s, I was a relatively fluent speaker of English. However, it didn’t take me long to realize that my English was marked. All of a sudden my relationship with English changed. In China, being able to speak English was a plus; therefore I was + English. As a non-na-

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tive speaker of English in Canada, the capitalized “I” automatically became a lower case and English became my problem … Soon after I started the MA program in English at York University, I felt numerous tensions building up around the language I thought I knew well. While I was proficient enough to function in the English-speaking environment as a graduate student, I had the feeling that the person people saw and communicated with was not the person inside. The “me” shown through the English language was not the same “me” shown when I spoke Chinese or when I “messed up English with Chinese.” I started to experience a persona split. I missed the old “me” with two languages in one person. Now I felt like two people. The English Me was definitely much quieter, more reserved, and less confident to the point that my voice became so low that people couldn’t hear what I was saying. I was constantly frustrated when people asked me “I am sorry, what did you say?” or “Pardon?” Each time I heard these, I became so self-conscious that I couldn’t hear my own voice. It made me feel worse when I heard people say “Never mind!” I felt like an idiot, unable to comprehend what other people had said. All these instances made me wonder what was wrong with my English. Was my English that bad? (Excerpt from Wendy’s story; italics added) Likewise, Angel was made to feel ashamed of her English: English in my secondary school days was something I felt I mastered and owned. I felt competent and comfortable in it. It was not until my first year as an undergraduate English major in the University of Hong Kong that I was induced to feel ashamed about my own English—or made to feel that I hadn’t really mastered it or owned it. Many of my fellow students at the university had mostly studied English literature in their secondary schools while I had only the slightest idea of what it was! (English Literature is not offered in the curriculum of most secondary schools, but it is offered in a small number of well-established prestigious schools in the urban area in HK). When I spoke in tutorial sessions, I noticed the difference between my Cantonese-accented English and the native-like fluent English that my classmates and the tutor spoke. It was, however, too late for me to pick up the native-like accent then. (Excerpt from Angel’s story)

Searching for resolution: Reclaiming and re-exercising ownership of English. Both Wendy and Angel constructed in the latter parts of their narratives a self that has reclaimed ownership of English through continuous education—gaining more linguistic as well as symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986): Continuing education was my remedy for making up what comes naturally to native speakers, the confidence to speak. … not until I started teaching

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English as a second language with the Toronto Board of Education did I feel comfortable with English and myself. I no longer considered English as their language. It was mine. It had to be mine before I could teach it to my students. (Excerpt from Wendy’s story; italics added) My life and career took a turn after my Master’s degree and my residential years in the Robert Black College. I have acquired both the paper credentials and the actual linguistic and cultural resources to get and do the job of an English teacher. I had not (and have not) acquired a native-like English accent, but relatively speaking, my spoken English was more fluent and idiomatic than before the Robert Black College years. I no longer felt that I was an “impostor” (Bourdieu, 1991), or an “incompetent” teacher, an object of mockery by my middle-class students and colleagues. I seemed to have somehow managed to enter the elite group of English-conversant Chinese in Hong Kong. (Excerpt from Angel’s story) It has to be pointed out that the resolution, which seemed to have come easily, was, in fact, just a temporary resolution. The feeling of having to prove oneself (and one’s competence in English) is a recurrent one, and the struggle is one that continues, as both Wendy and Angel are reflecting on it now.

Helping our students. In the final part of the storyline, all four authors are engaged in the positioning of self as a helping teacher, as someone who wants to help learners like themselves to achieve what they have achieved in relation to English and to life in general: I strongly believe that helping learners relate to each other in the target language and develop the confidence to use the language as their own should be the primary objectives for second language teaching and learning. (Excerpt from Wendy’s story) Whenever I hear my students express worries about their English proficiency, I also notice that they have had a very different relationship than that I have developed with English over the years. I am still trying to find ways to help them stop seeing English as only a subject, a barrier, a difficult task in their life, but as a friend who would open up new spaces, new challenges and new lands for them, both socioculturally and intellectually. … To me, this is a life-long research and practice question to embark on. (Excerpt from Angel’s story) I’m not sure how much or if my students are satisfied with my classes, but I’ve been learning a lot from teaching here. For example, since I came here, I’ve been more able to put myself in my students’ place and to improve my

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way of teaching. I’ve been not only teaching action research but also using it for my classes. … I’m beginning to feel that I can share what I’ve learned from my studies with my students and that I can learn from them. (Excerpt from Nobu’s story) I try very hard to create a sense of self-confidence in my students and develop their potentialities. This, I understand, originates from my own experience as a learner. My students have come to know me as a caring teacher, an attribute that has occasionally received some criticisms on the part of my colleagues. (Excerpt from Mehdi’s story)

Critical reflexive analysis of our collective story—Identities without guarantees. In writing our autobiographies to present at the 2001 TESOL Conference (Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, & Riazi, 2001), we have at times reproduced the dominant storylines of Self and Other and at other times attempted to put forward alternative subject positions for ourselves. Echoing Hall’s (1996) notion of “Marxism without guarantees,” we realize the limitations in trying to carve out new subject positions and identities using old discourses. For instance, while attempting to resist being positioned as an inferior copy of the “master’s voice,” we reproduced at times the dominant storyline and the essentialized and hierarchicalized categories of “native speakers” and “non-native speakers” (e.g., “All the teachers were fluent speakers of English, though not native speakers.”—excerpt from Wendy’s story). Can the subaltern really speak (Spivak, 1988)? Can we speak only through the “master’s voice” or speak only as a “domesticated Other” (Spivak, 1988)? Is there any way of finding our voice, remaking our identities, reimagining our storylines, reworking the dominant discourses, and re-visioning the field? The storyline of our collective story is a familiar one: “EFL learners” who aspire to master the English language, work extremely hard on it, have been helped by some special teachers or schools, have gained a considerable degree of success, have climbed up the socioeconomic ladder partially using this success with English, and have found a bilingual self both culturally enriching and psychologically liberating, as if finding a “third space” (Hall, 1996). Then the storyline of two of us (Angel as a colonial subject in pre-1997 British Hong Kong, and Wendy as a Chinese immigrant in Canada) gets an anticlimax, which is still a very familiar one. For instance, such an anticlimax is found in the storylines of biographies of former colonials such as Ghandi, who encountered experiences of being Othered as “coloured people” in South Africa despite his British education and fluent English (Ghandi, 1982). Yet, in producing our stories, it is as if we subconsciously wanted to reposition ourselves in a reimagined storyline found in idealized stories of cross-cultural encounters, that is, an encounter between equals, a peaceful friendship-building and mutually enriching meeting of different peoples and cultures on

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egalitarian footings of mutual curiosity and respect (e.g., as found in movies such as ET, versus movies or TV dramas such as Aliens or The X-Files). Our reimagined storyline also says something else: We wanted to gain ownership of the cultural tool of English, to find our place and identity, to define who we are and what we shall become in a quest for expanded selves. Again, this is a familiar storyline—the quest for wider significance and expanded identities, socialness, and human mutuality, what Willis (1993) feels to be a quest that is part of the experiences of being human. Can our idealized, reimagined storyline be realized? Can we overcome those binary, essentialized, and hierarchical categories that saturate our language (e.g., “native vs. non-native speakers”)? Can we appropriate those “first world” theories to understand and analyse “third world” experiences (Spivak, 1990) while at the same time trying to rework and destabilize those categories? And in what ways can our local stories and lived experiences contribute to the knowledge and discourse of the discipline? It is to a discussion of these issues that we shall turn in the next section.

PART III: CONTRIBUTION OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE TO THE DISCIPLINE: SOCIOCULTURAL SITUATEDNESS OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNING, TEACHING, AND USE Any episode of human action must occur in a specific cultural, historical, and institutional context, and this influences how such action is carried out. (Wertsch, 2000, p. 18)

Whereas many sociocultural and critical researchers have pointed to the sociocultural situatedness of language learning, teaching, and use (Canagarajah 1999b, 2000; Pennycook, 2000a, 2000b; Wertsch, 2000), mainstream TESOL methodologies are still mainly informed by studies and experiences situated in Anglo societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Britain. This Anglo-centric knowledge base constitutes the canons of the discipline and often gets exported to periphery countries as pedagogical expertise to be followed by local education workers. Drawing on our own lived experiences in different sociocultural contexts, we shall discuss the value of local knowledge to the discipline with reference to the questions of (a) what counts as “good pedagogy” and (b) what motivates language learning? What Counts as “Good Pedagogy”? Our local stories and lived experiences tell us that such a question should be rephrased as “What counts as good pedagogy in specific sociocultural contexts?” For instance, consider Mr. Qi’s bilingual teaching strategy and Wendy and her

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peers’ code-mixing and code-switching practices, which have helped them gain both confidence and fluency in using English for meaningful communication. These bilingual teaching and communicative practices are likely to be devalued or frowned upon under current Anglo-based orthodox pedagogies of the discipline, which have not had the benefit of gaining the socioculturally situated perspective that Wendy and her contemporaries had. Consider also Nobu’s encounter with his mentor, Mr. Okuhara. The text reading and translation teaching method of Mr. Okuhara will hardly receive any commendation from current methodologies of the discipline. However, it was precisely Mr. Okuhara’s teaching that had turned a little boy around and aroused in him great interest and motivation to learn English, and more importantly, to enter a new world and learn about that world through English. We believe that the discipline needs to be informed and reshaped by much more such local stories as told by different learners, teachers, and researchers situated in different sociocultural contexts. Often found in the discipline are problematic implicit claims to context-free knowledge about English language teaching (ELT) methodologies. However, any relevant pedagogical knowledge has to be locally produced and negotiated in different sociocultural contexts (Canagarajah, 1999b, 2000; Holliday, 1994; Lin, 1999; Pennycook, 2000a, 2000b). Investment in Language Learning: Agency, Ownership, and Identity From Wendy’s reflection in the previous section and her autobiographic excerpts in Part II, we can see that the question of what fuels language learning is closely related to the learner’s agency and identity making in appropriating English in her or his learning process (Norton, 1997, 2000). For instance, the bilingual discursive space that was creatively opened up by Mr. Qi and Wendy and her peers helped these Chinese students experiment with and expand their identities; they felt liberated to comment on current sensitive social and political issues in this bilingual space and identity position that they temporarily created and occupied for themselves. In Wendy’s words, “English became a language of dream and a language of freedom.” Furthermore, Wendy’s aspired identity (as an interpreter) fueled her language learning efforts. Reflecting on the question of what fuels her language learning, Wendy writes, In analyzing my earlier experience as an English language learner, I have come to realize that imagination was an important source of my motivation. With a dream of becoming an interpreter that I inherited from my parents and took it as my own, learning the English language took on a personal meaning. English was no longer a simple school subject; it was a tool for me to realize my dream, to become who I wanted to be. The prospect of becom-

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ing an interpreter, a highly desired position in China, continued to fuel my motivation and got me through all the difficult times and obstacles. In all of our lived stories, it appears that issues of agency, ownership, and identity are closely related to the learner’s investment in English. For instance, in Mehdi’s story, his dissatisfaction with the position and social identity as a “low-level electronic technician” led to his decision to invest in studying English. Using his good performance on the English section of the University Entrance Exam, he entered the university and became an English specialist. The decision to shift from the identity of a technician to the identity of a university English major and later an English expert kept his investment strong, despite severe hardships, such as having to work to provide for his family while at the same time continuing with his university English studies. In Nobu’s story, the examination system seemed to have constructed a “failure identity” for him when he failed to enter the prestigious high school that his elder brother was attending. He lost all interest in learning and studying. His subsequent important encounter with the English teacher, Mr. Okuhara, turned things around for him. Mr. Okuhara seemed to have validated in Nobu a sense of a worthwhile young man with great potential for learning the different kinds of knowledge in the world: philosophy, biography, adventure, history. All kinds of worthwhile readings were opened up to him through the supportive interactions with Mr. Okuhara, who provided a scaffolding (the L2-L1 annotation format) for Nobu to see his own potential and to develop a new sense of self. He was no longer that failure student, an identity constructed by the examination results; he was a young person being treated with respect and trust by a supportive teacher who was leading him into a whole new world of learning, mediated by Mr. Okuhara’s text-reading and translating teaching method. He began to know who he was, and who he wanted to become: an English teacher like Mr. Okuhara himself—a new identity totally different from that failure identity imposed on him by the examination and schooling system. He knew where he was going and who he could become, and this led to his investment in his English learning. In Angel’s story, her investment in learning English was initially fueled by her desire to pass the examination, to achieve good results, and to please her parents. However, when she entered a community of practice in her circle of girlfriends, where it was trendy to write to overseas pen pals, her investment in English was fueled by her desire to enter into a new world with a new self in English; she felt that she could express her feelings more freely, as if in a third space, free from sanctions of the Chinese adult world. Her adolescent bonding with her pen pal, Gretchen, and her opening up of herself in English to her overseas pen pals led to a new sense of self for her—that English was not just a tool for getting rewards from adults; it was a tool for her to enter into different sociocultural groups, forming new friendships on an entirely different plane from her ordinary friendships.

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All these stories witness the complex, intimate relationships among agency, ownership, identity, and investment in L2 learning. We can see how learning a language both shapes and is shaped by one’s way of knowing, being, and behaving in a specific sociocultural context. This seems to touch on the same point suggested by Canagarajah (2000) when he discusses local agents’ appropriation of English in specific contexts. In this regard, stories of language learners situated in different sociocultural contexts can make valuable contribution to the knowledge and discourse of the discipline. Much of conventional research seems to have been written by strangers who tend to simplify the worlds of their subjects, consciously or unconsciously. Personal stories (which are simultaneously sociological and political; see discussion in Parts I & II) told by the agents themselves unfold the complex and multidimensional nature of mastering and appropriating English in different sociocultural contexts. We believe it is time to re-vision the field and propose an alternative storyline and research program for the discipline.

PART IV: RE-VISIONING THE FIELD: FROM TESOL TO TEACHING ENGLISH FOR GLOCALIZED COMMUNICATION Rather than a coercive monologue by the industrialized world, contemporary international cultural relations appear more like a dialogue, albeit unbalanced in favor of industrialized countries, but a dialogue still. … “Glocalization,” by accounting for both global and local factors, is a more appropriate conceptual framework to capture and accommodate international communication processes … the concept originated in Japanese agricultural and business practices of “global localization, a global outlook adapted to local conditions.” (Kraidy, 2001, pp. 32–33)

In Part II of this article, we see that just as Wendy and Angel were beginning to feel that English had become part of their identities, they were confronted with processes of Othering, which made them feel like an “imposter” (Bourdieu, 1991), an illegitimate speaker of English, mainly because of their local “accent”—their voice not being heard as an “authentic English voice.” It seems to be no accident that only Wendy and Angel’s stories told of experiences of being Othered. Unlike Iran and Japan, Hong Kong was a British colony. As for Wendy’s experiences in Canada, it is likely that the immigrant speaker can be subject to processes of subordination and Othering, a bit like subjects in colonies.4 The discourses in the applied linguistics and TESOL literature tend to classify people into “native English speakers” and “non-native English speakers.” These categories also frequently appear in job advertisements for English teachers in Asian countries (e.g., “native English speakers preferred,” “native English speakers only” found in the classified ads for English teachers in the Korean Times, Feb-

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ruary 10, 2001), and “native” and “non-native” categories of teachers receive different kinds of treatment and status in institutional structures (Canagarajah, 1999b; Lai, 1999; Oda, 1994, 1996; cf. Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997). These dichotic, essentialized categories are so pervasive in our consciousness that we even reproduce them in our own stories. Many learners of English in Asia themselves subscribe to the storyline that native English speakers are necessarily better English teachers than non-native English speakers. However, the world is increasingly witnessing “the decline of the native speaker,” as Graddol (1999) puts it: First, … the proportion of the world’s population speaking English as a first language is declining, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Second, the international status of English is changing in profound ways: in the future it will be a language used mainly in multilingual contexts as a second language and for communication between non-native speakers. Third, the decline of the native speaker [will be explored] in terms of a changing ideological discourse about languages, linguistic competence, and identity. (p. 57)

Following in the footsteps of researchers doing important work in this area (e.g., Braine, 1999; Canagarajah, 1999a, 1999b; Graddol, 1999; Kubota, 2001), we continue with their work by attempting to further destabilize the “native speaker versus non-native speaker” categories and proposing to erase the boundaries. The approach we take is to problematize the colonial Self–Other/Master–Friday storyline underlying these categories. If altering the discourse can lead to doing things differently (Erni, 1998), what difference will it make when we develop new ways of talking about English speakers and English voices by acknowledging the various, nonhierarchicalized ways of being an English speaker? As a step toward such reimagination and re-creation of discourses, we propose a paradigm shift from doing TESOL to doing TEGCOM. One rationale behind this proposal comes from the recognition that the name TESOL already assigns dichotic Self–Other subject positions to teacher and learner: It implicitly positions the Anglo teacher as Self, and positions the learner in a life trajectory of forever being the Other, and continuing the colonial storyline of Friday—the “slave boy” resigned to the destiny of forever trying to approximate the “master’s language,” but never legitimately recognized as having achieved it (de Certeau, 1974/1984, p. 155). Such a storyline precludes an alternative storyline such as that proposed in Part II previously. If one is willing to shift her or his attention from the differential status of speakers (e.g., “native–non-native,” “mainstream–minority,” “first world–third world,” etc.) to the mutual practice of communication itself (e.g., adopting an alternative storyline proposed previously in Part II), then we see in the postmodern, glocalized world today that there are increasing, legitimate demands for cross-cultural communication to be construed and conducted as an endeavor of mutual efforts on

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egalitarian footings. The “communicative burden” in cross-cultural, cross-ethnic communication is increasingly conceived as something that should be shouldered more or less equally by all participants in communication, and not just the “non-native English speaker” (Goldstein, 2002; Lippi-Green, 1997). Both the name and discourses of TESOL assume that it is the “Other-language” speakers who need to be subjected to “pedagogical treatment” (de Certeau, 1974/1984, p.155)—to enable them to make themselves intelligible to “native English speakers.” This lopsided storyline has its historical roots in the colonial era. However, in today’s multipolar world, we can imagine a TEGCOM class in which all learners are monolingual “native English speakers” who need to be instructed in the ways of using English for cross-cultural communication (e.g., cross-cultural pragmatic skills and awareness) in specific sociocultural contexts (e.g., for conducting business in Japan, China, or Iran). If we can start to reimagine the storylines underlying TESOL and its discourses, we can perhaps rework and destabilize the hegemonic relations in different settings in the world. Our lived experiences testify to the claim that it is when English learners have a sense of ownership of the language and are treated as legitimate English speakers, writers, and users that they will continue to invest in learning and using English, appropriating and mastering it for their own purposes in their specific contexts (see discussion in Part III). The answer to the question of whether an English speaker will serve as a good teacher or model is largely socioculturally situated (e.g., depending on the interactional practices that the teacher and her or his students cocreate in their specific sociocultural context) and cannot be determined (or even predicted) a priori based on the person’s plus- or minus- “native speaker” status (see also discussion on what counts as good pedagogy in Part III). We, therefore, see these dichotic categories more as interested social constructions serving existing power structures (Foucault, 1980) in the TESOL field and industry than as innocuous academic terms with much theoretical or practical value. Our proposal does not consist of merely renaming the field and erasing the previously mentioned dichotic boundaries. We are proposing a rethinking and re-visioning of the field from the perspective of sociocultural situatedness. Proposing TEGCOM means a fundamental change in conceptualizing the global and local divide in the discipline knowledge production and dissemination practices. Seeing English as a resource for glocalized communication where the global and local divide dissolves in the situated appropriation of a global means by local social actors for local purposes, a parallel decentering of the production of pedagogical knowledge in the discipline needs to happen. TESOL as a field guided by its instrumental rationality and modernist project of finding the most effective technology for teaching and learning English around the world has not concerned itself with the meta-analytical project of reflexively understanding its own implication in shaping the life chances, identities, and life trajectories of local people in different parts of the world. However, the “good” pedagogy cannot be found without taking

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socioculturally situated perspectives, and without engaging with issues of agency, identity, appropriation, and resistance of local social actors when they are confronted with the task of learning or using English in their specific local contexts. TEGCOM thus means a proposal of a paradigm change with implications for an alternative theoretical orientation and research program that put value on local situated knowledge.5

CODA Writing this article has been a collective project. Wang first proposed using autobiographic narratives to analyse our English learning experiences and wrote a methodological review on autobiographic analysis. Although Lin wrote most of the theoretical parts, all the authors participated in writing the collective story and critical analysis of the narratives. Lin first went through the four autobiographies and suggested that a specific storyline seemed to be emerging from them (see Part II). All four authors then looked back at their stories to select the episodes that would exemplify the different parts of the storyline. In the process, both the storyline and the critical analysis were continuously revised through discussions. We want to stress that there is diversity of voices among ourselves even as we coconstruct the collective voice that we present in this article. Our bonding in this article is based on our highlighting of our similarities for the purpose of addressing this specific question: How we can reposition ourselves and make our remote voices heard in the discipline? Can one use the “master’s tools” to deconstruct the “master’s house”? To the extent that we can rework, reimagine, and destabilize the various essentialized, dichotic, Self–Other constructions and the Anglo-centric knowledge-production mechanisms that saturate and dominate our language and institutional practices, we may achieve a first step toward imagining and reimagining and ultimately realizing the world as a place where multiple voices situated in different local sociocultural contexts are heard, valued, and given a chance to contribute to the disciplinary knowledge and discourses of applied linguistics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank Suresh Canagarajah, guest editor for this special issue of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and the three anonymous reviewers for their many useful critical comments and suggestions. Special thanks also go to John Erni, Tara Goldstein, and Allan Luke for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

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ENDNOTES 1Chan Yuen-ying is Professor and Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong. 2Appropriate used as a verb means “taking something that belongs to others and making it one’s own, using it for one’s own purposes, and with one’s own intentions.” The appropriation of mediational means or cultural tools (e.g., language, discourse, literacy, social practice) by the child, learner, or newcomer in her or his process of learning and development is an important concept in Russian sociocultural theories of psychology and education (see Wertsch, 1998, 2000). 3The term glocal and the process verb glocalize are formed by blending global and local. The idea has been modeled on Japanese dochakuka (deriving from dochaku “living on one’s own land”), originally the agricultural principle of adapting one’s farming techniques to local conditions, but also appropriated in Japanese business discourse to mean global localization, a global outlook adapted to local conditions (Robertson, 1995). 4Regarding the possible gender differences on this issue among the authors, Nobu says “When I started my MA program in the USA, I had low expectations towards life in the USA (my first study abroad). I don’t recall any specific incidents where I felt discriminated, but even if I had been discriminated, I would have taken it for granted because at that time I felt that I was not fully communicatively competent in English. (I should say that I did have good grammatical competence and academic thinking skills.) Maybe I had encountered such discriminatory occasions, with which Angel or Wendy would have felt annoyed, and I just didn’t notice them. When I think back on my life in the USA, I was just hoping to acquire more knowledge of TESOL, to get an MA, and to come back to Japan. I didn’t expect much. I fully accepted my identity as a foreign student from Japan, and therefore, maybe, I didn’t care much about and paid little attention to my accent and the discrimination which my accent might have caused.” 5Due to limited space in this article, further delineation of the alternative theoretical orientation and research program proposed for TEGCOM will appear in a future article.

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Educational Policy for the Transnational Dominican Community Marianne D. Pita and Sharon Utakis Bronx Community College

The increasingly transnational character of many immigrant communities necessitates changes in educational policy. We use the Dominican neighborhoods in New York City as our local case, examining the economic, political, social, cultural, and linguistic evidence of the transnationalism of this community. Many Dominicans maintain close ties to their native country through global networks that facilitate language and cultural maintenance. In spite of discrimination, Dominicans in the United States need to maintain their Spanish and want their children to develop fluent Spanish. Neglecting the language needs of transnational children leads to serious academic and social problems. Enriched bilingual bicultural programs would promote parallel development in both languages, providing cultural as well as linguistic instruction so that students can succeed in either country. Key words: educational policy, transnational communities, Dominican Republic, New York City immigrants, bilingual education

Global economic changes have led to a new paradigm of migration and the creation of communities that transcend national boundaries (Glick Schiller, 1999; Glick Schiller, Basch, & Blanc-Szanton, 1992). Some immigrants travel back and forth between native and host countries, weaving an economic, political, social, cultural, and linguistic web between two places. In the interstices of the global economy, these transnational communities have found ways to exploit global transportation and communication networks to maintain their native language and culture. Bilingual education and English as a second language (ESL) programs in the United States have been designed to serve immigrants who settle here and wish to assimilate (Crawford, 1992). However, changes in migration patterns should lead Requests for reprints should be sent to Marianne D. Pita, Department of English, Bronx Community College, 181 Street and University Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453. E-mail: [email protected]

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to changes in language programs to meet the needs of transnational communities. Educational policy cannot be formulated exclusively from above, for immigrants in general. It must be responsive to local context, to a particular population, to their lives, their histories, and their goals (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988). Local knowledge must inform educational policy to effectively serve the needs of a community. In the case of a transnational community, local knowledge must include an understanding of both native and host contexts and how the transnational community experiences the connection between the two places. As English teachers at Bronx Community College, we have noticed a disconnect between educational policy in New York City (NYC) and the needs of our transnational students and their children. Most of our ESL students at Bronx Community College are Dominican, and many go back and forth between the Dominican Republic and New York. Using the Dominican1 neighborhoods in New York City as our local case, we argue that the increasingly transnational character of this immigrant community necessitates changes in educational policy. Since the community is transnational, students need to learn two languages and be able to live in two cultures. Schools should help students develop and maintain fluency and literacy in both languages and should help students understand both cultures. In this article, we provide an overview of the Dominican community in New York City and advocate changes in educational policy for this transnational community.

THE TRANSNATIONAL NATURE OF THE DOMINICAN COMMUNITY IN NEW YORK CITY The Dominicans are the largest immigrant group in New York City (Sontag & Dugger, 1998). Jennifer Chait of the New York Department of City Planning estimates that there are 600,000 people of Dominican origin in the city (Kugel, 2001). However, although Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrant communities in the United States have been the subject of extensive linguistic and sociological studies (e.g., García & Otheguy, 1987; Peñalosa, 1980; Zentella, 1997a), Dominican immigrants, who have come to the United States more recently, have been the subject of significantly less research (Bailey, 2000b; Hernández & Torres-Saillant, 1996). According to an article in the New York Times, “Dominicans, regardless of class, are probably the most transnational of all New York’s immigrants … they have transformed their nation while laying claim to whole New York neighborhoods” (Sontag & Dugger, 1998, p. A28). Dominicans maintain close ties to their native country through global networks that facilitate language and cultural maintenance. These migrants can go back for vacations or extended visits because of inexpensive plane fares, and they stay in regular contact with family, friends, and institutions through phone calls, faxes, and the Internet. A 1997 poll published in the Dominican Republic reports that half of all Dominicans have family in the United States, and more than

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65% would move here if they had the opportunity (Rohter, 1997). In a monograph on the Dominican community in Washington Heights, Jorge Duany (1994) describes transnational communities as, “characterized by a constant flow of people in both directions, a dual sense of identity, ambivalent attachment to two nations and a far-flung network of kinship and friendship ties across state frontiers” (p. 2). The transnationalism of the Dominican community can be seen in its economic, political, social, cultural, and linguistic characteristics. Evidence of the economic ties between New York City and the Dominican Republic can be seen in the businesses that proliferate in the Dominican neighborhoods of New York: agentes de dinero extranjero (foreign money brokers), mudanzas (movers), envios (shipping), and agencias de turismo (travel agencies). Dominican entrepreneurs have created an economic infrastructure that forms the basis of transnational exchange. As noticeable as the economic impact of this transnational community is on New York City, the impact on the Dominican economy is even more substantial. Dominicans living in the United States send more than 1 billion dollars a year back to the island (Kugel, 2001). Transnational political ties attest to the importance of transmigrants on the island. In recognition of the dual identity of many Dominican migrants, the Dominican Republic changed its constitution to allow citizens living abroad to hold dual citizenship and vote in national elections (Smith, 1997). However, there is no mechanism for Dominicans living abroad to cast their ballots, so thousands fly back for national elections. In May 2001, hundreds of Dominicans marched in Manhattan to demand the right to vote from abroad in the 2004 Dominican presidential election (Kugel, 2001). In the 1996 election, Leonel Fernández, a transmigrant, was elected President of the Dominican Republic. Fernández, who holds a green card, moved to New York City in the 1960s, attended public school in Washington Heights, then returned to the Dominican Republic to attend law school (Guarnizo, 1997a; Smith, 1997). Dominicans place a strong value on familismo, commitment to extended family (Castillo, 1996; Pita, 2000). In this transnational community, many families have relatives in both countries, and strong kinship ties are maintained by regular travel. Lacking adequate daycare facilities in New York, parents often send their young children back to be cared for by grandparents. With family in both countries, parents can send teenagers to the Dominican Republic to shelter them from gangs, drugs, and early sex. Our students at Bronx Community College sometimes leave in the middle of the semester to go back to care for sick relatives or attend funerals. Many Dominicans save up so they can buy a house and/or a business in their native country and retire there, rejoining family left behind. In 1996 more than 50% of the Dominicans who died in New York City were returned to the Dominican Republic for burial (Sontag & Dugger, 1998). Second generation Dominican Americans are still strongly tied to the Dominican Republic. A qualitative study of a small group of Dominican girls born and

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raised in New York City revealed that these children often went back to their country for summer vacation (Pita, 2000). They identified as Dominican and maintained many Dominican customs. For example, these preadolescent girls were expected to maintain complete innocence in appearance, thought, word, and deed, a state of innocence called pudor in the Dominican Republic. Their Dominican parents were trying to raise children with traditional Dominican values. Dominican migrants maintain their ties to their native land on a daily basis. El Nacional, a leading newspaper in the Dominican Republic, has a New York edition with a circulation of 25,000 copies every day. In addition, five more dailies from the Dominican Republic are sold in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, among other places in New York (Smith, 1997). Sue Dicker and Hafiz Mahmoud (2001) of Hostos Community College have made an extensive survey of language use in the Dominican community in Washington Heights. The results indicate that these migrants are moving toward acquisition of English and greater participation in the larger society, while simultaneously maintaining their native language and their involvement and interest in Spanish cultural activities. Whether this transnational community can maintain their native language over the long term is a question for further research. The final item in Dicker and Mahmoud’s language survey asked participants whether they plan to stay in the United States or return to the Dominican Republic. Among those planning to stay in this country, a significant number also indicated plans to return to the Dominican Republic. Staying in this country and returning to their native country were not seen as mutually exclusive. Dominican migrants are forging a transnational identity that spans the two countries. Many of these migrants view their own identity positively. In a survey of Dominican high school students in New York City, Castillo (1996) found that 95% considered themselves “Dominicans and proud of it, regardless of where they were born” (p. 51). Fernando Mateo, a businessman who shuttles between New York and Santo Domingo, is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I believe people like us have the best of two worlds. We have two countries, two homes. It doesn’t make any sense to be either this or that. We’re both” (Sontag & Dugger, 1998). However, many Dominican migrants face conflicts in trying to create a transnational identity. In the Dominican Republic, transmigrants are called Dominicanyorks by the elite, a pejorative term for transnationals stereotyped as drug traffickers (Castillo, 1996; Duany, 1994; Smith, 1997) and discriminated against in business associations, private social clubs, schools, and housing (Guarnizo, 1997b). Nevertheless, lower nonmigrant classes look up to the migrants as role models and “a sort of revenge against the traditional elites” (Guarnizo, 1997a, p. 305). In the United States, many Dominicans feel they have to choose between being Dominican or being “American.”2 This forced choice pushes some to cling tightly to their own language and culture, making it difficult for them to learn English. In New York City, Dominicans tend to live in segregated neighborhoods in northern

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Manhattan and the west Bronx where they have little need to speak English (Duany, 1994; Smith, 1997). Dominicans are disparaged for not becoming “American” quickly or completely enough. Other migrants, particularly adolescents and children, feel that in order to be accepted in this country, they need to abandon their native language and culture. The process of forging a transnational identity is made more difficult by the discrimination against Dominican migrants based on race, language, and social class. Although 90% of the population of the Dominican Republic is of African descent, Dominicans in the United States resist categorization as Black, preferring to identify as “Spanish” because they speak Spanish (Bailey, 2000a). Nevertheless, “Negative stereotypes promoted by the mass media, especially since the 1992 riots in Washington Heights, have stigmatized the entire Dominican community as violent drug-trafficking gangsters” (Duany, 1994, pp. 43–44). Our Dominican students report discrimination in the workplace, schools, housing, hospitals, and streets. Although we focus on language-based discrimination, this form of discrimination is inextricably bound with racism and class discrimination. Discrimination based on language, or linguicism, leads to a hierarchy of language varieties, in which some varieties have lower prestige than others (Phillipson, 1992). In this country, Spanish, especially the Spanish of poor and working class immigrants, has low prestige relative to English (Dicker, 2000–2001). Furthermore, different varieties of Spanish have different levels of prestige within the Spanish-speaking community. Among Spanish speakers in New York, both Dominican and Puerto Rican Spanish have low prestige, according to Ana Celia Zentella (1997b). Why do Spanish speakers look down on Dominican Spanish? Zentella argues that, “The negative impact of U.S. language policies on Puerto Rico and of decades of dictatorial repression in the Dominican Republic, as well as the lower incomes and darker skins of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in NYC, place them at the bottom of the language status ladder” (1997b, p. 175). Even among Dominicans themselves, Zentella found that 35% of Dominicans expressed negative opinions about Dominican Spanish, and 80% said that Dominican Spanish should not be taught in schools (1990). The question of which language or which language variety should be used in schools is of vital importance for the success of Dominican transnational students.

CURRENT EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN THE DOMINICAN COMMUNITY Children from the Dominican community move between two school systems and, as a result, may suffer academically in both countries. Neglecting the needs of these transnational children can lead to devastating academic and social outcomes. According to a study by Luis Guarnizo (1997b), many Dominican Americans, concerned about the influence of New York culture on their school-age children,

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send the children back to the Dominican Republic to continue their schooling, often against the children’s wishes. Some of these children were born in the United States or migrated here at a very young age. Guarnizo notes that “many return children had undergone their primary socialization in the United States and did not even speak Spanish—or if they did, theirs was a limited, domestic Spanish inadequate for schoolwork or ‘proper’ social communication” (p. 42). At best, these children suffered from a difficult adjustment period with poor academic performance. At worst, they resisted their new environment in socially unacceptable ways. Guarnizo notes that the challenges posed by these children went beyond the domestic sphere to create “a widespread and neglected social problem” (p. 42) in the Dominican Republic. Peggy Levitt (2001) gives further evidence of the academic challenges transnational children face: “Because these students lack full linguistic or cultural fluency in either setting, they often fall irrevocably behind. Just as they begin to catch up … their parents move them again” (p. 84). Because the children may well return to this country, the schools in Dominican neighborhoods in New York City have an interest in preparing students for an educational future in both the Dominican Republic and New York. One of the most important assumptions underlying educational policy for immigrants in the United States is that people come to settle permanently, and to be successful they need to master English and assimilate as quickly as possible (Crawford, 1992). Historically, ESL teachers have been responsible for helping students to assimilate by teaching them English and those aspects of middle-class Anglo culture that are supposed to help them survive in the United States. Implicit in this view is the idea that immigrants do not need to develop or even retain their native language or learn about their own culture. The arguments in favor of bilingual education tend to be about affective aspects of language learning, how important it is for students’ self-esteem and family connection to maintain some level of proficiency in the native language (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988; Zentella, 1997a). Researchers have also argued that academic proficiency in the native language leads to more rapid acquisition of English (Cummins, 1989; Krashen, 1991). In fact, students who have mastered their native language have an advantage in learning a second language because of the transfer of academic skills (Cummins, 1986; Krashen, 1996; Zentella, 1997b). Although we agree with these arguments in favor of bilingual education in general, for transnational Dominican students the need to develop high levels of proficiency in Spanish is not merely affective, nor simply a matter of the most effective way to learn English. Their academic and economic survival depends on knowing both languages well. Dominicans in the United States want to maintain their Spanish and want their children to develop fluent Spanish (Castillo, 1996) in spite of some negative feelings about their language variety. Zentella (1990) found that 94% of Dominicans surveyed wanted their children to be bilingual.

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How well do the language programs available in New York City public schools serve the needs of transnational Dominican students? According to the Chancellor’s Report on the Education of English Language Learners (New York City Board of Education, 2000) in New York City, four programs are recommended: freestanding ESL, accelerated academic English language, transitional bilingual, and dual language. Freestanding ESL programs immerse students in content area instruction in English for most of the day. ESL instruction may occur in the classroom or in pull-out settings. Currently in an experimental phase, accelerated academic English-language programs, also called “High Intensity English,” employ content area teachers trained in ESL methodology. All instruction is in English. Both programs focus solely on the acquisition of English; students are typically given no support for their native language and, in fact, are encouraged to discard it. Although there is evidence that students acquire the language variety of their peers in English-speaking classrooms, academic competence in their native language (and in all academic subjects other than English) is sacrificed to expedient and cost-effective English learning. While they may maintain fluency in Spanish because of their home environment, they rarely develop further competence in their native language, and reading and writing skills are likely to deteriorate. Students who return to their native country suffer academically from having been deprived of continued instruction in their mother tongue. Transitional (short-term) bilingual programs are the most common form of bilingual education in New York City. In District 6, which has the highest concentration of Dominican students, 79% of English-language learners are in transitional bilingual programs.3 Such programs are an improvement over English immersion, but their goal is still monolingualism in English, “to transition students to regular English only classes as quickly as possible” (New York City Board of Education, 2000, p. 17). The native language is used to keep students from falling behind in other subjects while they learn English, but these programs shortchange students because after they are mainstreamed, language maintenance is ignored and academic competence in the native language atrophies (Skutnabb-Kangas & Garcia, 1995). Students in transitional bilingual programs are penalized for learning English quickly: As soon as they have reached minimal competence in English, their studies in Spanish are terminated (Cummins, 1980; Krashen, 1996). In New York City, students are expected to exit from bilingual and ESL programs after 3 years (New York City Board of Education, 2000). Next we come to dual language programs, in which the focus is on the development of proficiency in English within three years, with the additional goal of mastery of both English and a second language (New York City Board of Education, 2000). Evelyn Linares is the principal of the 21st Century Academy (Academia del Siglo 21), a dual-language public school in District 6. She believes that of the programs currently available in New York City, dual-language programs best serve

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the needs of Dominican children because “They recognize from the beginning that the [Spanish] language is important … they put stress on learning the language in a deeper way” (personal communication, November 30, 2001). Although dual language programs are currently the best alternative available for transnational Dominican students in New York City, they are small, limited in number, and often serve only elementary school students. According to Linares, her school suffers from high attrition as transnational students return to the Dominican Republic, and it is difficult to integrate new students beyond the second grade and maintain a balance between English and Spanish dominant students. The educational establishments in both New York and the Dominican Republic are beginning to recognize the challenges that these school systems face in trying to meet the needs of transnational Dominican students. The State Education Department of New York and the Dominican Department of Education called an Education Summit in April 2001. A Memorandum of Understanding between the two education departments was signed and included the following statement: Each year, large numbers of elementary and secondary school students of Dominican Republic heritage and their families migrate between the Dominican Republic and the State of New York, sometimes more than once in a school year; … such two-way migration impacts on the continuity and effectiveness of the education of such students … increased communication, collaboration and sharing between DR [Dominican Republic] and SED [State Education Department] … is in the best interests of such students of Dominican Republic heritage and of such educational systems. (New York State Education Department, 2001, p. 1)

Both the New York State Education Department and the Dominican Department of Education recognize the educational impact of this two-way migration on students. Although there are suggestions in the Memorandum for information sharing, instructional material exchange, and school staff exchange programs, bilingual education is not even mentioned, perhaps because bilingual education is so controversial in the United States.4

TOWARD A COHERENT EDUCATIONAL POLICY The Education Summit is a starting point, but New York City needs a more coherent language policy for Dominican students. Public school students, who may go back to the Dominican Republic at any time, need to continue to develop competence in both languages for as long as they are in school. The educational system should help students develop and maintain fluency and literacy in both languages. We are proposing an enriched bilingual bicultural program, so that students can succeed in school systems in either New York or the Dominican Republic. Stu-

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dents in a transnational community need a bicultural as well as a bilingual program. Josh DeWind (1997) describes the goals of such programs as follows: “Bilingual/bicultural programs are intended not only to help students develop dual language skills but also to help them become comfortable in both their native and American cultural contexts” (p. 141). As it stands, students in this country study U.S. history, and students in the Dominican Republic study Dominican history. A survey of Dominican high school students in New York City showed that they have very little knowledge of Dominican literature, art, folk culture, and history (Castillo, 1996). In a bicultural program in New York, students would study both histories and the relationship between the two countries. The history of U.S. political and economic intervention in the Dominican Republic and the resulting immigration patterns are an integral part of students’ own histories. The curriculum should integrate materials that are relevant to students’ lives, from their home country as well as the United States. Thus, this model is different from dual language programs that focus only on language instruction without giving equal consideration for culture. Furthermore, students in 12th grade in New York City should have a 12th-grade Spanish reading and writing level, even if they came to this country in 4th or 5th grade. Basic education with native language instruction would also help students who may well return to the Dominican Republic to develop further their literacy in Spanish. In the long run, education in the native language may help the transnational Dominican community to maintain Spanish in future generations. Zentella argues that “All groups … are unlikely to pass Spanish on to the next generations, despite their fervent desire to do so, if they do not make special efforts to raise their children bilingually. These include insisting on Spanish at home and demanding developmental—not transitional—bilingual education in the public schools, and Spanish for Native Speakers courses at the university level” (Zentella, 1997b, p. 195). In this sense, the model we propose differs from the other available programs—such as freestanding ESL, accelerated academic English language, and transitional bilingual models—which favor the dominant host language (English) and lead to monolingualism among immigrant students. This does not mean that the acquisition of English should be de-emphasized. In spite of the need for and interest in Spanish in the Dominican community in the United States, English is the language of power, and students want to learn that language because of the material advantages and increased security accruing from mastery of English. Even some of our students planning to return to the Dominican Republic report that they want to learn English because they will be better situated to get a good job in the Dominican Republic and to choose where they settle. However, teaching Standard English uncritically reinforces notions of the superiority of English and inferiority of Dominican Spanish. Since Dominicans in New York City speak a low prestige variety of a low prestige language, it is particularly important for teachers to help students value their own language. One way to do

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this is by helping students become aware of the historic, social, and economic reasons why some language varieties are more valued than others. Critical language awareness gives students the tools to understand the relationship between language and power. Teachers can create a space where explicitly sociopolitical and linguistic discussions can occur. For example, readings on bilingual education, the English Only movement, and assimilation have provoked intense discussions in our classrooms. This transnational perspective can lead to a critique of conditions in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. Ideally, educators from the same background (in this case Dominican teachers) can serve as role models of how students can become bilingual and bicultural (Auerbach, 1996). Furthermore, with Dominican teachers, students can learn to value their own language variety. The linguistic and cultural needs of Dominican transmigrants are increasingly complex, and educational policy should be responsive to students’ changing needs. School systems and educators need to work with the transnational community to develop programs that bridge continents, cultures, and languages.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Angus Grieve-Smith, Sue Dicker, Len Fox, Frederick De Naples, and Michael Denbo for their comments and suggestions; to the Dominican Studies Institute and John Acompore of the New York City Board of Education for help in finding information; and to Evelyn Linares for sharing her experience and insight. We especially thank Suresh Canagarajah for his thoughtful comments. All errors are our own.

ENDNOTES 1We have generally used the term Dominican, rather than Dominican American. Because of the transnational nature of this community, many migrants prefer the unhyphenated term. The question of identity is an important topic for future research. 2Clearly, “American” could refer to anyone from North, Central, or South America. However, we use the term in quotation marks in reference to people associated with the United States. 3John Acompore, Deputy Director of the NYC Board of Education Office of English Language Learners, reported in spring of 2001 that out of 9,937 general education English Language Learners in District 6 entitled to bilingual or ESL services, 7,850 were in bilingual education, 1,874 were in ESL, and 214 were in neither. 4The controversy surrounding bilingual education, in particular the 1998 California Referendum rejecting bilingual education, led to the “re-examination of current practices in educating ELLs [English language learners]” in New York City according to the Chancellor’s Report (New York City Board of Education, 2000, p. i).

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REFERENCES Auerbach, E. R. (1996). From the community to the community: A guidebook for participatory literacy training. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Bailey, B. (2000a). Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity among Dominican Americans. Language in Society, 29, 555–582. Bailey, B. (2000b). Social/interactional functions of code switching among Dominican Americans. Pragmatics, 10, 165–193. Castillo, J. (1996). Young Dominicans in New York City. Unpublished master’s thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Crawford, J. (1992). Hold your tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of “English only.” Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cummins, J. (1980). The exit and entry fallacy in bilingual education. NABE Journal, 4, 25–60. Cummins, J. (1986). Bilingual education and anti-racist education. Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, 17(3 & 4), 9–12. Cummins, J. (1989). Empowering minority students. Sacramento, CA: California Association for Bilingual Education. DeWind, J. (1997). Educating the children of immigrants in New York’s restructured economy. In M. E. Crahan & A. Vourvoulias-Bush (Eds.), The city and the world: New York’s global future (pp. 133–146). New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Dicker, S. J. (Winter 2000–2001). Hispanics and the Spanish language: Is their status rising? NYS TESOL Idiom, 30(4), 18–19. Dicker, S. J., & Mahmoud, H. (2001, February). Survey of a bilingual community: Dominicans in Washington Heights. Paper presented at the 23rd Annual NYS-TESOL Applied Linguistics Conference, New York. Duany, J. (1994). Quisqueya on the Hudson: The transnational identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights. New York: The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. García, O., & Otheguy, R. (1987). The bilingual education of Cuban-American children in Dade County’s ethnic schools. Language and Education, 1(2), 83–95. Glick Schiller, N. (1999). Who are these guys?: A transnational reading of the U.S. immigrant experience. In L. R. Goldin (Ed.), Identities on the move: Transnational processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin (pp. 15–43). Austin: The University of Texas Press. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. In N. Glick Schiller, L. Basch, & C. Blanc-Szanton (Eds.), Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered: Vol. 645. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (pp. 1–24). New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Guarnizo, L. E. (1997a). The emergence of a transnational social formation and the mirage of return migration among Dominican transmigrants. Identities, 4, 281–322. Guarnizo, L. E. (1997b). “Going home”: Class, gender and household transformation among Dominican return migrants. In P. R. Pessar (Ed.), Caribbean circuits: New directions in the study of Caribbean migration. (pp. 13–60). New York: Center for Migration Studies. Hernández, R., & Torres-Saillant, S. (1996). Dominicans in New York: Men, women, and prospects. In G. Haslip-Viera & S. Bauer (Eds.), Latinos in New York: Communities in transition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Krashen, S. (1991). Bilingual education: A focus on current research. NCBE Focus: Occasional Papers in Bilingual Education, 3. Krashen, S. D. (1996). Under attack: The case against bilingual education. Culver City, CA: Language Education Associates. Kugel, S. (2001, May 20). Dominicans march for voting rights (on the island). The New York Times, p. B4.

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Levitt, P. (2001). The transnational villagers. Berkeley: The University of California Press. New York City Board of Education. (2000, December 19). Chancellor’s report on the education of English language learners. New York City. New York State Education Department. (2001). Memorandum of understanding between the Department of Education of the Dominican Republic and the New York State Education Department. Peñalosa, F. (1980). Chicano sociolinguistics: A brief introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Pita, M. (2000). Reading Dominican girls: The experiences of four participants in Herstory, a literature discussion group. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, New York. Rohter, L. (1997, February 19). Flood of Dominicans lets some enter U.S. by fraud. The New York Times, p. A4. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1988). Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas & J. Cummins (Eds.), Minority education: From shame to struggle (pp. 9–44). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Garcia, O. (1995). Multilingualism for all—General principles? In T. Skutnabb-Kangas (Ed.), Multilingualism for all (pp. 221–256). Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger B.V. Smith, R. C. (1997). Transnational migration, assimilation, and political community. In M. E. Crahan & A. Vourvoulias-Bush (Eds.), The city and the world: New York’s global future (pp. 110–132). New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Sontag, D., & Dugger, C. W. (1998, July 19). The new immigrant tide: A shuttle between worlds. The New York Times, p. A1, A28–A30. Zentella, A. C. (1990). Lexical leveling in four New York City Spanish dialects: Linguistic and social factors. Hispania, 73, 1094–1105. Zentella, A. C. (1997a). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York City. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Zentella, A. C. (1997b). Spanish in New York. In O. García & J. A. Fishman (Eds.), The multilingual apple: Languages in New York City (pp. 167–201). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 329–333 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

BOOK REVIEWS Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos. Lachman Mulchand Khubchandani. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997, 255 pages, $32.50 (hardover). The Politics of Indian English: Linguistic Colonialism and the Expanding English Empire. N. Krishnaswamy and Archana S. Burde. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998, 214 pages, $22.50 (hardcover). Linguistic Genocide in Education—Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2000, 818 pages, $55.00 (softover). Mary Elizabeth Curran Rutgers University

The books chosen for this review fall within the focus of this special edition that calls for a re-examination and celebration of local knowledge about language. All three texts challenge tradition, move beyond what the mainstream is saying about language, and offer metacritiques of the dominant models and central constructs within applied linguistics. Skutnabb-Kangas, in her voluminous Linguistic Genocide in Education—Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights, responds to the crisis of inequity within formal educational systems. In her discussions regarding the status of languages in the world, state linguistic policies, and linguistic human rights, she shows how our educational systems “participate in maintaining and reproducing unequal power relations … especially between linguistic minorities and others” (p. x). She urges the necessity to unveil the rationales supporting the dominant ideologies and the way they often mask and depoliticize injustices. With this aim, she calls for a shift in focus from positivistic-oriented research, limited to descriptions (the what and how) regarding language issues to a focus on what she calls “the uncomfortable why-questions” (p. xxvii). These why-questions would attempt to unveil the way much scholarship in the field of applied linguistics, with its “technical micro-level questions” (p. xxii) depoliticizes the language of schooling, research, or policy. However, Skutnabb-Kangas adds that the asking of why-questions in itself is not enough. We must move beyond interpretations to actions for change. She calls for

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the development of a research paradigm that demands a union of “the heart, the stomach and the spirit” (p. xxvi). One suggestion she makes with regard to the development of this paradigm is to begin from the standpoint of the marginalized. This would increase the chances that local knowledge and rights are represented without distortion and valued for their perspective and firsthand experience. In her effort to take the risk to “move issues about linguistic human rights … toward the center of the discipline” (p. xxvii), Skutnabb-Kangas draws on a wealth of multidisciplinary resources. For example, she moves outside the field in her chapter on “Connections Between Biodiversity and Linguistic and Cultural Diversity” in which she discusses the possibility that “linguistic and cultural diversity may be decisive mediating variables in sustaining biodiversity itself” (p. 91). She discusses the roles of economic development and local and global politics in her chapter on “Globalisation, Power and Control.” In an acknowledgment of the multifaceted nature of our identities and discrimination, she also makes links to the relationship between linguistic discrimination and other forms of discrimination (racism, sexism, etc.). For example, she recounts a personal communication regarding the assumption held by some in South Africa that people speaking Zulu are not educated, except if “the person is white, and then an entirely different (and far more positive) set of assumptions comes into play” (p. 399). To strengthen her case further, Skutnabb-Kangas employs several other strategies not usually associated with mainstream academic knowledge production. For example, she intentionally uses inflammatory language, as seen in her choice of the term linguistic genocide, and makes direct appeals to her reader such as “You, reader, if you are an involuntary monolingual, stop tolerating the educational language policies in your country!” (p. 667). In this way, she both challenges and models ways by which the student, teacher, researcher, or politician may “clarify for herself the relationship of intellectual knowledge to morality, duties, and struggle” (p. xxv). Her text is an example of an answer to the call that Canagarajah (1996) and others have made urging scholars to engage in alternative forms of more critical research reporting. These new forms would demand “a more sustained and rigorous exploration of the ways the researcher’s subjectivity influences the research process” (Canagarajah, 1996, p. 325) and allow space for the possibility (through the use of narratives, dialogic texts, coauthoring texts, etc.) that local knowledges are represented. These new spaces would call for an “unrelenting reflexivity and critical open-endedness” (Canagarajah, 1996, p. 329) both by researchers in their representations and by readers, the consumers of research, in their interpretations. These new spaces would ask and respond to why-questions. Additionally, Skutnabb-Kangas has composed the text in a collage-like format with boxes throughout, which provide definitions, examples, reader tasks, and addresses. These boxes offer more explanation and both quantitative and qualitative support for her claims (for example, in the form of statistical data, narratives from personal experience, or examples from popular media), and they also provide

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jumping-off points for reflection in the classroom or links to the community. Although Skutnabb-Kangas’s professed aim with these boxes was for ease of reading, they also serve to interrupt the traditional reading process. These interruptions may be an uncomfortable distraction for some readers, and they may disappoint others for their brief treatment of some topics. Others may be put off by the volume’s 818 pages, which make this an awkward and not very portable text for use in a classroom setting. However, I assume this multilayering and stylistic bombarding of the reader with text are other intentional parts of the aim to keep the reader active, responsive, and overwhelmed with evidence to support the urgency of her claim. As such, the textual structure, combined with its size, encourages the use of this text as a resource and reference. Its bibliography and indices alone make this an essential tool for anyone wishing to begin an investigation into issues regarding language and education within a political context. In Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos, Khubchandani has collected and reworked papers originally presented at various seminars for different audiences. Uniting these papers is the goal of “understanding the crucially plural character of the verbal strategies that have evolved among the heterogeneous people of South Asia” (p. 33). Like Skutnabb-Kangas, Khubchandani calls for viewing language heterogeneity as a human right, instead of as a problem. To aid in this, he writes that we “need to grasp the composite and integral character of the plurilingual ethos in many Oriental and African societies” (p. 35). Some examples that make up this plurilingual ethos are “fuzzy demarcations of language boundaries,” “issues of identity versus communication in defining languages,” and “grassroots versus elite tensions in prescribing a ‘representative’ standard in language” (p. 35). He calls for academics to give these multilingual societies and their unique linguistic issues the pertinent, serious attention they deserve. According to Khubchandani, this demands that language theory move beyond the two extremes of the universal and unique, to “a growing awareness of the plurality of cognitions, structures and institutions” (p. 32). He calls for a convergence of perspectives into an integrative approach that correlates form with context and involves the strengths of complementary methodological orientations. This theory also moves beyond a focus on language as structures and products to a view of language as a process of transaction and negotiation. Such a theory would have the capacity to encompass such “anomalous patterns” as seen in Indian classrooms in which “the teacher and the taught interact in one language, classes are conducted in another, textbooks are written in a third, and answers are given in a fourth language or style” (p. 206). Khubchandani offers suggestions regarding ways to move beyond traditional boundaries of linguistic theory in his first chapter. Above all, he calls for a convergence of perspectives that would draw on natural language and its context. This, he writes, is where we will find richness and strength. It is in these multiple perspectives where we see the value and necessity of affirming local knowledges, for it is

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their input into a “plurality of consciousness” that raises hope and the likelihood that “in the final stage of unification many different cultural traditions may live together” (p. 54). For Khubchandani, “this pluralist vigor is the most promising methodological posture in social sciences” (p. 54). Subsequent chapters provide critiques and push boundaries regarding the topics of communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic minorities, language pluralism, Indian diglossia, language census, language modernization, language planning, and language elites. Khubchandani makes direct challenges to the status quo. For example, in his chapter on education, he documents ways in which language development planning is out of synch with the Indian reality and calls for questioning its elitist framework. In addition, he offers suggestions for alternative possibilities (for example, promoting links between professional educators and grassroots groups) and future studies, which of necessity must draw on the plurality of consciousness in studies on language. Krishnaswamy and Burde’s The Politics of Indian English: Linguistic Colonialism and the Expanding English Empire is an example of the type of scholarship called for by Khubchandani, which gives serious academic attention to the role of English in India from beyond the confines of the Western point of view. In this data-based, sociolinguistic study, the authors provide a historical overview and a review of relevant scholarship on English in India. They offer “inter-active contemplations” in response to the literature, with particular attention given to what they have called “Kachru’s circularity, the ‘otherness’ syndrome, bias for or against the non-nativeness of ‘Indian’ English” (p. 47), which they see as the outcomes of many factors—“a colonial past, English education bequeathed by the colonizers, and political freedom that did not generate indigenous thinking, to name the most obvious” (p. 48). Drawing upon the work of de Certeau (1974/1984), Krishnaswamy and Burde boldly situate their study within a framework acknowledging and questioning the “technology of power.” They use this framework to show how “several belief-systems like nationalism, ideologies, political parties and many other social networks like education, schools, police, the administrative apparatus, the media net-work, etc. have become the instruments of control and maintenance of authority” (p. 61). They make the connection to the way English has been used as a tool for perpetuating gaps between the elite and “the common people.” Within this context, they discuss the way Western scholarship has “simultaneously colonized and mythified” (de Certeau, 1974/1984, pp. 131–132) the voice of the people. In this way, they provide an explanation of how scholarship in the dominant vein has often appropriated and compromised its representations of local knowledge. Like the two previous texts, this study questions the limitations of current knowledge construction practices prevalent in the dominant ideology—for example, the use of the native-speaker construct. And, although still potentially problematic in its binary nature (as is all labeling), they suggest new ways for speaking

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about Indians’ multimodular use of English, which operates on two levels—Indians’ English (which functions at the international level) and Inglish (which functions at the intranational level). They see these terms as a means to reflect what they call the multifaceted nature of Indian life and language usage. In this way, the study is noteworthy in its attempt to reflect what Khubchandani calls “the fuzzy reality” of Indian English, although this particular element of their analysis could have been longer and more detailed. These three texts are grounded in the basic fact that many speakers are disenfranchised and marginalized because of the language they speak. Together they expand the field, exemplifying scholarship that draws on literature within and outside the field and attempts to bridge the usual divides of theory versus practice, local versus global, and strictly focused positivistic versus interpretive research. Each offers some insight toward ways of constructing knowledge about language theory, language identity, and language education in more multifaceted and complementary ways, proposing approaches that are integrated, grounded in the grassroots, and conscious of power hierarchies. All three texts, in different ways, stress the inherent limitations and damages caused by our current knowledge production practices and how we cannot afford to continue to exclude multiple voices and ways of constructing knowledge.

REFERENCES Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 321–330. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (Steve F. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1974)

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 334 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

ERRATUM

In the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 1(3), in the article “Class, Ethnicity, and Language Rights: An Analysis of British Colonial Policy in Lesotho and Sri Lanka and Some Implications for Language Policy” by Janina Brutt-Griffler, the sentence at the bottom of page 221 should read as follows: “Her solution focuses on the recognition of what she calls linguistic human rights, with the focus on ‘access to the mother tongue(s)’ and a corresponding (mother tongue) ‘language-related identity’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000, p. 498).”

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 1(4), 335 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education thank our two editorial assistants, Megan C. Bushar (University of Texas, San Antonio) and Wayne E. Wright (Arizona State University), who have played an important role in producing Volume 1 of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education. We also acknowledge the work of our production editor, Janet Roy of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., and the many other professionals at Lawrence Erlbaum who have played an important role in the production of the journal. Finally, we are happy to acknowledge the contribution of the following scholars (including members of the Editorial Advisory Board, whose names are preceded by asterisks) who reviewed manuscripts in the period ending December 2001.

*Dwight Atkinson Richard Bailey *Colin Baker *Robert Bayley *Sarah Benesch *Robert Berdan Margie Berns Maria Brisk *Janina Brutt-Griffler *Ursula Casanova *JoAnn Crandall Gerda de Klerk *James Paul Gee Josué M. González *Nancy H. Hornberger Thom Hudson Olga Kagan *Kimi Kondo-Brown *Juliet Langman *Magaly Lavadenz Barbara LeMaster Joe Lo Bianco *Reynaldo F. Macías

*Jeff MacSwan *Mary McGroarty *Jeff McQuillan *Stephen May *Brian Morgan *Bonny Norton *Alastair Pennycook *Robert Phillipson Yoko Pusavat *Stanley Ridge Kellie Rolstad Olga Rubio Keiko Saminy *Otto Santa Ana Ron Schmidt *Kamal F. Sridhar *James Tollefson *Lucy Tse Guadalupe Valdéz *Colin Williams *Ruth Wodak Wayne E. Wright