[Linganth] last call for abstracts: Reinforcing Monolingual Hegemonies: the Development State in Globalization

[Lauren Zentz]

Hello everyone,
  I still have one more spot I'd like to fill on what is turning into a
really interesting set of papers. Please see my session abstract below, and
contact me at laurenzentz at gmail.com with a question or an abstract!
  Thanks,
  Lauren Zentz
-- 
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
Department of English
University of Houston


Reinforcing Monolingual Hegemonies: the Development State in Globalization

Postcolonial state-level policy makers have reinforced national identity
through nationally emblematic, reworked “indigenous” or “proto-national”
(Errington, 2008) philosophies, and they have attached to these
philosophical orientations singular national languages that are supposed to
contain and re-awaken such “familiar” beliefs among their citizens. These
“familiar” philosophies are, however, to most citizens of these countries,
indeed “strange”: they are often imagined, or adapted from very particular
indigenous philosophies by policy makers to create ujamaa—or traditional
socialism—in Tanzania (Blommaert, 2014), hexie—harmony—in China (Wang et
al., 2013), and Pancasila—the five pillars—in Indonesia (Zentz, 2012).
Focusing our attention on “developing” nations, we will explore how such
purportedly indigenous and familiar ideologies have been “revitalized,” or
“re-familiarized,” perhaps, at different points in time in the past century
as these nations have established their independence and autonomy and faced
challenges imposed by decolonization and globalization. These philosophical
frameworks have been deployed to (often violently) enforce an inherent,
“natural” and “self-defendable form of power and coercion that can be used
to impose certain order and normativity” (Wang et al. 2013) by
“re-familiarizing” citizens with “their” indigenous belief systems. In this
panel we will explore national language policy statements and the histories
that they are embedded within, among various developing nations, in order
to examine trends and variations as these states vie for acceptance among
an international community, while simultaneously consolidating and
naturalizing state-level hegemony by politically and culturally unifying
their nations.
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