[Linganth] SLA meeting CFP: "English's Others"

[Josh Babcock]

Dear colleagues,

If you are looking for a panel to join at the March SLA meting, we are
still looking for one or two additional panelists. You can send 250 word
abstracts to me (Josh Babcock, jdbabcock at uchicago.edu), Velda Khoo (
velda.khoo at colorado.edu), and Jay Schutte (jschutte at uchicago.edu) by this
Friday, October 27.

- - - - - - - - - -

*English’s Others: Problems with ‘Complexity’ and ‘Hybridity’*

*Discussant*: Lisa Mitchell, Department of Anthropology, University of
Pennsylvania

*Abstract*: In *Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows* (2007), Alastair
Pennycook articulated a now canonic position on the globalization of
English:

[English] cannot be usefully understood in modernist states-centric models
of imperialism or world Englishes, or in terms of traditional,
segregationist models of language. Thus, while drawing on the useful
pluralization strategy of world Englishes, I prefer to locate these
Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization (Pennycook 2007: 5).


The “more complex” vision advocated by Pennycook and others (e.g. Gilley
2017) proposes that “we need to move beyond arguments about homogeneity or
heterogeneity, or imperialism and nation states, and instead focus on
trans-local and transcultural flows” (ibid: 5 – 6). In similar ways,
scholarly accounts of cultural “hybridity” and “mixing” in pre- and
post-colonial contact situations emphasize the obsolescence of
state-bounded analytic approaches to languages in plural societies (cf.
Furnivall 1956[1948], Chua and Kwok 2001) or new nations (Geertz, ed. 1963,
Castles et. al 2014[1993]). “Local” or “regional” Englishes, whether
celebrated or excoriated, have been identified everywhere and at virtually
every possible analytic scale (Palmié 2006)—*analytic*, in that it falls to
the analyst to identify the pure types that ostensibly precede any given
hybrid situation.

This panel challenges two assumptions that emerge in a wide variety of
sociolinguistic scholarship on the trans-national appropriations of,
engagements with, and local (hybrid, mixed, blended) transformations of
English, as both language of command and register of globalization. The
first is the assumption of a scholarly *we* that can give up on passé
projects of decolonization so *we* can focus on the “more complex” reality.
The second is the assumption that “new forms of power, control and
destruction” as well as “new forms of resistance, change, appropriation and
identity” (Pennycook 2007:5) are somehow antithetical to, and can fall
somehow beyond the rubric of, both theories of decolonization and analyses
of language and power.

This panel reconsiders the categories of “English” and “Englishes” as they
are defined by speakers alongside or against the backdrop of this “new”
scholarship, and explores the consequences and limits of ideologies of
linguistic flux. We invite papers that engage concerns with language
stratification, stereotyping, and enregisterment in relation to English as
lingua franca. Themes might include language and decolonization, the
political economy of language, linguistic intersectionalities, and queer
linguistics.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20171024/71ade673/attachment.htm>