Suresh Canagarajah

Reconstructing Local Knowledge

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:

Agency and power in intercultural communication: negotiating English in translocal spaces

Abstract Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and transnational relations, this model enables us to address the role of power in shaping the uptake of resources in shifting social contexts. Sociolinguists in this tradition show how the resources that enjoy power and prestige in certain local contexts receive lower status as migrants move to other social contexts, especially in Western urban communities. Despite the usefulness of this orientation, the sociolinguistics of scale suffers from certain limitations. It presents a highly stratified vision of social spaces, ignoring the possibility for renegotiating status differences and hierarchies. It assumes a normative orientation to languages, unable to accommodate the possibility that new language norms and practices might emerge, leading to new orders of indexicality. For these reasons, it is also insensitive to agency in mobility, unable to theorize how migrants may renegotiate norms in elite and privileged contexts. I present interview data from African skilled migrants in the UK, USA, and Australia to demonstrate their attitudes toward renegotiating the valuation and status of their own varieties of English in transnational contexts. Their narratives suggest how migrants negotiate spatiotemporal scales to their advantage, redefine the translocal space, and reconstruct new orders of indexicality in intercultural communication. Though I lack interactional data to examine uptake, the interview data helps develop a more complex use of scalar metaphors to address the dynamics of agency and inequality in intercultural communication in translocal spaces.

Styling One's Own in the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora: Implications for Language and Ethnicity

This study focuses on the ways youth in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Canada, Britain, and the United States construct their ethnic identity when proficiency in their heritage language is limited. Though these youth claim only rudimentary proficiency in Tamil and identify English as their dominant language, they are nonetheless able to claim ethnic identity through strategic language practices. Different from Ramptons theorization of crossing, such acts involve self-styling. While crossing is transgressive, self-styling is affirmative. While crossing is ludic, self-styling is invested. Furthermore, while crossing has been studied mostly in terms of the tokens produced, this study illustrates the way receptive proficiency and nonverbal participatory practices can help style ones own. The study illustrates certain new configurations of language and ethnicity in diaspora life.

Skilled migration and development: portable communicative resources for transnational work

As interest grows on the value of skilled migration for development, scholars and policy makers are addressing the portable resources migrants need for professional success and development contributions in home and host communities. Neoliberal orientations to human capital emphasize scripted communication in a uniform language for efficiency. Lingua franca English thus gains importance in immigration policies in host communities and educational policies in home countries. The interview-based study with African skilled migrants reported in this article points to a different answer. The narratives reveal the value of negotiating different varieties of English and diverse languages in professional and development contexts. The interviewees are able to adopt such an orientation because they have developed certain dispositions to engage with language diversity in their multilingual social backgrounds. This paper argues for treating such dispositions as a more beneficial portable resource as it enables migrants to negotiate diversity and expand their repertoires for transnational work and development.

Diaspora Identities and Language

Recent developments in diaspora studies show the importance of language in constructing and negotiating diaspora identities and relationships. However, scholars in linguistics-based fields have not explored these connections as much as have scholars in the social sciences. This specialtopic issue showcases the contributions applied linguistics and sociolinguistics can make to diaspora studies. The issue introduces emerging orientations and themes from a range of new and old diaspora communities, and encourages further studies in diaspora linguistics. Traditional orientations to diaspora have anchored the concept to the homeland from which dispersal occurred. More recently has come the understanding that dispersed populations do not necessarily expect or desire a diasporic return. Clifford, for example, (1994, p. 306) points out that the “teleology of original return” does not generally apply to diaspora communities anymore. This is in one sense a social fact for many recent diaspora communities, such as the Sri Lankan Tamils studied in this special issue, who feel they don’t have a secure or even identifiable homeland to return to. The teleology of return also doesn’t necessarily apply to the archetypal communities, such as Jews and Greeks. Even Zionist Jews (see Brown & Silberstein [this issue]) do not necessarily imagine their own return. One has to ask whether it was ever true that all diaspora subjects always held a return to their homeland as their ultimate goal. This realization has motivated a more decentered, hybrid, even non-cohesive notion of diaspora. To begin with, we should not think of diaspora as having a static and stable identity tied to the homeland or the past. As Stuart Hall (1990) has pointed out, diasporas are changing

Skilled migration and global English

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, it is clear that we continue to observe the uneven consequences of globalisation via a variety of forms of (forces and voluntary) mass migration, social and political reconfigurations of nation states and regions, and continuing technological advancements. In addition, the rise of transnational corporations and the opening of borders across nation states (until more recently, the European Union was an exemplar case) has encouraged the movement of people, from students to skilled workers, seeking often English-mediated learning experiences or employment opportunities so as to engage with the global employment market. Nowmore than ever, migration can no longer be thought of as a set of unidirectional flows (if they ever were) but rather one that is multi-sited as migrants will sojourn in other places before settling in their final destination. Yet as Canagarajah (2017, 20) observes,

The unit and focus of analysis in lingua franca English interactions: in search of a method

ABSTRACT The dominant analytical approaches to Lingua Franca English interactions are largely influenced by a structuralist orientation that prioritizes verbal resources in localized face-to-face contexts. This article argues that recent developments in globalization, mobility, and digital communication call for a more complex orientation to the focus and unit of analysis. Researchers should consider how more expansive and layered scales of time and space mediate and shape interactions. Also, semiotic, material, and multimodal resources beyond words should be treated as part of the data. The article demonstrates the implications for expanding the focus and unit of analysis by illustrating from a study of workplace communication in an English-dominant country.

Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies

In this book, I respond to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism by applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests. While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, I argue that we have to distinguish the language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. I draw from my empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations to deploy alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to reconfigure neoliberal orientations to material development. I label the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish it from that of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies keep languages separated and hierarchical, treating them as instrumental for profit-making purposes, my informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated for ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. I thus clarify that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their purposes.

Negotiating voice in translingual literacies: from literacy regimes to contact zones

ABSTRACT Voice in mobile texts has received attention lately among scholars in literacy, sociolinguistics, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have argued that uptake is shaped by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and resources, they are considered silenced in translocal contexts where elite norms and resources are legitimised. In this article, we analyse the ways in which a Japanese student and her instructor negotiated voice in an American university-level writing course. The case study, deriving from teacher research, shows how both the instructor and the student negotiated uptake for a voice that merged the resources from the student’s own cultural background and the dominant conventions of academic literacies. What made this translingual textual realisation possible was the design of the classroom as a contact zone, along the definition of Mary Louise Pratt. Such a pedagogy provides ecological affordances for the negotiation of competing norms and the emergence of new genres.

Interethnic Understanding and the Teaching of Local Languages in Sri Lanka

In precolonial times, equal socioeducational recognition accorded to local languages played a key role in promoting inter-ethnic harmony, co-existence and ‘connectedness’ between linguistically and ethnically diverse people of Sri Lanka. This history should motivate policy considerations in post-colonial situations in the country. This chapter has its focus on educational issues surrounding the promotion of local languages for interethnic harmony in Sri Lanka, where the promotion of Sinhala among minority Tamils, and Tamil among the majority Sinhalese has been the subject of many current political, policy and popular discourses. Proficiency in the local languages was encouraged actively through policies and practices during precolonial times. However, despite popular thinking that there is an acute need to promote Tamil, its manifestation as a classroom subject in school education curricula for the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils in post-war Sri Lanka has been lost in the public and policy discourses. Using archival records and opinions expressed in newspapers as data, this chapter explores these ambiguities in attitudes, policies and practices from precolonial times to the present day.