Rachael Shapiro

Pennycook, Alastair. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Summary

In this super fun book, Pennycook combines material analysis of hip hop with theoretical analysis of globalization, identity, and culture toward a more complex understanding of language. Referencing both Mignolo and Hardt and Negri, Pennycook argues for a conception of globalization that moves beyond the economic, and for an understanding of local that takes emergence, production, rearticulation, etc. into consideration. Against the background of a more complex theory of local/global, he poses the question of whether global Englishes are unified by their common essence in practice in various places, or if English is rather defined through the composite of its distinct usages. In order to sidestep frequent theoretical walls of either overdetermination of power or overdetermination of agency, Pennycook turns to trangressive theories “to transgress the boundaries of conventional thought and politics” (40). Ultimately, he uses hip hop as a cultural artifact to reveal ways in which language must be thought as situated, performed, exchanged, and produced within and across spaces of power, culture, and history.

Quotes

The notion of transgression refutes the modernist hope of ideology critique and demystification and moves towards alterity. This is what makes a notion of transgression so important for thinking about domains such as popu-lar culture, hip-hop and, I would like to argue, language. We need ways of thinking about the pleasure of doing things differently. We do not live in a world where people conform mindlessly to the putative rules of language; we live in a world of language transgressions, impossible without some presumed order worth transgressing, and made possible by the desire for dif-ference. Transgression is not merely, therefore, an act of going against what is accepted, of testing the possibilities of difference, but is also an explo-ration of boundaries of thought. (42)

Transcultural and transidiomatic practices point to the ways in which those apparently on the receiving end of cultural and linguistic domination select, appropriate, refashion and return new cultural and linguistic forms through complex interactive cultural groups (defined not in ethnic terms but along subcultural affiliations of gender, class, sexual orientation, profession, interest, desires and so on). Transcultural and transidiomatic practices therefore refer not to homogenization or heter-ogenization but to alternative spaces of cultural production. This allows us to get beyond the question of uniformization or particularization, and opens up an understanding of cultural movement while never losing sight of the uneven terrain (global economies, the music industry) over which such movements occur. (47)

I have tried to present a case here for understanding language, identity and refashioning in terms of performativity. Performativity opens up a way of thinking about language use and identity that avoids foundationalist cat-egories, suggesting that identities are formed in the linguistic performance rather than pregiven. This opens up a way of thinking about the effects of language not only in terms of world view, ideology or discourse but also in terms of what language does, what effects it brings about. (76)

Thus English (or other so-called metropolitan languages) is already in its use a tropicopolitan language (Aravamudan, 1999) bound up in a diverse set of local relations of language ideology, politics and social life. The local use of English in relation to different cultural formations (such as the messages and ideologies of rap) is always a contextual use influenced by many different community and regional views. There is a constant tension between the global flow of an ideology of authenticity and the local fixity of what authenticity means and how it should be realized. To use English in different contexts is to invoke issues of class, location and identity. (112)