The Politics of Intentionality in Englishes: Provincializing Capitalization

Abstract

This article theorizes how the privileging of “intentional” deviations from ostensibly mainstream Englishes represents a form of epistemic violence that replicates and sustains the logics of coloniality, presuming the inherent and chronic inferiority of nonmainstream cultural forms, practices, and institutions. In response, this article considers the potentiality of errors in peripheralized Englishes as moments of disinvention through an extended analysis of an artifact that represents an enunciation of political and linguistic decoloniality. Focusing on the orthographic feature of capitalization as a case in point, I enact the practice of provincialization toward exposing the inadequacies of monofunctional orthography for an inherently and increasingly plurilithic language like English. To conclude, I use alternatively capitalized English as a reconstituted and decolonizing expressive mode.

Notes

¹ Another issue that needs to be noted is that critiques of coloniality from postcolonial theorists in general, and from sociolinguists more particularly, have tended to center their analyses of postcoloniality within a European/non-European binary. For instance, studies by Pennycook (1998), Schneider (2007), and Kubota (forthcoming) focus on the processes, histories, and legacies of British colonialism. However, the Japanese colonization of Korea, along with ongoing tensions between the two countries, demonstrates the limits of attempting to locate the ideological facets of Japanese coloniality within a European/non-European binary. The Japanese occupation of territories such as Korea and Taiwan was characterized by a distinctly intraracial assimilationist agenda in which imperial subjects were mandated to adopt Japanese names and customs. Further, it is well known that Japanese colonialism was itself, in part, a response to the growing threat of European hegemony in the East Asian region at the turn of the 19th century. Therefore, it may be argued that contemporary Korean resistance to the legacies of Japanese colonialism, in addition to representing the continued struggle for symbolic sovereignty, complicate the narrative of “mainstream” postcolonial theory that centers on European/non-European binaries.

² The Kachruvian paradigm also introduces the concepts of the outer circle (OC) and the expanding circle (EC). In the OC, English is a common component of individuals' linguistic repertoires and English has attained “official” status or is a de facto national language. Examples of OC countries include Singapore, Nigeria and India. Whereas regions in the OC are postcolonial societies, in the EC are countries such as China, Greece, and Korea, which are not necessarily former colonies of IC countries; nonetheless, English is used by a significant portion of the population, although not usually in any official settings. While IC varieties continue to be imagined as normative varieties of English, I will explain in the following section why I am not situating my argument solely within the WE paradigm.

³ Of course, any reference to standardized spelling must be tongue-in-cheek, even if we are talking strictly about IC varieties. There is no “standardization” even in the spelling of the word “standardisation” between the two IC varieties regarded as the most prestigious in many sociolinguistic contexts: U.S. English and U.K. English.

⁴ In other words, the unconventional capitalization patterns in this section are not oversights by the copy editor.