Being chair of a new major at my university, called Global Liberal Studies, has taken me out of my comfort zone within the narrower fields of World Englishes, English as an international language, and English as a lingua franca – but in a positive way. I was an Economics major at a small liberal arts college in my undergraduate days (taking full advantage of electives in Philosophy, History, English, and Political Science), and then earned an MBA, before moving into teaching – with a master’s in Bilingual Studies and a PhD in English. Perhaps it can be said that I was working in several disciplines for a long period.
When at Nagoya City University from 1996 to 2000, I lived in a small apartment complex owned by the city, and a stream of visiting scholars lived three doors down from me for that entire time. Among the German and American scholars whom I got to know very well were a well-known political scientist from Berlin (Helmut Wagner), a groundbreaking scholar in intercultural communication (Ed Stewart), and a leading cultural anthropologist (Peter Koepping). As I drove them to and fro in my Toyota, I marveled at how many different areas they could discuss. They were truly renaissance men, who thought critically and ‘outside the box’, drawing deep interdisciplinary connections. In contrast, several years later we had a linguist in his late thirties as a visitor, and I was surprised he had never heard of the controversial bestseller The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington. While he was a substantial scholar in our field, I felt he was missing out on potential growth by not reading more widely in related fields.
As I have taught, read, and researched for these past 15 or 20 years, whenever I came across a broader concept in the humanities, mentioned in a book by Kachru or Bloomaert for example, it has paid off to diverge and read about positivism, constructivism, structuralism, systems theory, complexity theory, the dangers of ‘binary’ thinking, post-modernism, and so forth. Having an awareness of these constructs can help those contributing to Asian Englishes to bring a more informed approach to how we set up our inquiries, and the conclusions we reach. Due to our small faculty in the Global Liberal Studies major, I now teach a class called ‘Intellectual Traditions’, another called ‘Global Governance and Society’, and yet another called ‘21st Century Cities’. The governance class came out of an awareness of the increased demands for accountability and compliance within the Japanese university system, and the 21st Century Cities class comes out of a field called cultural geography. I encourage all of us to consider pushing the boundaries of our specialty, and to draw connections across those artificial borders, using new fundamental concepts in the humanities.