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Notes
Each of the former British colonies has a different political linguistic history, yet they all institutionalized English not through political force but through hegemonic processes and language policies, including English-medium education that was a prerequisite for employment in colonial government. Today English is an official language in these settings, which retain their multilingual ethos of communication, but it exists in a complementary fashion with other indigenous, vernacular or standard, local languages.
For a problematization of the concept similar to our own see Robert Phillipson (Citation2007, forthcoming). For discussions concerning the impossibility of separating language from culture, see Bessie Dendrinos (Citation1992) and Gunther Kress (Citation1990). Both view language as social practice and explain that the use of discourse, materially configured as genre and text, cannot be apolitical or a culture-free practice.
Old or Anglo-Englishes must be distinguished from the Englishes that developed in the former colonies where the indigenous languages were suppressed and/or extinguished.
This term is inspired by Jean-Louis Calvet (Citation1974) who spoke of French colonial policies as ‘glottophagie’.
By reconstellation, we mean the theoretical gesture of wrenching texts and discourses out of their ‘native' or original context and thrusting them into unfamiliar and previously untried theoretical terrains and encounters, thereby creating a new constellation of relations and affiliations (re-constellation). See Theodor Adorno's analysis of ‘constellation' and his reading of Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragedy in Negative Dialectics.