Strangerhood and intercultural subjectivity

Abstract

An increasingly salient justification for the study of foreign languages is the value of language learning for developing intercultural competence, and in particular for showing how interculturality meshes with widespread aims of equity and acceptance of the stranger in new contexts of global diversity. In this article I consider intercultural experience of language learning through the model of strangerhood, a concept first advanced by Simmel as a necessary marginality in society (the stranger as a social type) and later developed by Kristeva (drawing on Freud) as an internalised feature of late modern individuals which requires us to live with the ambivalence of different subject positions, each of us carrying strangerhood within us. A key but under-examined aspect in the development of intercultural competence is understanding our own (inter)subjective predispositions which we bring to intercultural encounters, and how these mediate our sense of belonging or, conversely, of alienation, a major trope of narratives of mobility and language learning. Presenting extracts from language learners' autobiographical data I examine how individuals position themselves as strangers, set apart from the mainstream, and how this trope constructs narrative worlds of outsiderness. Autobiographical narration offers a discursive space for developing our understanding of the social world, with the potential to take us beyond realist descriptions towards an enquiry into how language and place are symbolically appropriated in our lives. Sociological frames (e.g. as proposed by Bourdieu or Wenger) have extended our understanding of inequity and assumptions of power in intercultural settings and this paper contributes further by proposing strangerhood as a psychological disposition requiring language learners to observe beyond themselves while also apprehending one's own image as this refracts and changes shape through the lens of others.

L'étude des langues se justifie de plus en plus par sa capacité à développer la compétence interculturelle chez l'individu et à montrer en particulier, comment l'interculturalité dans ses grandes lignes correspond au but égalitaire de l'acceptation de l'autre (l'étranger) dans les nouveaux contextes de la diversité mondiale. Dans cet article, je considère l'expérience interculturelle de l'apprentissage des langues à travers le modèle de « strangerhood » (l'étrangeté). Ce concept fut avancé d'abord par Simmel comme une marginalité nécessaire dans la société (c'est-à-dire l'étranger en tant que type social) et puis a été développé plus tard par Kristeva, s'inspirant de Freud, comme une caractéristique intrinsèque de l'individu de notre ère moderne qui nous mène à vivre l'ambivalence des différentes positions du sujet, chacun d'entre nous portant en soi sa propre étrangeté. Or, un aspect clé, mais peu étudié, dans le développement de la compétence interculturelle est la mise en examen de nos propres prédispositions (inter)subjectives que nous apportons à toute rencontre interculturelle, et la façon dont celles-ci influencent notre sentiment d'appartenance ou, au contraire, d'aliénation, un trope majeur dans les récits sur la mobilité et l'apprentissage des langues. En m'appuyant sur des extraits d'autobiographies linguistiques, je montre comment les individus se positionnent comme des étrangers, mis à part du collectif, et comment ce positionnement construit des mondes narratifs de différence et similitude. Les récits autobiographiques proposent un espace discursif pour développer notre compréhension du monde social, mais au-delà des descriptions objectives, car ils permettent de questionner/d'analyser les représentations intersubjectives du « langage » et de la « place ». Si les cadres sociologiques (par exemple, ceux proposés par Bourdieu ou Wenger) nous ont aidés à comprendre la répartition inégale du pouvoir dans des contextes interculturels, l'approche proposée dans cet article contribue au débat en proposant l'étrangeté (strangerhood) comme une disposition psychologique qui exige des apprenants de langue (et de nous tous d'ailleurs) d'observer au-delà de soi tout en appréhendant l'ambivalence de sa propre image qui se transforme à travers le prisme des autres.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• intercultural
• narrative
• subjectivity
• Unheimliche

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to colleagues for their feedback as I was writing this, in particular Ben Rampton, Constant Leung and Guy Cook, and also Claire Kramsch for her encouraging comments.

Notes on contributor

Simon Coffey teaches foreign language education and applied linguistics at King's College London, where he is a member of the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication. His research interests focus on language choice and interculturality and, in particular, he uses narrative analysis to investigate language learning and subjectivity.

Notes

1. An example of this is the latest wording of the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) National Curriculum for England and Wales (2008) which, for the first time, cited ‘Intercultural understanding’ as one of its four key objectives.

2. Unless otherwise indicated all subsequent references to Kramsch pertain to Kramsch (2009).

3. It is worth mentioning here that, despite developments in sociolinguistics rejecting the cultural essentialism that became associated with nation states throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the monolithic relationship linking language–culture tends to persist in pedagogy.

4. In this article I follow the conventional translation of Der Fremde as the Stranger, following Wolff's 1950 translation, but this lexical choice is not without difficulty, especially when compared with other translations e.g. l'Étranger in French, or other sociological conceptions of marginality such as Becker's Outsiders (1963).

5. The fictional cannon provides several examples of characters who do not fit in, either in relation to their place of origin or to their imagined place of destiny – these are literature's ‘rolling stones’, e.g. Tonio Kröger, Steppenwolf, Mersault. In the social sciences Stonequist's The Marginal Man (1937) described the migrant as a social type caught between cultures (significantly, belonging to neither) seeking to adapt to a new environment. Stonequist's stages of adaptation reflect the stage of deconstruction, alienation and reorientation that are discernible in many later language learning memoirs although a key difference being that Stonequist's ‘marginal man’ can never integrate and so always remains caught between two spaces.

6. Robert E. Park, one the founders of the Chicago School, had attended Simmel's sociology course in Berlin in 1900. Park was later (in 1921) the first to translate the Stranger into English.

7. As Kristeva points out, though: ‘it is nevertheless against a background of national conscience and patriotism or nationalism that the contemporary position of foreigners stands out and can be understood’ (1991, p. 173). Part of the problem here is in the rendering of her original étrangers as ‘strangers’ in the title of Étrangers à Nous-Mêmes, whereas the standard translation (by Roudiez) also uses ‘foreigners’ at different times.

8. Freud used Hoffman's gothic novel The Sandman to articulate the fear of the stranger as a near other who resembles us but is also different. As Kristeva (1991, pp. 182–183) explains, the anxiety of ‘uncanny strangeness’ is explained by the psychoanalytical hypothesis according to which aspects of ourselves that are deeply repressed surface under certain conditions. Kristeva (p. 181) situates Freud's contribution, placing it within humanistic and Romantic ontology.

9. All references to Kristeva in this article pertain to Kristeva (1991).

10. As Kramsch reminds us, ‘(in drawing on the notion of narrative construction) we are no longer dealing with images, maps, representations, and various aspects of self, but with constructions, relations, simulations and synchronicities’ (p. 74).

11. Migrant narrative analyses include Norton (2000) and Baynham and De Fina (2005); different studies of language learners in study abroad contexts are included in DuFon and Churchill (2006) and Kinginger (2008).