English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language

ABSTRACT

What is at stake for multilingual subjects when English becomes a site of conflicting emotions about being in/with the world? What does it mean to understand, negotiate with, and perform the meaning of English as a global curriculum, a lingua franca, a “thing” of the senses, and a desire awakened by narratives feeding into and being fed by discourses of power, appropriateness, globalization, and cosmopolitanism? In this performative auto/ethnography, I enact twenty years of data collected and organized in the feeling, teaching, studying, and experiencing of English through transnational encounters in classrooms, workplaces, immigration centers, and on the streets of the so-called “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations.

Contributor

Sandro R. Barros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses on world languages, curriculum, and pedagogy. His research examines the affordances and challenges of multilingualism in public education and the effects of language rights' debates on articulations of citizenship. He is the author of Competing truths: Narrating otherness and marginality in Latin America.

Notes

1. In Culture and imperialism, Edward Said (1993) remarks, “appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions–about influence, about blame and judgment, about present actualities and future priorities” (p. 3).

2. The term brasilidade (Brazilianess) conveys those characteristics found in cultural practices articulated through cultural discourses in the beginning of the 20th century that are part and parcel of Brazilian modernist movements and their stated goal to “reinvent” Brazil. In aesthetic terms, to strive for brasilidade meant that subjects subscribed to a nationalist discourse that, in the Foucaultian terms, framed the possibilities of cultural identifications as authentic performances. Intellectualsiand to a certain extent the popular classes in generalimanifested brasilidade a broader political project of nationalist difference, a practice of distinction that, in the context of Brazil's postcolonialism, meant that subjects' essentialisms were subjected, too, to the whimsical will of internal and external linguistic markets and their characteristic groups fighting for power over more desired forms of legitimate expression of a Brazilian quality or essence of being.

3. “My homeland is the Portuguese language; and I don't have a homeland. I have a motherland and I desire fraternity.”

4. Rather than regarding the spread of English as universally beneficial, I agree with Pennycook (1994); Pennycook (2010) who argues that we need to look closely at the impact of language ideologies on people, how they conceptualize and enact language practices, their cultures and specific knowledge forms. For him, it is not a matter of appreciating English as a destructive force; rather, we need to examine the uptake of English in the multiplicity of its purposes across a variety of contexts.

5. Later I remembered this quote appeared in the introduction to Homi Bhabha's edited collection Nation and narration (1990). I shared this information with the class later.

6. “I had words at my fingertips, or fingers at the tip of my tongue. My language trembles with desire. Emotion comes twice-touched: in the first instance, the entire activity of discourse arises discretely, indirectly, a unique signified: “I desire you.” My language frees itself; it feeds, it extends, it explodes (language plays by touching itself). Next, I am entangling the other in my words. I caress It, I graze It, I interrogate the reasons for this brushing against my skin. I dwell on the ways I submit to this relationship.”