ABSTRACT
Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2002) conceptual lens of “borderland spaces” can contribute greatly to understanding the complexity of language teaching and learning, in which individuals continually encounter, wrestle with and cross borders of “language,” “culture,” “place,” and “identity” (Rutherford, 1990), as well as affirm and reify them in complex and, in many cases, seemingly conflicting ways. Building on and extending the growing body of research on identity, the current special issue adds to the scholarly conversation on identity in language education, with a focus on the multifaceted, fluid, and performative nature of the negotiation of being and becoming in borderland spaces characterized by movement, change, diversity, hybridity, and tension, and intersectionality. The studies in this issue illustrate how multilingual individuals perform their identities as they perpetuate, resist, patrol, question, and/or challenge the ideologies that both give shape to and reflect discursive and material spaces.
Una lucha de fronteras/A struggle of borders
Because I, a mestiza,
continually walk out of one culture
and into another,
because I am in all cultures at the same time,
alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan
simultaneamente.
Gloria Anzaldúa, en Borderlands/La Frontera/The new mestiza
Anzaldúa’s words seek to convey the intensity and complexity of her lived experiences as a self-defined mestizaFootnote1 negotiating identity as an individual apprehending, identifying, negotiating, problematizing, grappling with, and traversing borders of being, becoming and belonging that are both discursively and materially constructed. Identity negotiation is a subjective, political struggle over positionality pertaining to “self” and “other”: to who individuals, and others around them, “are/are not,” and “can” and/or “should” be or become (Rudolph, Citation2016; Rudolph, Yazan, & Rudolph, Citation2018. See also Martin-Jones, Blackledge, & Creese, Citation2012). Individuals and groups delineate, patrol, problematize and challenge borders of being and becoming, which may result in the affordance, limitation or stripping away of authority, resources, voice and agency (whether theirs or others’) (Block, Citation2007, Citation2009; Gebhard & Willett, Citation2015; Gee, Citation2008; McCarty & May, Citation2017; Norton, Citation2013; Norton & De Costa, Citation2018).
Wrestling with “cracks between worlds” (Anzaldúa, Citation2002), “sociocultural in-betweenness” (Canagarajah, Citation2013) or “discursive faultlines” (Kramsch, Citation1998; Menard-Warwick, Citation2014), multilingual individuals traverse borderland spaces in which they experience varying conflicts, contradictions, and tensions of liminality as well as perform hybrid, complex, and multifaceted identities (Bhabha, Citation1992; Higgins, Citation2015; Ishihara & Menard-Warwick, Citation2018; Rudolph, Citation2012, Citation2016). Such individuals live in a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary … a constant state of transition. … [and] cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Anzaldúa, Citation1987, p. 3).
The “borderland spaces” theorized and articulated by Anzaldúa (Citation1987, Citation2002) are characterized by movement, change, diversity, hybridity, and tension. We contend this lens contributes greatly to apprehending the complexity of language teaching and learning, in which individuals continually encounter, wrestle with and cross borders of “language,” “culture,” “place” and “identity” (Rutherford, Citation1990), as well as affirm and reify them in complex and, in many cases, seemingly conflicting ways. Borderlands are blurry overlapping areas of “shared influence” between these “regions” lacking “clear edges” (Clandinin & Rosiek, Citation2007, p. 38) and they are characterized by ambiguity, duality, and intersectionality. Learning a new language involves experiencing such borderland spaces in which language learners and teachers “juggle” languages and cultures (Anzaldúa, Citation1987, p. 101). Through this “juggling” in cultural and linguistic practices, they experience “border-crossings,” “in-betweenness” (Ramos, Citation2015; Rudolph, Citation2012), and a struggle of borders both internally and externally (Anzaldúa, Citation1987). These borderland experiences include negotiating and reimagining borders and play a significant role in the ways in which language learners and teachers construct identities.
Earlier studies theorized and explored identity as “multiple, a site of struggle, and continually changing over time and space” and identity negotiation as inseparable from language learning (Darvin & Norton, Citation2015, p. 45). They conceptualized and scrutinized identity in relation to such concepts as investment (Norton Peirce, Citation1995), agency (Deters, Citation2011; Duff, Citation2012), legitimacy (Ramos & Sayer, Citation2017; Sayer, Citation2012), emotions (Miyahara, Citation2015), and ideologies (Pavlenko & Blackledge, Citation2004). These existing conceptualizations can be further expanded with the lens of borderland spaces and identities that captures the struggle including tensions, contradictions, and conflicts between individuals and powers of borders and corresponding ideologies. Building on and extending the growing body of research on identity, this issue attempts to further investigate the complexities involved in the ways language learners, teachers, and users interact with the social world and construct their identities through language. More specifically, this issue contributes to the scholarly conversation on identity in language education, with a focus on the multifaceted, fluid, and performative nature of the negotiation of being and becoming in borderland spaces characterized by hybridity and intersectionality (though we acknowledge that individuals and groups themselves may certainly not recognize or acknowledge such, when attending to their positionality or that of others). The studies in this issue illustrate how individuals perform their identities as they perpetuate, resist, patrol, question, and/or challenge the ideologies that both give shape to and reflect discursive and material spaces.
This issue
The current issue brings together five articles that approach and examine borderland negotiations of identity with various lenses employed in a diverse array of contexts. Katherine Christoffersen draws from sociolinguistic interviews in The Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) [Bilingual Corpus of the Valley] (Christoffersen & Bessett, Citation2019) and examines three young adults’ identity negotiation in relation to language ideologies in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. Christoffersen’s three-level narrative analysis illustrates three young adults’ identities as they encounter “linguistic terrorism” (Anzaldúa, Citation1987) and take on multiple and contradictory positionalities within borderland spaces. Mary Amanda Stewart and Alexandra Babino investigated three young self-identified Mexicana students’ investment in being multilingual speakers, which is impacted by their identity positions, ideologies, and capital. Stewart and Babino discuss the ways in which these women problematize and challenge the essentializing and idealizing discourses in their educational contexts. Nicole Siffrinn and Kathleen McGovern rely on Foucauldian constructs of discourse, power, and the subject, and explore multilingual and multidialectal middle schoolers’ identity construction in a semester-long youth participatory action research project. Siffrinn and McGovern’s analysis illustrates how these students strategically adopted or resisted the positionings over the span of the project and enacted dynamic, constantly-changing subject-positions in the ideological borderlands of the action research program. Kongji Qin views the processes of language teaching and learning as spaces for identity negotiation and moral positioning, and analyzes a routinized vocabulary activity with a small stories approach. Qin’s analysis demonstrates that the language curriculum provides teachers and students with discursive resources to perform identities to maintain or subvert dominant discourses of being in the language classroom. Lastly, Paul McPherron and Kyle McIntosh analyze three cross-cultural memoirs, namely Peter Hessler’s River Town, Elaine Mar’s Paper Daughter, and Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about This Place, to understand their instructional value to introduce students to the complexities involved in border crossers’ identity negotiation. Pointing to the power of narratives in portraying multilingual experiences and identities, McPherron and McIntosh assert that such memoirs can support students’ critical reflections on ideologies at the micro, meso, and macro levels which multilingual speakers perpetuate or resist as part of their ongoing identity negotiation within and across borderlands. It is our hope that with these studies, the current special issue will contribute to further complexifying the approaches to identity negotiation in language education.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the International Multilingual Research Journal editorial team, Jeff MacSwan, Megan Madigan Peercy, Jeff Bale, and Mileidis Gort, for providing us with the space, support, and guidance throughout the process. We are also very thankful to the editorial assistant, Carmen Durham, who has been tremendously helpful in preparing this issue for publication. Lastly, we want to acknowledge our colleagues who were so generous with their time to review the papers in this issue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 “In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to? … Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war” (Anzaldúa, Citation1987, p. 78).
References
- Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: La frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.
- Anzaldúa, G. (2002). Preface: (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces. In G. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home (pp. 1–5). New York, NY: Routledge.
- Bhabha, H. (1992). The world and the home. Social Text, (31/32), 141–153. doi:10.2307/466222
- Block, D. (2007). The rise of identity in SLA research, post. The Modern Language Journal, 91(1), 863–876. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2007.00674.x
- Block, D. (2009). Second language identities. London, England: Continuum.
- Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. London, England: Routledge.
- Christoffersen, K., & Bessett, R. (2019). Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa). Rio Grande City, TX: University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
- Clandinin, D. J., & Rosiek, J. (2007). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tensions. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 35–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
- Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. doi:10.1017/S0267190514000191
- Deters, P. (2011). Identity, agency and the acquisition of professional language and culture. London, England: Continuum.
- Duff, P. (2012). Identity, agency, and SLA. In A. Mackey & S. Gass (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 410–426). London, UK: Routledge.
- Gebhard, M., & Willett, J. (2015). Translingual context zones: Critical reconceptualizing of teachers’ work within the context of globalism. Linguistics and Education, 32, 98–106. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2015.07.002
- Gee, J. (2008). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Higgins, C. (2015). Insults or acts of identity? The role of stylization in multilingual discourse. Multilingua, 34(2), 135–158. doi:10.1515/multi-2014-1006
- Ishihara, N., & Menard-Warwick, J. (2018). In “sociocultural in-betweenness”: Exploring teachers’ translingual identity development through narratives. Multilingua, 37(3), 255–274. doi:10.1515/multi-2016-0086
- Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
- Martin-Jones, M., Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge handbook of multilingualism. New York, NY: Routledge.
- McCarty, T. L., & May, S. (Eds.). (2017). Language policy and political issues in education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.
- Menard-Warwick, J. (2014). English language teachers on the discursive faultlines: Identities, ideologies and pedagogies. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
- Miyahara, M. (2015). Emerging self-identities and emotion in foreign language learning: A narrative-oriented approach. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
- Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.
- Norton, B., & De Costa, P. I. (2018). Research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching. Language Teaching, 51(1), 90–112. doi:10.1017/S0261444817000325
- Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31. doi:10.2307/3587803
- Pavlenko, A., & Blackledge, A. (Eds.). (2004). Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
- Ramos, D. C. (2015). The utilization of bilingual practices as linguistic capital: A multiple case study of upper class Latina/os on the U.S.-Mexico border ( Unpublished doctoral dissertation). The University of Texas, San Antonio.
- Ramos, D. C., & Sayer, P. (2017). Differentiated linguistic strategies of bilingual professionals on the US-Mexico border. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 14(1), 25–57. doi:10.1080/15427587.2016.1228457
- Rudolph, N. (2012). Borderlands and border crossing: Japanese professors of English and the negotiation of translinguistic and transcultural identity ( Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park.
- Rudolph, N. (2016). Negotiating borders of being and becoming in and beyond the English language teaching classroom: Two university student narratives from Japan. Asian Englishes, 18(1), 1–17. doi:10.1080/13488678.2015.1132110
- Rudolph, N., Yazan, B., & Rudolph, J. (2018). Negotiating ‘ares,’ ‘cans’ and ‘shoulds’ of being and becoming in ELT: Two teacher accounts from one Japanese university. Asian Englishes, 21(1), 22–37. doi:10.1080/13488678.2018.1471639
- Rutherford, J. (1990). The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity, community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart.
- Sayer, P. (2012). Ambiguities and tensions in English language teaching: Portraits of EFL teachers as legitimate speakers. New York, NY: Routledge.