Keating, Anna Louise. “Making New Connections” : Transformational Multiculturalism in the Classroom. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 4 (2004): 93-117.

Summary: Introducing the concept of transformational multiculturalism, Keating proposes pedagogy for “radical, liberatory change—on both individual and collective
levels.” She however maintains that these changes are context-specific and open to negotiation. She claims that students and teachers can be changed through exploration of multicultural issues and themes in the classroom, however, also cautions that “although multiculturalism has this potential to bring about change, it cannot do so unless scholars incorporate a more sustained analysis of the underlying dominant-cultural
framework and connect our theorizing more closely to our teaching practices” (94). She draws on her own teaching experiences to offer concrete suggestions for ways to enact transformational multiculturalism in the classroom and suggests one component of transformational multiculturalism that she thinks is highly effective: relational teaching tactics that begin with commonalities.

Area Cluster: 103–Theory
Methodology: Theory appication
Citation: Anzaldua, Giroux, Freire, Deloria, Hall,

Provocative Quotes:
“transformational multicultural teaching…can explode…stereotypes and expose the
“white” supremacist narrative from which they emerge and on which they rely” (93-4).

—Melting-pot Multiculturalism…
“differences are verbally and visually valorized yet in many ways dehistoricized and erased. Commonality—defined simplistically as sameness—replaces difference, as racism, sexism, and othersocial justice issues are subsumed under facile celebrations of “diversity” that fit well with contemporary U.S. consumer culture and thus reaffirm the status quo (Prashad 2001: 63)” (95).

Separatist Approach to Multiculturalism:

“At other times, multiculturalism indicates the existence of discrete
ethnic/racial/cultural traditions and groups, or what Trinh Minh-ha (1991:
232) describes as “the juxtaposition of several cultures whose frontiers remain
intact.” Like melting-pot multiculturalism, this separatist approach reinforces
the dominant-cultural worldview. More specifically, by referring to the existence
of a number of distinct “races,” separatist multiculturalists employ a
rhetoric of authenticity that supports the “commonsense” belief that selfcontained
ethnic identities are permanent, unchanging categories of meaning
based on biology, family, history, and tradition” (96).

“separatist multiculturalists reduce multiculturalism to a series of self-enclosed
binary configurations, where each ethnic/racial-specific canon is
examined primarily, if not exclusively, in opposition to “mainstream” (Eurocentric)
….This oppositional approach inadvertently reinscribes inflexible boundaries that foreclose possible common ground in the discussion of works by different racialized groups. While scholars often arrive at profound observations, the literary boundaries they construct prevent us from applying insights acquired in one cultural tradition to others” (96).

“In its most vicious manifestations, readers, scholars, and writers become isolationist and
gravitate only toward works corresponding to their own self-perceived identities” (96).

Resistant/Revolutionary/critical Multiculturalism:

“Less frequently, multiculturalism takes a turn toward the “resistant,”
the “revolutionary,” or the “critical,” and investigates underlying relations of
power…critical multiculturalism intervenes in the dominant-cultural framework and thus
represents an important development in multicultural theorizing. Critical
multiculturalists reject the commonsense belief that cultural identities are
preexisting, organic discoveries. While acknowledging that cultural meaning
often relies on what seem to be unitary notions of an authentic past and an
essential, self-contained set of unique traits, critical multiculturalists challenge
this rhetoric of authenticity. They demonstrate that cultural identities
are created, not discovered” (97).

“critical multiculturalism exposes the hidden biases (the Eurocentrism, the racism, and other forms of domination) that have shaped existing literary standards. Insisting that it’s not enough simply to expose and critique this oppressive framework, critical multiculturalists also seek new forms of criticism, new interpretative methodologies, and new definitions that more accurately reflect the complex realities of U.S. literature
and life” (97).

“I describe the multiculturalism I envision and attempt to enact as transformational (rather than “critical” or even “revolutionary”) to underscore its potential to effect change in the classroom. As I use the term, transformational multiculturalism entails nonbinary oppositional epistemological and pedagogical methods that work in the service of social
justice. Building on critical multiculturalism’s insights concerning the relational nature of all cultural identities, transformational multiculturalism eschews simple binaries—whether between “self ” and “Other,” “us” and “them,” or “oppressor” and “oppressed.” This nonbinary approach opens space for individual and collective agency that makes change possible (although not inevitable). Because we are all mutually implicated—albeit in differently power-inflected ways—in the “white” supremacist masculinist framework
that normalizes the unjust status quo, we can (indeed, we must) destabilize
and attempt to transform it” (97-8).

“Through self-reflection students can recognize
the ways their values, perspectives, and beliefs have been influenced by
the “imperatives of culture.” This recognition denaturalizes the dominant cultural
framework and enables students to recognize the roles they (can) play
in challenging and/or reinforcing an unjust status quo” (98).

“transformational multiculturalism begins with the premise that U.S. American culture and literature have always been multicultural and explores the reciprocal, uneven movements by which peoples, cultures, and texts are altered through their interactions with each other” (98).

“Relational teaching begins with commonalities. I define commonalities …as complex points of connection that enable us to negotiate among sameness, similarity, and difference” (103).

“I invite them (students) to investigate their own previously unexamined worldviews and the dominant-cultural framework that supports them” (105).

“I heighten their sense of agency and hold them more accountable
for the choices they make” (110).

“Relational teaching is situation-specific and can take many forms.
These forms, in turn, will be shaped by the courses we teach; by our own
identities, interests, experiences, and concerns, and those of our students; as
well as by other variables” (111).

“The recognition of our profound interconnectedness offers a vital key to long-term individual/collective change, a crucial point of departure in my work for social justice: if we’re all interconnected, then the events and belief systems impacting my sisters and brothers in New York City or Kabul or Baghdad or Jerusalem have a concrete effect on me” (112).

“design situation-specific, relational teaching tactics that acknowledge the ways we are mutually implicated in historical and contemporary events. This, at least, is my hope and one of my goals as an educator” (112).

Keating, Ana Louise. “Making New Connections”: TransformationalMulticulturalism in the Classroom.

 

Summary: Introducing the concept of transformational multiculturalism, Keating proposes pedagogy for “radical, liberatory change—on both individual and collective
levels.” She however maintains that these changes are context-specific and open to negotiation. She claims that students and teachers can be changed through exploration of multicultural issues and themes in the classroom, however, also cautions that “although multiculturalism has this potential to bring about change, it cannot do so unless scholars incorporate a more sustained analysis of the underlying dominant-cultural
framework and connect our theorizing more closely to our teaching practices” (94). She draws on her own teaching experiences to offer concrete suggestions for ways to enact transformational multiculturalism in the classroom and suggests one component of transformational multiculturalism that she thinks is highly effective: relational teaching tactics that begin with commonalities.

Area Cluster: 103–Theory
Methodology: Theory appication
Citation: Anzaldua, Giroux, Freire, Deloria, Hall,

Provocative Quotes:
“transformational multicultural teaching…can explode…stereotypes and expose the
“white” supremacist narrative from which they emerge and on which they rely” (93-4).

—Melting-pot Multiculturalism…
“differences are verbally and visually valorized yet in many ways dehistoricized and erased. Commonality—defined simplistically as sameness—replaces difference, as racism, sexism, and othersocial justice issues are subsumed under facile celebrations of “diversity” that fit well with contemporary U.S. consumer culture and thus reaffirm the status quo (Prashad 2001: 63)” (95).

Separatist Approach to Multiculturalism:

“At other times, multiculturalism indicates the existence of discrete
ethnic/racial/cultural traditions and groups, or what Trinh Minh-ha (1991:
232) describes as “the juxtaposition of several cultures whose frontiers remain
intact.” Like melting-pot multiculturalism, this separatist approach reinforces
the dominant-cultural worldview. More specifically, by referring to the existence
of a number of distinct “races,” separatist multiculturalists employ a
rhetoric of authenticity that supports the “commonsense” belief that selfcontained
ethnic identities are permanent, unchanging categories of meaning
based on biology, family, history, and tradition” (96).

“separatist multiculturalists reduce multiculturalism to a series of self-enclosed
binary configurations, where each ethnic/racial-specific canon is
examined primarily, if not exclusively, in opposition to “mainstream” (Eurocentric)
….This oppositional approach inadvertently reinscribes inflexible boundaries that foreclose possible common ground in the discussion of works by different racialized groups. While scholars often arrive at profound observations, the literary boundaries they construct prevent us from applying insights acquired in one cultural tradition to others” (96).

“In its most vicious manifestations, readers, scholars, and writers become isolationist and
gravitate only toward works corresponding to their own self-perceived identities” (96).

Resistant/Revolutionary/critical Multiculturalism:

“Less frequently, multiculturalism takes a turn toward the “resistant,”
the “revolutionary,” or the “critical,” and investigates underlying relations of
power…critical multiculturalism intervenes in the dominant-cultural framework and thus
represents an important development in multicultural theorizing. Critical
multiculturalists reject the commonsense belief that cultural identities are
preexisting, organic discoveries. While acknowledging that cultural meaning
often relies on what seem to be unitary notions of an authentic past and an
essential, self-contained set of unique traits, critical multiculturalists challenge
this rhetoric of authenticity. They demonstrate that cultural identities
are created, not discovered” (97).

“critical multiculturalism exposes the hidden biases (the Eurocentrism, the racism, and other forms of domination) that have shaped existing literary standards. Insisting that it’s not enough simply to expose and critique this oppressive framework, critical multiculturalists also seek new forms of criticism, new interpretative methodologies, and new definitions that more accurately reflect the complex realities of U.S. literature
and life” (97).

“I describe the multiculturalism I envision and attempt to enact as transformational (rather than “critical” or even “revolutionary”) to underscore its potential to effect change in the classroom. As I use the term, transformational multiculturalism entails nonbinary oppositional epistemological and pedagogical methods that work in the service of social
justice. Building on critical multiculturalism’s insights concerning the relational nature of all cultural identities, transformational multiculturalism eschews simple binaries—whether between “self ” and “Other,” “us” and “them,” or “oppressor” and “oppressed.” This nonbinary approach opens space for individual and collective agency that makes change possible (although not inevitable). Because we are all mutually implicated—albeit in differently power-inflected ways—in the “white” supremacist masculinist framework
that normalizes the unjust status quo, we can (indeed, we must) destabilize
and attempt to transform it” (97-8).

“Through self-reflection students can recognize
the ways their values, perspectives, and beliefs have been influenced by
the “imperatives of culture.” This recognition denaturalizes the dominant cultural
framework and enables students to recognize the roles they (can) play
in challenging and/or reinforcing an unjust status quo” (98).

“transformational multiculturalism begins with the premise that U.S. American culture and literature have always been multicultural and explores the reciprocal, uneven movements by which peoples, cultures, and texts are altered through their interactions with each other” (98).

“Relational teaching begins with commonalities. I define commonalities …as complex points of connection that enable us to negotiate among sameness, similarity, and difference” (103).

“I invite them (students) to investigate their own previously unexamined worldviews and the dominant-cultural framework that supports them” (105).

“I heighten their sense of agency and hold them more accountable
for the choices they make” (110).

“Relational teaching is situation-specific and can take many forms.
These forms, in turn, will be shaped by the courses we teach; by our own
identities, interests, experiences, and concerns, and those of our students; as
well as by other variables” (111).

“The recognition of our profound interconnectedness offers a vital key to long-term individual/collective change, a crucial point of departure in my work for social justice: if we’re all interconnected, then the events and belief systems impacting my sisters and brothers in New York City or Kabul or Baghdad or Jerusalem have a concrete effect on me” (112).

“design situation-specific, relational teaching tactics that acknowledge the ways we are mutually implicated in historical and contemporary events. This, at least, is my hope and one of my goals as an educator” (112).

Bahri, Deepika. “Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies

Bahri, Deepika. “Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and
Composition Studies.” Crossing Borderlands. Eds. Andrea A. Lunsford and
Lahoucine Ouzgane. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 67-83

Summary: “In Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies,” Deepika Bahri treats “the confusion that have come to characterize both postcolonialism and the writing classroom in the current climate produced by transnationalism and economic globalization” by clarifying terms and concepts and showing in detail how a terministic reciprocity between composition and postcolonial studies may be effected” (5).

Area Cluster: 103—Theories

Methodology: Application of theory

Citation: Bhabha, Spivak, Said, Viswanathan, Friere, Rushdie, Guha, Kent

Provocative Quotes:
“At the most obvious, postcolonialism enters the world of rhetoric and composition in the very person of the third world postcolonial, the authentically visible diversity. The growing numbers of expatriate, excolonized international academics, the coming of age of a sizable population of the immigrants of color in Anglo-America, as well as institutional goals of increasing visible diversity are gradually repopulating the once “color-less” halls of the academy. The presence of these individuals, along with that of a more diverse student body at a time of growing interest in diversity, is at least partly responsible for coloring the rhetoric and composition field in new ways.” (68).

“Nudged by, but not always prepared for, the new mandate to educate students in cultural sensitivity, the composition teachers find a ready ally in the lexicon and concept bank for dealing with otherness, oppression, resistance, and novelty that postcolonial theory has so obligingly provided in the last decade or so. Terms such as orientalism, subaltern, cultural tourism, colonization, neocolonization, monolithic other, difference, alterity, self/other, discourse, power, authority, speaking, agency, and subjectivity (not necessarily unique to postcolonial vocabulary but gathered efficiently under its umbrella) allow the teacher to negotiate the rocky terrain of otherness with some modicum of theoretical guidance and support for teaching and classroom discussion” (69).

“Increasingly, postcolonial theory deals not only with the impact of colonial education on individual and collective postcolonial identity, but also addresses the politics of education in the Anglo-American education where many postcolonial critics now find themselves. Such discussions can be very relevant to composition studies,which has been animated by issues of disciplinarity almost from the beginning” (69).

“Composition studies has found commonalities between its concerns and those raised in post-colonial theories. The former’s interest in rhetoric, discourse, and power; in the recovery of hitherto silenced voices; in the liberatory possibilities of advanced technologies; and in the relation of the text to the social finds echoes, and often counterparts, in the debates dominant in the latter” (70).

“Turning to postcolonialism and composition studies in particular, we might say that both have vested interest in examining the issues of authority and power as sources of psychological and social conflict. Both are, moreover, committed to a vision of theory and teaching as intervention and to addressing the persistently problematic dichotomy between theory and practice. It is thus not surprising that references to Said’s formulations of power and discourse or Spivak’s discussions on supplementarity, otherness catachresis, and strategic essentialism now routinely appear in discussions on histories of classical rhetoric, on questions of agency, and various other issues in rhetoric and composition” (71).

“Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry as a “discourse of ambivalence” that constructs “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” might be seen as useful in many ways (Location 86): for those studying the rhetoric of public discourse, the politics of basic writing classrooms, the production of educated or institutionalized subjectivity, or the production of discourse in any of several situations where power conjoins with the production of knowledge but remains ambiguated by its own contradictions” (72).

“The notion of subaltern…already appears frequently in rhetoric and composition studies. It has served various roles in these discussions: to identify marginal student populations, to describe resistive modes of agency, and to tackle the difficulty of locating agency in the subaltern” (72).

“Postcolonialism as an alibi is certainly a problem for those in postcolonial studies, but it should alarm those in composition studies as well. The nexus of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, the often unreflective slippage, should alert us to the role both have come to play—often through engines of the composition classroom—within transnationalism. The enlistment of postcolonial texts within a liberal multiculturalist agenda is not without contradiction. If the purpose is to sensitize students to other cultures, there is certainly value in exposing them to a variety of cultural expressions. If it is also, as one assumes, to prepare them for dealing with difference in their own contexts, the postcolonial can actually serve as a distraction. It is the displacement of the local context, local concerns, and of local struggles by the postcolonial on the one hand and the re-christening of the local others with an abstract and historically voided category of post-colonial that concerns me. The net impact of the use of postcolonial literature in this fashion is to present the other as always beyond the local shores rather than in our very midst and to privilege the notion of distant difference instead of examining the complex ways in which difference and marginality are produced in particular contexts rather than being inherent by virtue of category” (77).

Same is the case with multiculturalism:

“the naming of the margin in euphemistic terms is a way of reducing discomfort and diverting attention away from precisely those problems of marginality, otherness, and of historical particulars that should be addressed” (77).

“The theoretical sophistication of postcolonialism and its links with elite (and largely Western) movements like poststructuralism and postmodernism, and its often conveniently abstract nature, reinforces its place within the academy while deferring attention to the operations of power and resistance in specific contexts” (77-8).

“The concepts of sunalternity, colonization, and postcolonial can…all be mobilized for initiating useful discussion, but their value is curtailed if they are left to function as generic shorthand” (79).

“The flattening of postcoloniality into a “condition” of the moment obscures the economic and social particulars of the postcolony as well as Anglo-America, while creating a liminal zone of otherness that diverts attention from the fact that the others in Anglo-America do not all exist on the same terms. In effect, the easy recourse to postcolonial tropes and concepts dehistoricize the local struggle and prevents the development of specific strategies to cope with the particularities of the moment, whether in the classroom or in theory” (80).

“the visible success of border-crossers like Bhabha and Rushdie can also create a dangerous illusion about the dexterity and comfort of “hybrid people.” The scores of underclass immigrants in Anglo-America and illegal boarder crossers not only cannot “make themselves comfortable” with the same ease that other postcolonials have but also know that border crossing can be dangerous and potentially fatal…because of the overvaluation of hybridity and transnational border crossing, the usual invocation of hybridity rarely addresses the issue of literal hybridity, that is, the plight of racial hybrids in a black-and-white culture” (81).

“The term subaltern can become meaningless…when it becomes overused. Spivak, in fact, complains that “it has become a kind of buzzword for any group that wants something that it does not have” (“Subatern” 290)” (81).

“The strategic use of postcolonial concepts can be very fruitful indeed in rhetoric and composition studies, and its own agenda and concerns have led to the development of several useful concepts that can, in turn, inform the debates in postcolonial studies or any discipline where the study of rhetoric, power knowledge, and resistance are of importance. Concepts such as the fundamental idea of “process” exemplified in the Janet Emig and Donald Murray and the new interest in social constructionism and postprocess, the notion of the “paralogic” associated with Thomas Kent, the distinction between “audience addressed/audience invoked” developed by Lunsford and Ede, intimations of the need for a new kind of literacy in the “late age of print” associated with Jay Bolter, the many useful reports from composition teachers in the pedagogical battlefield, and the growing and sophisticated discourse on electronics and communication associated with Jay Bolter, Richard Lanham, and Stuart Moulthrop, among others, can provide a conceptual map which is particularly apt for our times because these discussions have come out of a field that might be said to have come of age in the last twenty-five or so years” (82).

“collaboration and partnership between postcolonial and composition studies in tackling the challenges of the moment and of the future. If we can agree that the task before us all in a time of cultural chaos and a changing economic landscape is to conceive of a project beyond binaries, of grappling with the challenging proposition that both power and resistance are dispersed and come from everywhere instead of being neatly segregated for our theoretical and pedagogic purposes, then we all need to address in more nuanced ways the abiding issue of differentials and privilege without tokenization, to resist commodification without abandoning ethical investigation, and to agree to a rigorous (self) invigilation in our scholarly pursuits and in the practice of out everyday lives” (83).

Rose, Jeanne Marie. “‘B Seeing U’ in unfamiliar places: ESL writers, email Epistolaries and Critical Computer Literacy.

Rose, Jeanne Marie. “‘B Seeing U’ in unfamiliar places: ESL writers, email Epistolaries and Critical Computer Literacy. Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 237-249.

Abstract/Summary: This article poses a rich, to date unexplored, resource for facilitating students’ development of critical technological literacy: the email epistolary novel. With reference to a developmental writing class populated primarily by international English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students, the article describes
How the study of an email epistolary helped students to examine technology critically and made students’ technological literacies a course emphasis. This approach to writing pedagogy, the article argues, illustrates how ESL students negotiate their technological literacies in the context of their assimilation into American undergraduate communities. The article concludes by suggesting that email epistolaries can guide students at all levels toward more nuanced understandings of how technological literacy emerges
in dialogue with other literacy practices.

Area Cluster: 106—Information Studies, 108—Language

Methodology: Case Studies, Discourse Analysis

Citation: Hawisher, McCarthy, Selfe, Perl, Rose

Provocative Quotes:
“By raising distinctive concerns regarding authenticity in electronic
environments in this way, email epistolary novels encourage students to consider how the
absence of face-to-face cues and vocal inflection shapes the character of online conversations… such novels may prompt students to critically examine the choices they make when chatting online, including with whom to correspond, what to disclose, how to construct oneself rhetorically, and whether to pursue real-time friendships and relationships with email acquaintances” (240).

“email epistolaries, because they routinely include graphical features like abbreviations, emoticons, and variations in type and font at odds with the conventions of Standard Edited English … enable second language learners to explore expression of ideas and appeals to audiences without the characteristic anxiety about spelling and mechanics that comparisons between their own writing and assigned texts frequently yield (Kells, 1999)” (240).

“such novels pave the way for classes to address the language associated with email in relation to larger concerns regarding technology, privilege, and access. Such considerations are particularly salient for developmental ESL students, many of whom, whether they are immigrants or bilingual Americans, equate language learning with assimilation, financial security, and upward mobility in the United States” (241).

“For international students, many of whom have been excluded from dominant society in North America on the basis of racial, ethnic, and/or linguistic difference, the conformity that initially seemed to me to reinforce technology’s invisibility likely represents a route toward assimilation and acceptance” (247).

“Moreover, in serving as a site for examining technology and language together, email epistolaries can help students to view computer use in relation to other literacy activities…email epistolary novels’ characteristic conflation of online and print media can elicit responses through which all students, developmental and mainstream students alike, articulate how their computer use shapes and is shaped by their distinctive literacy habits and values. Such responses, shared within the context of the class, allow subtle and substantive variations in students’ literacy practices to emerge as part of the writing curriculum and, more significantly, to inform their ongoing development of critical technological literacy” (248).

Lu, Min-Zhan. “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism.”

Lu, Min-Zhan. “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism.” College Composition and Communication 56 (2004): 16-50.

Summary: “This is an attempt to define what being a responsible and responsive user of English might mean in a world ordered by global capital, a world where all forms of intra- and international exchanges in all areas of life are increasingly under pressure to involve English. Turning to recent work in linguistics and education, I pose a set of alternative assumptions that might help us develop more responsible and responsive approaches to the relation between English and its users (both those labeled Native-Speaking, White or Middle Class, and those Othered by these labels), the language needs and purposes of individual users of English, and the relation between the work we do and the work done by users of English across the world. I argue that these assumptions can help us compose English against the grain of all systems and relations of injustice” (16).

Area Cluster: 108 Language

Methodology: Discourse Analysis,
Citation: Canagarajah, Morrison, Fairclough, Kachru, Hall

Provocative Quotes:

“To use English responsively and responsibly, we need to unravel several residual fears hovering over the Angel in My House of Composition: the fear that “linguistic imperfection” will cause a “communication” breakdown; the fear that critical engagement with the language one needs to survive and thrive is incompatible with one’s effort to acquire it; a fear arising from the assumption that (socially or self-identified) Native-Speaking, White, and/or Middle- Class users of English are monolingual; the fear that issues of dissonance are irrelevant to their learning and discursive practices? (18-9).

“I pose two related directions aiming to san these fears. I argue for the need to depict Composition as boundary work: efforts to articulate responses (or take a stance towards) the dissonance between and across languages, englishes, and discourses with asymmetrical economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital in today’s world. And I foreground the need of all of us (Native-Speaking, White, and/or Middle Class and their Others) to grasp and make constructive uses of the dissonance in each of our (socially constructed) discursive resources and purposes for acquiring English” (19).

“An Associated Press report indicates that in a world ordered by fast capitalism, the struggle between users intent on deadening and enlivening English is intensifying intra- and internationally” (19).

“The “war” against “Chinglish” points to the intricate grid of intra- and international jiaos taking place on the linguistic, economic, social, political, and cultural fronts as a result of the global extension of market modes of operation and of the logic of flexible accumulation to all areas of life (Fairclough 163-64).’ The pressure to acquire and use English is increasingly becoming a lived reality for peoples stratified by labels such as Native-Speaking, Educated, Developed Countries, or Democracy and their Others. The “war” against “Chinglish” also indicates that the english we use in Composition has the potential to directly and indirectly police how peoples the world over use English. (20).

“Aside from illustrating our institutional designation to deaden English by imposing a “linguistic perfection” to maintain the intra- and international exclusivity and dominance of standardized U.S. english, the China Daily report also points to the fact that even as English is becoming a language of international commerce, media, and politics, it is breaking into multiple and increasingly differentiated englishes marked by accents, national origins, and cultural and professional or technical affiliations (Cope and Kalantzis, “Introduction” 5). (21).

“In making English serve a different reality-social relations, needs and purposes other than (and thus, Othered by) the ones presumed and thus, prescribed by standardized English-the designer of the “Chinglish” signs might be seen as a resistant user of English working in concert with Native Americans, African Americans, and peoples across the world to use English against the englishes of their oppressors” (22).

“The work of resistant users of English indicates that, like any other language- e.g., Chinese or Spanish-English is best defined as an unstable process kept alive by the intense intra- and international struggle between and across English and diverse languages (peripheralized by the power of English under fast capitalism), and between and across diverse standardized englishes and their Othered, peripheralized englishes (variously labeled Dialectal, Creole, Pidgin, Indigenized, etc.). Whether we realize it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, we take part in this struggle through every decision we make on which english to use and how to use it. Composition is boundary work. How we go about using English matters” (24).

“Incorporating concepts from recent work in linguistics and education, I propose a method of reading that proceeds from two assumptions: (1) all users of English (self- or socially identified Native-Speaking, White, and/or Middle-Class users of English and users Othered by these labels) are actively structuring the english they are acquiring, its relation to other englishes, and the relations of peoples invested in the competing englishes; (2) in every instance of discursive practice, all users of English are working with and on very specific, often complex and sometimes dissonant, discursive resources and for potentially complex and conflicting purposes. Working with these assumptions would compel us to take a dual approach to all texts (spoken or written): investigating not only whether certain features in a given text meet the standardized templates of the english with the most social, political, linguistic, and symbolic capital in fast capitalism’s Free Market but also how and why individual users of English have designed such features on a given occasion” (25-6).

“Instead of presenting Our confusion as resulting from Others’ “linguistic imperfection,” we might treat it as resulting from our lack of know-how or effort to make sense of how and why individual users of English might have come up with specific redesigning of standardized designs” (26-7).

“In summary, to be a responsible and responsive user of English, we need to delay our sound bites on what english this designer needs and how she needs to use it until we have studied her understanding of her discursive resources: the options opened up and closed down by her actual language expertise, affiliation, and/or inheritance as well as by her sense of her actual, imagined, and possible self and life” (35-6).

“As many in Composition have long argued, notions of “expertise” are socially constructed, depending on the criteria and assumptions historically used to assess the discursive practices of people categorized along lines of class, gender, sex, race, occupation, ethnicity, religion, education, national origin, etc” (36).

“One way Composition might link its work with the language practices of resistant users of English within the United States and across the world is learning to perform “closer” readings of texts that “confuse” those of us with “fluency” in the standardized englishes of Developed Countries” (38).

“Fast capitalism’s standardized template of selfhood would encourage users of English to leave its life in the hands of the Market and envelope ourselves in the caul of standardized fear-myths. To intervene with the order of Fast Capitalism, it is the responsibility of Composition to work with the belief that English is enlivened-enlightened-by the work of users intent on using it to limn the actual, imagined, and possible lives of all its speakers, readers, and writers, the work of users intent on using English to describe and, thus, control those circumstances of their life designed by all systems and relations of injustice to submerge them. It is our responsibility to call attention to the potential desires, capabilities, and needs of all users of English to actively participate in the redesigning of standardized englishes with the highest Market value and to do so in intra- and international jiaos on all levels of life” (43).

“How we use English in Composition matters. Trying to critically engage with the standardized designs of a discourse of flexible accumulation when reading and writing in English can have long-term effects on the future of all languages, all users of English, and the order of the world we share” (43).