Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows

Alastair Pennycook

London: Routledge (2007) Pp 189 2007

The rapid spread of English worldwide sends an obvious signal -- the English language is protean and fluid as today's living language.

So fluid and flexible is English that it pervasively permeates global, regional, national and local levels. The notion of Englishes has emerged, demonstrating the vitality of English which grows and develops mainly as a local language variety.

Although closely tied to the processes of globalization, it is too simplistic to account for its spread from the sole context of globalization, Americanization, imperialism or world Englishes and homogeneity.

Such perspectives, Alastair Pennycook argues, while useful, cannot provide an adequate understanding of how English is developed in a localized specific context.

The focus of this book is not to present a view of how the world is being homogenized through -- hence imperialized by -- English but rather to encourage a better understanding of world Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization.

Elevating issues such as power, control, resistance, change, appropriation and identity is felt relevant to account for the phenomenal global Englishes because they are largely overlooked in most contemporary discussion about its global spread -- which is laden with the linguistics and politics of the twentieth century.

Situating himself within the framework of a sociolinguistic domain, Pennycook was able to demonstrate the fluidity of English as a translocal language highly embedded in local contexts, including those of East Asia, Australia, West Africa and the Pacific Islands, to which the English language has flowed.

The discussion of English in relation to other languages in East Asia, such as Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog makes this book informative in its substance.

In regard to this, Pennycook stresses that the diverse use of English varieties is not imitative of the English language per se, but part of a localized subculture in many parts of the world.

Moving on from this, Pennycook uses his own coined term "transcultural flows" in a broad sense to refer to "the processes of borrowing, blending, remaking and returning, to processes of alternative cultural production".

Unlike other scholars who are interested in linguistic imperialism and homogenization of world cultures, Pennycook takes a look at how the flows of cultural forms produce new forms of localization, and how the use of global Englishes produces new forms of global identification.

Broad cultural formation of rap, break-dancing, graffiti and DJing -- known also as the first element of hip-hop -- becomes the vital point in his discussion about global Englishes throughout this book. The choice of hip-hop over, for example the domain of literature, is not without reasons, however.

Pennycook said that hip-hop can reveal much more about how people engage with global culture, and as a form of popular culture it is often overlooked in the field of applied linguistics and the Teaching of English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL).

The inclusion of hip-hop in this book has significant cultural, linguistic, philosophical and educational implications, he said.

The book's strength lies in its in-depth review of selected literature used as a theoretical framework for analysis.

Pennycook's adroitness in synthesizing a mixture of varied theoretical stances from scholars of different disciplines certainly adds to the rigor of his analysis.

Transgressive theory and performative theory, for instance, have been scrutinized in two different chapters, constituting the core frameworks for the interconnectedness of hip-hop, global Englishes, transcultural flows and pedagogy.

Transgressive theory serves as an analytic framework for elucidating important novel trans- concepts used in the book such as transculturation, transmodality, transtexualization and translation.

Performative theory, on the other hand, helps pave the way for thinking about language use in a novel, yet critical way, countering the ideas of language, identity, culture or gender seen strictly from a foundationalist perspective.

A perusal of these two chapters reveals that Pennycook owes much of his own theoretical formulation to some of the world's distinguished scholars, most notably Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Noam Chomsky, John Dewey, John Austin and Michel Foucault.

The book concludes by devoting a chapter to education. Essentially, this chapter offers possible implications for the design of language teaching curriculum based on his theories.

Fresh in insights and thought-provoking in exposition, this book is a timely reference for linguistic and sociolinguistic studies, cross-cultural studies and English language teaching.

The writer is chief editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and teaches English composition at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@atmajaya.ac.id.

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