Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing

Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367201821
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535635
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The literacy autobiography is a personal narrative reflecting on how one's experiences of spoken and written words have contributed to their ongoing relationship with language and literacy. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing is a cutting-edge study of this engaging genre of writing in academic and professional contexts.

In this state-of-the-art collection, Suresh Canagarajah brings together 11 samples of writing by students that both document their literary journeys and pinpoint the seminal works affecting their development as translingual readers and writers. Integrating the narrative of the author, which is written as his own literacy autobiography, with a close analysis of these texts, this book:

• presents a case for the literacy autobiography as an archetypal genre that prepares writers for the conventions and processes required in other genres of writing;
• demonstrates the serious epistemological and rhetorical implications behind the genre of literacy autobiography among migrant scholars and students;
• effectively translates theoretical publications on language diversity for classroom purposes, providing a transferable teaching approach to translingual writing;
• analyzes the tropes of transnational writers and their craft in "meshing" translingual resources in their writing;
• demonstrates how transnationalism and translingualism are interconnected, guiding readers toward an understanding of codemeshing not as a cosmetic addition to texts but motivated toward resolving inescapable personal and social dilemmas.

Written and edited by one of the most highly regarded linguists of his generation, this book is key reading for scholars and students of applied linguistics, TESOL, and literacy studies, as well as tutors of writing and composition worldwide.

PART I

A teacher’s literacy autobiography

PART I INTRODUCTION

கற்பனை: an invitation

“Can we discuss how to deal with the painful personal experiences presented in these essays?” Tim interjects during my lecture after the short break in our three-hour class on “Teaching Second Language Writing” one evening. It is obvious that some students had discussed this need during the break. I had seen small groups of students engrossed in a conversation in the corridor in hushed voices. There was an uncomfortable silence after Tim’s question, as if no one was sure whether personal issues were an appropriate subject in an academic course. I had avoided addressing the traumatic experiences some students were narrating in their literacy autobiographies. I found it convenient to focus on issues of thematic coherence, rhetorical effectiveness, and genre conventions and avoided a discussion of the personal. To break the silence, Tim clarified almost in apology: “Some narratives are so traumatic that we don’t know how to respond to them.” The class had just peer-reviewed a draft by Ruth. She had started her university education as a highly motivated music student, when she found one day that she couldn’t practice her piano for more than a short time. A diagnosis revealed that she had muscle damage that was going to be permanent. Devastated, she changed to majoring in French and teaching English as a second language and undertook a study abroad in France. She developed a new identity and vision for her future. In the previous class, we had discussed Kyoko’s draft on growing up in Japan as a “middle child” among brothers who were always given preferential treatment. This made her seek refuge in expressive and imaginative writing, developing an alternate identity for herself. For some others, navigating countries, cultures, and institutions to develop their multilingual writing proficiencies had turned out to be disorienting. As we proceeded to discuss these charged narratives, we gradually realized that this genre of writing was making us vulnerable, transparent, and intimate, crossing the lines of typical classroom writing.

As we became more engaged in writing about our literacy development, we got even more involved in analyzing our struggles and achievements and adopting creative new textual and linguistic forms to represent them. There was something inviting in this genre for all of us. We gradually became more invested in exploring our lives and experimenting with effective ways to represent them. It seemed heartless to ignore the poignant experiences represented in the narratives, the serious self-reflection and analysis that had gone into exploring them, and the creativity and experimentation involved in writing them. There was a compelling need to bring these stories out. The students and I therefore conceived this book as a labor of love.

Objectives

At the end of that semester, we realized that we had to relate to literacy autobiographies (“LA” hereafter) in a different way from other academic genres we were familiar with. Broadly, the LA genre is a narrative about how we become literate in community, academic, and professional discourses. The genre could be personal and yet academic, narrative as well as an argument, literary and analytical. It could be written for a specific community but voice the experiences of diverse, especially marginalized, communities. It could be descriptive of one’s learning experiences but also performative of projected repertoires and voices. One could develop the LA variably depending on one’s purposes and contexts. We started treating it as a liminal genre for these reasons. This was a genre between genres. In fact, it was congenial for representing in-between identities and discourses – i.e., those straddling community, disciplinary, and knowledge boundaries.

The literacy autobiography is not new to teaching, research, or scholarship. Though it is called by different names – such as literacy narratives, creative nonfiction, or autoethnography – LA is amply represented in scholarly literature in different fields. Writing personal narratives is a popular pedagogical activity in composition classrooms (Hindman, 2003) and teacher development courses (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). Beyond pedagogical contexts, many professionals and scholars in different fields, such as medicine (Gawande, 2014), economics (McCloskey, 1999), and law (Williams, 1991), are writing their personal stories to explore experiences and knowledge they are unable to represent through their dominant professional genres. For research purposes, LA is attracting interest in many disciplines for the alternate forms of knowledge it generates, particularly in applied linguistics (Barkhuizen, 2011; Pavlenko, 2007) and composition (Young, 2004), fields close to my scholarly interests. Different methodological approaches have been used to analyze them, ranging from narrative analysis and discourse analysis, to psychoanalysis and cultural studies (to be reviewed in Chapter 3).

I want to focus attention on two issues that are unique to the LAs presented in this book.

First, these LAs represent the literacies and identities of writers as situated between communities – that is, positioned as transnational. Since other writers have considered their literacies and identities as bounded by a specific community or adjusting to a new community, their tropes and styles are different. The objectives in language learning and literacy development for such writers are also different from those represented in transnational LAs. It is therefore important to define the term transnational so that we understand the locus of this writing.

Since the efforts of 17th-century nation formation, the boundaries of the nation-state have served as the default location for our thinking on community. Though the nation-state accommodates diverse ethnic, racial, and class groups, it provides the outer boundary for society. Given the imposing institutions of the nation-state (i.e., government, police, army, taxation, citizenship), it is understandable that the national border governs perhaps all facets of our life. Similarly, academic research and inquiry have worked on the operating assumption of a “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002) – i.e., the treatment of the nation-state as the assumed context that frames and contextualizes any inquiry. Contemporary developments in globalization have reminded us that our social relations and identification practices transcend the nation-state. Even during earlier periods when the nation-state was treated as all-encompassing, our social practices, relationships, and identifications exceeded its bounds. To capture such spaces that include but also transcend nation-state boundaries, scholars use the term transnational social fields (Faist, Fauser, & Reisenauer, 2013). This is a space, not a place. That is, spaces are virtual, social, constructed, and emergent. A physical place may be bound by the laws and policies of the nation-state. Thus, the term transnational indexes something qualitatively different from multinational. The latter is an enumerative concept of putting many countries together in a relationship. Transnational indexes the liminal spaces beyond the nation-state, where people from many countries relate to each other. We can perceive physical places as hosting such transnational relations. To refer to the physical locations where such transnational relations, influences, and practices are played out, I will adopt the term contact zones (Pratt, 1991). The term will help us perceive the classrooms and institutions where the writing of my students in this book happened as a transnational meeting place of diverse cultures and languages.

Let us consider the benefits of adopting the transnational space as the location of our writing, teaching, and analysis. The narratives in this book typify the experiences of millions of migrants in the world today. Increasing numbers of people live outside the countries where they and/or their families were born (Faist et al., 2013). These include not only those who cross borders willingly for better life prospects but those who move under compulsion due to wars, ethnic hostility, political oppression, climate change, and environmental damage. While these people might have relocated, their social and psychological affiliations are transnational. For others, periodically or constantly shuttling between borders for work or family life has become a fact of life. Beyond these cases of physical migration, almost everyone experiences the effects of mobility in their everyday life. That is, even if they don’t physically move, they are living with people who are mobile and bring resources and practices from elsewhere to their familiar habitations. Also, they are inundated with translocal resources through media, texts, and technology. These influences lift them out of our physical rootedness and situate them in translocal spaces. Thus, we all inhabit transnational social fields. It is important to consider the challenges for literacy and identity when writers are located within such liminal spaces.

The narratives presented and discussed in this book belong to both “native English speakers”¹ who are local to the place (i.e., Anglo-American² students in US classrooms) and multilinguals (i.e., international, migrant students). Despite these differences in language identities and citizenship, all of them brought varying degrees of transnational positioning in terms of their attitudes, perceptions, relationships, and identities. Many of my international students expected to return to their home countries for teaching (and did so in the case of some Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Saudi Arabian students). Some international students who planned to remain in the US for further studies or work enjoyed affiliations with their home countries and elsewhere and considered diaspora-belonging as their identity (which was similar to my own positioning and affiliations in my role as the teacher of these courses). Some Anglo-American students had visited other countries for studies and teaching and considered mobile professional lives as their future. Others gradually adopted a transnational perspective in the context of writing and learning with international/multilingual students, in classes that were designed as contact zones.

To move to the second feature that is unique about these literacy autobiographies, they are translingual. When we create a space for writing between communities – i.e., a classroom contact zone – the LAs develop diversified textual and linguistic properties. I will provide a theoretical framework in the third chapter to demonstrate how transnationalism and translingualism influence each other. I demonstrate that mobile writers who negotiate diverse languages and semiotic resources in the composing process, or mesh these resources in the final product, are not doing so for mere embellishment. There is a compelling rhetorical need to adopt this writing practice for communication in transnational social fields. Simply put, these writers realize that in order to satisfactorily resolve their multilingual proficiencies, affiliations, and identities in shuttling between locations, they need to construct new textual “homes” that creatively merge grammars and transcend linguistic boundaries. The writers are not satisfied locating themselves within the confines of narrowly circumscribed languages, which are often labeled and territorialized as belonging to one nation-state or the other (such as French or Spanish; or British English or American English).

Translingualism, like transnationalism, is not a new practice or experience. This label simply reminds us of practices that have always been there but have been suppressed or hidden by traditional definitions of language. Dominant ideologies define languages as separate and autonomous, territorialized in specific communities or nation-states, owned by a specific group of people, and stabilized into static grammatical systems (see Canagarajah, 2013 for explanation). Regardless of these language ideologies, which have also considerably shaped citizenship policies and teaching pedagogies in many countries, communicative practice has always involved a negotiation of diverse verbal and semiotic resources. Recent forms of mobility have only brought into greater visibility the limitations of territorializing language ideologies and policies. As a corrective, scholars have adopted new terms and constructs to discuss the complexity of language practice. Translingual refers to an orientation to communication and competence that treats words as always in contact with diverse semiotic resources and constantly generating new grammars and meanings out of this synergy. This perspective differs from the traditional view that each language has its own self-sufficient grammar for meaning making. Furthermore, I see verbal resources as one dimension of other such meaning-making symbols, including, color, sound, and objects, which I collectively label “semiotic resources.” Writing can manifest this synergy between semiotic resources, just as conversation, digital communication, and other interactions do. I adopt the term codemeshing to refer to the hybrid textual products with mixed languages and/or semiotic features that emerge from translingual practice. In other words, translingual is a form of practice, and codemeshing is one of its realizations as textual product. These terms are related but not synonymous. In writing in English, multilinguals may read, think, draft, and discuss their writing in multiple languages – though the final product may appear to be in English. In this manner, not all translingual writing practice has to result in ostensibly codemeshed texts. I qualify my statements above with “appear” and “ostensibly” because we often misrecognize codemeshed writing for being monolingual. Dominant ideologies of language purity and standardization make it difficult to see the diversity within what is labeled as “Standard English” or homogeneous “English.” For me, English is a creolized language that has been appropriating resources from diverse languages from its earliest days of formation (Canagarajah, 2013). The provenance of borrowed words often becomes salient in specific rhetorical and social contexts. As we encounter different forms of social fluidity now, involving spaces of interaction and communication that cut across national or geographical boundaries, all of us live in zones of language contact, sometimes shuttling across languages and developing subtle intuitive and receptive competence that may not find dramatic multilingual manifestation in our writing or speech. Therefore, I consider a translingual disposition available to all of us, though some may consider themselves monolingual in their proficiency.

While such transnational and translingual dispositions have been observed before in certain biographical and creative writing, there is a reason why they are becoming more visible now. I now discuss the historical conditions that have created a readiness for writers to represent these discourses and audiences to engage with them. At the same time, there is no claim made in this book that writers will always represent these literacies or readers will be tolerant of them. I will go into the factors that might motivate more people to represent themselves as transnational and adopt translingual practices. Suffice it to say that the transnational LA is becoming so visible that some scholars have called for more research attention and pedagogical focus going forward (see Sharma, 2015).

The scene

A quick reminder, therefore, is needed of the historical moment and rhetorical context. Recent forms of globa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I A teacher’s literacy autobiography
• Part II Students’ literacy autobiographies
• Index