The Global-Local Interface and Hybridity

Exploring Language and Identity

Rani Rubdy, Lubna Alsagoff

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781783090846
• eBook ISBN: 9781783090877
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The chapters in this volume seek to bring hybrid language practices to the center of discussions about English as a global language. They demonstrate how local linguistic resources and practices are involved in the refashioning of identities in a variety of cross-cultural and geographical contexts, and illustrate hybridity as an enactment of resistance and creativity. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and ideological perspectives, the authors use contexts as diverse as social media, Bollywood films, workplaces and kindergartens to explore the ways in which English has become a part of localities and social relations in ways that are of significant sociolinguistic interest in understanding the dynamics of mobile cultures and transcultural flows.

1 The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization: Problematizing Hybridity

Rani Rubdy and Lubna Alsagoff

Introduction

Globalization is not just one of the most hotly debated concepts this century; it has become a social reality of contemporary importance – ‘both as a social mode that we need to keep probing and as a focus for some new ways of understanding language in society’ (Coupland, 2010: 2). Much has been written by globalization theorists (Castells, 1996; Featherstone, 1995; Giddens, 1990; Hall, 1991; Huntington, 1996; Inda & Rosaldo, 2008; Kraidy, 2002, 2005; Pieterse, 2004; Robertson, 1992; Tomlinson, 1999) on the nature and meaning of globalization, its causes and consequences, and its many contradictions and paradoxes. Indeed, globalization is best thought of as a multi-dimensional process that cuts across various spheres of activity in the realms of economy, politics, culture, technology and so forth that is transforming the world into a complex place – in the way it is imagined, represented and acted on by its inhabitants (Blommaert, 2010: 63). Furthermore, these transformations are so messy and unpredictable that we can only understand globalization as a complex of processes evolving and developing at different levels of scale, scope, speed and intensity, changing the world landscape in a number of ways.

Drawing on our insights from the voluminous literature on globalization, we suggest that the following characteristic elements of globalization have relevance for our engagement with the dynamics of language and culture in society.

• First of all, the development of worldwide modes of transport and communication has meant the speeding up of the flows of capital, people, goods, images and ideas across the world (Appadurai, 1996), thus pointing to a general increase in the pace of global interactions and processes (Inda & Rosaldo, 2008). National borders that were traditionally fixed have become increasingly porous and permeable, allowing more and more people to be cast into intense and immediate contact with each other. This is true not only in relation to trade, capital and information but also to ideas, norms, cultures and values.

• Second, the increased connectivity brought about by technological advances, and the unsurpassed speed with which events and messages can be transmitted to other parts of the world so that people located elsewhere experience them in real time, has erased the barriers of space and produced the experience of a ‘shrinking world’, of ‘compressed time-space’ (Harvey, 1989: 241–242).

• Third, globalization results in the intensification of worldwide social relations. As a result, happenings, decisions and practices in one area of the globe can come to have consequences for communities and cultures in other, often quite distant, locales around the world (Giddens, 1990).

• And finally, resulting from all this intensification of interconnectedness, driven by innovations in communication, media and technology, ‘globalization also implies a heightened entanglement of the global and local such that, while everyone might continue to live local lives, their phenomenal worlds have to some extent become global as distant events come to have an impact on local spaces, and local developments come to have global repercussions’ (Inda & Rosaldo, 2008: 11–12).

The image this evokes is of a world full of movement and mixture, contact and linkages, and persistent cultural interaction and exchange – a veritable ‘global mélange’ (Pieterse, 2004).

The social transformation triggered by globalization calls for profound changes in the way both language and culture have been traditionally conceptualized. Blommaert (2010), for instance, contends that the new forms of social interaction associated with globalization necessarily require that research reconsiders the earlier sociolinguistic frameworks and assumptions concerning the social nature of language. An engagement with globalization means cultures can no longer be conceived of as neatly bounded entities but rather ‘as socio-cultural arrangements in terms of different forms of mobility or flow’ (Coupland, 2010: 6) and that sociolinguistics must rethink itself as ‘a sociolinguistics of mobile resources’ (Blommaert, 2010: 1). Much like Pennycook (2007, 2010), Blommaert maintains that sociolinguistics and applied linguistics need to go beyond the traditional conceptual apparatus based on the idea of languages as autonomous codes in order to understand the complex ways in which linguistic and other semiotic resources act and interact in multilingual settings. More importantly, he argues that ‘(w)hat is globalized is not an abstract language, but specific speech forms, genres, styles, and forms of literacy practices’ (Blommaert, 2003: 608). That is, people have repertoires – not the whole of any language, and they employ specific bits and pieces of language included in these repertoires for different purposes.

This characterizes, particularly well, the heterogeneous speech forms of many English-knowing bilinguals in the multilingual settings of former colonial countries and their diaspora communities, increasingly infiltrated by the spread of global English through film, television, popular music, the internet, advertising and youth culture. One key aspect of this heterogeneity is what Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) call discoursal hybridity – the intermixing of discourses and genres resulting from the unsettling of boundaries between different domains of social use of language in late modernity.

The concept of hybridity is intrinsically linked to the notion of identity for multicultural individuals and the present volume examines the ways in which language choice represents varying degrees of multiple identities and mixed cultural origins. The underlying theoretical position of this volume is that the English-based expressions of hybridity analyzed are a manifestation of such hybridized identities constructed at the intersection of global and local languages and cultures that are also embedded within broader discoursal and social practices. It focuses on hybridity as a natural principle intrinsic to processes of language choice and language practice in multilingual settings.

In the rest of this introductory chapter we present a more in-depth discussion of the dynamics of the global-local interface. First, we examine the three most influential paradigms proposed in accounting for the cultural dynamics of globalization in building a case for hybridity. We then discuss what it means for such hybrid lingua-cultural resources and practices to be part of the local, while they are part of the global. Next, we affirm the conceptual inevitability of hybridity as a construct in analyzing postmodern pluralist cultural identities, before mapping out the problematic of the notion of hybridity itself. Finally, we suggest the need to theorize the notion of hybridity and complicate it further in developing a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange under translocal conditions of communication. Our engagement with hybridity in grappling with conceptualizations of cultural adaptation seeks to avoid a romanticized and celebratory valorization of hybridty/ization as symbolizing present-day linguistic and cultural diversity, and attempts a validation of its relevance as a theoretical and analytical construct in interpreting the impact of globalization in sociolinguistic research.

Globalization and Culture: Three Paradigms

Three theoretical positions in the literature on cultural globalization have been proposed, each with clearly distinguishable claims on this issue. The most common interpretation, the cultural imperialism thesis, is best expressed in the phrase the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world (Ritzer, 2000), associated with the acceleration of Western, particularly American, influence.

Implicit in the arguments of the cultural imperialism thesis is the assumption that global interconnectedness, equated with worldwide homogenization of societies through the impact of multinational corporations and the synchronization of technological, commercial and cultural influences emanating from the West, leads to the erosion of the culture of recipient nations – many of them in the developing world – by a single imposed culture, as in the global sweep of consumerism, or the hegemonic dominance of global English.

The second view is that of cultural polarization, expressed in terms of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which sees cultural difference as enduring and as generating rivalry and conflict between nations and groups (Huntington, 1996). From this perspective, the most salient feature of cultural globalization is not homogenization but heterogenization, in which local cultural and religious identities are being revived and revitalized mainly as a response to the threat, real or perceived, posed by globalization.

The third school of thought believes that ‘cultural transmission is a two way process in which cultures in contact shape and reshape each other directly or indirectly’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2008: 44). In this view, the forces of globalization are so complex and overlapping that they cannot be explained in terms of the narrow perspective of a center-periphery or East-West dichotomy. The two forces are in fact much like two sides of the same coin, with both homogenization and heterogenization operating in tandem and ‘plunging the world in a creative as well as chaotic tension’ (2008: 38) – a tension that is resolved through a process of hybridization. Sociologist Roland Robertson (1992) coined the term ‘glocalization’ to capture the essence of this intricate process in which ‘the global is brought in conjunction with the local, and the local is modified to accommodate the global’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2008: 45).

The Local in the Global, the Global in the Local

There is sufficient counterevidence to show that the entire world is not being swamped by Western cultural imperialism. For starters, cultural products are not simply passively consumed by periphery subjects, but periphery subjects creatively engage with these products in terms of their own local frameworks and dispositions, interpreting them according to their own cultural codes. There is overwhelming evidence that even ‘cultural messages’ which emanate directly from the US are differentially received and interpreted; that ‘local’ groups absorb communication from the ‘center’ not in a unidirectional manner but through ‘selective incorporation’ in a great variety of ways (Tomlinson, 1999).

Second, the major alleged producers of ‘global culture’ increasingly tailor their products to a differentiated global market (which they partly construct). Hollywood’s attempt to employ mixed ‘multinational’ casts of actors and a variety of ‘local’ settings particularly to attract a global audience is a case in point. Similarly, there is much to suggest that seemingly ‘national’ symbolic resources are in fact increasingly deployed for differentiated global interpretation.

Third, cultural flows are not simply one way – a flow from the West to the rest. To be sure, ‘there is substantial asymmetry in the flow of meaning in the world: the center mostly speaks, while the periphery listens’ (Inda & Rosaldo, 2008: 20, citing Hannerz, 1992: 219). The claim about the one-sided dissemination of ideas and knowledge by a power elite, whether Euro- or US-centric, therefore needs to be tempered by empirical evidence about international cultural flows, and in particular, countervailing flows. Culture does move in the opposite direction, that is, from the rest to the West. The flow of ideas and practices – in religion, music, art, fashion, cooking and so on – from the so-called Third World to the dominant societies and regions of the world has been seriously underestimated. In the case of food, certain cuisines such as Indian, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Mexican, have become standard eating fare for many in the West. Music in the West now includes not only rock and roll and rhythm and blues (R&B), but also samba, salsa, reggae, rai, juju and so forth (Inda & Rosaldo, 2008: 21). In media entertainment, Latin American soap operas and telenovelas, Japanese Manga comics, Korean pop music and Indian Bollywood movies are famously exported to the US and Europe. Finally, the most visible sign of this reverse traffic is the millions of people from less affluent parts of the world ‘who, largely as a result of poverty, economic underdevelopment, civil war and political unrest, are driven to seek a future in the major urban centers of the “developed” and “developing” nations’ (p. 21), creating a marked presence of Third World peoples in the metropolises of the West. Such globalized environments, characterized by increased movement and worldwide migration, and complicated further by the emerging new media and technologies of communication that facilitate access to local as well as translocal networks, are generating complex multilingual repertoires involving extreme forms of linguistic diversity and hybridity.

Several concepts have been suggested to describe the complexity of such new forms of diversity, or indeed ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007), in multilingual settings, accompanying the perception that multilingualism itself is changing. The most widely used among these, translanguaging, refers to ‘the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages’ (García, 2009: 141, also Chapter 6, this volume). Other terms proposed include metrolingualism (Pennycook, 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, also Chapter 5, this volume), polylingualism (Jørgensen, 2008; Møller, 2008), transidiomaticity (Jacquemet, 2005) and translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013).

Essentially, all of these terms reflect ‘a general dissatisfaction with the traditional enumerative and classificatory view of multilingualism […] simply as a pluralisation of monolingualism’ (Lähteenmaki et al., 2011: 2). For instance, Pennycook rejects the ‘multi’ in multilingualism as ‘a simplification in which multiplicity is made to consist of distinct, fixed and countable languages and cultures’ (p. 4) in a way that does not capture the complex realities of contemporary language use. He proposes metrolingualism (Pennycook, 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) as a concept that best captures the hybrid ways in which people in today’s urban multilingual environments employ the resources at their disposal to play with and negotiate identities through language. A similar attempt to deconstruct such fixed notions as language and multilingualism characterizes Møller’s (2008) and Jørgensen’s (2008) concept of polylingualism, which refers to the way in which language users orient to a linguistic norm using all the linguistic resources available to reach their communicative goals (Møller, 2008: 218). Rather than languages, then, speakers and writers use features, selecting and combining them from more than one set of ‘so-called languages’ (Jørgensen, 2008). Like Otsuji and Pennycook, they view ‘polylingualism as situated action, in that language users can and do negotiate the ways in which they orient to norms and values ascribed to different types of linguistic behavior in society at large’ (Lähteenmäki et al., 2011: 5). A related concept is Jacquemet’s (2005) transidiomatic practices, ‘the communicative practices of transnational groups that interact using different languages and communicative codes simul...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization: Problematizing Hybridity
• Part 1: Interrogating the Canon
• Part 2: Hybridized Discourses of Identity in the Media
• Part 3: Multilingual Diaspora and the Internet
• Part 4: Performing Hybrid Cultural Identities
• Author Index
• Subject Index