English in China

Creativity and Commodification

Songqing Li, Songqing Li

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000592757
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: English Language

English-related linguistic creativity and language commodification are a constant topic of interest and analysis for scholars. This volume is intended to initiate a dialogue between these two domains of inquiry that have been abundantly addressed but rarely documented together or in relation to one another.

English as used in mainland China is presented as a case study where it remains rather unclear the extent to which the language is actually used in people's lives, outside the domain of education. The volume enriches existing empirical studies by exploring the creative and innovative uses of English in people's lives and its commodification at different language-centred economic spaces within China while also providing an update of our understanding of the sociolinguistic situation of English in China, a country undergoing rapid socio-economic transformation.

English in China is the first attempt to discuss the possible relationship, intersection, and tension between two seemingly inseparable research topics. The book is an important resource for students and scholars in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Bilingualism, Sociolinguistics, Translation, and Contemporary Chinese Studies.

Part ITheoretical framework

1 Linguistic creativity and language commodification research An intersectional perspective

Songqing Li

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292326-3

Introduction

As noted significantly by Carter (2013), one of the principal benefits of sociolinguistics’ engagement with contemporary social theorizing has been the ability to overcome a false dichotomy between “structure” and “agency” in analysis. This means that we do not have to view linguistic practices of creativity and commodification either as a reflex of predetermined social categories and forces or as resulting from the autonomous actions of individuals behaving solely in accordance with their own beliefs and desires. Rather, socially meaningful practices of linguistic creativity and language commodification are determined by both the various predispositions about language and social life to which we have been socialized (i.e., our “speech community norms”) and the agentive choices we make about how to negotiate these normative expectations (e.g., Bourdieu, 1991; Bell, 2001; Coupland, 2007). Analysis of creative linguistic practices, however, tends to remain relatively beholden to explanations grounded in unitary categories of lived experience (e.g., Carter, 2004; Maybin and Swann, 2007; Jones, 2012). Thus, while we have developed sophisticated accounts of how particular linguistic forms come to take on social meanings, for example, and of how those meanings are then recruited by speakers in interaction, we have been somewhat less attentive to the fact that those social meanings of linguistic practices are also simultaneously interconnected and intertwined with other social categories and that, when applying these forms in communication, interactants draw upon all of these underlying social connotations together. In order to capture the need to escape the predefinition of a language user, it is useful to refer to the notion of “metrolingualism” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010), a term developed from Maher’s (2005) metroethnicity. Including a much broader view of contexts of translingual practices across communities, metrolingualism seeks to explore the contingencies of language, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and geography instead of assuming connections between these categories. This seems particularly applicable to the creative use of English as a local language (Pennycook, 2010). Emerging from the ongoing discussion is the suggestion to consider the often irreducible intersection of creative and innovative English practices with other social categories including identity and/or language commodification for a more robust account of socioculturally meaningful practices of the English language across the world.

This chapter is intended to facilitate understanding and interpreting comprehensively linguistic creativity and the commodification of language, the two seemingly disparate research issues customarily addressed with different focus in the areas of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. I claim that research into linguistic creativity and/or language as a commodity needs to adopt a more sophisticated approach to the ways in which these different dimensions interact. I argue that intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989; McCall, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2011) provides us with an analytical framework for doing so. In what follows, I first outline political, conceptual, and methodological concerns of intersectionality, bringing them into conversation with English as a local language and English as a global commodity in late modernity. This is an essential step because many scholars continue to press for such conceptual clarity due to the ongoing challenges they face when applying intersectionality in their fields of research. I then describe how, because of its insistence on the mutual constitution of socially relevant categories, intersectionality prevents us from considering both linguistic creativity and language commodification in isolation. Instead, with the intersectional perspective, we are pushed to examine critically how the ways in which they are intersected with one another in dynamic and mutually constitutive ways are the product of multiple and intersecting systems of social classification. I argue, moreover, that an intersectional approach stands to have broad ramifications for sociolinguistic theory more generally, well beyond the restrictions of research focusing exclusively either on linguistic creativity or on language commodification where it emerges. In this process, I seek to provide some direction and insights for the advancement of intersectionality-based work on linguistic creativity and/or language commodification. I conclude that while it is useful to review the research that has been conducted to date, intersectionality in the context of linguistic creativity and/or language commodification remains under-investigated, and thus its full transformative potential remains to be largely realized.

What is intersectionality?

Invoking the idea of interconnections, mutual engagement and relationships, the term “intersectionality” was first coined by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in a discussion about the inadequacy of non-discrimination protections available to black women. In emphasizing the importance of an intersectionality approach to identity, Crenshaw (1989, p. 140) claimed that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, and analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated”. Since its inception, an intersectional perspective had been adopted and developed more as a nodal point than as a closed system—a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities—by Black feminist scholars and others working on the sociology of gender and ethnic divisions (e.g., hooks, 1981; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983). What were once diffuse ideas about the interconnectedness of gender, sex, race, class, and other systems of power in language, gender, and sexuality research are now central to intersectionality as a new way of looking at social inequalities and possibilities for social change. The idea of intersectionality, it is worth highlighting, offers varied strands of thought and is very intricate and complicated (see Cho et al., 2013 for an overview). Hiramoto (2019) compared the mainstream media coverage of two female tennis players at the 2018 US Open incident, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, who can be labelled with the racial signifier “Black”. She found that the very intersectional nexus points through which they are represented were adopted differently by the media. Specifically, in contrast to Williams, Osaka’s blackness is trumped by her Japaneseness in media presentations. Thus, as suggested by Carastathis (2016, pp. 3–4; see also Cho et al., 2013, p. 795), it is more appropriate for intersectionality to be framed “as an analytical sensibility, a disposition, or a way of thinking, … as opposed to a determinate resolution of cognitive essentialism, binary categorization, and conceptual exclusion”. For purposes of the present chapter, I abstract away from some of this theoretical complexity and focus exclusively on the basic principles that all forms of intersectional analysis share.

In an interview with Guidroz and Berger (2009), Crenshaw posited intersectionality as a metaphor referring to an ongoing communicative process of trying to understand race in terms of gender, or gender in terms of class. The intersection metaphor that facilitates a new view of social relations as interconnected entities suggests the benefit of deflecting away from seeing social phenomena as separate and distinct and toward seeing their interconnections. As discussed below, the metaphoric use of intersectionality provides a conceptual foundation for discussing sameness and difference as a way to see the intersection of creative English practices and the commodification of English. Emphatically, as noted by Block and Corona (2016), while intersectionality involves analysis across several dimensions of identity, there is usually one baseline dimension of identity around which other identity dimensions rotate continuously. Attention in this way is directed to the proactive engagement with “how dimensions beyond the base dimension articulate with that base dimension as well as each other” (Block and Corona, 2016, p. 511).

The second shared tenet of intersectionality theory is that intersections are dynamic, and emerge in specific social, historical, and interactional configurations. This means that rather than predetermining the significance of, and relationships between, any one set of structures and/or social locations, intersectionality expects these to be determined and made politically relevant through inductive research process (Hankivsky et al., 2012). Intersectionality theory insists on examining the dynamics of difference and sameness to consider gender, race, and other axes of power in a wider range of political discussions and academic disciplines.

Moreover, intersectionality theory holds the view that constructs such as class, race, and gender crucially depend for their meaning on their relationship to the other categories with which they intersect. As practitioners within discursive communities, we observe the shift of attention away from the effects of intersections of social categories to the unitary “main effects” of categories (e.g., Walby, 2009; Choo and Ferree, 2010). We are asked “to identify not only how a gendered act, for example, may also be raced or classed but also how gender as a system of social organization is itself ultimately articulated in race- or class-based terms” (Levon, 2015, p. ...