Abstract
This paper presents what I call extralingual citizenship which theorizes an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrate the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I build on the work of Kachru on World Englishes, Tupas on unequal Englishes and extralinguistic value, Rosa and Flores on raciolinguistic ideologies, and translingual scholars such as Trimbur, Cannagararah, and Gilyard to frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, attempting to shift the focus of English pedagogy and practice away from the syntactical and etymological concerns of language use to the agentive potential of the language user. I center this study in India, framing the English language as an archive of the memory and afterlife of colonialism, exploring the idea of extralingualism through (i) Gauri Vishwanathan’s Gramscian exploration of English literary study in colonial India, (ii) autobiographical fictions written by Ahmed Ali, Ramabai Ranade, and Shevantibai M. Nikambe, (iii) a juxtaposition of the formative language debates of the Constituent Assembly of India with the recently updated National Education Policy of 2020, and lastly (iv) a comparison of the Spoken English coaching industry in India with Writing Centers in India’s emerging private liberal arts schools to speak to the English-markets reified by extralingually differentiated Englishes. My aim, across the full scope of this project, is to reframe English as a contested linguistic field where multiple Englishes become analogous to the respective forms of capitalism, sociality, and subjectivity constructed through them.
Author Information
Prateek Shankar, Rhode Island School of Design, United States
Paper Information
Conference: PCE2023
Stream: Challenging & Preserving: Culture
This paper is part of the PCE2023 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Shankar P. (2023) Citizens of the English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Indian Subjectivity ISSN: 2758-0962 The Paris Conference on Education 2023: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2023.8
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2023.8
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