Critical Perspectives on Language and Discourse in ...

Critical Perspectives on Language and Discourse in the New World Order

Critical Perspectives on Language and Discourse in the New World Order

Edited by

Faiz Sathi Abdullah, Mardziah Hayati Abdullah and Tan Bee Hoon

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Critical Perspectives on Language and Discourse in the New World Order, edited by Faiz Sathi Abdullah, Mardziah Hayati Abdullah and Tan Bee Hoon This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Faiz Sathi Abdullah, Mardziah Hayati Abdullah and Tan Bee Hoon and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-340-9; ISBN 13: 9781847183408

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Part I: Theoretical Perspectives Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Language and the New Imperial Order: Africa in a Global Context Alamin M. Mazrui Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Linguistic Imperialism, the Ideological Foundations of Modern Linguistic Thought and the Study of Asian Languages Gerry Knowles and Zuraidah Mohd Don Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 38 Paradoxes of the “Glocal” Self in the New World (Dis)Order: The National Identity Project Faiz Sathi Abdullah Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 71 Power, Gender and Ethnicity in Workplace Discourse: A Critical Perspective Janet Holmes Part II: Applied Studies Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 100 The Politics of “Othering” in the New World Order Annita Lazar and Michelle M. Lazar Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 111 Through Western Eyes: Covering Islam after September 11 Shakila Abdul Manan

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 134 Diplomatic Culture and Communication: Crossings from the Self to the Other Hafriza Burhanudeen Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 150 The Quest for a New Civic and Linguistic Identity: Mandarin and English Encroachment upon the Taiwanese Language Johan Gijsen and Liu Yu-Chang Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 167 Language Shift and Ethnic Identity Lokasundari Vijaya Sankar and Rajeswary Sargunan Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 182 “Normal” and “Ageing” Bodies: The Commodified Female Body in a Consumer Culture Zuraidah Mohd Don and Gerry Knowles Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 202 Voices of Malaysia: A Discourse Representation of Aids Lean Mei Li and Rosaline Prasana Fernandez Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 216 “Us” And “Them” in Different Times and Space Ramesh Nair Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 232 Women’s Language Styles: Strategic Manipulation of Leadership and Power Jariah Mohd Jan Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 252 Test Innovation and Implementation: A Critical Examination of the MUET Impact Wong Bee Eng and Chan Swee Heng Contributors............................................................................................. 275 Index........................................................................................................ 280

PREFACE

The papers in Critical Perspectives on Language and Discourse in the New World Order were originally presented at the 4th Malaysia International Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (MICOLLAC 2005) that was held from 23 to 25 April, 2005, at the Holiday Villa Subang Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. Each of the papers in the present volume expands on the above theme by exploring language use in a broad range of discourse fields. The volume begins with four papers that provide theoretical perspectives on global orientations to social, political and economic transformations in the “New World Order”, and extends these with studies of the impacts of such transformations at the local, national, regional and global levels. The publication of this book would not have been possible without the sustained effort and commitment of various parties within and without the university. First, we would like to thank Noritah Omar, the Chair of MICOLLAC 2005, who helped establish communication with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP), UK. We wish to express our sincere appreciation too to Amanda Millar, Andy Nercessian and Carol Koulikourdi of CSP for their professional work with the manuscript and their patience throughout the project. We also take this opportunity to extend our thanks to the Dean of the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, for making available the necessary funds for the editorial work, and Emiliza Markun for editorial assistance. Our final note of gratitude goes to the many enthusiastic followers and excellent paper contributors of MICOLLAC. Your interest, inspiration and passion for debate and discussion will continue to drive the biennial conference forward with engaging themes and issues that address the changing realities of a globalising world.

INTRODUCTION

It has been argued that the New World Order (henceforth, NWO) is a neoliberal, capitalist project (it is a project because it is not yet complete) (Bourdieu 1997; Chomsky 1998; Fairclough 2000), a putative discoursal macro-representation of the world by its hegemonic players. The fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War apparently marked a new era of glasnost and perestroika: “Out of these troubled times, our objective–a new world order–can emerge. Today, that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we have known” (Former US President, George H. Bush, September 11, 1990). The coinage of the term and the attendant global discourse, particularly of US foreign policy, has had profound implications for geopolitical relations and balance of power. As Chomsky (1991) has noted of the rhetoric that underscores increasing US hegemony and its unilateral role in determining how the United Nations conducts its affairs: For the first time the United Nations, which has undergone a wondrous sea change, the press tells us, for the first time the United Nations will be able to seriously undertake its peace-keeping role, but now that the Cold War is over it's no longer impeded by the automatic Russian veto and the psychotic behavior of various Third World hysterics. (Emphasis added.)

Hence, buttressed by the military might of the sole superpower, particularly post-September 11 2001, and economic and cultural “globalisation” of the world’s affairs orchestrated in the main by its chief Anglophone actors, the USA and Britain, NWO discourses attempt to (re)produce geo-political relations of power in bipolar rather than multipolar terms: “You are either with us or against us” (US President George W. Bush 2001). Since all discourses by their intertextual and interdiscursive nature are also historical, how do global/local actors seek meaning in the discourses of globalisation and the NWO? To what extent do globalisation and militarisation legitimate recolonisation of the hearts and minds of the subaltern via appropriation of language and discourse? Are nations losing their relevance in the metanarrative of the “brave new world”? How do these predominantly macro issues impact social relations of power and how may global and/or local instantiations of related

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discourses be analysed? And at a more micro level, how are forms of language realised in a range of discourse “fields” given the assumed “postmodern turn” in sociocultural practice? One of the aims of this collection of papers is to help address questions such as these by first highlighting theoretical viewpoints that use data to support rather than constitute them, and then presenting critical analyses of discoursal events that seek to draw conclusions applicable mainly to those events. Towards this end, a brief overview of salient aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, CDA) is attempted at this point in the Introduction to establish, as it were, some basic parameters in the field of inquiry in question. It is generally acknowledged that “discourse” is primarily concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with the dialectical relationship between language and society, and with the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication both in the written and/or spoken modes. Although discourse potentially engages a variety of semiotic resources besides language (e.g. multimedia texts and related multimodal discursive practices on the Internet), language is the main, and probably the most complex, semiotic modality in the process of situated meaning-making (“semiosis”) in social contexts (Halliday 1978). Simply put, discourse is language (linguistic text) in context and refers to expressing ourselves using words in ubiquitous ways of knowing, valuing, and experiencing the world. As theory and research in systemic functional linguistics have shown, linguistic forms can be systematically associated with social and ideological functions (Halliday 1994). Hence, discourses (or for that matter, “Discourse” i.e. with a capital “D” after Gee 1997) can be symbolically used for the (re)production of systemic power relations and knowledge, and dominance or hegemony (e.g., the unmitigated influence of one social institution, group or nation over another). Perhaps, more importantly, discourses can also be used to resist and critique such assertions of power, knowledge and dominance with a view towards transforming them into more egalitarian constructions of reality, and thereby empowering the individual in society towards instituting social change. Given the symbolic power of the spoken/written word and the notion of transformative empowerment mentioned above, the study of discourse, or more commonly known as discourse analysis, as a broad field of inquiry, is related to the study of textual meaning beyond the clause/sentence via a range of multidisciplinary approaches such as conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics and discursive psychology (Jaworski and Coupland 1999).

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CDA is a relatively new field that has been germane in describing, interpreting, analysing and critiquing social life as it is reflected in language use as discourse (Luke 1997). It stems primarily from Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory and related espousals of the “critical” in the work of Louis Althusser, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the neo-Marxist tradition of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Michel Foucault’s views on power and “orders of discourse” are acknowledged in the approach of CDA’s principal exponents such as Norman Fairclough whose work is related to Michael Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics as well as to the critical linguistics of Roger Fowler, Tony Trew, Gunther Kress and Bob Hodge. An alternative approach to CDA, though not exclusively so, may also be discerned in the literature, i.e., the sociocognitive approach of Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak (Titcher et al. 2000, 144). Wodak also calls her approach the “discourse-historical method” in as much as it particularly serves to address the discursive construction of national identity, in her case, Austrian national identity as the emergent, imagined sense of nationhood in the post-World War II era, using three closely interwoven analytical dimensions of thematic content, discursive strategy, and linguistic means and forms of realisation that shape representative discourses of identity (Wodak et al. 1999). In a somewhat similar fashion, Fairclough (2001) in his sociocritical approach postulates that discourse is shaped and constrained by social structure (class, status, age, ethnic identity and gender) and culture, and the three central tenets of CDA: (a) language, i.e., the actual text that serves as cues to or traces of the discourse; (b) context of interaction that produces the discursive practices; and (c) social structure, which is the larger social context that bears upon the discourse. He determines the relationship between these three dimensions of a given discourse and its interdiscursivity with other discourse moments via three interrelated levels of analysis, namely, description, interpretation and explanation, to systematically explore and uncover often opaque relationships between ideologically invested discursive practices. Hence, critical discourse analysts study written texts and spoken language, including forms of visual language such as graphic text in media discourse (Fairclough 1995a) to reveal hidden ideological assumptions and related discursive sources as well as formations of power, dominance, inequality and bias, and how these sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced and transformed within specific social, economic, political and historical contexts (van Dijk 1998). Needless to say, the practical techniques of CDA are derived from various disciplinary fields, including discourse pragmatics, narratology, speech act theory, and more recently,

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genre theory within a social constructionist framework that argues that texts are forms of social action which occur in complex social contexts. As McGregor (2003) notes, CDA “tries to illuminate ways in which the dominant forces in a society construct versions of reality that favour their interests” and to unmask such practices “to support the victims of such oppression and encourage them to resist and transform their lives”. This is because language and discourse can be used by the power-holders in society, particularly the state and/or those who control the mass media, to make unequal power relations and representations of social groups appear to be “common sense”, “normal”, and “natural” when in fact there is inherent prejudice, injustice and social inequity. Using “legitimate language”, purveyors of social power or those seeking it are able to mislead us so that our concerns about persistent, larger systemic issues of class, gender, age, religion and culture seem petty or non-existent. Thus, CDA provides a framework to deconstruct their discourse and demystify their words, as it were, so that we avoid being “misled and duped into embracing the dominant worldview (ideology) at our expense and their gain” (McGregor 2003). The present theme is prompted by the debate in language and discourse studies surrounding ideological representations of the current geopolitical scenario that challenge our economic, social and cultural perceptions of global as well as local realities vis-à-vis the NWO. The lives of people are gradually being shaped by two superordinate but conflicting trends of global and local identities, respectively (Castells 1997), against a backdrop of globally networked economic “restructuring” and “rescaling” powered in the main by the information technology revolution of the neoliberal globalisation project. Much of the transformation is taking place through the English language as the “language of modernisation, democracy and freedom”, and hence is discourse-driven, as Fairclough (2004) notes, to involve “‘restructuring’ of relations among the economic, political, and social domains… and the ‘rescaling’ of relations among different scales of social life—the global, the regional (e.g. the European Union), the national, and the local” (103). National governments (read: the ruling body politic or state) across a wide range of politico-ideological persuasions are embracing, and appropriating, as it were, these neo-liberal, neo-capitalist discourses of change to commodify and marketise fields such as education (particularly language planning and policy), science and technology, mass media, commerce and nation building, which are all subject to the market logic of the global order. Nevertheless, despite “all the talk of a borderless world, nation-states remain significant” (Hall 2001, cited in Hewison 2002, 4) even if only to

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maintain local dominance and reproduce the status quo by aligning their nations with the global superpower in the name of “national security” in the post-September 11 2001 world (cf. “Either you’re with us or against us” that is attributed to US President George W. Bush 2001). Such strategic positioning as “pro-NWO”, not to mention “pro-globalisation”, in the pax Americana mould by nation-states, while ostensibly deemed “natural” in view of the unequal power relations, may be expected to assume a broader range of experiential and relational values in most spheres of the sociopolitical discursive space of countries such as Muslimdominant but “moderate” Malaysia (Faiz Abdullah 2004). Therefore, language in its semiotic instantiation as discourse has an increasingly important role to play in determining the direction as well as the complexity of contemporary socioeconomic changes than it has had in the past (the linguistic turn in the postmodern world?). Fairclough (2004) advocates a textual analysis of associated discourses using the systemic functional linguistics model as the linguistic framework while adopting a critical perspective on relations of power, and on the difference between text as a linguistic unit and discourse as “a representation of some area of social life from a particular perspective” (111). CDA thereby becomes an interdiscursive analysis of text in the way it integrates social and linguistic analyses and to the extent that social practices are networked. Some of these dimensions are explored in the papers in this collection to focus on theoretical perspectives and insights from applied studies. A preview of these papers now follows.

Theoretical Perspectives In the opening paper of this first of two sections of the book, Alamin M. Mazrui interrogates the roles played by an imperial language and mother tongues in the “conveyability” of African ideas and values. In his paper, “Language and the New Imperial Order: Africa in a Global Context”, he examines how imperial powers appropriate relativistic arguments and strategies to promote a “universalistic” global agenda of domination and control, and how African languages, while being mobilised in the struggle against imperial domination, have also been transmuted into instruments of domination. He argues that “counter-discourse” cannot be restricted to the generation of alternative meanings, but that it has to involve linguistic transgression in challenging the social rules and cultural politics that govern language use, that determine who says what to whom, how, when and where.

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While Mazrui examines the impact of discursively constructed universalism on African languages, in “Linguistic Imperialism, the Ideological Foundations of Modern Linguistic Thought, and the Study of Asian Languages”, Gerry Knowles and Zuraidah Mohd Don address three main issues of whether linguistics is a science or a scholastic system, whether global English represents a threat to other languages or is an opportunity for their development, and whether Asian languages are really just like European languages or have identities of their own. Drawing support from corpus linguistics research, they conclude that national languages such as Malay will continue to flourish provided that languagebased technologies continue to grow in the 21st century, and that a more scientific approach to linguistics is adopted as the study of language becomes more interdisciplinary and collaborative. In “Paradoxes of the Glocal Self in the New World (Dis)order: The National Identity Project”, Faiz Sathi Abdullah examines how “glocal” identities are constructed for the self to mitigate “endist” arguments about the effects of global pressures on economic autonomy; privacy; and the nation-state with reference to its democracy, sovereignty, national language, culture, ideology and identity/difference. Saying that the resultant multiple identities “are at best essentially reflective of the contestation of the ‘third space’ as the globalisation project moves inexorably forward in the dominant bipolar discourses of pax Americana, the putative ‘coalition of the willing’ and the coterminous formation, renewal and realignment of geopolitical allegiances” (cf. Fairclough’s [2004] reference to the rescaling of social life at global and local levels above) , Faiz uses a broad critical discourse analysis framework to explore a range of issues related to identity politics and the discourses of globalisation and world order. Subsequently, he presents descriptive hypotheses about the paradoxical nature of hybridised identities and illustrates the related dialectics of identity construction via the interdiscursive analysis of a sample text within the ambit of the historical Malaysian national identity project and the salience of Bangsa Malaysia (Lit. “Malaysian Nation”). In the final paper of the section, alluding to the Foucauldian notion of systemic power in her paper “Power, Gender and Ethnicity in Workplace Discourse: A Critical Perspective”, Janet Holmes explores how social power is discursively constructed and reinforced in “everyday, unremarkable workplace interactions” to enable dominant groups to determine meaning and how this impacts definition for minority groups. Thus, in contrast with Faiz Abdullah above, she deals with power and dominance at the “micro” level. Drawing on the extensive database of the

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Wellington Language in the Workplace project, she illustrates the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which systemic power relations are constructed and reinforced through the discourse fabric of New Zealand workplace interaction.

Applied Studies This section opens with the paper “The Politics of ‘Othering’ in the New World Order” by Annita Lazar and Michelle Lazar who conduct an intertextual analysis of the NWO discourses of three US presidents. They examine how “orientalisation” is used as an ostensibly effective discursive strategy within the rhetoric of Othering to reproduce “as the ‘core’ a universalised western moral order while expelling to the ‘periphery’ those strange and aberrant to it”. By “outcasting” the Arab/Muslim oriental in this way, the strategy serves to reinforce racist stereotypes of the “disorderly Other” and morally justifies American control and containment. In the next paper, Shakila Abdul Manan takes up the demonisation of Muslims/Islam issue. She avers, in “Through Western Eyes: Covering Islam after September 11”, that the rhetoric of “Othering” Islam in the mass media as the religion of terror, evil, violence, fundamentalism, oppression, primitiveness, atavism and religious hysteria, particularly after the September 11 2001, is xenophobic and threatens the establishment of a “true” new world order of justice and peace. She supports this stand with data procured from Newsweek and Time. Hafriza Burhanudeen’s paper, titled “Diplomatic Culture and Communication: Crossings from the Self to the Other”, discusses how diplomatic culture, communication and disposition enable the Self to assume the role of the Other in the pursuit of regional and international cooperation. The paper also looks at how diplomacy and diplomatic language act as a bridge for the Self to cross borders to the Other in political negotiations. Johan Gijsen and Yu-Chang Liu examine the changing sociolinguistic environment in Taiwan in their paper, “The Quest for a New Civic and Linguistic Identity: Mandarin and English Encroachment upon the Taiwanese Language”. Using results from previous and ongoing research sponsored by Taiwan’s National Science Council, the authors argue that Taiwanese youngsters are becoming increasingly monolingual, and survey data illustrate the encroachment of more dominant languages, particularly English, upon Taiwanese. There is no growth in community support for the mother tongue, and the Taiwanese public does not seem to

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be aware that their vernacular is endangered. The paper compares results from the authors’ research with identical surveys done in Japan, Belgium, Germany and Morocco. In “Language Shift and Ethnic Identity”, Lokasundari V. Sankar and Rajeswary Sargunan discuss the connection between language shift and the part that ethnic identity plays in the maintenance and/or shift of the mother tongue. A study was conducted on the Malaysian Iyers, a minority group of Tamils living in Malaysia, in order to find out if they had shifted from their mother tongue of Tamil to include other languages in their daily linguistic repertoire. The study elicited data on their language use in four domains: domestic, social, religious and formal education. The findings showed that the Malaysian Iyers have moved away from Tamil in the home as well as social and educational domains. English and Malay have been incorporated into their linguistic repertoire to a very large extent. However, the language shift from Tamil to English and Malay has not resulted in a loss of ethnic identity as various factors such as traditional and cultural beliefs and practices, caste, religion and food still provide them with an identity. The next three chapters cover aspects of news media discourse. In “‘Normal’ and ‘Ageing’ Bodies: The Commodified Female Body in a Consumer Culture”, Zuraidah Mohd Don and Gerry Knowles address the question of how advertisements contribute to the commodification of youthful facial skin. In particular, they bring into focus the strategies used in skincare advertisements in order to sell their anti-ageing products. They highlight the ideological assumption that the female body is only “desirable” when it conforms to the “ideal body image”, and so media texts place responsibility upon women to counteract signs of imperfection and ageing. The writers assert that social practices and consumer culture have created women’s self-identity which is equated with bodily appearance and in which image is paramount. Lean Mei Li and Rosaline Prasana Fernandez, in their paper on “Voices of Malaysia: A Discourse Representation of AIDS Discourse”, examine newspaper articles on AIDS published in Malaysia. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach as employed by Fairclough (1995a, 1995b), the intertextual analysis looks particularly at the various voices that are given space in the text and how they are woven together textually, how they are recontextualised (i.e., as direct quotes, indirect discourse, free indirect discourse, and narrative report of speech act) in the new context and how they are framed in relation to each other and in relation to the writer’s voice. The results from the analysis reveal the

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manifestations of voices from various quarters, denoting unequal power relations. Ramesh Nair, in his article “‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in Different Times and Space”, examines the exclusionist discursive strategy of Us vs. Them in a Malaysian mainstream newspaper that constructs favourable subject positions for Malaysians in relation to out-groups of post-Tsunami sufferers and illegal immigrants in neighbouring countries. He uses Fairclough’s (2001) three-dimensional model of discourse as text, interaction and context to uncover ideological assumptions that underlie time-space distantiated representations of “them” as inferior to “us”. In her article entitled “Women’s Language Styles: Strategic Manipulation of Leadership and Power”, Jariah Mohd Jan draws on Holmes’ earlier work on “tentative language” and uses it within a Conversation Analysis (CA) framework to examine how language style shapes and is shaped by leadership discourse and the inherent power relations between men and women. By raising awareness about gendered language styles of women in power, she seeks to advance women’s position via informed training processes. In “Test Innovation and Implementation: A Critical Examination of the MUET Impact”, Wong Bee Eng and Chan Swee Heng maintain that the power of tests lies not only in determining pass-fail status, providing certification or standards for programme entry, but also in its connections to and implications for the political, social, educational and economic contexts of use. They maintain that any language test innovation or implementation therefore invariably becomes “a de facto language policy”. They conduct an assessment of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET), which was implemented at a critical juncture to complement national efforts towards creating new standards in language competence among Malaysian pre-tertiary students. The authors’ assessment is aimed at providing “a timely and critical assessment of [MUET’s] role and power in playing out political and social agendas”.

Concluding Remarks The papers in this volume highlight and illustrate current concerns among academics and political commentators about the potential social impact of representations of the NWO in language and discourse. The present work, we believe, is important in raising social consciousness towards the central role that language and discourse play in cultural, political, economic and religious transformations and the social issues that arise thereof, as well the construction of shifting/multiple identities at the global, national and

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local levels. In this way, the role of critical discourse analysis and indeed that of the analysts themselves becomes an emancipative and socially transformative one. The value of such consciousness-raising for potential social action in language user empowerment terms cannot be overstressed, particularly given the ascendant position of the English language in the NWO. We hope that this collection is also a significant contribution to the ongoing critical discussion on global order discourse. True to the acknowledged nature of all discourse, the present work on critical discourse is expected to help shape the ways in which we perceive our world in as much as the discourse is undoubtedly constitutive of and shaped by our perceptions.

The Editors August 2008

References Bourdieu, P. 1997. A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism. New Left Review, 227: 125-130. Bush, G. H. 1990. “Transcript of President’s Address to Joint Session of Congress”. New York Times, September 12, 1990. Bush, G. W. 2001. Transcript of President Bush’s Speech from the Islamic Centre. September 17, 2001. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics. (accessed March 28, 2005) Chomsky, N. 1991. “The New World Order”. Transcript of a speech given at a benefit for the Middle East Children's Alliance, University of California at Berkeley, March 16, 1991. http://cyberspacei.com /jesusi/authors/chomsky/interviews/9103-berkeley.html. (accessed March 28, 2005). —. 1998. “Whose World Order: Conflicting Visions”. http://aidc.org.za/archives/chomsky_04.html (accessed September 22, 1998). Fairclough, N. 1995a. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold. —. 1995b. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. —. 2000. “Language in the New Capitalism”. http://www.uoc.es /humfil/nlc /LNC-ENG/Inc-eng.html (accessed June 19, 2000). —. 2001. Language and power (2nd Ed.). New York: Longman. —. 2004. “Critical Discourse Analysis in Researching Language in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinarity, and Textual

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Analysis”. In Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change, eds. Young, L. and C. Harrison: 103-122. London: Continuum Publishers. Faiz S. Abdullah. 2004. “Prolegomena to a Discursive Model of Malaysian National Identity”. In Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change, eds. Young, L. and C. Harrison: 123-138. London: Continuum Publishers. Gee, J. P. 1999. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge. Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. —. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold. Hewison, K. 2001. “Globalization: Post 9/11 Challenges for Liberals”. In September 11 and Political Freedom: Asian Perspectives, eds. Johannen, U., A. Smith and J. Gomez: 2-29. Singapore: Select Books. Jaworski, A. and N. Coupland. eds. 1999. The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge. Luke, A. 1997. “Theory and Practice in Critical Science Discourse”. In International Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Education, ed. Saha, L. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Luke/SAHA6.html. (accessed October 20, 2005). McGregor, S. L. T. “Critical Discourse Analysis—A Primer”. http://www.kon.org/ archives /forum/15-1/mcgregorcda.html (accessed October 20, 2005). Titscher, S., M. Meyer, R. Wodak and E. Vetter. 2000. Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. London: SAGE Publications. Wodak, R., R. de Cillia, M. Reisigl and K. Liebhart. eds. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. van Dijk, T. A. 1998. Ideology. London: SAGE Publications.

CHAPTER ONE LANGUAGE AND THE NEW IMPERIAL ORDER: AFRICA IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT ALAMIN M. MAZRUI, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Language has been an important and integral part of control and domination. Exactly how that imperial mission has been accomplished, however, has been a subject of much intellectual contestation in Africa as elsewhere in the so-called third World. Relativists, in particular, have assumed that the imposition of the imperial language itself on the subject “Other” has been crucial to the exercise of imperial rule. Drawing on the policies and practices of the USA, in the aftermath of the Cold War, this paper demonstrates that, like the earlier experiences of European colonialism in Africa, imperial responses to language as an engine of imperial hegemony have been varied, often entailing a complex interplay between universalistic and relativistic considerations.

Introduction In January 2000, writers and scholars from around the world gathered at an international conference in Asmara, Eritrea, to examine the state of African languages in various domains of society in relation to the “new global order.” At the conclusion of this historic event suggestively titled “Against All Odds”, the participants released the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures. Noting that “Colonialism created some of the most serious obstacles against African languages… [which] still haunt independent Africa and continue to block the mind of the continent,” the Declaration concludes that “African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds and for the African Renaissance.” This position, of course, is one that is widely held in African intellectual circles and has sometimes led to the conclusion that the

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“domination of a people’s language by languages of the colonizing nations was critical to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized” (Ngugi 1986, 16). And the post-colonial hold that languages of European origin have continued to have on African nations is seen as a continuation of this imperial legacy. For some of these nationalists, in fact, the language and what it expresses are one. Peter Mwaura, once director of the School of Journalism of the University of Nairobi, has argued that “…if the communication media [in Africa] are to be part of our culture as indeed all effective and meaningful communication should be – then they must use the local language[s] of our culture” (1980, 27). Mwaura’s reasoning derived from the idea that: Language influences the way in which we perceive reality, evaluate it and conduct ourselves with respect to it. Speakers of different languages and cultures see the universe differently, evaluate it differently, and behave towards its reality differently. Language controls thought and action and speakers of different languages do not have the same world view or perceive the same reality unless they have a similar culture or background.

(1980, 27) Mwaura then concludes that there is a real sense in which “the medium of communication is also the message" (1980, 27). A central objective of this essay is to interrogate the terms of this relativist position–especially the idea that the imperial order relies more or less exclusively on the imposition of an imperial language–drawing examples from the old European empires as well as from the new empire of a globalising world under the hegemony of the USA.1 Of course, the difference between the “old” European empires and the “new” American imperium is not only in political geography; some of the differences are more systemic.2 Whatever the case, the general thrust of my argument is that it is not at all unusual for the imperial power to appropriate relativistic arguments and strategies to promote its own “universalistic” (Eurocentric?) global agenda of domination and control. To that extent, “relativism” and “universalism” can sometimes serve as two sides of the same imperial coin.

Between Relativism and Universalism This African debate is, of course, part of a wider contest of ideas that has taken place within linguistics between advocates of relativism and those of universalism. As Alidou and Mazrui (1999) have argued, the contestation between relativism and universalism can be associated with the ideas of

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Benjamin Lee Whorf and Noam Chomsky, respectively. Whorf’s views were influenced by those of his predecessor, Edward Sapir, and their contribution to linguistic relativism came to be popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sapir was not entirely consistent in his views about the relationship between language, culture and cognition. In his earlier writings, he did not posit any particular correlation between linguistic form and cultural content. “When it comes to linguistic form,” he declared, “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam” (1921, 134). Later, however, in his well-known article on the status of linguistics as a science, he took a deterministic turn, arguing that “Human beings are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society…The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality” (1929, 209). Whorf was an even more enthusiastic proponent of linguistic relativism than Sapir, for he claimed that a person’s basic ontology or worldview is structured or determined or organised by language. Specifically, he argues that grammar embodies the nascent form of a cultural metaphysics. According to him, each language is encoded with a particular mode of thought, a metaphysics that affects the speaker’s experience at the level of perception. For this reason he concludes that speakers of different languages will map the world in different ways; the linguist’s task is to work out the fragments of a notional grammar (for example, categories of time, space and gender) and, to determine the semantic associations by means of which it is translated into a cultural worldview. Like Sapir, Whorf later modified his views and acknowledged that “the importance of language cannot…be taken to mean necessarily that nothing is back of it of the nature of what has traditionally been called “mind.” My own studies suggest to me that language, for all its kingly role, is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness which are necessary before any communication, signalling, or symbolism whatsoever can occur” (1949, 239). Relativism thus subsumes a broad spectrum of opinions that range from a strong, deterministic claim that language actually controls thought in a culturally specific manner to a rather weak suggestion that there is a loose correlation between language and cultural metaphysics. In spite of these vacillations of relativists such as Sapir and Whorf, however, their rejection of a hierarchical ordering of

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language and their insistence upon the equality of cultures remained constant. In contrast to them Chomsky stressed the common human features of language and played down the “surface” features that characterise individual languages. Specifically, he declares: “It is plausible to suppose that apart from pathology (potentially an important area of inquiry), such variation as there may be is marginal and can safely be ignored across a broad range of linguistic investigation” (1986, 18). Superimposed on this human linguistic uniformity is the assumption that the language faculty itself is an innate human characteristic. Chomsky views it as a genetically pre-determined, organised property of the mind and not an acquisition that is obtained from outside the individual by means of socio-psychological or cultural conditioning. “Knowledge of language is normally attained through brief exposure, and the character of the acquired knowledge may be largely predetermined. One would expect that human language should directly reflect the characteristics of human intellectual capacities, that language should be a direct mirror of mind in ways in which other systems of knowledge and belief cannot” (1968, ix-x). Chomsky thus supports one of the Enlightenment’s most cherished ideals–universal human identity. From the psycholinguistic point, there is little hard evidence to support either of these two hypotheses in their extreme forms. Chomsky’s universalism tends to be anti-empiricist, having originated in a speculative intellectual tradition that continues to shape its doctrine. Modest attempts have been made to adduce evidence of the universality of human language from natural language, child language and language acquisition, speech errors, speech pathology, foreigner talk, pidgins and creoles; but none of this evidence provides any concrete proof about the inner workings of Chomsky’s “mental faculty of language”. As for the relativist hypothesis, it has repeatedly been attacked on the basis of empirical evidence. Several scholars have called into question the research data that supposedly supports the notion of a causal relationship among language, culture and cognition. By the mid-1960s Burling regarded the entire paradigm of linguistic relativism as having fallen into disrepute (Burling 1964, 26), even though more recently there have been attempts by cognitive linguists to rehabilitate Whorf and Sapir. But what about at the more political level of the debate? Does the African experience lend greater credibility to one hypothesis over the other? Let us begin with the colonial period during which the imposition of European languages is often seen to have been an inextricable feature of colonial engineering to dominate the colonised.

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Language under the “Old” Empire The African colonial experience, especially as it relates to the mass media, provides numerous examples that contradict a monolithic reading of European colonial language policy. While newspapers like Muigwithania (1925) in Kenya and Sauti ya Tanu (1957) demonstrate how nationalists made use of African language media to protest against colonialism, there are numerous examples of the so-called vernacular papers that were launched with the specific objective of furthering the ends of colonialism. A good early example of colonial use of African language media can be drawn from what was then Tanganyika under German colonial rule. Prior to the revolutionary eruption of Maji Maji, an important section of the German colonial establishment regarded Kiswahili as a reservoir of an Islamic spirit and a potential agent of inter-ethnic African unity against German rule. According to one colonial ideologue of the time, H. Hansen, Islam and Kiswahili together constituted not only the mortal adversaries of Christianity, “but also, in Africa, the unrepentant enemies of colonial politics” (quoted by Pike 1986, 231). The existence of El-Najah, a Kiswahili journalistic venture using the Arabic script openly agitating against German colonial rule was seen as a vindication of Hansen’s position. On the other hand, Carl Meinhof, a prominent German linguist of that time who saw the adoption of Kiswahili as a very practical aid to German administration in Tanganyika, suggested that Kiswahili could be disIslamized. Towards this end he proposed the replacement of the Arabic script (which had been used for centuries in writing Kiswahili) with the Roman script and Arabo-Islamic loan words with Germanic ones (Pike 1985, 224). This linguistic strategy, it was argued, would purge Kiswahili of its Islamism to render it a more suitable instrument of colonial consolidation. It was in this political climate that German Christian missions (both Protestant and Catholic) began producing Kiswahili newspapers with the explicit aim of promoting the cultural foundations of German colonialism. These Kiswahili journalistic ventures of the late 1800s included Msimulizi, Habari za Mwezi, Pwani na Bara, and Rafiki (Mazrui and Mazrui 1999, 58). To further the ends of colonialism, then, the German colonial establishment did not consider it imperative to impose their own language, German. Rather it was able to appropriate Kiswahili and make it the language of its media propaganda. Another relevant example is that of Southern Africa where in 1931 the Bantu Press was formed with the explicit intention of diverting Africans

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away from political engagement to other pursuits at a time when socialistic ideas were gaining currency in the region. When it eventually expanded its operation to what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1944, it began to produce Ndebele and Lozi versions of the Bantu Mirror and Shona and Chinyanja editions of its African Weekly. The Bantu Press was itself a project of the South African Argus Group, disproportionately controlled in its share-holdings by Cecil Rhodes who insisted on a conservative, pro-colonial approach to political reporting (Bourgault 1995, 160). Similar colonial ventures in print media can be found elsewhere in Africa. It is in the electronic media and especially the radio, however, that we find even more compelling examples of colonial uses of African languages for colonial ends. And this is to be expected since the radio has been one of the most powerful instruments of electronic communication due to its relative affordability, its accessibility to both literate and non-literate audiences and the scope of its demographic reach. The use of local languages in radio transmission was, of course, quite legion in British colonies. France, on the other hand, with its policy of (linguistic and cultural) assimilation, tied its French radio services in its African colonies directly to France. In fact the French regarded radio broadcasting in the French language as an inexpensive means of counteracting “the discussions of educated Africans turning rapidly to subversive and antigovernmental ideas” (Tudesq 1983, 15). The average citizens of French colonies, however, soon learnt to turn to the radio broadcasts in local languages coming from neighbouring countries under British rule. People in the West African French colony of Niger, for example, would listen to radio broadcasts in Hausa from neighbouring British-controlled Nigeria. In an attempt to counteract the influence of these radio services in African languages from across the border and provide its own point of view, the French began providing indigenous language broadcasts to Africans in its own colonies (Bourgault 1995, 71). Even a staunchly assimilationist France that had a deliberate policy banning the use of African languages in formal domains, was ultimately compelled to resort to African languages in its media campaign when political circumstances made it expedient to do so. A similar change of colonial language policy in relation to the media took place in African colonies of the Portuguese. Like the French, the Portuguese too pursued an assimilationist policy whose objective, according to a document from the colonial Service For Psycho-Social Action was to teach the Portuguese language so as to “instil [in the native] the desire to learn Portuguese so they will speak of it as ‘our language’”

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(quoted by Ferreira 1974, 159). As a result, before the beginning of the armed struggle for independence, broadcasts in Portuguese colonies were exclusively in the Portuguese language. However, once the war for liberation broke out, the Portuguese colonial administration found it necessary to broadcast programs in African languages in order to communicate their propaganda in languages that the colonised majority could understand. The political psychology behind this strategy was explained in the following terms: The simple fact that our advice and suggestions are being transmitted by an authoritative voice that contacts the people in their own language is for the more retarded a guarantee of authenticity, omniscience and infallibility. As he who has been taught to read piously believes in the printed letter, the native believes in the voice that speaks to him in his language over the air. (quoted by Ferreira 1974, 159)

Thus the oral potency of radio transmission convinced the Portuguese that, at that particular juncture of anti-colonial history, its colonial mission could be fulfilled best by mobilising African languages in the media. In addition, as much as the coloniser came to appreciate the value of African languages in colonial propaganda, Africans too soon learnt that at times anti-colonial ends could also be served by the complementary use of the languages of their colonial oppressors. This is amply demonstrated by the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. In the earlier phases of the struggle, national resistance and identity was pegged exclusively to Arabic, and the use of French, the language of the coloniser, was virtually regarded as an act of cultural treason. Later, however, confronted with the reality of combat on a day-to-day basis with international ramifications, the Arabic language came to be stripped of “its sacred character, and the French language of its negative connotations” (Fanon 1967, 92-93) whereby its adoption was now no longer seen as an act of self-abnegation or of slavish identification with the new oppressor. Very instrumental in this process of “acquisition of new values by the French language,” was the creation of a radio transmission of the anticolonial combatants under the name of Voice of Fighting Algeria. The broadcasting in French of the programs of the Voice of Fighting Algeria, we are told: …was to liberate the enemy language from its historic meanings. The same message transmitted in three different languages [Arabic, Berber and French] unified the experience and gave it a universal dimension. The French language lost its accursed character, revealing itself to be capable also of transmitting, for the benefit of the nation, the messages of truth that

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And when the French occupiers realized what was becoming of their own language in the hands of the revolutionary forces of Algeria through the power of a revolutionary media outlet, it expectedly threw them into a state of confusion and disorder about the full implications of their policy of linguistic assimilation.

Language and the New Empire As we know, the USA did not begin to take much interest in African languages until the concluding years of European colonisation in Africa. When it finally did, the policy was partly related to superpower rivalry. Area studies in the American academy (including African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, East Asian Studies etc), and under whose ambit comes the study of African and “other” languages, developed in the USA partly in response to the Cold War. It was one of the academic foundations that the US government erected in its bid to lay claim to certain regions of the world and “protect” them from the Communist threat, or to penetrate regions that had already come under Soviet influence. In the process, the US government invested heavily in the Voice of America to maintain a wide range of multilingual radio transmissions as well as in the study of African among other “Third World” languages. Expectedly, then, the end of the Cold War turned area studies (and African languages) into an engagement of relatively low priority in the US government’s agenda on foreign relations, as the decreasing funding for international education and cultural exchange programs demonstrates (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 1995, A 43). The needs of capital in light of new technological advances, however, combined, later in the aftermath of the Cold War, with the unfolding of new political conditions, gradually stimulated a new kind of interest–part economic and part political—in the languages of the other. It is on this latter development that I would like to focus for the remainder of this discussion. The momentous changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union which were just beginning to unravel in the late 1980s led Francis Fukuyama to advance his controversial thesis that the world as a whole was increasingly moving towards a liberal democratic capitalist system that was destined to be the final sociopolitical paradigm of all human

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evolution (1992). While Fukuyama’s conception of the finality of world history is itself ahistorical, he is not altogether wrong in his view that politico-economic developments in the world are postured towards a hegemonic world culture. Being the only super-power in the post-Cold War period, the USA has naturally become central in this globalisation process. As one observer has put it, “Americanization in its current form is a synonym for globalization, a synonym that recognizes that globalization is not a neutral process in which Washington and Dakar participate equally” (Readings 1996, 2). In time, post-Cold War globalisation has compromised the sovereignty of nation-states in Africa and elsewhere (Readings 1996, 47), neutralising protectionist state-nationalist ideologies in the process. One of the results of this declining sovereignty has been the momentum for privatisation (often imposed by World Bank and IMF) in a way that no longer questions the domination of African electronic and cyber spaces in general by foreign interests (including the CNN and the African Virtual University). In the process, the new imperial centre came to have unfettered access to the African public, with computer-based technology making particularly important linguistic strides. There is little doubt today that the computer, the World Wide Web and the Internet are increasingly dominating the global network of communication, serving as relatively new engines of empire building and the creation of a homogenised transnational consumerist capitalism.. It is not a coincidence that in his address to the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairperson and CEO, used the term “penetration” to describe the advance of computer-based technology and communication to the rest of the world. “Over the next five or six years…you will get a very high penetration, even in Africa, where [connecting] is quite challenging,” he said (Microsoft, 1999). Capturing the essence of Gate’s words and seeing the commercial Internet in the world as predominantly an American enterprise, Tom Watson compares Internet globalisation (of which he is an ardent advocate) to imperial expansion of old. “In many ways,” he says, “it is a bit like the old East India colonial days—but without the guns and ships and, hopefully, without the exploitation [How, one wonders!]” (1999, 1).3 Of course, Watson’s claim was made before the American military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. For a long time, computer-based communication was regarded as the domain of the English language beginning, in fact, with American English.4 More recently, however, this linguistic pattern seems to be shifting towards a multilingual configuration as American businesses begin to see great capitalist value in more direct linguistic links with the

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market (Biggs 1999, 52). As a result, a whole new industry, the so-called “localisation industry” has emerged seeking to adapt products and services to languages and cultures of target audiences in distant lands.5 When it comes to computer-based communication then it is becoming increasingly clear that the forces of economic globalisation have developed great interest in penetrating world markets through local languages and are working to transform these languages into commodified instruments of economic and cultural domination. In spite of the fact that economic globalisation continues to spur the spread of English globally— sometimes accompanied by a deliberate policy of cultural Americanization6—there is the centrifugal effect which creates new avenues for the advancement of certain African languages in the service of that same economic globalisation. The recent Microsoft project to make available its windows office in Swahili and a select number of other African languages (The East African Standard, Nairobi, October 29, 2004) must be seen as part of this computer technological trend towards a new global equation in the ranking and relationships between different languages of the world. In the colonial period some African languages were privileged and selected for standardisation and codification to serve imperial ends. As Johannes Fabian (1986) and others have demonstrated, African languages became part of the colonial project of command and control. In this era of the new empire we are again witnessing a selective process, controlled from the imperial centre, whereby some languages will get “technologised” and pushed to new positions in the global constellation of languages to better feed the imperial machine. The American invasion of Iraq, using the 11 September, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as a pretext, on the other hand, provides a good example of a new understanding of the role of language in American television in particular. As you may remember, it was at this time that the term “embedded journalism” was coined to refer specifically to the arrangement whereby American journalists wishing to cover developments in the war front could do so only under the cover of the American military, ultimately having access only to events, sites and people that the military made available to them. But the term “embedded” can also be used metaphorically to describe the extent to which the American media at home sees itself as an extension of the American government. It is not at all unusual, for example, to hear American journalists making use of the inclusive “we” in reference to US government actions in Iraq. Consider the following statements: