Review: Reclaiming the Local

Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. Ed. A. Suresh Canagarajah. Mahwah, New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005. 297 pp.

In their introduction to The Globalization Reader, Frank J. Lechner and John Boli raise a number of questions like “what does globalization involve?”, “Is globalization driven by expanding market?”, “Does globalization make the world more homogenous?”, “Does globalization determine local events?”, “Is globalization harmful” and engage the scholars and readers though into open discussion and debate indicating that there is and can be no definite answers to these contentious questions about as contentious and slippery concept and phenomenon as globalization. The scholars and thinkers across the disciplines included in the edited volume attempt to delineate and analyze the implications of political, economic and cultural globalization for peoples, cultures, values, practices, nations and ethnicities across the world.
Though the experts debate, discuss and try to figure out globalization as a phenomenon, they, however, do not and can not reach at the point of agreement. Some of them advocate for; others deprecate and yet others express mixed reactions. Those who stand opposed to see “globalization as a juggernaut of untrammeled capitalism.”(7) and as a process “lopsided because it imposes the political and cultural standards of one region of the world, namely the west, on the other regions” (7). For them, “Globalization is westernization by another name…[which] undermines the cultural integrity of other cultures and is therefore repressive, exploitative, and harmful to most people in most places” (7). The critics’ major point of attack is globalization’s homogenizing tendency which its advocates defend but Lechner and Boli, the editors gesturing to act neutral believe that the tension between advocates and critics, homogeneity and heterogeneity is integral to globalization. The editors don’t buy the idea that globalization homogenizes the world nor do they are convinced the world can remain essentially fragmented in the postmodern time. Rather, they argue that the forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity often collide and grapple in contact zones thereby making prediction of consequences impossible. They say, “We agree that some things become more similar around the world as globalization proceeds…But we do not think this leads to a homogenous world, for three reasons” (2). The reasons they provide are firstly “general rules and models must be interpreted in light of local circumstance” 92); secondly, “growing similarity provokes reactions” (2) and thirdly, “cultural and political differences themselves become globally valid” (2). This way, they continue, the homogenizing and heterogenizing currents grapple and collide ceaselessly; local and global events become more and more intertwined as the local feeds into the global and global also to a certain extent determines the local. But for me the problem with globalization is that it has differing implication for the winner and loser in the collision course. If the global emerges victorious, it benefits certain countries, peoples and cultures hugely and is consequently “harmful to the well-being of individuals, countries, and cultures” (Lechner and Boli 3) of other parts (local) as the global tends to create the local in its own image thereby erasing its existence. That’s why the fear that “ if globalization makes the world more homogenous… many cultures are in trouble” ( 3) becomes so real and alarming to many that as provokes certain kind of reaction from the part of the local. I found Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice a specimen of similar reaction. It advances the global-local and homogeneity – heterogeneity debate further from Lechner and Boli’s academic and conceptual level into the level of concrete action and policy formation pertaining to the issues of local language, writing and teaching practices in the context of them all being threatened to extermination by increasing encroachment of global forces. All the scholars/researchers/authors in the book discuss, endeavor and present the result of their studies and research on how to give voice to the local and ensure their presence in language policy which has immediate implication to language, writing and other cultural practices in the classroom or society in general. The voice or presence of local, they argue, can be ascertained either by strategic resistance or tactful appropriation of the global as and when necessary. The book is divided into four parts the first part “Redefining Disciplinary Constructs” having four chapters, the second “Interrogating Language Policies” three, third “Reframing Professional Lives” two and fourth “Imagining Classroom possibilities” three making it a edited collection of twelve well-researched academic essays. As also referred earlier, though the chapters are primarily focused on the place of local in theorizing language policies and practices, they also handle as various topics as local social practices, communicative conventions, linguistic realities and knowledge system and their incorporation in language policies and practices for classrooms and communities in local contexts. Scholars from as diverse communities and places as Brazil, Hong Kong, Iran, India, and Malaysia express their realization of the limitations of dominant applied linguistic constructs and argue for the promotion of local knowledge, practices and perspectives.
Eli Hinkel, the editor of ESL& Applied Linguistics Professional series, the publisher makes comment on this book and its editor A. Suresh Canagarajah as: “unique…focuses specifically in the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities impacted by these changes... Canagarajah focuses on the great risk that local language practices, discourses, and values will be engulfed by the sweeping economic and political forces brought about by globalization” (ix). According to him, Reclaiming the Local portrays the local perspectives and gives voice to the communities, groups, and individuals hitherto and otherwise unheard and neglected. The book highlights the enormous forces of global wave and importance of preserving the local in case of language hybridity, loss and discoursal multimodality as well as identifies the urgent local concerns caused my overwhelming “linguistic homogeneity in the representations of literacy and expertise” (x). The chapters of the book thus shed light on the cost of globalization and “task of reclaiming the local my means of negotiating with the present and the global to make space for the local” (x).
In the same vein, Canagarajah in his introduction to the collection states that all the authors included in the volume “point to ways in which the negotiation of the global can be conducted by taking greater account of the local and respecting its value and validity” (xiv). Their common topoi, says Canagarajah, is that local as subsidiary to or component of global is not adequate to make a space for the local rather space can be ensured by “radically reexamining our disciplines to orientate to language, identity, knowledge, and social relations from a totally different perspective” (ix). They all firmly hold the idea that “local grounding should become the primary and critical force in the construction of contextually relevant knowledge …to develop more plural discourses” (xiv).
The effort of all these scholars is therefore to reclaim the local often ignored, neglected and overlooked for the standard, global and mainstream. That is the reason why all the chapters propose the strategic modes of intervention for the local in language policies and practices, argue for “a space for the local in knowledge construction activities” (xvi) and articulate “the case of the local before it gets silenced, distorted, or reproduced by the global” (xvi).
Even a cursory look at the twelve chapters is more than enough to notice the predominant current of reclaiming the local in language, writing and other cultural/social practices. In the first chapter of first part, Canagarajah provides a historical and theoretical notion of local knowledge and illustrates how understanding of local linguists can be instrumental in redefining the familiar constructs to suit the local contexts. His objective is to demonstrate how the local knowledge and values suppressed so far challenge and help reconstruct dominant paradigms. In the second Chapter, Rakesh Bhatt argues for the appropriation and pluralization of English to accommodate local practices. In the third, Dominique Ryon, raises the serious issue of the extinction of local language due to assimilation into the dominant national language and in the fourth, Lynn Mario de Souza deconstructs grapho-centric model of literacy and proposes multimodal literacy as practiced by the Kashinawa in Brazil whose texts feature the complex integration of diverse symbol system.
Second part “Interrogating Language Policies” has the essays on issues of Language policy and planning. Kanavilli Rajagopalan in chapter five discusses the local resistance in Brazil of the global English while in chapter six Maya david and Subra Govindasamy discuss the need of reaccomodating English in Malaysia now which was excluded earlier in national policy in favor of the indigenous language. Chapter seven by Sharon Utakis and Marianne Pita discusses the transnational policy formation in education for the Dominican community in New York going beyond the assimilationist assumptions motivating even well-intentioned bilingual programs for immigrants in the United States.
In the third part “Reframing Professional Lives” deals with the challenges facing the local and transnational professionals. David Block in chapter eight discusses the possibility of the teachers from France in England making critical contribution if they bring their teaher-fronted and form-focused learning local values in a context of task-based learning in England. Similarly, chapter nine by Angel Lin, Wendy Wang, Nobuhiko Akamastu, and Mehdi Riazi analyzes the ways in which their language learning experience may serve to reconceive English as pluralized global language informed by local norms, functions, and pedagogies. Both of these chapters emphasize on the point that in order to let the marginalized voices speak in the profession, new modes of writing and research is inevitable.
Part four “Imagining Classroom Possibilities” explores classroom contexts of language teaching. The chapters in this part conclude that classroom is an important site of policymaking at the mocrosocial level. The classroom values and practices have the power to reconfigure language relations in the wider society. Both in Chapters 10 &11, Peter Martin and Jasmine Luk complicate the dominant teaching methodologies to show the need and place of local discourses and identities to render teaching productive. Chapter twelve by Elizabeth Mermann-Zozwiak and Nancy Sullivan talk of borderland classroom composed of Mexican American and Anglo American students, “a contact zone” of the global and local.
Since all the contributors in this collection handle gracefully the issues of globalization and its implication for the local, brainstorm and devise the ways or strategies to give voice to the local penetrating the overwhelming global and bring to the fore the concept of globalization from below in order to formulate inclusive and effective language policies and practices, the collection is invaluable for anybody who has interest in current socio-political, cultural, economic or linguistic phenomena and movements including globalization, neocolonialism, multilingualism, ethnic identities, feminism, race, class, gender, interpellation, stereotyping, transnationalism, global structures and so on. The issues and cases discussed in this book have relevance and implication also to the multilingual, bilingual, ethnic and transnational writers who have what Homi K. Bhava calls “double-vision” or are situated “in-betweenness”. Similarly, multilingual writing pedagogists and theorists can gain insights from this book which is what appealed me most in this book. Therefore, this book deserves to be in the bookshelves of every scholar particularly the writing and language experts as well as learners..














Works Cited
The Globalization Reader. Ed. Frank J. Lechner and John Boli. Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishers, 200.