Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows

Alastair Pennycook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134188758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The English language is spreading across the world, and so too is hip-hop culture: both are being altered, developed, reinterpreted, reclaimed. This timely book explores the relationship between global Englishes (the spread and use of diverse forms of English within processes of globalization) and transcultural flows (the movements, changes and reuses of cultural forms in disparate contexts).

This wide-ranging study focuses on the ways English is embedded in other linguistic contexts, including those of East Asia, Australia, West Africa and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on transgressive and performative theory, Pennycook looks at how global Englishes, transcultural flows and pedagogy are interconnected in ways that oblige us to rethink language and culture within the contemporary world.

Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows is a valuable resource to applied linguists, sociolinguists, and students on cultural studies, English language studies, TEFL and TESOL courses.

1 Hip hop be connectin’

In the atmosphere: the wilder shores of English

December 2003. The Atmosphere nightclub in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Joe Flizzow and Malique¹ – Too Phat – come on stage; their gait has a loose rhythm, a languid movement of the body, a hinging of the knees that feels like a walk from elsewhere. Their hands wave in the air, fingers pointing, gesticulating with the urgent rhythm of the music. Their matching clothes hang loosely from their bodies: white trainers, baggy jeans, shirts hanging out (one a black T-shirt, the other an orange basketball shirt). Both wear baseball caps set off at a slight angle to the side. Against the background beat from large speakers at the side of the stage they rap at speed, microphones held up in front of them. Behind them, a break-dancing crew, also in baggy jeans, caps and T-shirts, do back spins, windmills, head spins. Joe Flizzow at the mic:

Hip hop be connectin’ Kuala Lumpur with LB
Hip hop be rockin’ up towns laced wit’ LV
Ain’t necessary to roll in ice rimmed M3’s and be blingin’
Hip hop be bringin’ together emcees²

How do we understand this English rap in a Malaysian night-club, with its African American influences on pronunciation and syntax (Hip hop be connectin’) its references to the world of hip-hop (blingin’, bringin’ together emcees) and current popular culture (Louis Vuitton clothes, BMW 3 series wheel rims)? Is this just a flow of culture from the centre to the periphery? Is the whole world becoming a stage for American culture? Does this suggest the gradual death of the rich heritage of Malaysian song and dance as American culture sweeps across the region, led by MTV, music channels, iPods, clothing fashions? Is this the ultimate triumph of global marketing, of the spread of American culture to take over the world, rendering traditional local cultural forms as nothing but a fetishist interest of cultural nationalists and anthropologists? And is the global spread of English the vanguard of the army of Western cultural imperialism, the Trojan Horse from which squadrons of cultural demons spread during the night? Or is it the other way round: is this fascination with copying Western cultural forms the precursor that opens the floodgates of English?

Or are there other ways of thinking about this? The language of hip-hop³ forms something of a subcultural code itself. An allegation in the UK that the lyrics of a song by Andrew Alcee, a writer of garage music, had been used on Heartless Crew’s album Crisp Biscuit, an album which, Alcee claimed, had references to drugs and violence, was dismissed in a decision by the British High Court in June 2003. Alongside the issue of rap’s tendency to borrow lyrics and sounds from other sources – an issue to which I shall return – were the judge’s comments on his inability in any case to make a judgement on the meaning of the rap lyrics: Mr Justice Lewison said the claim ‘led to the faintly surreal experience of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs examining the meaning of such phrases as “mish mish man” and “shizzle my nizzle”’. In spite of searching the web to try to understand some of the lyrics, he concluded that although they were in a form of English, they were ‘for practical purposes a foreign language’ and he had no expert evidence as to what they meant (Judge fails to unravel rap lyrics, Guardian Unlimited, 9 June 2003). As another report of the case (Hamilton, 2003) described the problem, ‘A High Court judge as good as admitted yesterday that the wilder shores of the English language were utterly beyond his comprehension’. The case had been unable to ‘bridge the linguistic divide between Queen’s Council English and the patois of young black England’.

Now if the ‘wilder shores of the English language’ are incomprehensible to speakers of mainstream varieties, and if it is these versions of English that are spreading as part of the global culture of hip-hop, we may well need a different way of looking at both English and English language pedagogy in the global context. Preisler (1999, p. 244), for example, argues that it ‘is impossible to explain the status of English in, and impact on, Danish society . . . without understanding the informal function of the English language, and indeed its sociolinguistic significance, in the Anglo-American-oriented subculture’. Using the example of the vocabulary of a group of Danish hip-hop ‘street dancers’, ‘Out of Control’, a vocabulary which includes break-dancing styles (boogie, windmills, back spin, head spin, turtle, cracking, waves, isolation, back spreads, locking, skeets), graffiti (tag, bomb, jams, cipher, burn-off, wild-style, straight-letters, piece, throw-up), MC-ing and DJ-ing (ragamuffin, scratch, mixer, cut-backs, cross-fader, break-beat) and the broader hip-hop culture (battle, biting, wanne-be, dope, pusher, graffiti-trip, hang-out, low-life, riot, stick-up), Preisler goes on to argue that there is far less variation in the forms of ‘English from above’ (‘the promotion of English by the hegemonic culture for purposes of “international communication”’) than in ‘English from below’ (‘the informal – active or passive – use of English as an expression of subcultural identity and style’) (p. 259). When we look at the global spread of English in relation to the global spread of subcultural style, then, this can also be seen in terms of an emergence of English from below, of the wilder shores of English bubbling up into everyday life.

The term Blinglish has been used either to refer to Black English or, more commonly, to disparage white kids’ (or ‘wiggers’) use of black hip-hop language (see Urban Dictionary, 2006). The term Blinglish combines not only Black English but also bling bling, a term that the Hip Hoptionary (Westbrook, 2002, p. 14) explains as ‘1) jewelry. 2) material showoff. 3) the glitter of diamonds.’ Of course, the very existence of a Hip Hoptionary and of online rap dictionaries suggests the need for assistance with the wilder shores of the English language. While the notion of Blinglish points us back at one level to the idea of a homogenizing spread of language and culture, as kids around the world imitate African American speech forms, it is also worth considering that if it is indeed disenfranchised African Americans who are spearheading the global dominance of North American language and culture, if hip-hop is indeed ‘a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America’ (Rose, 1994, p. 2), then we are looking at forms of expression of resistance to dominant white culture becoming a dominant global cultural form (Osumare, 2001). As we shall see in later chapters (5 and 7), the debates over the origins and spread of hiphop complexify this picture further.

While these lyrics by Too Phat are clearly laced with African American derived forms, imported cultural references and borrowed terms from the subcultures of hip-hop, there are other things at work here too: there is a clear sense of both locality and a global hip-hop community. They are based in Kuala Lumpur (KL), yet hip-hop as a cultural form is connecting Kuala Lumpur with LB (Long Beach, California, where a collaborator on this track, Warren G, is located); and at the same time that they celebrate the way emcees (MCs – rappers) are connected across time and space, there is also a rejection of the bling world (blatant crass materialism) of some hiphop culture. Worth noting too are the ways in which the global language and culture of hip-hop are both inclusive and exclusive. While on the one hand Too Phat claim membership of this global culture, they simultaneously use the in-house register of hip-hop that excludes many with its cultural references. Thus, while locating themselves within the linguistic and cultural world of hip-hop, which links across the globe yet operates as a cultural code, they are also locating themselves in Malaysia and positioning themselves in particular ways in relation to hip-hop culture.

Different Too Phat lyrics open up another perspective. Here is Joe Flizzow again:

If I die tonight, what would I do on my last day
I know I’d wake early in the morn’ for crack of dawn’s last pray
Then probably go for breakfast like I used to do
Fried kuey teow FAM and roti canai at Ruja’s with my boo⁴

If we accept the world Englishes definition of Malaysia as a country located in the Outer Circle (for further discussion, see Chapter 2), a country in which English has had a continuing role since the days of British colonialism, a country in which English has become localized, vernacularized to serve local purposes, a country where indeed we might say that English has become a local language, can we assume that Too Phat’s English use is an external imposition rather than an internal choice? Clearly in the lyrics above, we have local references to food, one of the most common features of local Englishes, as well as a reference to Muslim prayers at dawn. Here, the inclusions and exclusions are operating on a different level. Rather than global hip-hop as the cultural context, we are now dealing with local Malaysian references, Muslim prayers, and Chinese and Indian food eaten at stalls for breakfast: fried kuey teow or char kway teow is a popular dish of fried flat noodles, while roti canai (or roti prata in Singapore) is Indian bread (roti) with canai or channa: boiled chickpeas in spicy sauce. With the even more specific reference to Ruja’s, we are taken into the local world of Malaysia. And if English can thus become a local language, could not hip-hop also become a local cultural practice? When are the different elements of hip-hop – rapping (MC-ing), break-dancing, graffiti, DJ-ing, the clothes, the walk, the talk – reflexes of a global industry, and when can we see them as localized practices? Does Malaysian song and dance have to be traditional Malay gamelan or rebana ubi drums, or silat or joget,⁵ or lion dances, dragon dances or Chinese opera, or Indian Bharatnatyam or Kathakali dances? Or could hip-hop also be Malaysian? If English can be used to express local cultural practices, can such practices include more recently localized forms such as hip-hop?

Indeed, more important than a notion of Blinglish (the inauthentic use of African American English) is the way in which rap and English are woven together in new and creative ways. The use of English becomes not merely imitative, but part of a localized subculture in many parts of the world. The forms of identification with African Americans are multiple and complex. And the flows of hip-hop are far more intricate than merely from North America to the rest of the world; there are elaborate circuits of influence in different languages across many parts of the world (see Chapter 7). The participation in this global form, and the use of a major language such as English (or French or Spanish), have particular implications for the ways in which a global community is imagined. My interest, then, is in how the global role of rap in relationship to English produces particular understandings of what it means to partake in multilayered modes of identity at global, regional, national and local levels: How can we understand this use of English, as it locates its users both as part of the global imagined community of English users and as participants in the global music industry, creating links through the ‘international language’ and yet relocating through its juxtaposition with local languages? How do these new global raplishes⁶ work as tools for the performance of identities?

And when this moves one stage further, as in these ‘rap Melayu’ lyrics from Joe Flizzow in Ala Canggung (do you wanna have a party?), is the process of localization perhaps complete? Here, the inclusions and exclusions operate on another level, since most of what is said here is available only to speakers of Malay (or Bahasa Indonesia). Clearly, then, this is something different again. This is not recognizably part of African American culture, or global culture, yet nor is it easily located within Malaysian traditions. It is something else again:

Ya!!! Kau tertarik dengan liriks, baut lu terbalik
Mr Malique, Joe Flizzow dan T-Bone spit it menarik
Kita hit terbaik bisa bikin goyang
Tukang karut moden bercerita pasti girang
Inilah kugiran yang kan menghilangkan rasa sayu
Pertama kali gilang gemilang ku rap Melayu⁷

These are some of the questions that inform this book. On the one hand we have the many struggles and debates over English: How is English related to cultural forms and practices? Does its global spread now make it a culturally neutral language? Is the spread of English part of the gradual homogenization of the world? Is the world getting smaller? Or is English part of the greater diversification and heterogenization of the world? Is the world getting bigger? And how and why does a set of cultural practices such as hip-hop spread across the world? As the Japanese site ‘Nip Hop’ puts it, ‘Hip-hop is a culture without a nation. Hip-hop culture is international. Each country has its own spin on hip-hop. Japan has one of the most intense hip-hop cultures in the world . . . Japanese Hip-Hop has its own culture, but a culture that has many similar aspects of Hip-Hop around the world. These aspects include the DJ, MC, dancers and urban artists (taggers, spray paint art)’ (Nip Hop, 2004). Such statements raise many questions. If Japanese hip-hop has its own culture, is this global hip-hop with a Japanese flavour, Japanese culture with a global orientation, or something new altogether?

Global Englishes and transcultural flows

I use the term global Englishes to locate the spread and use of English within critical theories of globalization. English is closely tied to processes of globalization: a language of threat, desire, destruction and opportunity. It cannot be usefully understood in modernist states-centric models of imperialism or world Englishes, or in terms of traditional, segregationist models of language. Thus, while drawing on the useful pluralization strategy of world Englishes, I prefer to locate these Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization. This view seeks to understand the role of English both critically – in terms of new forms of power, control and destruction – and in its complexity – in terms of new forms of resistance, change, appropriation and identity. It suggests that we need to move beyond arguments about homogeneity or heterogeneity, or imperialism and nation states, and instead focus on translocal and transcultural flows. English is a translocal language, a language of fluidity and fixity that moves across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations. English is bound up with transcultural flows, a language of imagined communities and refashioning identities. I am interested, then, in locating English within a complex view of globalization here, not one that assumes that we are necessarily witnessing increasing levels of global similarity, but one that tries to understand the effects of cultural flows. I will discuss globalization and English in Chapter 2 in much greater depth.

The focus on the flows and appropriations of English and hip-hop, furthermore, will also mean that I will look at English in relationship with other languages. It has been observed at various times that the constant focus on English as a global language reinforces the position of English by incessantly reiterating its role. In this book, I will try to mitigate this focus on English through discussions of English use in relation to languages in East Asia, such as Japanese, Korean and Tagalog. I will also look at circuits of hip-hop that involve a range of other languages, from the French circuit that involves France, West African countries such as Mali, Senegal and Gabon, and Quebec, and which incorporates a wide variety of other languages, particularly from North Africa and the Caribbean (see Durand, 2002; Huq, 2001a, b), to the Pacific Island circuit with its use of Maori, Samoan, Tongan, Tok Pisin, and other languages. Indeed, one of the arguments that emerges in this book is that the use of languages in a domain such as hip-hop raises serious questions for our understanding of what languages are, particularly when considered as discrete entities. The focus on global Englishes, therefore, will also be aimed at rethinking many of the ways in which we view English and language more generally.

I use the term transcultural flows to address the ways in which cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts. This is not, therefore, a question merely of cultural movement but of take-up, appropriation, change and refashioning. While not ignoring the many detrimental effects of globalization on economies and ecologies across the world – increased exploitation of workers, forced migration, global ‘wars’ to serve particular interests, destruction of the environment – I am interested centrally here in the cultural implications of globalization, the ways in which cultural forms spread and change. Following Appadurai (1996) and Clifford (1997), the focus is not so much on how music works culturally in a specific location but on the effects of the many encounters and hybrid co-productions of languages and cultures. From this point of view, locality, tradition and place are produced, not given, a result of particular ways of constructing identity (see Chapter 7). Transcultural flows therefore refer not merely to the spread of particular forms of culture across boundaries, or the existence of supercultural commonalities (cultural forms that transcend locality), but rather to the processes of borrowing, blending, remaking and returning, to processes of alternative cultural production.

Unlike Phillipson (1999), therefore, who views the global spread of English as indelibly linked to the Americanization and homogenization of world culture and to media imperialism, I am interested here in the ways in which the flows of cultural forms produce new forms of localization, and the use of global Englishes produces new forms of global identification. As Levy (2001, p. 134) suggests, hip-hop constitutes ‘a global urban subculture that has entered people’s lives and become a universal practice among youth the world over . . . . From a local fad among black youth in the Bronx, it has gone on to become a global, postindustrial signifying practice, giving new parameters of meaning to otherwise locally or nationally diverse identities.’ While any such statements also need to be treated with a degree of caution – both in terms of the institutions that make it possible for hip-hop to achieve such spread and of the dangers of talking about a ‘universal practice among youth the world over’ as if global hip-hop affected everyone everywhere irrespective of classes, economies and localities – it is nevertheless useful to see this massive take-up in so many parts of the world as a postindustrial signifying practice, as new parameters of meaning that are neither simple adoptions of global practices nor local practices that have always been there.

As Appadurai (2001, p. 5) notes, ‘we are functioning in a world fundamentally characterized by objects in motion. These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques. This is a world of flows.’ Central to Appadurai’s vision of a world in motion is the argument that rather than globalization being ‘the story of cultural homogenization’ (1996, p. 11), it is better understood as a ‘deeply historical, uneven and even localizing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization’, since ‘different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently’ (p. 17). Thus, while remaining attentive to the deeply historical and uneven aspects of globalization, I am interested here in cultural and linguistic flows not so much as processes of homogenization but as part of a reorganization of the local. In talking of transcultural flows, therefore, my focus is not merely on the movement of cultural forms across the globe but of the local take-up of such forms. Transculturation may be understood as a ‘phenomenon of the contact zone’ describing how ‘subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (Pratt, 1992, p. 6).

By taking up metaphors of movement and the spatial frames of ‘trans’ theories (see Chapter 3), I am trying here to escape from the debates over globalization versus localization, or neologisms such as glocalization that, be eliding the two polarities, flatten the dynamics of what is occurring here. I am interested instead in looking at language and culture in terms of ‘fluidity’, which refers to the movement and flows of music across time and space, and ‘fixity’, which refers to ways in which music is about location, tradition, cultural expression (Connell and Gibson, 2003). As Connell and Gibson argue, a focus on fluidity and fixity takes us beyond the static dialectic of the global and the local, reflecting ‘more dynamic ways of describing and understanding processes that move across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations’ (p. 17). Working with this contrast between the fluidity of cultural and linguistic scapes and the fixity of place, I am interested in how music and language – with a particular focus on hip-hop and English – are simultaneously fluid and fixed, move across space, borders, communities, nations but also become localized, indigenized, re-created in the local. Caught between fluidity and fixity, then, cultural and linguistic forms are always in a state of flux, always changing, always part of a process of the refashioning of identity.

The socioblinguistics of hip-hop

For those who do not know the wonderful world of hip-hop, this eclectic mixture of ugly vandalism (graffiti), angular athletics (break-dancing), grating noises ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Hip Hop Be Connectin’
• 2 Other Englishes
• 3 Transgressive Theories
• 4 Performance and Performativity
• 5 Taking the Vernacular Voices of the Popular Seriously
• 6 English and the Global Spread of Authenticity
• 7 Language Flows, Language Mixes
• 8 Hip-Hop Pedagogies and Local Knowledge
• Notes
• Bibliography