Multilingual Matters Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places (Critical Language and Literacy Studies): 15

This book looks at language in unexpected places. Drawing on a diversity of materials and contexts, including farewell addresses to British workers in colonial India, letters written from parents to their children at home, a Cornish anthem sung in South Australia, a country fair in rural Australia, and a cricket match played in the middle of the 19th century in south India, this book explores many current concerns around language, mobility and place, including native speakers, generic forms, and language maintenance. Using a series of narrative accounts - from a journey to southern India to eating cheese in China, from playing soccer in Germany to observing a student teacher in Sydney - this book asks how it is that language, people and cultures turn up unexpectedly and how our lines of expectation are formed. Review This book offers Pennycook's always innovative theoretical insights in a brilliant, original blend of fine scholarship and personal narrative. It evocatively describes the author s retracing of his family's history in colonial India, draws on concepts from many disciplines, and makes unexpected and illuminating connections with language education. --Stephanie Vandrick, University of San Francisco, USA In Language and Mobility Alastair Pennycook takes us, the readers, to new territories and domains of language - questioning, doubting and reflecting in new ways about what we do. In this fascinating and passionate journey we cross geographical and conceptual boundaries, places, spaces and time, mobilizing between India and Britain deeply embedded in family mobile and local histories. Along the journey, we deliberate with new meanings of nativity, hybridity, movement, mobility, localness, and meaning as these are anchored in rich pasts, in present functionality and unexpected futures. It is a passionate trip that touches the centrality of language in its broad context based on original documents, narratives and personal experiences, integrated together to argue for resistance and change. A powerful book that will not leave any readers un-changed. --Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University, Israel About the Author Alastair Pennycook is Professor of Language Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. He is widely known for his work on the politics of language, language and globalization, language and popular culture and language education. His current research is exploring urban multilingualism (metrolingualism). His recent book Language as a Local Practice was shortlisted for the BAAL book award, which he has won on two previous occasions for The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language and Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Language and Mobility Unexpected Places By Alastair Pennycook Multilingual Matters Copyright © 2012 Alastair Pennycook All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-84769-764-6 Contents Acknowledgements, Series Editors' Preface, 1 Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees, 2 Turning Up in Unexpected Places, 3 Through Others' Eyes and Thinking Otherwise, 4 Constrained Mobilities: Epistolary Parenting, 5 Resourceful Speakers, 6 Elephant Tracks, 7 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard, 8 Beyond the Boundaries of Expectation, References, Index, CHAPTER 1 Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees The rough road to the manager's bungalow at Lahai Estate in Kerala winds its way up to the top of the hill between the rows of rubber trees that march in straight terraced lines around the sloping plantation. From the rubber tappers' spiral cuts in the dark grey bark, white latex drips slowly into the half coconut shells hanging below. The ancestors of these rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) grew quietly in the Brazilian rainforests, tapped only by indigenous people, before the demand for rubber disrupted and destroyed this way of life. When seedlings fi