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Wo rld Englishes ; World C o mpositions As poet Gerrit Lansing writes in “La p(l)age poetique”: Poetics will be planetary or not at all (hommage á Andre Breton): its data and resource are unrestricted by any “tradition.” The word of sin was always Restriction, and, in the bondage-scene of verse, was always, at its best, high play (game of Decorum, the keeping, the conventions apt to some local time-crystal). The dead hand, or confusion of times, was ever to take the living rules of one historical moment and try to fasten them down on another time. Pseudomorphosis. The restricted notion of “form” never furthers. (Lansing 2003, 134) Not just poetics, of course, but rhetoric as well “will be planetary or not at all.” Rhetoric has also been subject to the “dead hand, or confusion of times.” Rhetoric has also been the terrain of control and the desire for certainty and security. The decisions we compositionists face in the coming years between a planetary perspective and the restrictions of the anti-life drive of cultural purity, between the search for sustainable composing in the face of ecological crisis (and its attendant economic and political crises) and the oppression of class-based rules of discursive decorum, will become more acute. Linguists and TESOL educators are already facing this juncture as they decide how best to serve the needs of the times in general and the world’s students in particular . It is the search for equity and peace, sustainability and survival. It is nothing less. In its global reach, English represents both imperialism and cultural exchange, both conquest and variety. The linguists who take a global approach to language study recognize that “there is indeed greater emphasis today than in the past on capturing the expanding fusions and hybridizations of linguistic forms and the unprecedented variations in global functions of world Englishes” (Kachru, Kachru and Nelson 2009, xvii). This recognition of and respect for variety in English usage has caused linguists to open their discipline to the study of creativity and World Englishes; World Compositions     231 language politics on an international scale, study from which we compositionists can learn and to which we should certainly contribute. Applied linguistics is expanding at a rate too fast and with a scholarly production far too great to overview here. Instead, let me merely point to the fact that compositionists share respect, with the proponents of the world English, globalization and international language studies movements, for multicultural and progressive language use. In “World Englishes and Culture Wars,” Braj B. Kachru explains, “The concept world Englishes . . . emphasizes the pluricentricity of the language and its cross-cultural reincarnations” (2009, 446). According to Kachru, the world English movement in linguistics is a canon-busting, theoretical orientation that resists those with power who would attempt to legislate for homogenized standards of linguistic purity. He suggests that “we need a perspective of ‘variousness’” (465) in which English language educators teach from the vision that English is not one language but a variety of languages, each connected to local contexts and to each other, each offering unique opportunities for creative performance and understanding and each enriching the other with creativity. We need to act from this insight, Kachru argues, “if we do not want to continue walling up the world visions—including African and Asian—in this unique, cultural and linguistic resource of our times, world Englishes” (466). In “Literary Creativity in World Englishes,” Edwin Thumboo explains how people from different geographical settings exchange and borrow from one another to create new literary forms. He argues that these forms are worthy of study in their own right and not by measurement to mother-tongue standards. He calls for a “comparative spirit” in literary , world English analysis that “is sensitively attentive and exploratory” and that will lead to an understanding of “whether we can ultimately attempt an overview of all literatures in English” (2009, 422). In Cultural Globalization and Language Education, B. Kumaravadivelu argues that to understand either the relation of the local to global articulations, or the tension between cultural impulses toward heterogeneity or homogenization in language development, applied linguists need “to develop global cultural consciousness” (2006, 7). Even from these few quotes it should be clear that applied linguistics is undergoing a major shift that bears obvious theoretical and political kinship with an international composition studies as I propose in this book. But, there is a catch. Kachru claims that the world English movement may not support an...

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