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4 World Englishes or worlds of English? Pitfalls of a postcolonial discourse in Philippine English T. Ruanni F. Tupas While the anti-colonial project notes that the subaltern can and do in fact speak, and consequently have become agents of their own history, it simultaneously recognizes that the limits of class, ethnicity, culture, gender and difference define how, when and why the subaltern speaks. (Dei, 2006: 16) Introduction The aim of this chapter is to provide an interrogation of ‘world Englishes’ (WE) as a postcolonial discourse.1 Until recently, mainstream linguistics has paid little attention to the debates on postcolonialism associated with the work of Edward Said and others, despite an evident need for an interrogative stance toward formal language studies and its disciplinary and ideological underpinnings (Bolton and Hutton, 2000). This is not to say, of course, that postcolonial theorizing and cultural studies have not permeated ‘linguistic studies’ in the broadest sense. For example, the more (but not always) theoretically inclusive fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics of English in recent years have engaged in the polemics of postcolonialism, for example to investigate hybridized forms and silent voices of language use both inside and outside the classroom, and (re)read them as postcolonial practices of resistance against, among many things, the disempowering powers of monolingualist ideologies and (Western/colonial) conceptual tools of linguistic analysis. Two exemplars are Canagarajah’s (1999b) classroom practices of resistance against linguistic imperialism (cf. Phillipson, 1992) and Kachru’s (1997) empire writing back (cf. Ashcroft et al., 1989). Similarly, Said’s ‘colonial discourse analysis’ via Foucault and poststructuralism could be retrieved from Pennycook’s (1998) sustained engagement with colonial discourses in and around English and its teaching. However, in order to keep the interrogative academic spirit of our work as demonstrated in the 68 T. Ruanni F. Tupas postcolonial project, there is a continuous need for vigorous and sustained self-reflexive practices in our work, and without such critical self-reflexivity, there is always the danger of complicity with the ideologies and social structures against which we believe we resist. Such complicity has always been at the center of much debate on postcolonialism. Its radicalism — in the sense that it emerged from the praxis of anti-colonial struggles of much of the early and middle part of the twentieth century (Young, 2001) — in some cases has been reappropriated and reinterpreted to serve more palatable ideologies of globalization and related social phenomena (Ahmad, 1992; Dirlik, 1994). The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explore the ideological foundations of a particular paradigm in the sociolinguistics of English, i.e. that of ‘world Englishes’ (or ‘WE’). I will do so by situating the paradigm within theoretical and political contexts and concretizing my argument through a discussion of the political dynamics of ‘Philippine English’. In an earlier article (Tupas, 2004), I discussed the politics of Philippine English with the assumption that it works within the ideological underpinnings of the WE paradigm. This paper works in tandem with the earlier one, but this time I focus on the political dynamics of WE itself (see also Tupas, 2001a) using the example/experience of ‘Philippine English’ to concretize my arguments. I will argue that while the paradigm as a whole does not explicitly position itself as a postcolonial enterprise — its rhetoric of ‘inclusivity’ by itself opens itself up to a variety of approaches (Bolton, 2004; 2005) — much of its discourse is also culled from postcolonial theorizing.2 This is not surprising since much of the 1980s during which WE emerged as a powerful and radical paradigm in the understanding of the spread of English around the world was the time when ‘the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse’ (Chu, 2004: 37). True, it could be understood as a study of the sociolinguistic functions of English without the necessity of an explicit political analysis (e.g. Dissanayake, 1985; Lowenberg, 1986), but it is almost always implicated in political questions, simultaneously referring to itself as a sociolinguistics of hybridization, nativization, and resistance very much within the ideological purview of, say, Homi Bhabha’s (1994) articulate theorization of hybridity and Ashcroft et al.’s (1989) important work on postcolonial literary criticism. Even Kachru’s (1986a) immensely popular and useful mapping of the concentric circles of English language spread which traces the shifting locations of the power of the language from its Western imperial source (Inner Circle) to its erstwhile colonial strongholds (Outer Circles), and further into the ‘rest of the world’ (Expanding Circle...

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