Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 45) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853596469 ISBN 13: 9781853596469

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable. The chapters address various ways in which individuals may be positioned or position themselves in a variety of contexts. In asking questions about social justice, about who has access to symbolic and material resources, about who is ‘in' and who is ‘out', the authors take account not only of localised linguistic behaviours, attitudes and beliefs; they also locate them in wider social contexts which include class, race, ethnicity, generation, gender and sexuality.  The volume makes a significant contribution to the development of theory in understanding identity negotiation and social justice in multilingual contexts.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aneta Pavlenko is Associate Professor of TESOL in the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, US. Her research examines the relationship between language and cognition, emotions, and identity in bi- and multilingual individuals. She is a co-editor of two other volumes.

Adrian Blackledge is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK. His research focuses on language ideologies, relations of power, and the role of public discourse in diverse societies.

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Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts

By Aneta Pavlenko, Adrian Blackledge

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2004 Aneta Pavlenko, Adrian Blackledge and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-646-9

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Contributors, viii, 
Introduction: New Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts Aneta Pavlenko and Adrian Blackledge, 1, 
1 'The Making of an American': Negotiation of Identities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Aneta Pavlenko, 34, 
2 Constructions of Identity in Political Discourse in Multilingual Britain Adrian Blackledge, 68, 
3 Negotiating Between Bourge and Racaille: Verlan as Youth Identity Practice in Suburban Paris Meredith Doran, 93, 
4 Black Deaf or Deaf Black? Being Black and Deaf in Britain Melissa James and Bencie Woll, 125, 
5 Mothers and Mother Tongue: Perspectives on Self-construction by Mothers of Pakistani Heritage Jean Mills, 161, 
6 The Politics of Identity, Representation, and the Discourses of Self-identification: Negotiating the Periphery and the Center Frances Giampapa, 192, 
7 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Foreign Language Learning and Identity Reconstruction Celeste Kinginger, 219, 
8 Intersections of Literacy and Construction of Social Identities Benedicta Egbo, 243, 
9 Multilingual Writers and the Struggle for Voice in Academic Discourse Suresh Canagarajah, 266, 
10 Identity and Language Use: The Politics of Speaking ESL in Schools Jennifer Miller, 290, 
11 Sending Mixed Messages: Language Minority Education at a Japanese Public Elementary School Yasuko Kanno, 316, 
Index, 339, 

CHAPTER 1

'The Making of an American': Negotiation of Identities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ANETA PAVLENKO

Introduction

In the past decades, narratives and, in particular, stories people tell about their lives, have gained increasing stature outside the fields of literature and folklore and have become the focus of the evolving interdisciplinary field of narrative study, which posited narrative as the central means by which people construct identities and give their lives meaning across time. Consequently, scholars in a variety of disciplines expressed new interest in autobiographies as a unique, 'rich and unsurpassed resource for an understanding of the inward experience of how social and individual forces may interact' (Sollors, 1990: xi). The fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism are no exception to this trend: lately, several researchers have turned to stories people tell about their language learning and use (Kramsch & Lam, 1999; Pavlenko, 1998, 2001a,b,c; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Schumann, 1997; Tse, 2000; see also Kinginger, this volume). All of these investigations, however, examined contemporary stories, either published or elicited by the researchers. The goal of the present study is to see how sociohistoric circumstances impact ways in which people view the relationship between their languages and identities and construct their language learning stories. In order to answer this question, I will examine negotiation of identities in a corpus of narratives that has not previously been discussed in the field: immigrant autobiographies from the turn of the twentieth century. I will then compare narrative identities negotiated in this corpus to the ones constructed and negotiated in cross-cultural memoirs published in the past two decades.

In what follows, I will first introduce the theoretical framework and methodological approaches to narrative inquiry adopted in the present investigation. Then, I will examine which identities were negotiated in early-twentieth-century immigrant narratives. I will argue that these memoirs differ from contemporary immigrant autobiographies as far as the relationship between language and identity is concerned, and will attempt to explain the differences through ideologies of language and identity dominant in the early twentieth century. In doing so, I will show how sociopolitical, sociohistoric, and sociolinguistic circumstances shape individuals' understandings of themselves and their relationships with the languages in their environment.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework adopted in the present paper is situated at the nexus of critical and poststructuralist theories (Anderson, 1991; Bourdieu, 1991; Weedon, 1987), with the focus on autobiography and narrative identity construction (Green, 2001; Hokenson, 1995). In this perspective, identity is viewed as a dynamic and shifting nexus of multiple subject positions, or identity options, such as mother, accountant, heterosexual, or Latina. At various points in history different societies make somewhat distinct identity options available to their members (for instance, being anything but heterosexual may not be a legitimate option in some societies). Furthermore, at different times these options are negotiable to a different degree. Narrative identities, constructed in fiction and non-fiction writing, often emerge as reactions to available identity options, reproducing some and rejecting or reimagining others. Autobiographies play a central role in the process of identity negotiation in writing, as they are a prime example of 'identity narratives,' i.e. 'narratives constructed or construed as statements about the identity of the speaker and perhaps about the community of which she or he is a member' (Green, 2001: 8).

The focus of the present paper is on narrative identities constructed in American immigrant autobiographies, i.e. memoirs written by first generation immigrants who had arrived in the US as children or adults and who discuss the story of their assimilation. The aim of the paper is to examine sociohistoric constraints on these identity narratives and, consequently, on immigrant identity options seen as 'imaginable' or 'negotiable' in the US at the turn of the century. To explore ways in which European immigrants used the genre of autobiography to imagine and legitimize new identities for themselves and fellow immigrants, I will draw on Anderson's (1991) notion of nation-states as imagined communities. This notion is particularly apt for discussions of the encounter between new arrivals and the country they had imagined and in which they now had to imagine themselves. In addition to the notion of imagination, I will also appeal to Bourdieu's (1991) concept of speaking rights that will allow me to analyze which new immigrants had 'the right to speak' and the right 'to impose reception' in the process of identity negotiation. Finally, to explain why turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigrant memoirs may depict second language learning and the relationship between language and identity differently from contemporary cross-cultural autobiographies, I will resort to a sociohistoric analysis of the circumstances in which the two sets of narratives were produced and to a rhetorical analysis of tropes and narrative plots available to early-and late-twentieth-century immigrant autobiographers. I will argue that history has a profound impact on identity stories, not only in terms of material, social, and political circumstances in which they take place, but also in terms of ideologies of language and identity dominant in a particular place and time and in terms of identity options considered negotiable, legitimate, or particularly desirable.

Methodology and Research Questions

The present study will analyze 11 full-length immigrant memoirs and one...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853596469
• ISBN 13: 9781853596469
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Herausgeber: Pavlenko Aneta, Blackledge Adrian
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland