Description:
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.
Brief description: Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His work has focused on language, colonialism and knowledge disparities, concerns highlighted in The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize). In Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, (with Sinfree Makoni) - he has argued for the need for epistemological rethinking from the Global South. His most recent book - Language Assemblages (Cambridge University Press, 2024) - makes the case for a pluriversal and decolonial understanding of language and being.
Review Quotes:
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.