Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 65
economic activity – but rather that it has become increasingly clear that it
is not a very useful construct for thinking about language and culture.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the domain of popular culture. While
studies of language and globalization often take economic or various
utilitarian goals as primary driving forces behind both the spread and
takeup of different languages, it is also important to understand the roles
of pleasure and desire, and the possibilities that popular culture may hold
out for new cultural and linguistic relations, and for new possible modes
of identity. This chapter addresses questions raised by globalization and
popular culture, suggesting that the ways in which languages are being
mixed and changed present new possibilities for identities that have little
to do with national identifi cations. Using the global spread of hip hop as a
particular example, this chapter discusses new languages, new cultures
and new identities made possible by global fl ows of language and culture.
Such changes have major implications for language education, since the
languages and boundaries we have assumed as our educational goals may
no longer be what learners and users are tuning in to.
Globalization and Cultural Flows
We need fi rst of all to understand how languages operate in an uneven
world (Radhakrishnan, 2003) and how languages relate to the deep global
inequalities of poverty, health and education. Rather than viewing globalization
merely as synonymous with economic disparity, however, it is
more useful to explore the complexities of global fl ows of culture and
knowledge within this uneven world. Unlike those who insist that globalization
implies ‘the homogenization of world culture . . . spearheaded by fi lms,
pop culture, CNN and fast-food chains’ (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas,
1996: 439; italics in original), the argument in this chapter is that we need
to deal with globalization beyond this dystopic, neo-Marxist, critique
based only on political economy, and to engage with ‘pop culture’ in terms
beyond the gloomy Frankfurt School image of the duping of the global
masses. To suggest that globalization is only a process of US or Western
domination of the world is to take a narrow and ultimately unproductive
view of global relations. Likewise, to view culture and language in terms
only of refl ections of the economic – as with views that relate language
and culture too intimately with nationhood – is to miss the point that new
technologies and communications are enabling immense and complex
fl ows of people, signs, sounds, and images across multiple borders in
multiple directions. If we accept a view of popular culture as a crucial site
of identity and desire, it is hard to see how we can proceed with any study
of language and globalization without dealing comprehensively with
popular culture. The ‘real question before us’, argues Scott (1999: 215), ‘is
whether or not we take the vernacular voices of the popular and their