Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

118 Language Planning and Education
The wider point here is that because linguistic imperialism so strongly emphasises
top-down processes of imposition, it neglects, or underplays, the possibility of the
bottom-up planning mentioned above; that is, the ways in which English has been
appropriated and turned to varying political purposes, often deeply uncongenial to
the original imperial powers.
The role of English in anti-colonial resistance is certainly the key historical
example of appropriation, but there are others closer to us in time. English, for
instance, has become the lingua franca of the anti-globalisation movement. The
Guardian newspaper (26 January 2004) reports that six of the nineteen hijackers
involved in the attacks of 11 September 2001 entered the United States on the
pretext of studying English as a foreign language. Canagarajah (2000: 128),
meanwhile, outlines the role English has played in the local Tamil populace’s
resistance to the Tamil-only nationalism of groups who until recently waged an
armed struggle for a separatist state on the island of Sri Lanka. The very variety of
these instances, and their very different moral status, draws attention to the different
political causes in which English has functioned as a resource, and underscores how
its symbolic baggage is not a constant but varies with the local context in complex
ways that the deterministic linguistic imperialism thesis is ill-equipped to explain.
Hegemony and English spread
An important explanatory concept invoked by Phillipson (1992) and indeed by
other critical applied linguists (e.g. Pennycook 1995, 2001) to explain the widespread
adoption of English is that of hegemony. This is not hegemony as straightforward
dominance, but hegemony in the Gramscian sense (Gramsci 1971); that
is, a process by which ruling elites maintain their dominance not through overt
coercion but by winning the consent of the mass of the population to their own
domination and exploitation. They consent because the prestige of the ruling elite
allied with dominant taken-for-granted discourses saturates their practical daily
consciousness, communicating the idea that their subordination is an unavoidable
given, part of the natural order. Similar hegemonic processes operate, so it is claimed,
in the spread of English, particularly in the globalisation era: English is readily
accepted – even by those whom it disadvantages – because people are seduced by
dominant discourses that portray English as a beneficial language of modernisation
and opportunity (see also Pennycook 1994).
This view is not, of course, wholly implausible. When one considers how parents
in countries such as Zambia, Tanzania or Hong Kong demand education in English
for their children, even though this often hinders rather than facilitates learning (see
Chapter 7), one is tempted to postulate a hegemonic process.
There are, however, several problems that attach to the concept of hegemony
when deployed as a causal explanation. One is that it is empirically difficult to falsify.
What evidence can one produce to show that individual adoptions are not the
product of hegemony but of rational choice, ill-informed though that may sometimes
be? Another, related problem is that by ruling out rational choice as a basis of
individual action, the concept downplays critical reasoning capacities, and can end