ABSTRACT
Vulk Makedonski and Raceless of Melbourne-based hip-hop artists Curse ov Dialect suggest that the origins of hip-hop can be found in multiple cultural resources: according to Vulk Makedonski, “hip-hop is the culture of people that were oppressed at one stage, and a lot of cultures have songs about oppression in their folk tales. To me, that’s hip-hop. They’re expressing themselves through song, through dance – which hip-hop is – through graffiti, you know the old way when people used to write on rocks or whatever. That’s hip-hop.” Hip-hop, he suggests, has to be seen in relation to both diverse cultures and spaces and as having a long history: hip-hop “is too powerful to be modern, that’s why I believe it’s more ancient. It’s an ancient culture, with a new name. And the new name is hip-hop, that’s the modern name, but the elements that come out of hip-hop go back – way, way, back.” The elements of hip-hop, he suggests, should not be seen in terms of breaking, rapping and so forth, but rather as part of forms of music and dance that have been part of different cultures for centuries. Hip-hop, asserts Raceless, is about “bringing back old things, and reappropriating it” (CoD Interview 23/09/061). Drawing analogies with issues of localization in hip-hop (see also Alim and
Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook, 2007a), this chapter argues that processes of localization are more complex than a notion of languages or cultures spreading and taking on local forms; rather, we have to understand ways in which they are already local. Debates over the implications of the global spread of English all too often assume this metaphor of spread, suggesting that English spread from the centre (England/UK/USA etc.) until it was eventually adapted locally, leading to distinct local varieties of English. Imagine a stone dropped into a pond. The ripples move out as concentric circles, affecting ever new areas of water. The focus of World Englishes has been on the ways in which these ripples take on local characteristics, how the movement from the centre is also about change. But let us consider another aspect of this. It is not the water that moves outwards, but the energy created by the falling stone that passes through the water. By and large, the water in different parts of the pond simply moves up and down as the ripples move through.
Our focus, therefore, might be equally on the water or language that is already there: it is not that English spreads like ripples from the centre but rather that a certain force passes through, and languages move up and down to accommodate this. Ripples, like language, are not localized; they pass through, leaving the water or language that has always been there rocking slightly. “A language never spreads like a liquid, nor even like a disease or a rumour” (Fabian, 1986, p. 8). In this chapter on the locality of language, I shall ask what happens to ideas
about the global spread of English if we look at it as a local language. As we have already seen in Chapters 3 and 4, rethinking space and time in relation to language opens up different possibilities for how we think about locality. This does not mean, then, that English as a local language should be understood in terms of local adaptations made to English – new lexical items, locally influenced pronunciation, grammatical structures that differ from the centre norms – but rather as a practice embedded in the local. As Vulk Makedonski and Raceless remind us, English is too powerful to be modern; the elements that make up English go way, way, back. The issue is not one of English spreading and being locally appropriated but of English bringing back old things, and reappropriating them. To grasp this argument is to address particular ways of thinking about the locality of language. Current debates about the inapplicability of a World Englishes framework
to current conditions of globalization, or concerns that a focus on English as a lingua franca presents a new form of homogenization (see Rubdy and Saraceni, 2006), miss the point that we need to react not only to new conditions of postmodernity but also to the postmodern imperative to rethink language. This suggests the need to articulate a new sense of history and location, avoiding narratives of spread, transition, development and origins, and thinking instead in terms of multiple, heterogeneous and simultaneous histories that the dominant historical narrative has overlooked. If we question the linearity at the heart of modernist narratives about language origins and spread, we can start to see that global Englishes do not have one point but rather multiple, co-present, global origins. Just as hip-hop has always been Aboriginal, as MC Wire claims (see below), so has English. Such an understanding of global Englishes reshapes the ways in which we can understand global and local cultural and linguistic formations, and takes us beyond the current debates between monocentric and pluricentric models of English. To take these arguments further, I shall approach this from several direc-
tions. First, I shall return to the discussion of hip-hop and locality in order to open up discussion of the coevalness of origins. This will be followed by a discussion of the locality of English in Kerala, with particular reference to temple elephants. Once we start to view global Englishes in terms of local language practices, our attention is drawn away from a language entity called English with peripheral variants. We are directed instead to the doing of language in particular localities. This doing of language, as argued in Chapter 3, is part of the production of language, and as argued in Chapter 4, it is both a
spatial and linguistic practice. Local language practices do not reflect the local reality but are part of its production.
