ABSTRACT
A common complaint, especially in response to the writing by students who are users of peripheralized Englishes, is its sheer inscrutability. The culture of complaint in these encounters with student writing represents a leveraging of the cultural capital associated with mastery of an ostensibly standardized English. One way in which normative English can be disinvented is through the practice of provincialization. The expression provincialization was popularized by Chakrabarty (2000) to critique the ways in which the project of European colonialism and the residual logics of Eurocentrism have created the lingering universalist assumptions of European epistemology. Standardized English is always in the process of being readapted in order to serve the interests of those who can benefit from its continued privileged status. Students in the US and many other countries occupy linguistically liminal spaces, in that they are expected to develop proficiency in standardized English as part of earning their respective educational credentials.
