Jan Blommaert has in recent scholarship explored the subject of globalization in relation to sociolinguistic scales, indexicality, identity, migration, registers, repertoires, and genres, among other concepts. In Grassroots literacy, he explores the subject in relation to two literacy regimes at opposite ends of an ideological scale – grassroots and elite. This is the most recent monograph-length public declaration by Blommaert of his Africanist credentials, and an excellent example of interventionist scholarship. He makes this declaration unequivocally in the preface (p. xv), where he declares:

The book has four parts and nine chapters. Parts I and IV have a chapter each, while the data analysis and core discussions are presented in three chapters in part II and four chapters in part III. Blommaert explores the world of two Congolese writers, Julien and Tshibumba, which he (re)constructs from letters and other texts written by them. He uses this material to talk about the mobility of local texts in a global order and to suggest that local and global are inextricably linked yet asymmetrical, and therefore raise ethical issues, including ones involving power relations. Kendrick and Hissani's (2007) study of rural women developing literate identities provides further proof of letters as literacy objects in Uganda. The absence of a response of any kind from Julien and Tshibumba to Blommaert's reading and interpretation of their texts underscores the fact that we are dealing with the “ethnographies of text” (12). Blommaert reconstructs itineraries, disjunctures, and the resulting fragments into an interesting “life” in order to discuss inequality between local (so-called Third World) and elite (global) literacies.

I shall anchor this review to a number of controversies that are both theoretical and methodological in nature. I declare from the outset that I have no intention to resolve any of these controversies, but I certainly hope that readers will journey with Blommaert through the book bearing in mind the issues I shall raise. The first controversy stems directly from the sentiments expressed above and concerns the efficacy of the subjects and/or modes of Blommaert's ethnographies – an autobiography and a historiography upon which his reconstructions of the texts of Julien and Tshibumba are based. As a reconstructor he becomes a co-author. He is written into the versions of their lives in his reconstructions in much the same way that a translator is written into the translated text. The issue then arises of the extent to which the product is a usurpation of Julien's and Tshibumba's voices. One can imagine the logic of the objectification of subjectivity (see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2000) forming the solemn backdrop for a charge of self-arrogation of telling rights against Blommaert, and what may be seen as a denial of Julien's voice (cf. Street 1996, Hymes Reference Hymes1996). He claims, for instance, that “I am the one who can reduce Julien's three lives to one coherent, unified, ‘factual’, linearised and ‘objective’ story,” a capacity he owes to the privilege of his own location in the elite economy. Blommaert acknowledges up front that “there are serious ethical implications here. There is a huge risk of my voice becoming stentorian, of my voice silencing that of Julien” (89). But does that privilege invest him with the same subjectivity as his subjects or one of his own? Is he by extension an African like Julien and Tshibumba? Blommaert offers an important disclaimer: “I cannot write as a woman, not as an 11-year old, not as a poorly educated man, not as a working-class man, not as an African' (85; my emphasis), and this is in spite of access to resources and location in the West. This remark is particularly poignant considering Blommaert's Africanist stance in the preface, and especially when voice and authenticity are as topical as they are in this book. How do we deploy Bakhtin's (Reference Bakhtin, Michael and Michael1981) notion of “voice” vis-à-vis local authenticity in a post-Cold War globalizing world of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism? Blommaert emphasizes the mobility of texts under those conditions, but he needed to deconstruct “developments in the centre of the world also have effects on the margins of the world” (194). After all, in the worldviews of Nigerian Afrobeat maestro Fela Kuti and millions of fans, “Africa is the centre of the world,” even if Blommaert rules the rural Flanders of his childhood out of competition for that title (187).

The second controversy concerns the import of a few core terms and concepts which in spite of Blommaert's definition remain contested and problematic. Does “grassroots” have a universal meaning? Can anyone legitimately suggest that grassroots are equally banal or sophisticated spaces of social capital and competition in the USA and in Uganda, or is it a specific reference reserved for periphery practices and people not “fully inserted into elite economies of information, language and literacy” (7)? Blommaert's choice of “inserted” here both assigns agency to an ideological Center, a dominant actor or norm-setting institution, and reaffirms the helplessness of Otherness. He counterpositions elite (Western) to grassroots (African) and associates the latter with nonscientific knowledge (impressions, experiences, intuitions, recollections; 86), lack of punctuation, “unwarranted capitals,” and “vernacular local norms” (195–96), in contrast to histories and memoirs that are produced from archival materials (87). He cites Derrida's (Reference Derrida1996) “archontic power” – the power to construct an archive and to determine what goes in it and what does not – all paraphernalia of the structures that are the very basis of postcolonial discontent.

The category “elite” is anchored to specific semiotic systems, so we must anticipate variation in its unpacking. Even in rural Africa, “elite” is specific to a communal value system and may not necessarily be valid across cultural borders. Urban elites are distinguished from rural elites, and the category also differentiates along ethnic, religious, and national lines. The description of Julien's genre as “incomplete” because he lacked some formal resources can be defended only within the framework of the author's different and perhaps more robust worldview. Is it conceivable that Julien perceived his lifeworld as complete for his purposes? The point I am making here is that elite literacy is conceptually encumbered when we extrapolate across epistemological systems. In this book, it is characterized by resources and a mode of writing to which grassroots literacy lacks access – global archival and computer systems. This invokes a similar sense to what Hawisher & Selfe Reference Hawisher and Selfe2000 discuss as “global literacy.” Blommaert comments that his corpus is “replete with such exuberant displays of visual embellishments accompanying highly problematic displays of basic writing skills” (114), but the sketches and etchings into the margins are those that I am certain we have all encountered on the scripts of bored or distracted students in some lectures in our metropolitan classrooms. I offer as testimony my own indulgence in boredom art as a student back in the day, in some subjects I shall not name here for tactical reasons.

It is contentious that subjective ethnographies, rigorous analysis notwithstanding, can be projected as representative of the population from which they derive, in this case “Central Africa.” Grassroots versus elite literacy does not automatically translate into Local, Oral and African versus Global, Writing and European, respectively. We must open up “inequality” for interrogation and suggest that its application may not be simply structurally limited to colonizer/colonized differences. In chap. 3, Blommaert says that Julien writes without an “archive” and has “to remember his life from scratch.” This raises questions about the role and validity of memory as viable resource in construction and reconstruction as part of the epistemological processes of oral societies. I refer here to the public, collective memory that organizes norms and practices, as well as the individual's memory (subjectivity), which is anchored to the former. Thus, working without an archive but with memory may also be construed as a particular way of preserving raw, unprocessed history and artifact. Of course, the question that arises then is whether memory can be regarded as an archive. If so, whose memory? And is it an elite or non-elite resource? Does history reside within memory in oral societies? If that is the case, there are also issues around “elite genres” and “non-elite instruments” (180), and the suggestion that Tshibumba's self-qualification as a historian is “probably grounded in the congenial contacts he had with professional Western academics who expressed strong interests in his historical views” (181). Those who listen to Tshibumba as an “informant” rather than as a historian would regard Blommaert's suggestion that he has a “disciplined voice” (135) and “could have been seen as a structural voice” (181) as anarchic. Yet community histories in large portions of rural Africa are oral accounts constructed from the memory of aged folks in those communities.

The third controversy concerns the interdependence of political economies in the era of globalization, so that being physically located in the traditional space of one political economy (for instance, the developing world) does not automatically lead to an exclusive exhibition of literacy traits essentially identified with it. Blommaert emphasizes the interconnectedness of spaces (194). Appadurai's (Reference Appadurai1996) mediascapes and Pennycook's (Reference Pennycook2008) global transcultural flows also demonstrate the folly in making such an argument. The issue then has to do with relativity of globalization. Since Julien worked for expatriates (the Arens, a Belgian family) in Lubumbashi, he had to be moderately educated and somewhat literate. In colonial Africa, manual laborers worked under a supervisor who could communicate in the colonial language. The fact that Julien not only spoke but also wrote in Shaba Swahili and French suggests his membership in this slightly elevated status group in the native social hierarchy of colonial Africa; Blommaert calls the three autobiographical manuscripts “deep grassroots writing,” but in his supervisory role Julien in fact straddled the world of two literacy regimes as a bridge of sorts. Tshibumba was the object of Fabian's and Jewsiwiecki's presentations at the 1999 Belgium's Africa conference (99), facilitating the meeting of two worlds with his transnational text and not as an “informant”!

I shall finish by returning to the Preface. Blommaert began with an acknowledgment of a methodological limitation: the fact that for economic reasons the data texts on which his theses are based are not available for scrutiny in the appendix. There is a fundamental conflict here between Blommaert's positioning in his dismissal of hegemony and from a location within “the system” which privileges, honors, and takes his word for it. Would Routledge have published a Julien-authored or a Tshibumba-authored monograph without such data texts? Nonetheless, I recommend Grassroots literacy as an illuminating and resourceful book.