The title of this book wouldn't predict opening and concluding chapters on hip-hop and hip-hop cultures worldwide. What does hip-hop have to do with global Englishes? And what are transcultural flows? In this well-written, incredibly wide-ranging, and still slender volume, Pennycook connects the dots for us. What impresses Pennycook, quoting from Mitchell (Reference Mitchell and Mitchell2001:2), is that “hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African-American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world” (8). And along with the break-dancing, DJ-ing, and graffiti, the culture of hip-hop, through rap, is also causing English to take root in these youth cultures. What impresses Pennycook is that these “transcultural flows,” as he calls them, have comfortably rooted hip-hop (and English) in youth culture worldwide without uproars over the imperialism of spreading English to the world and without the time and effort of establishing national language policies calling for English to enter a particular country's school system by a particular grade. What is hip-hop doing right that academics scornful of studying funk and popular culture need to know? This is the fundamental question driving Pennycook's book.
As it turns out, hip-hop is doing quite a lot right, particularly in its hidden theoretical assumptions about cultural dynamics. First, indigenous cultures deserve more credit for their capacity to suit English to their own purposes than they are generally given by those (e.g., Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangas, Hoerkeimer, Adorno) conceiving English and Anglo-American culture as monoliths able to steamroll local difference. Wherever English has entered hip-hop cultures worldwide, be it East Asia, France, West Africa, or the Pacific Islands, it has entered as congenial, one of many codes in a code-switching neighborhood of imported and indigenous languages.
Second, nation-states and their Enlightenment understandings of language, knowledge, and colonization are out of step with the contemporary reality of cultural influence and change, particularly within youth cultures. Pennycook argues that even the “post” theories criticizing these understandings (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) lie trapped in the (outdated nationalistic) frameworks they are attacking. To understand the cultural dynamics of hip-hop, Pennycook seeks to replace “post” theories with “trans” theories – starting with theories of transgression. To transgress is to push against limits, to cross boundaries as one can, and all in the “pleasure of doing things differently” (42). It is this creative and playful pleasure that, according to Pennycook, is behind hip-hop. Pennycook further insists that such productive transgression is the driving force behind the use of language itself. The central mantra of hip-hop culture is “keeping it real” (98), which also translates into making it matter and what Pennycook calls “authenticity.” The emergence of hip-hop cultures across the world coincides with the emergence of youth, drawn by pleasure, play, and seriousness, to express their felt reality as authentically as they can. This is a powerful motivation for pedagogies of English education, and Pennycook devotes a final chapter to the promise of such pedagogies.
Third, “keeping it real” is a standard incompatible with the assumptions of language diversity and development held by those in the World Englishes movement (e.g., Braj Kachru). In contrast to theories that make English an imperial giant, Kachru's vision was to have every country define its own national standard for an “educated” English. This would allow countries not in the “inner circle” (the inner circle being England, America, and Australia) but once under British rule (the so-called outer circle, such as India, Kachru's homeland) to create their own English standards. And it would allow countries with no Anglophone connection (the so-called expanding circle) to rely on the inner circle for their standards until a time when they might find their own norms. Ostensibly, then, the World Englishes movement promotes admirable values of tolerance and plurality on behalf of many peoples across the world speaking many Englishes. Pennycook shows some sympathy with this approach. However, he hurls even more brickbats its way. Citing critics of World Englishes such as Bruthiaux, Holborow, and Parakrama, he notes that the concentric circles draw a broad and inaccurate brush across the world, confounding population demographics, English varieties, and world geography. Within each circle, many different English varieties are spoken. And any effort to select out a particular English-language norm per country, even in the name of worldwide inclusiveness, ends up excluding many local varieties, not least creoles. These local varieties and creoles are likely to form the “vernacular voices of the popular,” the voices in which youth are inspired to “make it matter” and “keep it real,” to derive pleasure and to achieve identity by succeeding at “doing things differently.” Such local varieties and creoles are thus the primary conductor of transgressive theories, and, as we recall from Pennycook, the impetus to transgress creatively is what gives hip-hop its transcultural mobility. Focusing on one unitary English standard per region, excluding the local vernaculars of transgressive play, the World Englishes movement bets on the wrong strategy for connecting the world through English.
Fourth, the problem lies even deeper than a flawed strategy. It lies in a flawed theory of language, a segregationist theory that separates language proper from the palette of semiotic options available when one wishes to communicate authentically. Pennycook endorses the integregationalist linguistics of Roy Harris, who sees language as deriving its full force in accompaniment with the other semiotic signposts – visual, sound, dance, music – available in a communication context. But if language intrinsically connects to other modalities and their contexts, what are the properties of language per se that enable such connective ties? To answer this question, Pennycook weaves speedily (perhaps too much so) through the ideas of Saussure, Kress, Scollon & Scollon, Pierce, van Lier, and Kramsch, and (with additional assistance from Vygotsky and Bakhtin) finally arrives at his notion of transtextuality, which is a perspective that insists on seeing meaning in its historical, contextual, subtextual, intertextual, and, finally, interpretive context. Transtextuality makes the decipherment of meaning a formidable work of translating across perspectives. One can then imagine what professional translation becomes under the guiding principles of transtextuality. Pennycook has a trans- name for that too: translingualism, an approach to translation that uncovers all salient differences between different codes in addition to their points of convergence.
All of these trans- approaches (and we have no space to elaborate transidiomatic) to language fall on the performance side of Chomsky's competence/performance distinction. Pennycook devotes chap. 4 to the meaning of performance within hip-hop culture specifically, and, generally, within theories of language proper. As Austin revolutionized speech act theory in the 1960s by teaching us “how to do things with words,” Pennycook finds in hip-hop culture the seeds of a new insight in performance theory: “how to do identity and language with words.” The basic idea is that we do not use words to enact an identity we already have. We rather acquire our identities through our performances. The production of identity is in the doing (71). Rather than language learning as a chore of mastering one authorized code, it becomes an imperative to use all the codes at our disposal to be real. This imperative creates identities in local places and inspires translocalization, others watching and listening from afar, to enact their identities elsewhere. Pennycook's penultimate chapter, “Language flows, language mixes”, illustrates the translocal codes and code-switching among hip-hop groups around the world.
Pennycook's strength is to expose the hidden and unresolved complexities when we think about the global spread of English. One can't read this book and ever again think that the global/local dichotomy is a simple one. Especially simplistic is the idea that English is invariably the global force intruding on indigenous languages. Pennycook has too many rich examples of hip-hoppers in Asia and elsewhere who have hoarded away English for the most local of their purposes. Translocalization does important theoretical work explaining these and many other cases of English as a local language globally.
Pennycook's weakness is to see hip-hop culture at the vanguard of English language learning. Perhaps it is. But to know this requires an account of how popular culture interfaces with and influences elite culture. While reading this book, one can't help but wonder how poor, disenfranchised, and mostly disconnected teens throughout the world will get the attention of the World Bank and serious investors in educational reform. What will such investors want to know? Even the staunchest believers in authenticity as a principle of literacy will wonder if all performances are equally good and worth an A. Once we start to interrogate the standards underlying how we value performance, the distinctions that Pennycook works so hard to dissolve (between language and context, language and modality, language and identity) may awaken from the grave. Perhaps that is Pennycook's next book.
