Harris & Rampton's collection of 25 classic and current articles on language and ethnicity is a welcome tool for the undergraduate-level instructor who requires an astute collection with diverse theoretical and historical perspectives. The introduction guides teachers and students toward theoretical implications of the articles and offers a number of organizational suggestions for how to “read.” The book is first organized into three sections: “Colonialism, imperialism, and global process,” “Nation states and minorities,” and “Language discourse and ethnic style.” In turn, each of the sections proceeds historically along a continuum: premodern → modern → postmodern. For pedagogical purposes, the editors supply a table locating each of the excerpts in its place along this continuum – “a gross oversimplification” to spark debate, for which they hope the readers will take them to task (p. 6).
A third organizational principle is invoked with Table 2, “Four orientations to linguistic and cultural diversity” (8–9). Here, approaches to diversity – deficit, difference, domination, and discourse – are outlined as they intersect with philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives and approaches to language, research, descriptive focus, and assumptions about the world. This detailed chart is also acknowledged as problematic but is presented with the hope that discussion will result from the effort readers make to locate articles within this matrix. The editors offer a final method of classification in Table 3, “Crude preliminary sub-classification by geographical and institutional focus” (11). Of course, classification is important to understanding historical trends. However, too much emphasis placed on this task rather than a more interpretive theoretical focus becomes ironic when authors attempt to engage readers in problematizing socially constructed categories of race and ethnicity.
Regrettably, Harris & Rampton's approach to these excellent articles – through extensive classificatory suggestions and condensation of content – verges on condescension to the reader. First, the condensation of the articles (citations, words, paragraphs, or pages left out through ellipses) leads to the elision of the linguistic diversity and ethnic diversity captured through real language examples. For instance, the elision of the pages of phonological and morphosyntactic explanations that illustrate the influence of Twi-Asante on Jamaican Creole in “Language and Jamaican culture” (54–68) leaves only a discussion of lexico-semantics (65) to support Mervyn Alleyne's thesis that there was much more influence from African languages on Jamaican Creole than many creolists had previously thought. The editors do not explain or offer a rationale for their choices, other than apologizing to the authors and noting that “rewording and adjusting” was done to “make them accessible to a wider audience” (10). These adjustments do not typically interfere with understanding the authors' main points, although they may detract from the overall impact. Most of them are acknowledged in the text through ellipses. Nevertheless, there are a number of editorial errors. For instance, a comparison of Susan Philips's “Native Americans and communicative competence” with the original, cited source shows that several missing paragraphs and a quote are unacknowledged (260, 263). Likewise, R. P. McDermott & Kenneth Gospondinoff's “Social contexts for ethnic borders and school failure” and John Gumperz & Eduardo Hernandez-Chavez's “Bilingual code-switching” have unacknowledged ellipses (278, 296, 300) and an added sentence (287).
Without more explanation, it is difficult to accept “accessibility” as a rationale for the cuts, especially since a few of the articles, such as Michael Billig's “Banal nationalism,” consist of components from different chapters of a monograph, spliced together to create an article. There are two problems with spliced excerpts: They distract from the central theme for the reader; and they mitigate the force of the original author's intent. The Billig collection, for instance, lacks some cohesion. Billig argues that the underlying “we” in British newspapers and the unconscious manipulation of such repetitive inclusivity (re)creates nationalism in potentially destructive ways. His critical discourse approach to the “national” news in England – weather, sports, and politics – deconstructs the naturalness of such “flag-waving” and notes its connection to masculinity and war. This is a complex point that can be succinctly and productively tied to the subsection theme of “Language, nation states and minorities.” Billig's analysis of language and nationality is, however, prefaced by a critique and comparison of patriotism and nationalism in the United States. In Billig's full-length book this discussion works, but here it detracts.
Otto Jespersen's (1922) “The origin of speech” derives from the last chapter of his book Language: Its nature, development and origin. As in Billig's contribution, the relationship between race and language has been decontextualized to illustrate a particular point in the current context. Jespersen's original point – that primitive and tribal languages (including classical Latin and Greek) are morphosyntactically complex or fusional and not actually good models if we are seeking the origin of human language – is obscured. When the text is cut up, Jespersen's linguistic racism becomes the most salient point. His use of the terms “primitive” and “tribal” can only be understood anachronistically, as they are associated here primarily with Africa and Native America. In effect, the original text and the meanings of its time are rendered less rather than more accessible.
Granted, where excerpts are amalgams, the reader is asked to grapple with texts that do not strictly fall within the relationship of language, gender and race. Through a postmodern sampling, readers are encouraged to understand the ways that these central themes are threaded through nation building, individual bilingual choices, attitudes about linguistics, and the construction of individual identity. The question remains whether this sampling and recontextualization of voices is ultimately successful for understanding the issues in depth.
Interestingly, those authors (Jespersen, Edward Sapir, Alleyne, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Philips) classified as “traditional” to “modern” speak to lesser-known, often rural languages, while the postmodern work on language policy represented here is quite urban in its conception. There is a gap between the current work on identity and endangered minority languages and the postmodern linguistic literature. Here postmodernism focuses on the positioning, appropriation, and mixing of healthy tongues. For instance, Jane Hill's “Mock Spanish, covert racism, and the (leaky) boundary between public and private spheres” traces the construction of Spanish and Latinos as “jokes” in the public sphere of the United States, reflecting white English speakers' power to appropriate at will and raise themselves above Latinos. In “Language and destabilization of ethnicity,” Roger Hewitt asks us to reevaluate traditional models of sociolinguistics to incorporate mixed varieties such as the Punjabi, Afro-Caribbean, and English of London youth culture, and Les Back's “X amount of Sat Siri Akal!” suggests that a unitary definition of identity in such contexts of mixing is misleading. Cecilia Cutler (“Yorkville Crossing, white teens, hip hop, and African American English”) argues, however, that white American youths' appropriation of hip-hop and African American English is in fact highly contested and can reinforce cultural boundaries.
A postmodern valorization of multiplicitous, mixed identities could be code for new global colonialism, especially for those people who are ideologically committed to asserting a strong connection between ethnic identity and traditional, local languages. Fortunately, two of the articles in the book – Alamin Mazrui's “The World Bank, the language question and the future of African education” and Jacqueline Urla's “Outlaw language: Creating alternative public spheres in Basque Free Radio” – construct a bridge between traditional and postmodern considerations and between globalization and ethnic identity in language. They tie the changing linguistic construction of ethnicity and language to both global political hegemony and local practices in language revitalization and literacy. Mazrui demonstrates that despite the World Bank's overt ideological commitment to first-language literacy education in Africa, it discourages monetary allocations for government education subsidies in this area. Additionally, colonial languages still dominate postsecondary levels of education in many African countries, belying the commitment to linguistic diversity and training minority language teachers. Urla, however, argues that Basque Free Radio creates an alternative public sphere that is resistant to both Spanish dominance and traditional Basque language preservationist ideology. Drawing on urban youth resistance movements throughout the world, “‘local’ expressions of Basque radical youth cultural are constituted through a kind of cultural bricolage that is facilitated by transnational flows of media, commodities, images, and people” (222). In both cases, ethnic identity in local languages is influenced by the market and dominant cultural needs.
Yet the dominant cultural norm that forms the context for postmodern mixed identities remains nebulous. The dominant norm is appreciatively consumptive of multiplicity and diversity, but only to the extent that the inconvenient details of other ethnicities (such as phonological and grammatical detail or first-language literacy) do not interfere with its own reproduction. The ethnic identity of this norm remains underdescribed throughout most discussions in this volume on ethnicity (exceptions are Hill and Cutler); but it is the proverbial elephant in the room. Although recent work in ethnicity has referred to these assimilative characteristics as “white” (Trechter & Bucholtz 2001), their global presence requires more contextual examination to understand whether whiteness is ethnicity, or only a backdrop for our exploration of other identities. Despite the difficulties with “reading” the volume, the collection of the articles begins that exploration.
