Sabrina Billings has made a fine contribution to scholarship on global English through a study of multivocality, truncated multilingualism, and semiotics in Tanzanian beauty pageants. Her research draws on fieldwork producing multiple types of evidence, including attending rehearsals, recording pageants, collecting recordings made by others as well as newspaper coverage, interviewing contestants and organizers, and conducting focus groups. The original research resulted in Billings's (Reference Billings2006) dissertation and several articles (Reference Billings2009, Reference Billings2011a, Reference Billings2011b), but in this volume she adds ‘a greater emphasis on gender as well as non-linguistic features’ at play in pageants (p. 26).
Chapter 1 introduces us to young urbanites who take part in—or aspire to—local, regional, national, and (rarely) international beauty pageants. Billings documents such pageants' popularity in Tanzania and their role in young women's fantasies of a better life, through not only the immediate tangible prizes possible but also dreams of leaving Tanzania. Most importantly, she shows the role that language and other symbolic resources play as they structure economic and gendered inequality.
She begins by juxtaposing two vignettes, one about a successful Miss Tanzania who spoke ‘a pan-African version of the standard English, at once full of exotic charm but also fully fluent’ (p. 5) and another about ‘Justina, a typical contestant’ (p. 3), who struggled to finish secondary school. Their stories illustrate the stark divide between, on the one hand, fantasized possible outcomes and, on the other, more probable outcomes.
Building on those examples, Billings moves on to review the literature on language and globalization, the sociolinguistics of mobility, and cosmopolitanism. Pageants are both global and local phenomena, and we must pay attention to how they are ‘made local’ and interpreted in local contexts (p. 8). This provides a link to her focus on English as a globalized language. Drawing heavily from Higgins (Reference Higgins2009), Billings argues for the importance of examining linguistic hybridity and multivocality. She uses the notion of ‘truncated linguistic competencies’ (p. 12) to examine the ‘highly fragmented and non-standard’ ways that contestants use English to index status and education. Yet, she illustrates, these indexicalities are ‘reordered’ if they win one pageant and advance to higher levels where they must compete with other contestants who may have more resources and access to education (p. 13); drawing on Blommaert's (Reference Blommaert2010) ‘scales’, she shows how varieties of English and Swahili are linguistic resources valued differently at different levels of pageantry.
Chapter 2 continues the work of an introduction that is already a bit too long. Readers familiar with Tanzania will want to skip this chapter to get to the meat of the book: Billings's very interesting data. For undergraduate readers, though, this chapter provides a useful overview of ‘the power of language’ in Africa (p. 31), language ideologies, especially regarding standard language, registers, national and educational language policies, and urban language use (again drawing heavily on Higgins).
Chapter 3 explores the history of international beauty pageants and their rise in Tanzania; after briefly appearing in the 1960s, they were banned by the government but then reinstated in 1994, and have flourished since then. Billings outlines the hierarchy of Tanzanian pageants from regional to zonal to national ones, useful for understanding the scales introduced earlier. And she shows how national identity is performed by Tanzanian pageant contestants, through clothing and links to their home regions as tourist attractions, as they hope to represent their country at the Miss World competition. Here, we encounter the first excerpts from the linguistic ethnographic data Billings obtained in Tanzania: a transcript from a Miss Northern zone competition recorder in Arusha (p. 73–4); and a contestant's response to the pageant question: ‘If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be and why?’ (p. 76). Billings's analysis of the latter is particularly interesting, showing how contestants mobilize references to HIV/AIDS and condoms to place themselves in both cosmopolitan and national frameworks. In light of other recent research on taboos that limit talk about sexuality in Tanzania (Ivanova, Reference Ivanova2015; Thompson, Reference Thompson2011), I was intrigued by Billings's claim that ‘the frequent mention of the word ‘condom’ signals a particular kind of Tanzanian positionality in which speaking openly about AIDS, sex and prophylactics marks one as urban and educated’ (p. 77). Billings also makes good use of Tanzanian news reports, including published interviews with contestants, but most of her own data comes rather late in the book and is surprisingly sparse in comparison with the other data on which she draws.
Chapter 4 explores how contestants need to speak in a ‘pure’ register of English, through a focus on the truncated multilingualism (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck, Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005) they display at various levels of competition. Here we finally get immersed in Billings's data, with excerpts from interviews and recordings from pageants, as well as analysis of newspaper coverage that comments on contestants' language use. One of the most interesting examples in this chapter again refers to AIDS. When a contestant claims, in English, that if she wins she will help fight AIDS, she pronounces it /eydiz/ and is laughed off the stage, even though the audience ignores her other ungrammatical uses of English and similar pronunciation errors from other contestants. Billings convincingly argues that AIDS ‘functioned here as a register shibboleth’ (p. 107). She explains: ‘The contestant's failure to produce the accepted pronunciation of this well known word … both foregrounded to the audience her discomfort with English and also suggested to them that her interest in the disease was disingenuous’ (p. 108).
Chapter 5 turns to the similarity between pageants and young women's quest for education, revealing the disjuncture between the social construction of education and actual prospects of obtaining an education, employment, and escape. Some contestants draw attention to their own education both through explicit reference to what level they have completed and through their use of English (p. 130), while others omit reference to it and use Swahili, unwittingly presenting themselves as not highly educated (p. 131), and still others pretend to have higher levels of education than they actually have (p. 131). Views on Tanzania's educational system are also a frequent topic in the speeches contestants give on stage. Again Billings illustrates the importance of discourses about HIV/AIDS, a key social issue that indexes one's education and a ‘modern Tanzanian’ identity (p. 134). Pageant language ideologies mirror those of the educational system: when a contestant speaks ‘pure’ English (without codemixing), it is valued over ‘pure’ Swahili. Even when Swahili is spoken with greater fluency, grammatical accuracy, complexity, and comprehension than English, a contestant who speaks English is more likely to win.
Chapter 6 is one of the most interesting, showing that ‘ethnic languages’ (those other than Swahili and English) are almost completely absent from pageants. Through interviews with contestants, Billings illustrates the widespread ideology that ‘mother tongues’ are not appropriate for use during pageants. While not claiming personal affiliation with any ethnicity, contestants use ‘self-conscious indicators of ethnicity’ for various artistic effects. Billings considers debates about a woman of South Asian heritage winning the national crown, raising the issue of race in relation to Tanzanian identity. I would like to have seen Billings complicate the issue of Swahili ethnicity more; her use of ‘ethnic languages’ for everything other than Swahili is problematic, as is her assumption that when contestants ‘claimed not to have an ethnic affiliation … this probably meant that they were ethnically Swahili’ (p. 157). Many have anecdotally observed that while Swahili has long been the first language of coastal people (the ‘ethnic Swahili’), it is rapidly becoming a first language in urban areas. Billings's work adds important evidence of this change, with many contestants professing ignorance of their ethnic languages; yet whether this means that they now think of themselves as ‘ethnically Swahili’ remains an open question that demands further research.
The final chapter returns to the theme of reality versus desire, with both education and pageants structured around the access to English that young women hope will help them achieve their desires for a better life but that, in reality, usually does not. Billings closes by returning to Justina, the ‘typical contestant’ we met in the introduction: She is still focused on escaping Tanzania, emailing Billings to request work, money, and help finding a Western boyfriend. The book ends with this image of Justina, like other young women, at the ‘precarious crossroads’ (p. 193) we have seen echoed in each of the preceding chapters.
I was left wanting to hear more from young women like Justina. Although we read quotes from contestants in response to specific questions Billings asked about language use, we don't get a rounded picture of any of them as individuals. At the same time, Billings's own voice is slightly overshadowed by an overemphasis on previous linguistic work on Tanzania (especially by Blommaert, and Higgins) as well as on various theoretical frameworks (especially Agha Reference Agha2007). Nevertheless, the book presents a highly nuanced account of language use, education, gender, and ethnicity in contemporary Tanzania, and it will certainly enrich discussions of multilingualism in both applied linguistics and African studies.
