Month: November 2020

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American prestige press newspapers valorize and celebrate the global hegemony of “America’s” language

These five newspapers are among the most influential in the U.S. “ and even in the world. Their coverage of the global hegemony of English both reflects, and reproduces, American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC).

This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in five major American newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times  and the Miami Herald cover the global hegemony of English. The paper itself offers an overview of my Ph.D. doctoral thesis in which I conducted a critical discourse analysis of more than 200 articles published in five American prestige press newspapers across more than a decade’s worth of time, from 1991 to 2003. The analysis found, among other things, that, in general, the newspapers valorized and celebrated the rise of English as a global language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American prestige press newspapers valorize and celebrate the global hegemony of “America’s” language”

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American university students and the global hegemony of English

This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in which more than 100 American college undergraduates reflect upon their own linguistic privilege vis-a-vis the global hegemony of English. The students reflect as well upon the ways in which being at the center of the global linguistic configuration of power also hurts them inasmuch as it reduces their incentive, and chances, to learn a non-English language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American university students and the global hegemony of English”

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American, Australian and Slovenian students debate the global hegemony of English

English is, far and away, the world’s most hegemonic language. This is true inasmuch as anyone who wants to rise to the top of global domains of power such as business, technology, science, higher education and law, pretty much has to learn English, typically to a very high degree of fluency.

Below is an abstract for a paper that examines the way in which the global hegemony of English privileges Anglo-Americans. The paper is based on a critical textual analysis of online discussion board exchanges about this topic among American, Australian and Slovenian university students. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) because it allows mother tongue speakers of English in the U.S. to get away without learning another language and therefore places a significant linguistic blinder on them. It also causes them to be more inward looking inasmuch as so few English-mother tongue speakers in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc. expand their linguistic horizons in any meaningful or deep way. A failure to expand these horizons means, of course — and this is redundant, I know — that their cultural and linguistic horizons are smaller and more inward pointing that members of other language groups all of who pretty much are required to learn English. Continue reading “American, Australian and Slovenian students debate the global hegemony of English”

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A South Korean film, Parasite, may have become the first non-English language best picture winner, but Americans still have little interest in foreign film

A poster for Parasite. In 2020, the South Korean film became the first non-English language film to ever win the best picture award at the Academy Awards . [Credit: CJ Entertainment]
For more than 100 years, the United States has been an exceedingly difficult market for non-English language films to penetrate. The historic win of the best picture award at the 92nd Academy Awards by the South Korean film Parasite cuts against that grain.

But only a little.

Yes, Parasite did break important new ground by becoming the first non-English-language film in the 92-year history of the Academy Awards to win the coveted best picture award. But — and this is an important but — it is the ONLY non-English language film, so far, to ever win this award. Continue reading “A South Korean film, Parasite, may have become the first non-English language best picture winner, but Americans still have little interest in foreign film”

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A listing of news media coverage of American Cultural Insularity

 

Credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons Graphic.

American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) does generate news media coverage, and has for awhile. In fact, the specific idea of ACIC seems to garner more attention in the news media than it does within academic research and scholarship where it is, within global media and international communication studies at least, largely overlooked as a phenomenon. Most of the attention by scholars is instead devoted to the impact of American culture outside of the United States rather than to some of the very clear, and also interesting, and, from a critical perspective, troubling dimensions of the comparative domination of American culture globally on its own domestic cultural production, consumption and distribution context.

Below is an obviously incomplete and somewhat eclectic but also interesting and revealing of list of news media coverage that touches upon, and often focuses upon, some dimension of or aspect of ACIC.  For now, I have organized the list chronologically, according to date of publication, from most recent to oldest.  I may change this organization as I search for, and come across, more news media coverage that either focuses on ACIC or touches on some significant aspect of it. Continue reading “A listing of news media coverage of American Cultural Insularity”

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American Cultural Insularity in the Center and the global hegemony of “standard” written Anglo-American English

Where American vs. British English tends to be taught as the “ideal” standard for those studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL). [Credit: reddit user Speech500]
The following paper  — The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard — which examines the key question of the different ways in which a global written standard English privileges elite Americans and solidifies their global language and general cultural hegemony, puts forward what I believe to be a powerful and accurate – and extremely important – critique of the ways in which global power brokers (re)create a cultural and linguistic order that favors them and people like them.

I submitted it for consideration for publication in two academic journals: World Englishes and Language Problems & Language Planning. In total, three anonymous academic reviewers read my  submission. All three returned what I found to be hugely unfair and also demeaning and dehumanizing rejections. The often demeaning and hypocritical and poor treatment of other academics under the cloak of anonymity is one of the things I dislike most about the academic world. My experience has shown that far too often anonymous review results in people abusing their anonymity to blast writers of submissions in deeply personal and charged ways. In this case, the reviewers clearly did not like the fact that, in this paper, I was criticizing two things: Continue reading “American Cultural Insularity in the Center and the global hegemony of “standard” written Anglo-American English”