Speaker: Rakesh Bhatt, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Biography:

Rakesh M. Bhatt is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His research is concerned with different aspects of acquisition and use of multilingualism.  His current research is focused mainly on demonstrating (a) the different ways in which bilingual’s creativity is expressed in contexts of language contact; specifically, code-switching and mixing, and (b) language ideologies that underlie a range of socio-linguistic domains; specifically, analyses of “expert” discourse in ESL pedagogy (in post-colonial contexts), linguistic acts of local resistance to global linguistic hegemony, and language loss, maintenance and shift of minority languages.

Title: "Colonial Discourse, Alter-native Ideologies, and the Politics of Linguistic Nostalgia"

Abstract:

In this talk I will attempt to accomplish one modest goal: to demonstrate how post-colonial subjects become “hegemony’s most successful discontents” (to borrow a phrase from Erickson 2004) by acting against the inclinations of their linguistic habitus, breaking away in the process with the order of things and carving out a niche that is neither global (colonial, Standard English) nor necessarily local (native, Indian English).  Specifically, I will analyze the strategic mixing of Hindi in the Indian English daily newspapers used to contest and shape alter-“native” representations of indexical practices.  I will argue that this process (of mixing) on the one hand challenges the colonial authority and hegemony (and the consequent homogeny) of English language use in India—cf. the Quirk/Kachru debate—and on the other hand, recalls at once the historical-cultural narratives that are native to the land, albeit in an irresolvable tension with the current secular political culture.