Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018
http://compositionforum.com/issue/40/

Review of Xiaoye You’s Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy

Hua Zhu

You, Xiaoye. Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy. Southern Illinois UP, 2016. 300pp.

Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy, by Xiaoye You, adds to the ongoing conversations on understanding and teaching linguistic diversity and creativity. By thoroughly grounding the work in composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and applied linguistics, You pursues two lines of inquiry: how do we ethically conceive language difference as situated in specific sociocultural arenas and at particular historical moments, and how do we practically enhance students’ ability to marshal language varieties as resources of writing in an era of globalization? In engaging with these questions, You first uses cosmopolitanism to conceptualize how English users in and beyond the school settings draw upon diverse languages, dialects, and literary styles to make human connections across boundaries of all kinds. His book thus provides us a thick description of language varieties as used in actual context of interactions. Meanwhile, You moves beyond a descriptive account of language varieties and addresses how teachers can teach language difference as repertoire. With its dual focus, You’s book offers us fresh data to understand how language users respond to contingent local-global conditions by moving across cultures, languages, and communities. It also provides teachers concrete pedagogic advice to foster students’ willingness and ability of using language varieties at a time of frequent border-crossings.

Although multiculturalism, feminism, and translingualism are also committed to appreciating language varieties and have significantly furthered our understandings of intersectional identities, these existing conceptual frames unfortunately associate language varieties with nation, race, gender, or ethnicity (4-6). These frameworks thus risk essentializing language differences and cultural identities, perpetuating boundary-making and, especially, the discourse of nationalism. With cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, You adopts an “anti-essentialist stance” (6), on the basis of which he acknowledges the connections between language variety and contingent local-global conditions, and further characterizes language users not in terms of a particular identity category but as citizens of the world. Via the frame of cosmopolitanism, You not only examines language in actual use without being confined by rigid cultural and identity categories, but more importantly, promotes “an ethics of globalization,” namely, a moral obligation to “engage strangers through creative meaning” and to communicate across “ideological, religious, political, racial, or linguistic differences” (9). As such, You also channels out one major call in Comparative Rhetoric, one that LuMing Mao highlights through the term “togetherness-in-interdependence” (78), that seeking human interconnection across cultures and discourse communities is the premise, the requisite, of any cross-cultural undertaking, and indeed, the responsibility of today’s writers.

Grounded in cosmopolitanism, which believes that all people “are morally obliged to” others and have the agency to form “new alliances” (6), You uses Cosmopolitan English (hereafter CE) to account for the sensibilities and practices of synthesizing different language varieties and other non-linguistic systems to engage with diverse national, ethnic, generic, and cultural discourses. Compared to existing analytical constructs such as interlanguage or World Englishes, CE highlights the situatedness of language difference. Together with translingual studies of language, and specifically, Min-Zhan Lu’s “living-English” project and Pennycook’s argument that language is “local practices,” CE mobilizes researchers to investigate English varieties not as deviation, but as creative responses to, and critical reshapings of, local conditions and transnational cultural practices. Further, CE also serves as a pedagogic heuristic, guiding students to critically interrogate the interplay between sociopolitical activities and English uses. CE hence allows teachers to add a global dimension to writing pedagogies and further promote transliteracy, an ability to mingle various language varieties and styles for communicating across linguistic, rhetorical, racial, and sociocultural differences.

In efforts to frame CE as both an analytical construct and a pedagogic heuristic of linguistic diversity and creativity, You’s book is roughly divided into two parts. The first half (from chapter two to four) is preoccupied with the making of CE on specific occasions of use, with a special attention to language uses in different online English learning forums. In the second part of the book, You focuses on language-in-use in academic contexts, teasing out practical tactics for enhancing academic performances and demonstrating how students and teachers could use CE to challenge a monolingual view of literacy competence.

To open up the discussion of CE and its role in forming identities, You first attends to the notion of cosmopolitan ethos in chapter two. By examining an English learning website in Japan, You shows how we may fluidly diffuse English with other semiotic symbol systems to bring people of different cultures together, and how we may develop new identities and attachments by re-building a digital space. He continues discussing in chapter three the functions of CE in reconstituting communal identities and its potential in collapsing the wall of nationalism: by investigating the “diasporic conciseness” of Chinese college-educated white collars (66), You provides a case study of how drawing upon a wide array of languages, dialects, and modalities could empower writers to adapt to a new lifestyle and forge social relations in a foreign place. Having investigated CE in digital space in chapter four, You turns to CE in three contemporary novels, concentrating on how multilingual writers synthesize discourse features and patterns of various communities to relate to a global audience. In these three chapters, You emphasizes we can no longer associate English with discrete national, ethnic, or regional categories. He further calls for the field to replace the World Englishes construct with the notion of CE. Circulating the term CE more widely will free us from nation-anchored labels of English, allow us to challenge the discourse of nationalism, and carve out space for disrupting the Standard English discourse, which has functioned at the expense of the cultural Others to realize the politico-economic interests of the privileged.

In the following three chapters, You takes his readers to three transnational writing classes and foregrounds his second line of inquiry: how do we promote and teach linguistic diversity and creativity in the classrooms? Chapter five scrutinizes various pedagogical accommodations made by American professors in a summer school in Shanghai, China, showing how teachers may act as “literacy sponsors and brokers” (117) to make space for students’ grassroots literacy practices in a high-stake, academic context. Meanwhile, You acutely points out that while the accommodations made by the American professors indeed have helped students speak in their own voices to audiences from an elite literacy regime, they only meet students’ needs halfway in that the mediations they made still presume a monolingual assumption of using Standard English in the academic setting. The next chapter thus proceeds to demonstrate how teachers and students could collaborate to challenge the rigid linguistic boundaries and identity categories in academic writings. Through analyzing three Chinese students’ literacy experiences in an English for Academic Purpose course, You emphasizes the potential of code-meshing in transforming nation-based labels, shifting subjectivities of writers, and forging “cosmopolitan dispositions” to communicate across cultures (141). Chapter seven takes the readers from summer schools in China back to American universities. By presenting his upper-level English course, You demonstrates how writing teachers could develop the transliteracy of American students, who generally see themselves as “native speakers” of English. In these three chapters, You joins in the conversation of translingual writing, in particular, addressing one long-debated question: how do students actually use their experiences in different languages and cultures as resources for literacy development? By showcasing concrete examples of teaching and particular moments of teacher-student interactions, You provides us practical methods and tactics of recontextualizing diverse literacy experiences to inform and enhance academic writing.

Not confining his scope to classrooms, You also addresses actions Writing Program Administrators may take. In chapter eight, he embarks on “a model of border crossing,” a model of teacher development that is based on global partnership between American and Chinese universities. While this professional development model involves administrative challenges, it nevertheless is valuable in that it provides opportunities for teachers to gain firsthand experiences of working with multilingual writers. This model also facilitates teachers to rethink commonplaces of composition, such as “audience” and “genre,” and further attunes us to the cultural associations and rhetorical complexities embedded in our day-to-day teaching.

In the concluding chapter, You uses a student’s reflection to underlie that transgressing boundaries between languages and nations will reconstruct the conceptual frames and the subjectivities of writers. Stressing these transformative effects of CE, You reiterates that writing teachers are obliged to prepare all students—not just students from particular ethnic or “minority” groups—to develop an appreciation towards diverse English varieties and modalities and cultivate a rhetorical attunement to rework and unwork existing linguistic, cultural, and evaluative categories.

As explicated at the beginning of this essay, You’s book is particularly valuable in two aspects. First, relying on the conceptual and analytical frame of CE, this book acutely captures the constantly changing forms of English in a local-global context. While a situated perspective of language is one major trend in our field, You’s critical analyses of English-in-use provide us fresh examples of translanguaging in schools and beyond. He demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of English varieties in transnational contexts, strengthening the argument that as difference in language is the norm rather than a deviation, an urgent task for scholars is finding means to move and reconstitute boundaries of language, culture, and identity. His book hence adds to our field’s ongoing efforts to remove the monolingual force of censoring, marginalizing, or essentializing any English variety. Second, by specifying the diverse forms of CE in a broad spectrum of social discourses, You offers teachers practical pedagogical tactics. In fact, writing and living in an era of globalization compels teachers to observe and abstract CE in practice. In this light, You’s book is generative in renewing our teaching methods to help students more critically understand the blurring lines between languages, styles, and modalities, guide them to actively transform linguistic, sociocultural, and rhetorical differences, and better prepare them to creatively perform within and across language, culture, discipline, and nation.

Works Cited

Lu, Min-Zhan. Metaphors Matter: Transcultural Literacy. JAC, vol. 29, no. 1-2, 2009, pp. 285-293.

Mao, LuMing. From the Spread of English to the Formation of an Indigenous Rhetoric. Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions, edited by Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson, Southern Illinois UP, 2014, pp. 77-89.

Pennycook, Alastair. Language as a Local practice. Routledge, 2010.