Composition Forum 45, Fall 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/45/

Review of Suresh Canagarajah’s Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing

Thir Bahadur Budhathoki

Canagarajah, Suresh. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing. Routledge, 2019, 282 pp.

Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing defies traditional generic categorization as the author’s literacy autobiography, a collection of students’ literacy autobiographies, a pedagogical resource, and a research report all at the same time. Exploring the personal narratives loaded with emotional and sometimes traumatic memories in a writing classroom, this book examines literacy development in a liminal space—an intersection of the translingual and the transnational. Concepts like transnational and translingual are associated with the mobility of people across the national borders as a part of globalization, but Canagarajah claims that they have existed since ancient times even though they were not named as such. To him, transnational is not a place but a space that is “virtual, social, constructed, and emergent” (5). This book can be taken as a continuation of his 2013 book Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations where he introduces translingual practice that questions monolingual notions of language as bounded, abstract, and timeless with ‘standard’ and ‘correctness’ as the defining features. Instead, translingual practice advocates for a new concept of language as fluid and contextual, and “meaning-making as a social practice that engages holistically with ecological and contextual affordances” (Translingual Practice 10). While this book offers both theoretical concepts and terminologies to define translingual practice as well as some pedagogical implications to the language and literacy classrooms, Canagarajah is aware of a common criticism that “advances in theorization of translingual practices have far outstripped pedagogical implementation” (Translingual Practice 12). So, with Transnational Literacy Autobiographies, Canagarajah fills this gap to an extent by analyzing his students’ literacy autobiographies in relation to his own development as a transnational, multilingual scholar working in the US.

In fact, literacy autobiography as a genre provides a great deal of insight about how the writers assess themselves and work to align their language and literacy practices in relation to dominant norms and values of the society. In this book, Canagarajah views the classroom as a contact zone --a liminal space where people from different cultures meet. Likewise, he portrays literacy autobiography (LA) as a liminal genre “congenial for representing in-between identities” or a “genre between genres” as it dwells between personal and academic, narrative and argument, and literary and analytical (Literacy Autobiographies 4). Through the literacy autobiographies of the ‘native’ speakers of English and bi/multilingual immigrants whose first language is not English, Canagarajah shows how the translingual and transnational are intertwined, traces his own literacy development as a migrant scholar, offers a translingual pedagogical model to the writing instructors, provides a collection of student writings for instructional purpose, and shows an example of translingual writing.

The book is divided into two parts: A Teacher’s Literacy Autobiography and Students’ Literacy Autobiographies. Part one contains an introduction and six chapters where the author’s journey as a transnational and translingual scholar is explored along with the discussion of literacy autobiography as a liminal genre in relation to translingual practice and transnational spaces. The first chapter traces Canagarajah’s literacy development as a Srilankan migrant scholar in the US. It explains how he, as a scholar shuttling between languages and communities, had to negotiate two different linguistic conventions. Drawing on the experience of writing a literacy autobiography in 2001, Canagarajah concludes that this genre made him aware of the “rhetorical challenges and options from [his] school days and graduate education to [his] early years as a faculty member” and that it made him “more respectful of [his] vernacular resources, more rooted in [his] traditions, more resistant of rhetorical impositions, and more open to negotiating with dominant norms critically and creatively” (Literacy Autobiographies 17). He defines LA as a performance of identity which, like the liminal nature of the genre itself, is in a state of becoming. Hence, the trope of becoming is a defining feature of LA, and this is corroborated by the details of his own literacy experiences.

In chapter two, Canagarajah talks about the influence of the Tamil linguistic heritage in his literacy as he grew up in post-colonial Sri Lanka with bilingual parents who spoke English in addition to Tamil. The fact that Tamil has a single term for all kinds of essays made him internalize the concepts of ambiguity, fluidity, and liminality of genre at an early age. But he experienced a watershed moment when he, as an English teacher, went to India for a conference. Chapter three shows how Canagarajah was made to realize by a ‘native speaker of English’ in the conference that his version of English was not ‘standard’. It was the beginning of a “journey toward a new identity and communicative practice” with a “painful realization of otherness at the transnational social field” (Literacy Autobiographies 50). This realization of otherness is crucial to understand the harmful consequences of the exclusionary ideologies of monolingualism that do not accept the differences. Interestingly, what is innovative or new and what is ordinary is at the heart of translingualism and other similar concepts like polylingualism and translanguaging that depart from the additive concept of language differences such as multilingualism that treats language as a close and discrete category. This notion of innovation and ordinariness is taken to a new height in Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness that “enable us to understand the ways in which ordinariness is rendered not only visible, as innovation, but also as invisible, along with the ideological ramifications of such renderings” (Lee and Dovchin 3). A major focus of this edited collection is the simultaneity of innovation and ordinariness of language experienced by the researcher and research subjects from their respective positionalities.

Chapter four opens a new avenue of translingual writing that was largely unexplored before--experiences of transnational, multilingual scholars. Canagarajah describes how his attempts to use the US academic writing genre move like CARS: Creating a Research Space received a push back from his Sri Lankan colleagues because they found it unusual. He finds himself an outsider in the US academic discourse because of his Tamil heritage and tries hard to learn it, yet learning the dominant discourse is not always enough because sometimes even “the norms of privileged Western countries also don’t travel freely to gain universal appreciation” (Literacy Autobiographies 70). He, then, proposes negotiated literacy as an alternative to the dominant models of autonomous literacy to account for “meaning in contexts of mobility, contact, and diversity” (71).

In chapter five, he continues to talk about how he mastered (and is still mastering) Western academic conventions, shuttling “between [his] native community and Western academic community” and being an “outsider in both the center and periphery academic communities!” (96). Although Canagarajah is not the first scholar to talk about the experience of transnational, multilingual scholars (see Lillis and Curry; Sharma), his is by far the most extensive treatment of the topic. In her book chapter in Translingual Dispositions, Mihut focuses on “multilingual, transnational scholars for their critical role in shaping pedagogies of language pluralism in mono- or multilingual writing classrooms” (273). One of her major findings shows that US-based transnational, multilingual scholars’ “predispositions to language pluralism and cross-cultural writing have been configured through personal and professional histories with language across multiple national and educational contexts” (273). This indicates that, like graduate students and graduate writing centers, transnational, multilingual scholars can be a new site to study the politics of language differences and its implications.

Part one concludes with chapter six where Canagarajah focuses on the learning implications of the literacy autobiographies studied in the book for teachers. Canagarajah becomes more self-reflective as he talks about his pedagogical practices and questions his grading decisions. In fact, assessment of writing is yet another least explored aspect of translingual practice. He recalls his decision to offer a B+ to a student because the final portfolio did not conform to his expectations but later, he realizes that perhaps he was focusing more on summative assessment than the formative one. In this chapter, Canagarajah discusses in detail how his teaching practice and philosophy are changing over time. His reflection offers insights into a translingual, contact zone pedagogy that inculcates transnational dispositions among students.

Part two contains an introduction followed by eleven literacy autobiographies written by the students from different socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Although the student writers approach their literacy development in a distinct way, there are some common threads that hold them together: they all demonstrate transnational and translingual awareness and connect their literacy experiences to the teaching of English as a second language.

Ruth Parish Sauder uses excerpts from a childhood storybook Miss Rumphius that her mom used to read to her to organize the narrative. She talks about her strong interest in reading and creative writing in elementary school, impact of the parents who were avid readers themselves, High School AP English class, the family tradition of reading and discussing books every summer, writing journals in college, etc. She also discloses her discomfort at her inability to help others despite her American privilege and her eventual discovery of a “a way to make the world more beautiful” by studying English as a Second Language instead of piano and teaching English to immigrants and help them better their lives (Literacy Autobiographies 173).

Likewise, Bendi Toso, a native of Tibet, finds inspiration to explore her mother tongue from which she had long been detached due to her schooling in China and her eventual journey to the US. Another student writer, Lifeng Miao, talks about his literacy development as shuttling between Chinese oral tradition and his passion for English language and literature that he studied as a second language. Having juggled with these two traditions throughout school and college, he now likes “to adopt English writing norms but with Chinese characteristics” which he believes are “not only for [himself] but to provide examples for others, as this increasingly hybrid world needs a voice like that” (189).

Moreover, in a rather more academic narrative, Jialei Jiang talks about how her literacy development began with images, particularly pictures in the texts. She quotes extensively from different theories to interpret the processes and stages of her literacy development to reach a conclusion that she underwent “the process from being a viewer of image to being a thinker of images and, finally, to being a creator of images” and now she wants to use “images as good resources in writing instruction” (196). Similarly, Randi Anderson, a native speaker of English, talks about her fascination with German followed by her intense desire to achieve a native-like mastery over Brazilian Portuguese, and the subsequent disillusionment that leads to a discovery of a translingual self inside her.

Next, Jingjing Lai, Shuo Zhao, and Xiaoqing Ge, three Chinese international students in the US, frame their literacy journey of shuttling between Chinese and English in terms of contrastive rhetoric. As bi/multilingual writers, they admit that each language has distinct rhetorical features and a second language learner experiences first language interference. But based on their experiences, they challenge this assumption and call for a more nuanced approach to understand language relations and differences. Likewise, Eunjeong Lee talks about the concept of voice in English academic writing, how she found it so liberating due to a different upbringing and literacy experiences in Korea.

Finally, Natalia Guzman shares her experience of learning English and French in addition to her first language Spanish, the different approaches used by her language teachers and what those experiences mean to her as a language teacher who perceives “language instruction as a mode of offering tools for meaningful communication instead of limiting it to a set of rules and vocabulary” (260) . Likewise, Michael Chesnut, a native speaker of English, talks about how passionately he learned Korean when he went to Korea to teach English. He believes that “learning a language should be conceived more as recreation . . . play, or even a verbal and textual tourism” (273-274).

In fact, Canagarajah's focus on the students’ writings has foregrounded the importance of classroom applications of translingual orientation, which is often criticized for being more theoretical than practical. This emphasis on classroom application is carried forward in a 2020 edited collection Translingual Dispositions that “interrogate[s] the implications of work that recognizes translanguaging in national and international, English-medium, educational settings where monolingual ideologies remain entrenched” (Frost, Kiernan, and Malley 6). With a focus on multilingual students’ experiences in English-medium classrooms, deliberately designed translingual pedagogies, and translanguaging practices, this collection brings the US and international English-medium institutions together to interrogate academic translingual practices in the writing classrooms.

Born and brought up in Sri Lanka, Canagarajah inherited a legacy of European colonies that included Britain, learned to negotiate linguistic and cultural differences and the resultant liminal spaces since childhood. His journey from Sri Lanka to the US academy has informed every bit of his professional life and this book is no exception. As a publication from one of the proponents of translingual practice, this book achieves some important goals. First, it clarifies a misconception that translingual practice is for multilingual speakers only. Because the problem is in language ideology and not in language category; even a native English speaker can develop translingual and transnational dispositions. Second, it shows that translingual practice is not just about codemeshing, which is a part of negotiation and a rhetorical choice rather than a consciously orchestrated performance. He argues that “writers don’t necessarily codemesh as an artificial exercise or under pedagogical duress” but they do it even when they are not required because when “writers occupy in-between spaces between the familial and social worlds, they have to construct new semiotic resources to represent their identities” (55). Third, he offers a useful pedagogical model for contact zone pedagogy and urges us to develop a critical awareness of language use and its related ideology. The book is useful for the scholars of literacy and writing studies, second language writing, and anyone interested in the politics of language.

Works Cited

Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Routledge, 2013.

---. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing, Routledge, 2019.

Frost, Alanna, Julia Kiernan, and Suzanne Blum Malley, editors. Translingual Dispositions: Globalized Approaches to the Teaching of Writing, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2020.

Lee, Jerry Won, and Sender Dovchin, editors. Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness. Routledge, 2020.

Lillis, Theresa, and Mary Jane Curry. Professional Academic Writing by Multilingual Scholars: Interactions with Literacy Brokers in the Production of English-medium Texts. Written Communication, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3-35.

Mihut, Ligia A. Enacting Linguistic Justice: Transnational Scholars as Advocates for Pedagogical Change. Translingual Dispositions: Globalized Approaches to the Teaching of Writing, edited by Alanna Frost, Julia Kiernan, and Suzanne Blum Malley, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2020, pp. 279-294.

Sharma, Ghanashyam. Cultural Schemas and Pedagogical Uses of Literacy Narratives: A Reflection on My Journey with Reading and Writing. College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 1, 2015, pp. 104-110.