O'Regan, JP; (2021) Unsettling Capital and Assemblages of English in the Modern World-System. Presented at: Sociolinguistics Symposium 23 (SS23), Hong Kong. (In press).

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Abstract

The modern world-system is a capitalist world-system which has its origins in the sixteenth century (Frank, 1967; Sweezy, 1972; Wallerstein, 2011). The indispensable rationale and sine qua non of the capitalist world-system has been the endless accumulation of capital: ‘the accumulation of capital in order to accumulate more capital’ (Wallerstein: 2013: 10). As capital has spread, so English has also risen to become the default lingua franca of the world-system. It has achieved this position by acting as a symbiont free rider upon capital (Olsen, 1965; Fontaine, 2014) and by secreting itself into the integuments of structural power in a US-dominated capitalist world-economy, both in its political and economic governance (e.g. US Treasury, UN, IMF, World Bank) and in its dominant mechanisms of knowledge production. These include global media organizations and regional centres for the production and reproduction of research for international publication. Simultaneous with the rise of normative models of English through the consecutive world-hegemonies of Britain and the United States has been the proliferation of diverse postcolonial Englishes. This has also been accompanied by a worldwide explosion in superdiverse, translingual and translanguaged realizations of English for communicative assemblage and display (Pennycook, 2017; Canagarajah, 2017; García & Li, 2014; Li 2018; Blommaert & Rampton, 2012; Kramsch, 2018; Lou & Jaworski, 2016). The global spread of capital appears to have had the effect of both unsettling English so as to produce a multiplicity of diverse local and trans-local assemblages and articulations of English, while also globally sedimenting English in its dominant normative form. Drawing upon Marx’s (1973, 1976) description of the circulation and appearance of the commodity form in capitalism, this paper presents a theorization of postcolonial Englishes and of late modern translingual assemblages which locates these realizations in relation to the widely-fetishized dominant normative form (Simpson & O’Regan, 2018).

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