Global Political Economy and Language Rights in the “Post-Civil Rights” Era

• In Event: The Role of Critical Language Policy Analysis in the “Post”-Civil Rights Era

Abstract

This conceptual paper argues the legitimacy of (and urgent need for) language rights based on new scholarship on Global Political Economy (see below). It begins with an analytic connection to recent critical appraisals color-blindness. This term of physical impairment mutated from being the central demand of the liberal wing of the civil rights movement from the 1960s to being the primary defense for contemporary claims that we live in a post-racial society. As Alexander (2010) has demonstrated, it is precisely “colorblind” laws that are used to incarcerate disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown people.

With respect to language, then, we might talk of the tone-deafness of contemporary policies and educators. After the overt policy attacks on bilingual education through state referenda some 15 years ago, emergent bilinguals’ access to their home language(s) at school has eroded dramatically in much more insidious ways: the impact of English-only literacy testing (e.g., Menken 2008); lowering what counts as ‘proficiency’ so as to exit emergent bilinguals into mainstream settings earlier (e.g., de Jong, 2013); and the implicit centrality of English as the only language in which students should develop rich skills as per Common Core. Indeed, almost one half of the panels sponsored by the Bilingual Education SIG at AERA 2013 were framed in terms of English Language Learners. In this way, current policy, and increasingly our own scholarship and pedagogy, are growing ever more tone-deaf to the needs – and rights – of emergent bilinguals to their home language(s).
In this paper, I build on recent applied linguistic analysis of the relationship between political economy and language (e.g., Block, Gray and Holborow; Heller 2010, 2011, 2012) so as to establish a theoretical framework for explaining (versus only describing) the current crisis in emergent bilingual education. First, I identify three theoretical questions left unresolved by the applied linguistic work on political economy cited above: (1) (To what extent) is the state still relevant? (2) Just how ‘post-national’ has global capitalism become? (3) How much of a break from past political economic constellations is the current ‘globalized’ or neoliberal one?

Second, I synthesize recent studies renewing and expanding diverse Marxist approaches to political economy and geopolitical conflict (e.g., Callinicos, 2009; Harvey, 2005; McNally, 2011; Meiksins Wood, 2003; ten Brink, 2008, in press), so as to establish these five points: (1) the global reach of the international economy has not resolved the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but rather exacerbated them; (2) this implies that the system of many individual territorial states continues to be a fundamental feature of capitalist relations, not a relic of earlier ‘modernist’ eras; (3) the competition among these many individual territorial states leads to both hard and soft forms of geopolitical or imperialist conflict; (4) conflicts over language policy, education, use, and shift are most often caught up in soft forms of geopolitical conflict, but can also serve as triggers for harder forms (i.e., overt military conflicts); (5) formal language rights, then, are still relevant both for challenging and potentially resolving such conflicts.

Author

• Jeff Bale, Michigan State University