Being and Becoming Anglophone, Then and Now

Biodun Jeyifo, Professor of English, Cornell University, USA

IntroductionIn 1986, in the book of essays titled, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, the revolutionary Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, announced that from the date of the publication of that book, he was no longer going to write in English; “henceforth”, Ngugi declared, “it will be Gikuyu and Swahili all the way”. In taking this momentous step, Ngugi argued that he called “Europhone African literatures” in English, French, or Portuguese, were mere offshoots of modern African literature, and not the authentic, valid stuff, which, in Ngugi’s opinion, could only be literatures written in indigenous literary languages of Africa. As can be expected, this generated considerable controversy and acrimony, but Ngugi stuck to his guns. He did so through critical essays which finessed his arguments and, more importantly, through imaginative works in drama and fiction written in a mix of Gikuyu and Swahili within Kenya which far outstripped those for his previous writings in English.

Moreover, the apparent political impact of the texts in these national languages of Kenya and East Africa considerably dwarfed any impact that the earlier texts in English had had, though outside Kenya and the east Africa region, in the rest of Africa and other regions of the world, the translations of Ngugi’s Gikuyu and Swahili texts into English continued to consolidate his status as one of the foremost Anglophone writers of the world. But the end of story – if there is an end to the kind of the stories I will be exploring in this paper – the end of the story came when about three years ago, Ngugi started writing in English again. Now, with his recent relocation from New York University to the University of California at Irvine, Ngugi has reportedly founded a program or center for translation of writings from the different cultural regions of the world, with special emphasis on South-South translation, that is between the different areas of the developing world.

Compare this narrative of Ngugi’s movement from the “cosmopolitanism” of his early career through he “nationalism” of his rejection of English to the “translation project at UC-Irvine

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to an infamous statement by Salman Rushdie in 1997. This statement was made n an essay in the New Yorker magazine in which Rushdie asserted that the only significant writings coming out of India were in English. And as if that was not controversial enough, he added that the bodies of writings in the indigenous literary languages of India were “parochial”. It is significant that these claims were made in a special issue of the New Yorker magazine devoted to a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India in 1947. Since he made these claims, a spate of rebuttals have been issued against Rushdie’s presumption of expertise on India’s indigenous literary languages and cultures.

As far as I am aware, Rushdie has not issued counter-rebuttals to demonstrate his wide and deep and comparative knowledge of the vast bodies o writings in India’s main literary languages. From this, one can surmise that the only authority which Rushdie had, or felt he had to make these pronouncements derived from his sense of his status as one of the most prominent, most canonical figures of a newly emergent global, Anglophone literature. That the cultural capital attached to this status is truly considerable is unquestionable, but not so unquestionable is the kind of cosmopolitanism reflected in Rushdie’s pronouncements on the relative merits and significance of Anglophone India writings and writings in India’s indigenous literary languages on vital links to any national or regional literary languages. This I would describe as a nomadic and flaneurist cosmopolitanism that acknowledges no vital links to any national or regional literary-cultural areas of the world. At the very end of this paper, I shall come back to these two narrative fragments on Ngugi and Rushdie, but for now I wish to make some preliminary remarks of the substance of this lecture by reflecting briefly on the etymology and the diverse meanings of the word “Anglophone” itself.

Anglophone and its UniverseI am sure that it will come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, when I first found out that until the mid to the late 1980s, the word did not begin to appear in any dictionary of the English language. For instance, it does not appear as an entry in one of the most comprehensive dictionaries of the language to be published in recent times, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, a dictionary of 2662 pages which was published a recently a 1993. Indeed, one

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of the most authoritative dictionaries of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED as it is generally and rather respectfully called, in its second edition whose the first printing of which took place in 1998, locates the origin of the word “Anglophone” in the early twentieth century and then states, rather significantly, that in actual usage, it was very rare until the 1960s. This, I would suggest, leaves us with a fascinating conundrum: the word first enters the language in the early twentieth century; it is rare in usage until the 1960s, after which it then achieves wide and visible usage; however, it does not begin to make a consistent appearance as an entry in dictionaries of the English language for two decades.

When we come to the meaning to be encountered in different dictionaries, we get an even more fascinating profile of how the word seems to be constantly changing in the course of its fairly very recent consistent appearance in dictionaries. Let us carefully review a few examples. At the most general level, the word is defined as being English-speaking. That is to say, being Anglophone is being English-speaking. This means that by the fact of being merely English-speaking, one is, or can be, Anglophone without predication, if you please. This is the view of OED in the edition already cited when it states: “adj., English-speaking” and then gives the following sentence as an illustration of its correct usage, “the population is largely Anglophone”. Compare that definition with the one given in the Penguin English Dictionary, 2nd edition, first published in 2003: “adj,. consisting of belonging to, or relating to an English-speaking population or community, especially as contrasted with a French-speaking population or community”. Here, being English-speaking is predicated in relation to another language; there is no auto-predication here. This particular entry obviously has Canada specifically or even exclusively in mind as its point of reference, for being Anglophone in this contrastive manner could as well apply to Hindi, as in India, or in relation to Spanish, as in many parts or the west, northeast and southwest of the United State. A far more open-endedly predicated and relational from of this definition of ‘Anglophone is in fact to be found in, The American Heritage of the English Language, 4th Edition, (2000) which defines it in the following manner: “noun, an English-speaking person, especially one in a country where two or more languages are spoken”.

Note that this definition does not specify any language in relation to English; it simply states rather capaciously, where

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two or more languages are spoken, you are ‘Anglophone’ if you are an English-speaking person. In effect, this applies to every country in the world with demographically significant populations speaking two or more languages, whether or not any of such populations are dominant or minority groups. One thinks here in particular of Britain and the United States: the respective English-speaking populations in each country is the dominant linguistic community, but many Welsh, Scots and Irish in Britain speak English as bilinguals who also speak Welsh and Scottish and Irish Gaelic, even if those languages have distinct minority status in their native homelands. With regard to the Unites States, Spanish especially, but also other languages like Arabic, Korean and Chinese have significant and growing populations. I would argue that this particular definition or usage of the word Anglophone ethnicizes the word beyond what we find in the definitions in the other dictionaries in that it suggests that being English – speaking in any country in the world, Britain and the United States inclusive, is being ethnically Anglophone in relation to the languages spoken by other significant language communities in each particular country. In other words, we are all Anglophones now, every one among us who belongs to any of the English-speaking communities of the world; indeed to use a postmodernist formulation, we have all always already been Anglophone.

This profile leads me to ask the following portentous question: if English departments throughout the world now mostly perceive Anglophone studies only in relation to the English-language writings of Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and Australasia, can one speculate that the day is not too far when they will see all English-language literary traditions of the world, including mainstream British and American literatures, as Anglophone? To understand why popular uses of the term ‘Anglophone’, as defined by the dictionaries of the English language, are so far ahead of its institutionalized academic codification, we now have to locate the fact of the relatively very recent appearance of the word in dictionaries, together with its diverse and somewhat mobile and unstable meanings, in the larger context of the world-historical things that have been happening to, and in English in the last five to six decades. This I wish to do through a review of the totally unprecedented worldwide spread of the English language in the last six or seven decades leading to what is now generally called global English, an English that is said to be without borders and

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frontiers. The burden of this review will be to tease out the implications of global English, the English without borders and frontiers, for Anglophone literary and cultural studies, now and in the future.

In 1977 when the space probe Voyager was launched, messages in fifty-five of the world’s languages were recorded and programmed to be transmitted as radio signals by the Voyager in its long journey to the very edges of the universe. In fifty-four of those languages, the recorded message was the same and it consisted of the few words of simple greeting to any other populations besides US that may exist in the universe. But in one language, English, the recorded message was longer and was indeed conceived as the principal message from us, earthlings, to whomsoever might be our neighbors out there in the vast immensity of space. The message was read by the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, in the Austrian accent of his country of origin. Here’s part of that message:

As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet earth. I sent greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of the solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon to do so, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and with hope that we take this step.

From this principal message of the Voyager probe to the cosmos, I would like to extrapolate two points. The first point pertains to the mother of all desires, the desire that is tied to what I would describe as the “lonely planet” complex that, at different levels and in diverse for certainty or proof that we are not alone in the universe, the fervent wish that there be other populated worlds in the Milky way, even though we also fervently hope that none of the inhabitants of such worlds are more powerful than us and therefore may be able to do us what we have done for ages, and continue to do, both to the most defenseless and vulnerable of our humankind and to the non-human species on our planet.

The second point has to do with the fact that, among the thousands of the world’s languages, there was no serious

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contender to the perception of English as the most appropriate linguistic medium for projecting this desire out into the universe by the space probe Voyager. English, the quintessential language of globalization, seemed poised to become the quintessential language of the cosmos, at least as projected from and by planet earth. In other words, from being a language beyond borders and without any frontiers in our solar system, English, in the calculus of the message of Voyager to the universe, seemed poised to become a language without any borders in the cosmos. In effect global English becomes intergalactic English: such is the vastness of the scale of desire inscribed in these projections of our poignant “lonely planet” complex as articulated in the cultural mission of that space probe, Voyager.

This talk is of course about global English, not an interplanetary or intergalactic English that, in fact, has not yet come into existence and probably never will. My purpose in alluding to this spectral, non-existent English without borders or frontiers in the universe itself is precisely to interrogate the very notion of a global English which, on our planet, is deemed to have effectively moved in the last few decades beyond every frontier, every boundary that in one way or another constrains virtually all other languages in the world.

At the most basic level of signification, the notion that global English is a language without frontiers implies that English as a world language is no longer tied in any regulative manner to England and the United States of America as both its ethnic or racial homelands and as the historic sources of its hegemony as a language of imperial conquest and domination. In purely sociolinguistic terms, this conception of global English implies that no superdialect of the language located either in Britain or the United States now acts to regulate or authorize any of the other dialects of English in all regions of the world. Indeed beyond this, the term global English now implies that we can no longer speak of dialects of the language: in place of this now putatively old-fashioned and pejorative term, we ought now to speak of varieties of English. It is this presumed state of affairs as the ultimate point of arrival in the unique trajectory of the vocation of English as world language in the past half moment in history. Another way of expressing this is to state that where there used to be the English-speaking world comprising mainly Britain, the United States and the English-speaking member-states of the British commonwealth, what we

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have now is an English-speaking. This, at bottom, is what being Anglophone in this contemporary and novel manner to its implications for literary and cultural studies of the present and the future. Therefore, coming to this discussion, permit me to briefly state the terms of the global reach and influence of English as, allegedly, a language without borders or frontiers.

Saying that global English is a language without frontiers or borders seems to be an assertively postmodernist view. But the notion of an English without borders and frontiers is in fact first and foremost based on sociolinguistic accounts of developments in English as world language in the last few decades that are empiricist and positivistic in the traditions of “hard” social science. Of the many examples of such accounts, I wish to draw attention to a series of documentary films produced by the BBC and PBS in 1986, titled, The Story of English and comprising nine separate and distinct hour-long episodes, this series constitutes and most comprehensive and compelling account in any medium, literary, academic or audiovisual, that we have on what has been happening to English as a world language from the beginning of the decolonizing movements in the former British empire at the end of the second world war to the present period of the late modern information age. Indeed, a good number of the facts and data that I now present to illustrate the alleged constitutive absence of frontiers in the global English of our day are extrapolated from the first of the nine episodes of the series titled, portentously, “An English Speaking World”. Parenthetically, I should add that while I am in complete disagreement with most of the underlying “theoretical” ideas of the series – as will become evident from ideas and observations on being and becoming Anglophone in the context of globalization that I will presently be throwing out for your contemplation – I wholeheartedly recommend the series to any high school or college teacher of English – the language and its literatures. This I do on the basis of the sheer informational and instructional value of the actual contexts of each of the nine episodes making up the series.

The global English, far more than any other language in the world, is a language without borders or frontiers, is marked first and foremost by the assertion that it is more influential than any other language that exists now or has ever existed. This can be stated in a slightly different but no less dramatic formulation: English has a global or “universal” influence now that no other language has now, or has ever had in the past. The facts, the

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data and the realities that firmly establish the veracity of this claim are nothing if not stunning. I give only a few of the most salient.

» English is the language for airlines taking off and landing is some 150 countries around the world. In other words, it is almost the “universal” language of air traffic control. This means, for instance, that an Italian pilot flying an Italian jet over Italian air space and speaking to Italian ground control staff speaks in English.

» 75% of the telexes, telegraphs, letters and postcards delivered around the world are in English.

» Some of the world’s most valuable commodities like silver, tin, titanium and platinum are traded in English.

» English is the quintessential language of technological and scientific modernisation. As illustrations of this fact, consider the following two sets of data: scientific abstracts throughout the world are required to be published in English, apart from the indigenous language of the particular national scientific community: and English is the language of 80% of the world’s computer data.

» English is also the preferred language of the managerial staff of virtually all of the world’s multinational corporations. This means that whether their home country is Sweden, Germany, Holland, Japan or Korea, English is the official medium of communication of all the multinational corporations of the world outside their home countries.

» English is overwhelmingly the language of the world’s culture industry: moves and musical forms like rock, jazz and hip hop are overwhelmingly produced in English, even by many arteries and groups not based in Britain or the United States and whose mother tongues are not English.

» English has made massive incursions into the other world languages of the most industrialized countries of the world in a manner and to an extent that the languages of these other countries have not, indeed cannot, make incursions into English. This has given rise to such new idiolects of global English as “Franglasis”, “Spanglish”, and “Ruslish”.

» Just as it was and still is the lingua franca of the Atlantic world, English is now the regional lingua franca of the Asia-Pacific region. Countries of the region like Indonesia and Vietnam whose colonially imposed lingua franca were respectively Dutch and French have moved significantly in recent decades away from those languages towards English, India and Singapore, the traditional English-speaking countries in the region, playing the role of

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educator in English to their previously non-English-speaking neighbors.

» The total number of books published annually in the world in English is far greater than the total number of books published annually in French, Spanish and Japanese combined. For example I obtained the following figures on this issue from the International Publishers’ Association: English, 183,200: Japanese, 67,522: Spanish and French are for the year 2001, the figure for English is for 1999, the IPA being as yet unable to obtain the figures for any of the years 2000 to 2003, presumably because of exponential increases in books published in English in those years and the widening global spread of their publication location.

» The scope of the teaching of English as a second language throughout the world has surpassed anything the world has never know in the teaching of world languages as second languages outside their historic homelands. Let me put this observation in concrete terms. French, Spanish and German are taught in many parts of the world as international or “world languages”. Languages like Chinese, Japanese and Hindi are also taught in many parts of the world, perhaps not as “world languages”, but definitely as important international languages of cultural exchanges, trade and commerce, especially in the diasporas of the Chinese, Indian and Japanese peoples in Asia itself and in North America, the Pacific region and with regard to Hindi, in Britain, and in parts of Africa and the Caribbean. But the teaching of none of these other world or international languages comes nowhere close to the worldwide scope of the teaching of English as either a second language or a foreign language. In China alone, by 1986, there were more than 250 million people learning English as the preferred foreign language. The numbers are equally startling in other traditionally non-English countries of Asia, the Americas and Africa, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Mozambique and Rwanda. This counter-currents which indicate that global Anglophone English is powerfully connected to what has been described as the scattered hegemonies of the unique form of imperialism that we all face at the present time.

That for several centuries the English language was the principal cultural tool of British imperial world domination is an established fact of a quite extensive scholarship within English studies in the last half century. Moreover, from Irish writers, from African writers, from South Asia writers, from Caribbean writers, from Maori writers in New Zealand and Papua New

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Guinea writers in Australia, and writers of virtually all the other regions and countries colonized by the British, we have eloquent testimonies of the ways in which the English language was used, in line with the civilizing mission, to alienate them from their mother tongues, their indigenous languages, in order to make them members of an Anglophile cultural elite who would help to make imperial rule hegemonic rather than coercive.

More specifically and concretely, this use of the English language in the age of British imperial world domination rested on the regulative role that the Queen’s English, or BBC English as it was also called, played throughout the length and breadth of the empire. From the experience of my own primary school days in colonial Nigeria and my secondary school days in the then recently independent, neocolonial Nigeria, I can testify that we were rigorously drilled not just in the English language, but in what was deemed the correct way to speak English, this being the Queen’s English. You were made to measure how well or conversely, how badly you spoke English by the benchmark provided by the English of the broadcasters of the world programs of the BBC. Of course, directly and in the context of the classroom, we were taught by British or African schoolmasters, but all of them all spoke, or tried at any rate to speak with exactly the same accent of the Queen’s English on the model provided by the broadcasters of the BBC. Thus, this dialect of English served as the superdialect, the linguistic and cultural gold standard of the empire. That was the way to be properly English-speaking, to be Anglophone then: one dialect was king; around it, all the other dialects of the English-speaking world was grouped in hierarchical patterns of high and low, standard and substandard, superior and inferior.

The British Empire is now a thing of the past and BBC or Queen’s English is now a relic spoken by ever-dwindling number of the Brits themselves. Moreover, even at the height of its hegemony, only one in fifty spoke this super-dialect of the language in Britain itself. The number of those who speak it in Britain now is less than a quarter of the proportion of that one in fifty aggregate of sixty or seventy years ago. Perhaps the most significant expression of this transformation in the world profile of the English, with Brits of ethnic South Asia, Afro-Caribbean and African backgrounds having a rather prominent presence among the current cohort of the organization’s broadcasters. To move to the American side of the Anglo-American equation, for a while in the 70’s and 80’s, it seemed that American English

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was going to replace public School or BBC English as the superdialect of the English-speaking world, but this potentiality quickly evaporated in the wake of the lifeless variety of English that began to be broadcast is the world programs of the VOA, the Voice of America.

Without denying the global influence or impact of varieties of American English purveyed by the global culture industry through movies, music videos, audio tapes and now the internet, it is now an incontrovertible fact that global English no longer radiates from one or two regulative centres located in Britain or the United States but is disseminated from polycentric axes spread out in different regions of the world. This is the mode of being and becoming Anglophone now: one remains or becomes English-speaking on models and varieties of global English distributed all over the world. As an eloquent illustration of this point, consider the following fact: while hundreds of millions of Chinese learners of English primarily base themselves on audio and video tapes of popular English-language instruction extrapolated from programs on the BBC, the famous call centers of India are replacing call centers in the United States and Britain itself on the basis of the impeccably intelligible ‘global English’ of Anglophone operators based in Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi. Moreover, as I have remarked earlier in this talk, with what has been called its “non-aligned” variety of global English, India has been servicing the tremendous upsurge in desire for instruction in English as the preferred international language in traditionally non-English-speaking countries of the South Asia and Southeast Asia regional communities.

But if spoken or written English, in its presently dominant Anglophone incarnation, no longer radiates from regulative centers located in Britain or the United States, I would strongly argue that this does not mean that we are now effectively in a post-imperial age. Indeed, the case of the economic and social ramifications of the Indian call centers as a composite indicator of the dispersal of centers of global English provides us with evidence to the contrary. Call centers that were once located in the United States have also been “out-sourced” to Ireland, but why is there little knowledge of this fact in the U.S media? I pose these as merely rhetorical questions, hoping that the very obvious answers that they generate will highlight the fact that the English language, even its decentered and modular global Anglophone form, is one of the most important sites of the

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collective drives, passions and desires let loose by the vastly unequal forces of the transnational globalization supervened by the world’s multinational corporations. This is the cultural face of the new imperialism: when transnational corporations move either capital or white-collar jobs at will around the world, global English is their principal enabling tool. Indeed, although I do not have the space and the time in this particular essay to give an adequate elaboration of the contention, I would argue that the global Anglophone English that I have been profiling is the single most important, most productive site available to us for apprehending and engaging the cultural contradictions of capitalist globalization, especially in its present neoliberal phase. Let me state this with as much clarity as I can muster: the means, the modes and above all, the desire by which one remains or becomes competently or competitively Anglophone at the present time compositely constitute perhaps the single best indicator of the harrowing negative effects of the currents of globalization that have been sweeping across the world in the last four to five decades. And this is true whether the frame of reference is a single national territory, a regional community, or the world inter-state system itself. Time will allow me to give only two particular illustrations of this contention. The first example is from the Asia Far East and it involves the bizarre expressions often assumed by otherwise quite rational market-driven desires to become proficient in English, and the other example is from United States, and it involves extremely bitter and fractious struggles over Spanish language rights in many parts of the country.

Although the boom in English language instruction in Far East Asia is several decades old, it increased to quite unprecedented levels after the crash of the Asia economies in 1997. This is especially true of China, South Korea and Japan, the three countries with the most internationally competitive economies in the region. Following the economic crashes of 1997, the determination of hundreds of millions of the population of China and South Korea to become more proficient in English, thereby becoming more internationally competitive, reached fever pitch levels. Parents who themselves were frustrated wither by not knowing English or by their inability to learn the language and become competent in it began to go to extraordinary lengths to make their children become competitive ‘Anglophoens’. In South Korea, this has assumed such practices as placing six-month old babies in front of the

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television to watch instructional videos in english for up to five hours a day, or sending seven year olds for hours of grueling after-school sessions “cramming” English words and phrases as spoken in instructional videos by native English speakers.

All told, it is estimated that with instructors’ fees, books, instructional videos and flashcards, English language instruction in South Korea is now a 3-billion-dollar a year industry. The most worrisome aspect of this craze for English is the widespread and increasing resort by desperate parents, in China and South Korea, to a surgical procedure for their children called “frenectomy”. This entails a simple operation to remove a tissue under the tongue called the “frenulum”, the thinking behind this being that in making the tongue longer and more flexible, the operation makes it easier for Chinese and South Korea children to pronounce English words more correctly than if the “frenulum” was left intact.

This development has caused great alarm among educational psychologists and linguists in both countries. But their arguments that poor or bad speakers of their own native tongues in both countries do not blame their deficiencies on the frenulum, and that Chinese American and Korea American kids in the United States have never needed frenectomy to enable them to speak “good English” have in no way decreased the number of the surgical procedures performed in both countries. Thus, frenectomy is purely and pathologically phantasmic, and it is so because Anglophone English is the site of terrifying anxieties and fears generated by the power and might of globalizing forces over local national and regional cultural capital like mother tongues and their perpetuation through state and private educational institutions.

The case of the struggle for Spanish language rights in the United State provides both striking parallels with, and radical differences from the Asia Far East case discussed above. The parallel may be seen in the number of desperate parents in Hispanic communities in the southwest and the west of the country who vigorously oppose bilingual education for their children in the hope that “English-only” instructional strategies provide the best or indeed the only way for their kids to become fluent speakers of English, thereby overcoming the non-competitiveness of these parents in local, national and global marketplaces of skills and competences tied rigorously to the acquisition of English. Initially, the “English-only” bandwagon exclusively comprised Anglos who feared and resented the

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waves of Hispanic legal and illegal immigrants from the South American neighboring countries of the United States. But as violently racist and nativist “English-only” calls mutated into offshoots like, “Official English” and “Workplace English” with implications for access to education and jobs, many Hispanic parents found themselves attracted to the “English-only” militants.

However, the struggle for Spanish language rights in the United States goes far beyond the bilingual education controversies and debates and this is where the differences with the East Asia case can be found. This entails the often fierce struggles of communities of foreign-born, foreign language speakers like Hispanics not to give up their languages, not to assimilate totally into the Anglo majority. For a nation overwhelmingly made up of generation upon generation of immigrants, it is remarkable that there is widespread disdain and lack of understanding for the deep existential and spiritual bases of these struggles, quite apart from the ethical and legal aspects of cultural rights as human rights. What is more, there is even less understanding of the vital and intricate processes of negotiation going on between English and Spanish as many Hispanics in the country try simultaneously to retain their deep ties to their mother tongue and to appropriate English in ways that complement and enrich the varieties of English used by the Anglo majority and by the country’s other racial and ethnic groups. Spanglish is the assertive name and sign of that negotiation and this is memorably documented in Ilan Stavan’s book, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language.

Nothing would please me better than to conclude on that happy, celebratory note of “Spanglish”. But at the beginning of this talk, I invoked narratives of Ngugi and Rushadie that told of radically different responses to the cultural contradictions of Anglophone writings of the world as increasingly one of the most important concentrations of the institutionalized cultural capital of global English. I would, now, like to invoke an echo chamber as perhaps the ultimate metaphor for what I have been profiling in this essay as “Being and becoming Anglophone,” at the present time, which is profoundly different from what it was to be English-speaking, to be part of the English-speaking world a half century ago at the twilight of the British empire. In an echo chamber a mere whisper becomes a magnified sound, and it reverberates repeatedly taking on new tonalities and inflections as it hits the different sides or walls of

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the chamber. Into this echo chamber of “Anglophonia”, I place those narratives of Ngugi and Rushdie with which I began this essay: beyond Ngugi and Rushdie as specific writing subjects, many other writers, critics and theorists speak in the idioms and accents of their particular incarnations of being Anglophone, their particular negotiations of the cultural contradictions of this conjuncture.

Let us recall that I described Rushdie’s stance as a nomadic, flaneurist cosmopolitanism: a sort of abstract citizen-of-the-world literary identity that denies any vital links to any of the cultural regions of the world, especially those of the developing world. Into his camp, for instance I would place our own Ben Okri, especially, after he won the Booker Prize. Ngugi’s self-positioning, I suggested, is more complex, moving from the untheorized cosmopolitanism of his early career through the complicated nationalism of his dramatic rejection of English to a sort of South-South transnationalism inherent in his return to English and his important translation project.

Frenectomy is also a distinct echo in that chamber, a trope of some of the bizarre currents and morbid symptoms of being and becoming Anglophone at the present time that we would do well not to ignore. In West Africa in general and Nigeria in particular, there is the quasi-frenectomy, the cultural self-mutilation in the widespread expressions of what I would describe as Pentecostal Anglophonia. These include names such as Testimony, Promise and Temptation in place of names in indigenous languages; and the shouting matches and over-literal linguistic intercourse between English and Yoruba, or English and Igbo (or any other Nigerian language) that pass for bilingual religious sermonizing on radio, television and audio cassettes. But if frenectomy is a distinct echo in that chamber, so is Spanglish and beyond this, so are echoes of the innumerable languages of the world without which English would simply be English, not Anglophone English, languages which combine in fruitful and productive encounters with English to produce the best of the Anglophone writings of the contemporary world.

ConclusionOn a concluding note, let me take up the subject of the scholarly or academic implications of the developments in global, Anglophone English that I have been exploring in this talk. In other words, what are the implications of these

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developments for Anglophone literary and cultural studies at the present time and more importantly, in the future? For this, I wish to throw out for our contemplation two observations that, in my opinion, will, in the long haul, profoundly shape the course of things.

First is what I would call the philogogical revolution, known in its most recognizable incarnation as the cultural studies approach to literary studies, and located by others in the so-called discourse theory or analysis. This philological revolution has tremendously expanded our nations of texts, of textuality itself, of the scope and limits of the objects of the study of literary and cultural studies. On this account, Anglolphone studies include not only what is sung, what is danced, what is performed, what is filmed. In other words, we are talking of written texts, filmic texts, musical and sung texts, digital texts, audiovisual texts, and performative texts. Think of the vastness of the scope of Anglophone textual production that this entails, all constituting the objects of teaching and research in the discipline of English studies of the future.

The second observation pertains to the fact that except in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this vast global Anglophone textual production is by writers, artists and performers who are normatively bilingual or multilingual and draw extensively on other languages for models and for inspiration. Increasingly, in nearly all regions of the world, being Anglophone means being so bilingually or multigually. To clarify this particular point, let me invoke one of my favorite aphorisms from the writings of Chinua Achebe: where Anglophone stands, Francophone will stand beside it. Spanglish will stand beside it and so will Hindi or Swahili or Arabic or Igbo or any of the other languages of the world, depending on the given national or regional cultural community.

In each case, the given second-language, creole or pidgin variety stands dynamically and dialogically with global Anglophone English. Indeed, the United States will eventually join the majority of the countries of the world where being Anglophone means being so bilingually or multilingually, without any racial or ethnic majority status attached to it. This is because all the census projections indicate that by middle of this century, the Anglos will be outnumbered by the combined populations of all the other hyphenated Americans.

The echo chamber of global Anglophone English through which all these forces and currents of history are coming to us

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Being and Becoming ‘Anglophone’, Then and Now

can be an image both of a nightmare and a hopeful portent. The role of teachers and students in our high schools, colleges and universities, now, and in the future, will be a crucial factor in negotiating between these two possibilities. The theoretical, methodological and pedagogical challenges that this conjuncture places before us are formidable.

In my own prospective view of radical, comparative post colonialism as one theoretical and ideological response to this challenge, I think of a new, critical hermeneutics in the ancient Greek god, Hermes and that also appropriates the significations of the Yoruba, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian god Esu. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, but himself is also a divinity, the god of roads, commerce, invention, cunning and theft. Esu is the trickster god of chance, contingency and indeterminacy, and he is also the lord of the crossroads. What cunning, theft, commerce, chance, contingency and the liminality of crossroads have to do with hermeneutics in general and radical, comparative postcolonialism in particular is a vast subject. But this is a topic for another lecture, or of questions and issues that we can begin to address right now, at this lonely hour of this instant of a long journey into new beginnings and possibilities.

*A revised version of a Public lecture by Professor Biodun Jeyifo on July 21, 2004 at the instance of the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.

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