Becoming (Un)Desirable: English Hegemony, Whiteness, and Higher Education

Recently, some scholars have investigated the social, historical, and cultural politics of English hegemony—a major global/local systematic machinery of power; others have examined how whiteness—another such machinery—is enacted and perpetuated by (not only white) students and teachers. Theoretically speaking, educational Othering throughout the English hegemonic U.S. higher education system situates non-native English-speaking subjects to develop a false consciousness or misperception with real material consequences. Otherness drives such subjects to move to the educational center, or the culture of power—which privileges certain groups of people with certain ways of being, thinking, acting—and their assimilationist attitude is often praised and their assimilations materialize as academic achievements. Students and teachers are rewarded according to the extent to which their performance mirrors whiteness or the hegemonic cultural practices embedded in the university system.

Based on a one-year critical scholarship, this book offers the potential of a conceptualization of English hegemony. The book, built on previous studies, provides the reader with ways in which faculty members of the humanities and social sciences in U.S. higher education, whose native languages are other than English, swim simultaneously with and against English hegemony through their scholarship and pedagogy. Carefully and critically engaging in such interrogation while attending to the global economy of knowledge associated with English hegemony requires a shift toward social justice, illuminating insights into (de)naturalizing the normative in nuanced, complex, and complicated ways. Thus, this book (re)constructs a figure of our institutionalization of knowing rhetorically and epistemologically as ethical mediators of/for social justice without dehumanizing or entertaining the powerful/established.

I entered this book as an aspiring critical pedagogue/scholar and a multilingual international professor of color with limited English proficiency in the English hegemonic U.S. higher education system—whose educational goals and professional interests are rooted in social justice care and advocacy as well as in critical reflections as a site and mode of critical labor. This book offers narratives, analysis, discussions, and a conclusion that productively complicate our understanding of what it means to be a (non-) native English-speaking subject, to be marginalized, to be critical, to be (non-) human, and to suffer/perpetuate the colonial/historical machinery of power/violence in our increasingly globalizing/globalized world. It highlights the dialectical tensions where we are situated in relation to one another under socially constructed categories of difference that are attributed to injustice, oppression, and privilege. It also offers ways in which English hegemony—along with other major global/local systematic machineries of power—drives particular kinds of knowledge production, ideological diffusion, information transmission, social stratification, and material resource distribution at the global and local levels as well as at the practical, theoretical, and metatheoretical levels.