Too Much and Not Enough Identity: Constituting English in Asian
Language Policy Circles

Joseph Lo Bianco
Chair of Language and Literacy Education
University of Melbourne, Austral

This lecture discusses recent and long-standing attributions of both
cultural neutrality and bias in and for English. The lecture will
trace both recent and longer-term associations of English and how it
has been regarded in various Asian and European contexts and
contrasts these with attributions made for other languages of wider
communication and with invented/artificial languages.

I have previously argued (Lo Bianco, 2005), that in Asian contexts
English is often constituted as a post-identity language when its
promoters seek to bolster its acceptability, and as a hyper-identity
language when English is seen to correct national deficiencies. Both
of these assume consumerist modernity under conditions of globalized
late-capitalist life as the essential identity-formation matrix.
English is inextricably counted as the realizer and vehicle of this
complex notion in which individualism, liberalism, and consumerism
are seen to form human subjectivity.

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