Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts: 45 (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853596469 ISBN 13: 9781853596469

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2004

Synopsis

The volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable. The chapters address various ways in which individuals may be positioned or position themselves in a variety of contexts. In asking questions about social justice, about who has access to symbolic and material resources, about who is ‘in' and who is ‘out', the authors take account not only of localised linguistic behaviours, attitudes and beliefs; they also locate them in wider social contexts which include class, race, ethnicity, generation, gender and sexuality.  The volume makes a significant contribution to the development of theory in understanding identity negotiation and social justice in multilingual contexts.

About this title

About the Authors

Aneta Pavlenko is Research Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oslo. Her research examines the relationship between multilingualism, cognition, and emotions. She has testified in court as an expert in forensic linguistics, lectured widely in North America, Europe and Asia, and authored more than a hundred articles and ten books, the most recent of which is The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is former President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year award and the 2009 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research.

Adrian Blackledge is Professor of Applied Linguistics at University of Warwick, U.K. He conducts ethnographic research in the field of language in society, with a particular focus of multilingualism and translanguaging. He is developing creative approaches to the representation of research outcomes. He is author or editor of 14 books, the latest of these is Essays in Linguistic Ethnography: Ethics, Aesthetics, Encounters (2013, Multilingual Matters), with Angela Creese. His current research project is “Strategies to strengthen European linguistic capital in a globalised world” (MultiLX, 2025-2027). He was Poet Laureate for the city of Birmingham, 2014-2016

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts

By Aneta Pavlenko, Adrian Blackledge

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2004 Aneta Pavlenko, Adrian Blackledge and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-646-9

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Contributors, viii, 
Introduction: New Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts Aneta Pavlenko and Adrian Blackledge, 1, 
1 'The Making of an American': Negotiation of Identities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Aneta Pavlenko, 34, 
2 Constructions of Identity in Political Discourse in Multilingual Britain Adrian Blackledge, 68, 
3 Negotiating Between Bourge and Racaille: Verlan as Youth Identity Practice in Suburban Paris Meredith Doran, 93, 
4 Black Deaf or Deaf Black? Being Black and Deaf in Britain Melissa James and Bencie Woll, 125, 
5 Mothers and Mother Tongue: Perspectives on Self-construction by Mothers of Pakistani Heritage Jean Mills, 161, 
6 The Politics of Identity, Representation, and the Discourses of Self-identification: Negotiating the Periphery and the Center Frances Giampapa, 192, 
7 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Foreign Language Learning and Identity Reconstruction Celeste Kinginger, 219, 
8 Intersections of Literacy and Construction of Social Identities Benedicta Egbo, 243, 
9 Multilingual Writers and the Struggle for Voice in Academic Discourse Suresh Canagarajah, 266, 
10 Identity and Language Use: The Politics of Speaking ESL in Schools Jennifer Miller, 290, 
11 Sending Mixed Messages: Language Minority Education at a Japanese Public Elementary School Yasuko Kanno, 316, 
Index, 339, 

CHAPTER 1

'The Making of an American': Negotiation of Identities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ANETA PAVLENKO

Introduction

In the past decades, narratives and, in particular, stories people tell about their lives, have gained increasing stature outside the fields of literature and folklore and have become the focus of the evolving interdisciplinary field of narrative study, which posited narrative as the central means by which people construct identities and give their lives meaning across time. Consequently, scholars in a variety of disciplines expressed new interest in autobiographies as a unique, 'rich and unsurpassed resource for an understanding of the inward experience of how social and individual forces may interact' (Sollors, 1990: xi). The fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism are no exception to this trend: lately, several researchers have turned to stories people tell about their language learning and use (Kramsch & Lam, 1999; Pavlenko, 1998, 2001a,b,c; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Schumann, 1997; Tse, 2000; see also Kinginger, this volume). All of these investigations, however, examined contemporary stories, either published or elicited by the researchers. The goal of the present study is to see how sociohistoric circumstances impact ways in which people view the relationship between their languages and identities and construct their language learning stories. In order to answer this question, I will examine negotiation of identities in a corpus of narratives that has not previously been discussed in the field: immigrant autobiographies from the turn of the twentieth century. I will then compare narrative identities negotiated in this corpus to the ones constructed and negotiated in cross-cultural memoirs published in the past two decades.

In what follows, I will first introduce the theoretical framework and methodological approaches to narrative inquiry adopted in the present investigation. Then, I will examine which identities were negotiated in early-twentieth-century immigrant narratives. I will argue that these memoirs differ from contemporary immigrant autobiographies as far as the relationship between language and identity is concerned, and will attempt to explain the differences through ideologies of language and identity dominant in the early twentieth century. In doing so, I will show how sociopolitical, sociohistoric, and sociolinguistic circumstances shape individuals' understandings of themselves and their relationships with the languages in their environment.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework adopted in the present paper is situated at the nexus of critical and poststructuralist theories (Anderson, 1991; Bourdieu, 1991; Weedon, 1987), with the focus on autobiography and narrative identity construction (Green, 2001; Hokenson, 1995). In this perspective, identity is viewed as a dynamic and shifting nexus of multiple subject positions, or identity options, such as mother, accountant, heterosexual, or Latina. At various points in history different societies make somewhat distinct identity options available to their members (for instance, being anything but heterosexual may not be a legitimate option in some societies). Furthermore, at different times these options are negotiable to a different degree. Narrative identities, constructed in fiction and non-fiction writing, often emerge as reactions to available identity options, reproducing some and rejecting or reimagining others. Autobiographies play a central role in the process of identity negotiation in writing, as they are a prime example of 'identity narratives,' i.e. 'narratives constructed or construed as statements about the identity of the speaker and perhaps about the community of which she or he is a member' (Green, 2001: 8).

The focus of the present paper is on narrative identities constructed in American immigrant autobiographies, i.e. memoirs written by first generation immigrants who had arrived in the US as children or adults and who discuss the story of their assimilation. The aim of the paper is to examine sociohistoric constraints on these identity narratives and, consequently, on immigrant identity options seen as 'imaginable' or 'negotiable' in the US at the turn of the century. To explore ways in which European immigrants used the genre of autobiography to imagine and legitimize new identities for themselves and fellow immigrants, I will draw on Anderson's (1991) notion of nation-states as imagined communities. This notion is particularly apt for discussions of the encounter between new arrivals and the country they had imagined and in which they now had to imagine themselves. In addition to the notion of imagination, I will also appeal to Bourdieu's (1991) concept of speaking rights that will allow me to analyze which new immigrants had 'the right to speak' and the right 'to impose reception' in the process of identity negotiation. Finally, to explain why turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigrant memoirs may depict second language learning and the relationship between language and identity differently from contemporary cross-cultural autobiographies, I will resort to a sociohistoric analysis of the circumstances in which the two sets of narratives were produced and to a rhetorical analysis of tropes and narrative plots available to early-and late-twentieth-century immigrant autobiographers. I will argue that history has a profound impact on identity stories, not only in terms of material, social, and political circumstances in which they take place, but also in terms of ideologies of language and identity dominant in a particular place and time and in terms of identity options considered negotiable, legitimate, or particularly desirable.

Methodology and Research Questions

The present study will analyze 11 full-length immigrant memoirs and one collection of essay-length immigrant autobiographies. The memoirs were published between the years of 1901 and 1935 and written by (or in case of Holt's (1906) volume, collected from) immigrants who had arrived in the US between 1870 and 1913, mainly during the Great Migration wave. While many other memoirs were published at the time, I chose the autobiographies below on the grounds of representativeness and visibility. In other words, I aimed to include memoirs that were well known and widely discussed at the time of publication. In order to offset the bias of focusing exclusively on narratives of successful middle- and upper-middleclass professionals, I also chose to analyze an edited collection which contains autobiographies of working-class immigrants from a variety of backgrounds (Holt, 1906). Below, I list the memoirs in the corpus in the chronological order in which they were originally published. To facilitate subsequent discussion, I offer a brief commentary on each author's ethnic, social, and linguistic background.

(1) Riis, J. (1901) The making of an American. Born in 1849 in a middle-class family in Denmark, Jacob Riis emigrated to the US in 1870. In 1873, after a series of jobs in the shipyards and in the ironworks, he became an editor of a weekly paper in Long Island City and, in 1878, a police reporter for the New York Tribune (Holte, 1988). His articles, dramatic photographs, and books, in particular the widely-acclaimed How the other half lives (1890), exposed the impoverished conditions under which immigrant workers labored and lived in the urban slums. Riis also led a number of urban renewal projects which positively transformed some of the communities described in his work. His autobiography was immensely popular at the time of appearance and went through 12 editions in seven years, even though some reviewers criticized its writing style and the amount of self-praise (Holte, 1988; Hutner, 1999).

(2) Antin, M. (1912) The Promised Land. Mary Antin, a Russian Jew from the small town of Polotzk, arrived in Boston in 1891 at the age of 10, fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian. She soon distinguished herself as a good student, a writer, and a poet, and published her first account of her journey in 1899 with a preface by Israel Zangwill. The Promised Land, her best-known memoir, met with an enthusiastic reception and sold 85,000 copies in 34 printings (Handlin, 1969). Afterwards, Antin spent several years giving public lectures on Americanization all over the US and received many literary and civic honors (Hutner, 1999).

(3) Steiner, E. (1914) From alien to citizen: The story of my life in America. Edward Steiner was born in 1866 in Slovakia, in a multilingual German-Jewish family. He arrived in the US in the late 1880s as a well-educated young man who, in his student days, visited Tolstoy in his estate in Yasnaya Polyana. For several years Steiner travelled around the US, working with immigrants wherever his journey took him. His budding interest in Christianity and knowledge of Judaism brought him to a seminary at Oberlin College, Ohio. Eventually, he converted to Christianity and became first a minister, and then a professor at Grinnell College, Iowa. Steiner put a lot of time and energy into the study of immigration, publishing 15 books on the topic.

(4) Ravage, M.E. (1917) An American in the making: The life story of an immigrant. Marcus Ravage, a multilingual Romanian Jew, arrived in New York City in 1900 as a young man. He tried a number of occupations and eventually graduated from Missouri State University. As a public figure, Ravage participated in numerous debates on immigration.

(5) Bok, E. (1921) The Americanization of Edward Bok: The autobiography of a Dutch boy fifty years after. Edward Bok arrived in the US from Netherlands in 1870 at the age of six together with his upper-middle-class family.

At the age of 13 he quit school to work as an office boy at the Western Union Telegraph Company. While working there, he wrote for several magazines and in 1884 became the editor of Brooklyn Magazine. In 1889 he was appointed the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal and remained in that position for 30 years, becoming one of the most influential journalists in the United States. His autobiography won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1921 and went through over 30 editions in four years (Holte, 1988).

(6) Panunzio, C. (1921) The soul of an immigrant. Born in southern Italy in 1885, Constantine Panunzio arrived in the US in 1902 as a sailor. Three years later he went to Maine Wesleyan Seminary, then to Wesleyan University, and then to Boston University School of Theology. Just before the First World War, he converted to Methodism, became ordained as a minister, and worked in several eastern cities as a mediator between Italian immigrants and surrounding communities. He went on to become a professor of sociology at the University of California and was honored at the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair as a foreign-born citizen who had made outstanding contributions to American culture (Hutner, 1999).

(7) Yezierska, A. (1925) Bread givers. A Jew, born in Russian Poland, Anzia Yezierska disembarked at Ellis Island at the age of eight in 1890. She left home at the age of 17 and worked in sweatshops and laundries while going to school and then university. In 1915 she began publishing short stories about immigrant life in the Lower East Side, the struggle against poverty, and Jewish women's experience of reconciling the New World with the Old. Her first collection was made into a Hollywood film which brought her wealth and fame. She went on to publish more stories and several novels until the topic went out of vogue in the 1940s and 1950s.

(8) Cahan, A. (1926) The education of Abraham Cahan. Abraham Cahan, a revolutionary Jewish refugee from tsarist Russia, landed in Philadelphia in 1882 at the age of 22. He is best known for founding in 1897 the Jewish Daily Forward, a popular Yiddish newspaper which he edited for the rest of his life. Cahan also gained respect as a writer, in both Yiddish and English, in particular for the acclaimed novel The rise of David Levinsky (1917). He publicly criticized Riis's 'other half' approach that, in his view, unnecessarily otherized and exoticized the incoming immigrants, in particular Eastern European Jews.

(9) Bartholdt, R. (1930) From steerage to Congress: Reminiscences and reflections. Richard Bartholdt arrived in the US from Germany in 1872, at the age of 17; he spoke German, English, French, and a smattering of other languages. A few weeks after landing in New York City he was already working in a Brooklyn printing office. Eight years later he was a legislative correspondent in Albany, New York, for a German-American newspaper. In 1892, he became a Congressional representative from Missouri, the first German-American to become a member of Congress. He retired from Congress in 1915. Even though earlier Bartholdt had planned to run for Senate, the First World War and resulting anti-German feelings killed this ambition.

(10) Adamic, L. (1932) Laughing in the jungle: The autobiography of an immigrant in America. Louis Adamic arrived in the US from Slovenia in 1913 at the age of 14. He started out working for a Slovenian newspaper, Narodni Glas (People's Voice). Later, he became a journalist and a writer, authoring a number of books on various social issues and participating vigorously in public debates on assimilation and Americanization.

(11) Nielsen, T. (1935) How a Dane became an American, or Hits and misses of my life. Nielsen came to the US from Denmark in 1890 at the age of 15, along with his brother and father. The family joined relatives in a little town in Iowa where Nielsen went to school. Eventually, he graduated from Cornell College, married an American woman and became an English-speaking Methodist minister, giving up the Lutheran faith and his native language, which aroused strong resentment from the local Danish community.

(12) Holt, H. (1906/1990) The life stories of undistinguished Americans (as told by themselves). These stories first appeared separately in Holt's newspaper The Independent. Then a representative selection of the life stories was published together as a collection.

The methodology chosen to analyze the texts is informed by Denzin's (1989) sociohistorical approach to the study of personal narratives, which sees autobiography as a 'literary and sociological form that creates particular images of subjects in particular historical moments' (p. 35). This approach leads me to consider personal narratives not simply as ethnographic data, subject to content analysis, but rather as a genre which is shaped by local contexts, as well as by social, historical, cultural, and linguistic influences. Thus, I will look not only at the content of the stories, but also at the sociohistorical contexts in which the narratives were created, at the ideological forces which shaped particular tellings, as well as particular silences and omissions, and, finally, at the voices which were – and weren't – being heard. Current literary scholarship also acknowledges that autobiographies produced in different literary traditions may be very distinct in shape and scope (Hokenson, 1995; Wong, 1991). Several authors who compared personal narratives written and published in English in the US with those constructed in other languages and for other audiences – even though at times by the same authors – found that these stories have different storylines and different foci, and are performed through distinct linguistic means (Pavlenko, 2001a; Taubenfeld, 1998; Wong, 1991; Yin, 1998). Consequently, the arguments in the present paper will be limited to the corpus of narratives written and published in English in the US in the early twentieth century.

Three questions will be asked in the present study: (1) which identities were negotiated in the immigrant narratives in the corpus; (2) what is the role of language and linguistic identities in these narratives; and (3) whether portrayals of second language learning and use in the early twentieth century narratives differ from those in contemporary immigrant autobiographies.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853596469
• ISBN 13: 9781853596469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Pavlenko Aneta, Blackledge Adrian