Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

REVIEW TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL professionals In addition to textbooks and reference materials, these include computer and video software, testing instruments, and other forums of nonprint materials Edited by DIANE PECORARI City University of Hong Kong Posthumanist Applied Linguistics Alastair Pennycook Abingdon England: Routledge, 2018 Pp x + 168 doi: 10.1002/tesq.567 Language separates humans from beasts Humans and objects are distinct The purpose of language is to communicate The goal of communication is to understand each other Underpinning all such statements, Alastair Pennycook argues, are certain assumptions about human exceptionality, knowability, universality, and anthropocentricism: the tendency to locate humans at the centre of everything, if not slightly above it (human hubris) Building on and expanding his work in urban multilingualism, Pennycook’s Posthumanist Applied Linguistics scrutinises a number of persistent (but increasingly irrelevant) dichotomies, boundaries, and tautologies concerning how our bodies, brains, and languages relate Posthumanist Applied Linguistics rethinks and reconfigures this relation, embedding it back into the world of distributed, multisensorial, material, and inter-species entanglements Chapter sets the scene for his case Pennycook begins by interpellating his reader with a series of unsettling vignettes (environmental damage, abuse of animals, poverty, discrimination, climate change sceptics, the plight of refugees) These call into question humanist appeals to shared notions of humanity or common human experience A posthuman perspective “questions human hubris, questions human minds as central to knowledge, ethics, action, and intention and questions the distinctions between humans and other creatures and objects” (p 14) Chapter extends the introduction by mapping out the historical, philosophical, and theoretical foundations on which a posthumanist applied linguistics will be set, and in doing so 529 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 54, No 2, June 2020 © 2019 TESOL International Association defamiliarises notions of the human subject A critical, spatial, objectoriented, and relational ontology is articulated and ready to be unpacked Chapters to illustrate this proposal through a number of radical steps In Chapter 3, Pennycook first reframes language and cognition as both distributed across human bodies and other resources in networks or assemblages, which are emergent, dispersed, multimodal, and interactive—and therefore of particular relevance to work on trajectories and repertoires Chapter reinstates touch, taste, and smell as senses that are highly relevant to linguistic study Because semiotic assemblages are affective and multisensorial, “we need to engage with the senses rather than reflect from our armchairs on how perceptions are linguistically realised” (pp 65–66) Better ways to address people’s linguistically embodied engagements multisensorially are required, such as through urban ethnography Chapter establishes our relations to and co-presence with other animals as central to human collaborative, cognitive, and linguistic activity If “human life cannot be understood in isolation from other animals” (p 73), why should animals be excluded a priori from our theories of language? A posthumanist applied linguistics considers the divide between human and nonhuman forms of communication not as absolute but as one of degree Chapter reverses the status quo of communication from understanding to mutual misunderstanding “The point is not so much that we never understand each other, but rather that understanding is messy, incomplete, different, complicated and never entirely shared” (p 107) Here, sanitised views of effective language and communication give way to accounts of the precariousness of interaction and apparent misunderstanding in situ Chapter decentralises agency from human subjects to include the agency of our environment, of its objects, and of the networks of relations between them The starting point is a critique of representationalism, surrogationalism, and correlationalism—the widely held but mistaken ideas that “signs stand for things in the world, and reality is about a relation between things in our head and things out there in the world” (p 113) Each of these radical steps has been “towards a post-humanist applied linguistics commons”—the proposed way forward that closes the book (Chapter 8) To understand language, and for our understanding of language to be relevant to wider concerns, we must embrace the precariousness, entanglements, and materiality of existence Aspects of this plight are reassuringly under way in applied linguistics: Vygotskian sociocultural theory, critical constructivist sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape research, new literacy studies, and nexus analysis The term posthumanism should therefore not be offTESOL QUARTERLY 530 putting: “the notion itself is less important than the constellation of concepts it makes possible” (p 126) Overall, Pennycook has made a compelling case to question, then broaden, the range of phenomena often taken for granted in linguistic, cognitive linguistic, and applied linguistic research The level of argumentation precludes in-depth analysis of empirical data but makes the book an important exercise in “rethinking relations between humans, language, objects and space, and considering more carefully what distributed agency, language and cognition may mean” (p 18) Central to studies of language has been the relation between languages, bodies, minds, and worlds Pennycook’s book reminds us why this relation must continually be rethought SIMON HARRISON City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong International Students’ Challenges, Strategies and Future Vision: A Socio-Dynamic Perspective Anas Hajar Bristol England: Multilingual Matters, 2019 Pp xv + 237 doi: 10.1002/tesq.573 The current monograph contributes to a growing number of publications on study abroad It reports on the lived experiences of eight Arab university students undertaking master’s degrees in the United Kingdom Using a longitudinal, qualitative approach, Hajar traces the participants back to their learning of English in their home countries in chapters and and up to their experiences in the United Kingdom during a pre-sessional course in chapter 6, their master’s courses in chapter 7, and their dissertation writing in chapter Through a socio-dynamic lens, Hajar explores the challenges the students faced, their strategies for coping with these challenges, and how the students’ future visions helped to motivate them throughout each leg of their journeys In chapter 1, Hajar makes quick work of an introduction, which includes an autobiographical narrative of his own journey studying in Syria before embarking on his postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom This narrative is brief but important in that it situates Hajar’s rationale for the current study in his own experiences as a 531 REVIEW Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective (pp 75–90) Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang Vygotsky, L S (1987) The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology (R Van Der Veer, Trans.) In R W Rieber & A S Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L S Vygotsky, Vol 1: Problems of general psychology (pp 233–343) New York, NY: Plenum Press Whitsitt, S (2005) A critique of the concept of semantic prosody International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 10(3), 283–305 Widdowson, H G (2000) On the limitations of linguistics applied Applied Linguistics, 21, 3–25 https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/21.1.3 Wittgenstein, L (1953) Philosophical investigations Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Xiao, Z., & McEnery, A (2006) Near synonymy, collocation and semantic prosody: A cross-linguistic perspective Applied Linguistics, 27, 103–129 532 INVITED RESEARCH ISSUES