Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity

Monica Heller

Jan 2011 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Nationalism informs our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and State--ideas that are being challenged by globalization and an emerging new economy. As language, culture, and identity are commodified, multilingualism becomes a factor in the mobility of people, ideas and goods--and in their value. In Paths to Post-Nationalism, Monica Heller shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-State are destabilized under new political and economic conditions. These processes, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Applying a fine-grained ethnographic analysis to the notion of "francophone Canada" from the 1970s to the present, Heller examines sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, State agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe. Her work shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to re-imagine--or resist re-imagining--who we are.

Ratings and reviews

In her Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity, Monica Heller explores how in the era of the newly emerged global economy, the concepts of the nationalist ideology are being challenged and changed. As long as globalization serves as a tool to transform language, culture and identity into commodities multilingualism becomes a factor in people's ability to change social and political discourses. The result is that while managers “still have to figure out whether monolingualism or multilingualism is most helpful to the exercise of their supervisory tasks” (Heller 2011: 171), “multilingualism is prized by francophones, anglophones and immigrants alike as they jockey for privileged access” (Ibid: 101). These processes lead us toward the era of post-nationalism, where we will abandon our local identities, languages and other symbols of nation-state in favor of new global discourses created by global economy. In order to make this argument, Heller uses sociolinguistic methodology to investigate how competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy emerge and become adopted by different social agencies. Heller (2011: 6) argues that sociolinguistics “is not a form of expert knowledge, but rather an informed and situated social practice, one which can account for what we see, but which also knows why we see what we do, and what it means to tell the story”. She describes the objective of her project as a desire to “move away from a position that claims objective, neutral, unconstrained, disinterested knowledge production which can, if called upon to do so, guide social and political action, and toward one that understands knowledge production to be socially situated, but no less useful for that” (Ibid: 6). Following post-modernist method of inquiery, the author also stresses the question of interests served, in her words, “how the kinds of knowledge we are interested in producing, and do produce, are embedded in complicated relations of power, not all of which may be readily apparent to us and not all of which allow tor reliable prediction of the consequences ot our work” (Ibid: 6). Hellers explores sociolinguistics that was revealed from the “links between the structure and functioning of the academy and the growth of the modern nation-state” (Ibid: 6). Recent changes in global economy that caused to the emerging of the third sector, of “niche markets”, of “intensified globalized exchange and communication networks, of shifts in regulatory relations between the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors,” and these shifts of late modernity strengthened “the discursive turn away from universalizing scientific frames” (Ibid: 6). Becoming multilingual and abandoning nation-state centered values can be treated as a “major investments into gaining access to spaces where something important is happening, something that can make a difference to your life, or at least to your children's lives” (Heller 2011: 193). Heller (Ibid: 193) also argues that “new things come up for which discursive frames are not yet ready and must be fashioned.” The question is, how those new things will differ from all familiar to us events of violence that came from the xenophobic ideologies such as nationalism. If we take a look at the current events in Russia (December 2010), we will see the revival of that familiar nationalism, when the Us versus Them distinction becomes relevant for both masses and political leaders that mobilize them for action against so-called ethnic enemies. Is nationalism on its way to disappear? Then how sociolinguistic will explain that the term ‘Gastarbeiter’ (foreign worker) became so relevant in the modern Russian language as a term that produces practices of marginalization of ethnic minorities from Caucuses in Moscow? Evgeni Klauber University of Delaware

About the author

Monica Heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.