The Multi/Plural Turn, Postcolonial Theory, and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Complicities and Implications for Applied Linguistics

Abstract

In applied linguistics and language education, an increased focus has been placed on plurality and hybridity to challenge monolingualism, the native speaker norm, and the modernist view of language and language use as unitary and bounded. The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they both support hybridity and fluidity while problematizing the essentialist understanding of language and identity. However, postcolonial theory, which has been influenced by poststructuralism, met criticisms in the 1990s in cultural studies. The notion of hybridity has been especially criticized for its privileged status, individual orientation, and disparity between theory and practice. Furthermore, the conceptual features of the multi/plural turn overlap with neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, which uncritically support diversity, plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating color-blindness and racism. The multi/plural turn also neglects the ways in which neoliberal competition and the dominance of English affect scholars. This article examines the multi/plural trend by drawing on some critiques of postcolonial theory and neoliberal ideologies and proposes an increased attention to power and inequalities as well as collective efforts to resist the neoliberal academic culture underlying the multi/plural turn.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, I proposed a colloquium for an applied linguistics conference on plurilingualism and language teaching. In the proposal, my co-organizer and I mentioned that the concept of plurilingualism often runs into conflict with the current dominance of English in language teaching in many non-English–dominant countries. We received a comment that the global dominance of English is passé and it has been replaced by multilingualism—a more nuanced and complex situation in which the market saturation of English has opened up opportunities for other languages. This was surprising, and made me wonder how the popular theoretical trend to highlight linguistic multiplicity can or cannot adequately address challenges that exist in our society.

A recent prominent trend in applied linguistics is a multilingual or dynamic turn ( Flores 2013 ; May 2014 ), which focuses on the plurality, multiplicity, and hybridity of language and language use to challenge a traditional paradigm of understanding linguistic practices in various contexts. In this article, I will focus on this turn and call it ‘multi/plural turn’. The multi/plural turn can be observed in a large number of publications and conference presentations on such inquiry foci as multilingualism ( Martin-Jones et al. 2012 ; May 2014 ), plurilingualism ( Taylor and Snoddon 2013 ), world Englishes (WE) ( Kachru et al. 2006 ), English as a lingua franca (ELF) ( Seidlhofer 2011 ), codemeshing ( Canagarajah 2006 ), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010 ), translingual approach ( Horner et al. 2011 ), translanguaging ( Blackledge and Creese 2010 ; García and Sylvan 2011 ), multiliteracies ( Cope and Kalantzis 2009 ), and hybridity ( Rubdy and Alsagoff 2013 ).

Although linguistic multiplicity is nothing new in human history ( Cenoz 2013 ), the recent interest has been influenced by postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial thought as seen in such notions as multiplicity, heterogeneity, fluidity, hybridity, and constructedness, which expand and blur the fixed boundaries of the social and linguistic categories that are defined in an essentialist binary logic in the previous modernist paradigm ( Pennycook 2010 ). However, as this ‘turn’ grows in popularity, it seems as though its critical impetus has faded and its knowledge is becoming another canon—a canon which is integrated into a neoliberal capitalist academic culture of incessant knowledge production and competition for economic and symbolic capital, and neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates individual cosmopolitanism and plurilingualism for socioeconomic mobility. In bolstering neoliberal discourses, the multi/plural approaches lose a transformative edge that seeks significant changes in the sociopolitical and economic conditions of people who are using, learning, and teaching language. Indeed, while our discipline engages with multi/plural frameworks, we continue to see not only the dominance of English and standard language ideology but also ethnic conflicts, civil wars, racism, xenophobia, and growing economic gaps both nationally and internationally. While applied linguistics alone will not cure these social evils, some are within the purview of our discipline, and the gap between our celebrated ‘multi/plural’ perspectives and real lives of many people concerns me.

Similar concerns about a theory/practice divide were raised in the 1990s in many publications critiquing postcolonial theory, to which our field has paid little attention (cf. Kumaravadivelu 2008 ). Critiques of postcolonial theory are useful in alerting us to the problematic ideological overlap between the multi/plural turn and neoliberal multiculturalism. Drawing on some literature critiquing postcolonial theory and neoliberalism, this article demonstrates how facets of postcolonial theory and neoliberal multiculturalism parallel the conceptual foundations of the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics, and suggests a shift in attention from individual plurality and hybridity to asymmetrical power relations, social injustices, and resistance to neoliberalism in our academic community.

In critically examining the multi/plural turn, my focus is not specific arguments made in applied linguistics literature but rather a macro discourse on plurality and hybridity that has attracted so much attention. Neither is it my intention to deny the significance and utility of the multi/plural turn in understanding linguistic forms and practices. In fact, these conceptualizations are valuable as they challenge a broader political and educational discourse that privileges a dominant language and culture. My aim is instead to encourage us to critically reflect on ideological complicities that undermine the philosophical impetus of the multi/plural turn.

Below, I provide an overview of the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics, followed by a review of relevant criticisms of postcolonial theory, neoliberalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism and their implications for applied linguistics. Finally, I suggest narrowing a gap between theory and practice by focusing more on power and inequalities in research and on resistance to neoliberal scholarly practices in our academic communities and institutions.

THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Some of the aforementioned inquiry areas constituting the multi/plural turn describe linguistic forms and practices, while others inform language pedagogy. In these discussions, two closely related orientations are observed: pluralism and hybridity. The pluralist orientation focuses on using and learning multiple languages or varieties of a language in social and educational contexts. Frameworks such as WE, traditional foreign language pedagogies, and immersion or maintenance bilingual education are pluralist in the sense that they challenge previous linguistic norms—Anglocentric native speakerness or monolingualism—and embrace linguistic pluralism and multilingual competence. However, they tend to support an atomistic view ( Cenoz 2013 ) or segregationist view of language ( Harris 1998 ), which regards languages, language varieties, and language use as autonomous entities with clear linguistic boundaries ( García and Flores 2012 ) and constitutes monoglossic instruction or what Cummins (2007) called two-solitude pedagogies of bilingual education, in which language mixing is discouraged.

In contrast, the hybrid orientation support the holistic view ( Cenoz 2013 ) or integrational view of language ( Harris 1998 ), which regards multilingual linguistic practices as products of language users’ multiple repertoires that are employed in a contingent and flexible manner rather than an aggregate use of languages that are separated along structural boundaries. In this sense, the hybridity orientation is distinct from the pluralist one, even though they both attempt to pluralize the traditional norms. In contrast to WE, for instance, recent research on ELF focuses on the investigations of fluidity and hybridity as observed in English users’ negotiation of meaning, expressions of their identities, and multilingual interactions in fluid, contingent, and heterogeneous ways ( Jenkins et al. 2011 ; Cogo 2012 ).

The hybrid orientation has also influenced pedagogy. García and her colleagues proposed translanguaging as a communicative and pedagogical principle of multilingual communities, in which multiple discursive practices across languages, such as code-switching and translation, are performed by language users to express their meanings in multilayered and multidirectional processes ( García and Sylvan 2011 ). This is a heteroglossic, dynamic, multilingual pedagogical approach as opposed to the traditional monoglossic view of bilingualism or multilingualism as a manifestation of two (or more) separate competencies in one individual. From a similar perspective, Canagarajah (2013) advocated the translingual practice of code-meshing (as opposed to code-switching) in English writing. While code-switching presupposes switching between two or more separate semiotic systems, code-meshing views languages, symbols, and communicative modes as a single unified hybrid system ( Canagarajah 2006 , 2013 ). Translanguaging and translingual practices underscore plural and hybrid language use and identity as legitimate forms of expression.

The rejection of the monoglossic and fixed view of bi/multilingualism is also seen in the notion of metrolingualism. According to Otsuji and Pennycook ( 2010 : 264):

Metrolingualism describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction.

Although Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) draw attention to metrolingualism as hybrid expressions of language and identity, they problematize the notion of hybridity as a fixed category of pluralization, a notion that reflects a modernist view of language as a bounded and countable object ( Makoni and Pennycook 2005 , 2012 ), rather than complexification. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) also reveal contradictions as manifested in the cultural and linguistic fixity observed in metrolingual users who simultaneously demonstrated hybridity in language and identity. Although metrolingualism problematizes hybridity as superficial celebration, it is still grounded in the postmodern affirmation of multiplicity and fluidity, which keeps it from critiquing how inequality is often solidified or intensified within multiplicity and fluidity.

As implied thus far, there are some significant differences and disagreements among scholars supporting multi/plural frameworks. One intriguing tension is seen in the discussion of ELF and WE in the context of Singapore ( Pakir 2009 ). Although both frameworks support a pluricentric view of the form and use of English, they differ in that ELF implies borderless hybrid uses of English by nonnative speakers, whereas English in Singapore, though similarly used as a lingua franca, is forming nativized uniqueness as seen in the emerging creative literature and new canons that denote national linguistic identity. This exemplifies a tension between hybridity and rootedness as discussed later.

In sum, the inquiry foci and concepts of pluralism and hybridity problematize the previous view of language as a bounded system with one-to-one relationships between the signified and the signifier, between language and the nation state, culture, or ethnicity, and between language and language user. They underscore the fluid, dynamic, multiple, flexible, and hybrid natures of language, language learning, and language use, and call for transforming fixed monoglossic thinking which supports the native speaker norm, the monolingual norm, and the superiority of standard language. Other areas of inquiry, such as nonnative English speakers ( Moussu and Llurda 2008 ) and usage-based linguistics of second language acquisition, including complexity theory ( Larsen-Freeman 2012 ; Ortega 2014 ), share this skepticism of traditional monoglossic approaches.

These multi/plural perspectives parallel aspects of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, which have been applied to various inquiry areas in applied linguistics. As a critique of modernist ideas of objectivity and essentialism, poststructuralism, which postcolonial theory significantly draws on, pays attention to the dynamics, fluidity, and contingency of social, cultural, and linguistic categories as well as power that circulates and constructs knowledge and subjectivities ( Morgan 2007 ).

However, scholarly discussion on multilingualism has been critiqued from a poststructuralist perspective as well. Drawing on poststructuralist tenets of critiquing social, political, and cultural systems and raising critical awareness of ‘the irrational, of violence within social structure’, McNamara ( 2011 : 431) critiqued the multilingual turn in a special issue of The Modern Language Journal entitled ‘Toward a multilingual approach in the study of multilingualism in school contexts’. McNamara cautions against assuming that ‘multilingualism in itself is simply a cause for celebration’ (p. 432) and calls for a more critical and complex understanding by examining monolingual ideologies. These ideologies are seen in Africa, where learning English rather than local languages is promoted for economic and political causes, and in Europe, where multilingualism is promoted for speakers of majority languages but not for immigrants. The denial of multilingualism for marginalized populations indicates how power produces and justifies social violence, a problem to be scrutinized ( McNamara 2011 ). Also from Marxist, globalization, and poststructuralist perspectives, O’Regan (2014) critiqued the ELF movement as idealist hypostatization that obscures ideology, discourse, and power that underlie racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities of English learners/users around the world.

Although McNamara (2011) and O’Regan (2014) draw on poststructuralism to challenge the celebratory trend of multilingualism or ELF, the multi/plural turn can also be theoretically scrutinized by the criticisms of postcolonial theory that were published in the 1990s in cultural studies. Paradoxically, such criticisms challenge poststructuralist and postmodernist thought underlying the influential works by postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Below, I present some criticisms of hybridity, a major concept underlying both postcolonial theory and the multi/plural trend, and related issues. These criticisms offer alternative conceptual lenses to challenge the multi/plural turn, as shown briefly in the next section and in more detail in the subsequent one.

CRITICISM OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Hybridity has been theorized by Bhabha (1994) and discussed widely as a key concept of postcolonial theory. Whereas Edward Said focused on binary representations of the colonizer and the colonized and critiqued how colonial power was exercised in their discursive construction, Bhabha proposed hybridity as a space for enunciating and translating cultural difference, in which culture is never understood as primordially fixed or universal and cultural purity is untenable. As the Third Space of enunciation, hybridity is a space in which cultural meanings and signs ‘can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew’ ( Bhabha 1994 : 55). Resistance can be articulated in the Third Space, where ‘it is possible to return the colonial gaze and subvert the ambivalent construction of cultural supremacy itself, where colonial rule and the relational construction of colonizer and colonized can be destabilized from within’ ( Andreotti 2011 : 31). Hybridity is performed via translation, mimicry, and appropriation; colonized people’s use of the colonizer’s cultural and linguistic codes destabilizes power hierarchy and has subversive effects of resistance.

Although hybridity aims to provide the colonized with a new identity and possibility for liberation, the notion has been critiqued. First, it has been argued that the notion of hybridity is predicated on the existence of non-hybrid cultures. Moore-Gilbert (1997) argues that the Center, and to a lesser extent the Periphery, tends to be described with such non-hybridity, leading to cultural homogenization. This problem appears to be solved by the argument that ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity’, forming the ‘third space’ rather than a mixture of ‘two original moments from which the third emerges' ( Rutherford 1990 : 211). However, if all cultures are hybrid and in-between, a postcolonial critique conflicts with its original impetus to recreate a distinct agency and identity of the colonized ( Moore-Gilbert 1997 ). Here, hybridity can become a fixed categorization (cf. Otsuji and Pennycook 2010 ), either existing in a binary of hybrid or non-hybrid or referring to the all-encompassing. In applied linguistics, this problem is exemplified by the recent contradictory advocacy for rhetorical hybridity to be achieved by mixing culturally essentialized rhetorical styles in academic writing for unique self-expression ( Li 2014 ).

Secondly, critics argue that hybridity can be exploited for the benefit of the dominant in various ways to create and legitimate hierarchies. In the case of India, Moore-Gilbert (1997) argues that hybridity of the colonized was historically used to legitimate the imposition of the power of the colonizer as a unifying force. Furthermore, ‘cultural hybridity became a means of securing colonial control through the production of complicit “mimic men” ’—‘the national bourgeoisie … to which control was relinquished at the beginning of the (neo)-colonial period’ ( Moore-Gilbert 1997 : 195). Another example is Imperial Japan from the late 19th century to the end of World War II, in which a dominant discourse about national identity was hybrid ethnicity rather than monoethnic purity, as it conveniently legitimated Japan’s colonial control over East and Southeast Asian nations which consisted of diverse ethnic groups ( Oguma 1995 ). Far from being liberatory or celebratory, hybridity, when assigned a superior status, can become oppressive. The promotion of hybridity by dominant groups corresponds to the neoliberal ideology of plurilingualism ( Flores 2013 ) and neoliberal multiculturalism, as discussed later.

Thirdly, hybridity disregards the significance of cultural nationalism or collective politics. It is necessary to remember that it was cultural nationalism, the separatist politics of identity and resistance, rather than hybridity that first prompted decolonization. Cohesive forces continue to exist. As May (2009) notes, many governments confront demands from ethnic and religious groups who present themselves in collective terms rather than from hybrid positions. The postcolonial or poststructuralist stance of anti-essentialism and a denial of rootedness demonstrates a shift in attention ‘from national origin to subject-position’ ( Dirlik 1994 : 335) or from group identity to individual subjectivity. However, by doing so, it endorses the colonial civilizing mission in which individualism (but not freedom) was introduced to the colonized along with the ideas of modernity and enlightenment ( Chakrabarty 2000 ). In the context of capitalist globalization of the Empire ( Hardt and Negri 2000 ), the nation-state no longer appears to exert its political and economic power. In this sense, the perceived decline of cultural nationalism and the rise of hybridity constitute an idea aligned with capitalist globalization. Despite, or because of, the ‘decline in sovereignty of nation-states’ ( Hardt and Negri 2000 : xi), the nation-state ‘might be the only political formation able to mitigate the unprecedented poverty and discrimination, violence, and civil strife, that are results of globalization and of the geo-political interventions of the west’ ( Sethi 2011 : 123). Likewise, group solidarity can challenge hegemonic forces of racism, sexism, and homophobia, although solidarity can also obscure various differences and inequalities within each group. A tension between collective politics and hybridity or individual difference can be observed in indigenous language revitalization and maintenance, as discussed in the next section.

Fourthly, hybridity typically refers to relations between the postcolonial and the First World, rather than between two postcolonial subjects, indicating that it overlooks the politics of location as ideological and institutional structures ( Dirlik 1994 ). This leads to a contentious point: the notion of hybridity and in-betweenness, when applied to postcolonial scholars’ professional status and theoretical stances, demonstrates a privileged elitist position of power located in the First World, which is not shared by subalterns who are forced to take a marginalized status or location. Referring to postcolonial scholars of Third World origin, Dirlik (1994) states:

However much postcolonial intellectuals may insist on hybridity and the transposability of locations, not all positions are equal in power. … To insist on hybridity against one’s own language, it seems to me, is to disguise not only ideological location but also the differences of power that go with different locations. Postcolonial intellectuals in their First World institutional locations are ensconced in positions of power not only vis-à-vis the ‘native’ intellectuals back at home but also vis-à-vis their First World neighbors here. My neighbors in Farmville, Virginia, are no match in power for the highly paid, highly prestigious postcolonial intellectuals at Columbia, Princeton, or Duke; (p. 343)

Postcolonial theory, which favors Eurocentric textual analysis and European theorists but overlooks social, economic, and political struggles experienced by the underprivileged, creates a privileged location, in which ‘the identity of the postcolonial is no longer structural but discursive’ ( Dirlik 1994 : 332). As a caveat, it is important not to totalize European knowledge as antithesis to the (post)colonial but to view it as a complex and contradictory construct that was adopted and resisted by the colonized in the establishment of bourgeois individualism and modernism even in decolonization ( Chakrabarty 2000 ). In applied linguistics, our academic status as scholars corresponds to the privileged position of postcolonial academics that Dirlik (1994) critiques.

Finally, the power and privilege attached to postcolonial scholars and the location of theorization further indicate a gap between theory and practice ( Sethi 2011 ). Comparing Bhabha’s texts imbued with words from Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss with the people in the Third World, Ahmad (1992) states, ‘Those who live … in places where a majority of the population has been denied access to such benefits of “modernity” as hospitals or better health insurance or even basic literacy; can hardly afford the terms of such thought’ (pp. 68–9). Similarly, referring to poverty and violence in many developing countries, Miyoshi (1995) notes, ‘As we talk about postcoloniality and postindustrialism in the metropolitan academia, we ignore those billions outside our ongoing discourse for whom life has nothing “post” about it’ (p. 71). Relying on Western intellectual canons such as poststructuralism as well as such notions as hybridity, syncretism, and multiplicity, postcolonial theory champions Eurocentric rational thought, though appropriated and resisted in ambivalent ways, endorsing rather than reversing the colonial relations of power. A similar theory–practice divide of the multi/plural turn is seen in the examples discussed by McNamara (2011) . The criticisms reviewed so far raise the following implications for the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics.

IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Hybridity and related notions are neither neutral nor apolitical; they involve contextual and relational arrangements of power. Without addressing power and ideology, advocacy of multi/plural approaches and hybridity in language use can become complicit with domination and will fail to solve real problems. Furthermore, when our intellectual engagement becomes entrenched in the popularity of the multi/plural turn, we may lose sight of the persistent demand for monolingualism and linguistic purism in various locations as well as Anglocentrism and English-only ideologies in many non-English–dominant neoliberal societies. It is important to keep in mind that, as Shohat (1992) mentions, ‘A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence’ (p. 109).

An awareness of the hegemony and ideology behind postcolonial concepts requires contextual understandings. Hybridity carries many political meanings and consequences in different locations. It is necessary to examine hybridity not in universal but contextual terms within the current neocolonial hegemonies. To cite Shohat (1992) :

As a descriptive catch-all term, ‘hybridity’ per se fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political cooptation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence. (p. 110)

This implies that hybridity or the Third Space between a dominant group and a subordinate group may either support or hinder cultural and linguistic revitalization of indigenous groups.

Tension between hybridity and rootedness

Studies on indigenous language maintenance and revitalization reveal a complex web of power. While postcolonial theory challenges cultural/linguistic essentialism and purism as violence of colonial discourse, authentication of linguistic and cultural resources and identities often constitutes a key strategy for revitalization. Contrary to the postmodern sociolinguistic idea that language is no longer fixed at a certain location ( Blommaert 2010 ), claiming to belong to ancestral land constitutes important means for language preservation or revitalization and for resistance in indigenous communities. Although the mobility of people, including indigenous populations, shifts linguistic practices ( Patrick 2007 ), there is a conflict between the idea of deterritorialized language use built upon individualism and an indigenous epistemology of land. The claim for linguistic belonging in the context of Singapore expressed by Pakir (2009) similarly indicates how rootedness constitutes linguistic identity. Concepts such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism can undermine the positive effects of rootedness to form local solidarity among minoritized groups, and instead promote neoliberal capitalism, as discussed later in more detail.

Conversely, such fixed authentication creates a feeling of shame and reluctance to learn or use a heritage language among indigenous youths, who lack the ability to use a correct form of the language ( Lee 2009 ; McCarty et al. 2009 ). This shows a dilemma between authentication and postcolonial plurality. Although authentication of premodern indigeneity is paradoxically founded upon the modernist definitions of language and language rights ( Patrick 2007 ), postcolonial hybridity that challenges such modernist definitions will undermine traditional indigeneity. Indeed, it is difficult to negotiate two opposing poles: political efforts to seek collective rights to identity and attempts to support indigenous youths who negotiate their hybrid identity. This raises several questions: ‘Who defines what counts as language? Who defines what language should be revitalized ? How does one avoid alienating speakers of other language varieties (e.g. younger, mixed-language speakers)?’ (Donna Patrick, personal communication). Additionally, who proposes either hybridity or authentication as a goal to be sought on what grounds? Significantly, both cultural hybridity and authenticity may work to undermine cultural and political identities and rights of indigenous peoples ( Franklin and Lyons 2004 ).

As Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) point out, hybridity coexists with fixity in plurilingual individuals’ linguistic expressions and cultural identity. Blackledge and Creese (2010) also reveal how national belonging to a heritage culture was insisted on in heritage language classrooms in the United Kingdom, which was shaped within a more powerful discourse of national belonging to the dominant language and culture. Here, the authors stress duality, rather than hybridity, of identity.

Hybridity as a privileged position

The complexity of power relations also implies that hybridity can become a privileged position as seen in the politics of location that privileges postcolonial theory and its scholars. Although some individuals, who are socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged or displaced, become linguistically hybrid, as in the case of an African asylum seeker described in Blommaert (2010) , hybridity can also signify cultural capital. In global capitalism and neoliberalism, linguistically hybrid plurilingual English-speaking subjects are transnational elites who are considered to be superior to monolingual users of a single national language ( Flores 2013 ). Given that assimilationist monolingual ideology continues to predominate in many countries, economically privileged and ethnically dominant students who employ translanguaging, codemeshing, and plurilingualism become more privileged than those who are trained to become monoglossic. It is important to ask whether all language users regardless of their racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other background equally transgress linguistic boundaries and engage in hybrid and fluid linguistic practices. As mentioned earlier, hybridity tends to be more focused on individual subject positions than on group identity. However, access to certain linguistic competencies or performativities is unequally distributed among not only individuals but also groups. So the question to ask is, among different groups, ‘who is included and excluded in the celebration of hybridity?’ ( Lorente and Tupas 2013 : 70).

The availability of hybrid positioning is also relevant to scholars. Just as postcolonial scholars of the Third World or any other origin who work in the First World can enjoy privilege without actually transforming the lives of the people in the Third World, it is owing to our privilege that we applied linguists, including myself, can discuss and even model hybridity and multiplicity of linguistic practices. Of course, oppressive policies and ideologies that marginalize certain populations should indeed be challenged, and hybrid and multiple identities of marginalized people who are excluded by monolingual/monoethnic ideology need to be protected. However, our scholarly promotion of the multi/plural turn may primarily function as a way to legitimate and reaffirm our own hybrid and plural subjectivities rather than as an aid to transforming the lives of the people we refer to. These people include those who are linguistically, racially, and economically marginalized, for whom hybridity may be a site of struggle rather than celebration, or students and scholars who are expected to conform to the conventions of academic writing and standard language ideology. Applied linguistics will perhaps more meaningfully mobilize its academic knowledge for social transformation not simply by promoting multi/plural concepts but also by examining their political, economic, and ideological underpinnings.

A gap between theory and real-world needs

The gap between theory and practice or the fallacy of pedagogical practice deemed progressive was discussed extensively in the 1990s in relation to the process-oriented teaching of literacy. It was argued that the liberal constructivist approach of student-centeredness with a focus on meaning and free expression rather than form and accuracy worked for middle-class students who were already equipped with cultural capital, but not for working-class racially minority students. An alternative approach proposed was to appropriate the language of power—the teaching of the dominant code via form-focused instruction without devaluing the cultural and linguistic identity of minority students ( Reyes 1992 ; Delpit 1995 ). Successful implementation of this pedagogical idea is to provide these students with an opportunity to gain cultural capital, and eventually economic and symbolic capital, for socioeconomic success.

Will hybridity-oriented ideas also have the same effect? While appropriation of the dominant code alone is unlikely to destabilize its power, neither are hybridity-oriented ideas since they address individual students’ expressions but not broader sociopolitical constraints that limit more fluid, multiple, and hybrid expressions. In this sense, scholarly discussion on hybridity and multiplicity more likely becomes self-serving academic activity than social impact. The relationship between applied linguistics scholars and practitioners/students seems to parallel that between the First World scholars and the Third world populations which constructs ‘a division of labour in which the Third World acts, while the First thinks (or, even worse, in which the First World speaks, while the Third dumbly acts)’ ( Moore-Gilbert 1997 : 164).

Academics’ privileged status and the politics of multi/plural turn are implicated in multiculturalism in a neoliberal era. Many published critiques of postcolonial theory in the 1990s pointed out its complicity with neoliberal world order. I now examine how notions of plurality, flexibility, hybridity and so on used in applied linguistics today are located in neoliberal ideology.

THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN AND NEOLIBERALISM

Neoliberalism and plurilingualism

Critics have pointed out the complicity of postcolonial theory/scholars in neoliberal global capitalism. Neoliberalism, a topic of growing interest in applied linguistics (e.g. Kubota 2011 ; Park 2011 ; Block et al. 2012 ; Park and Lo 2012 ; Flores 2013 ; Holborow 2013 ), is an ideological and structural apparatus that promotes a free-market economy by privatizing public services, creating a flexible workforce, and increasing individual and institutional accountability for economic success, while reducing social services and producing disparities between the rich and the poor. With global capitalism, neoliberalism supports economic activities across national borders. Theorizing the realignment of global power in late capitalism, Hardt and Negri (2000) argue:

Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities. (p. 150)

As increased numbers of multinational corporations and smaller businesses cross-national borders, successful management of diversity—recognition of multiplicity and negotiation with cultural and linguistic difference among diverse employees and clients—has become a key to economic success.

A link between neoliberalism and the multi/plural trend of language studies, especially the pluralist orientation, is found in the discourse of plurilingualism promoted by transnational organizations such as the Council of Europe and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ( Flores 2013 ). Based on the key neoliberal concept of human capital, plurilingualism has been promoted essential for working in global capitalism. Critically reviewing a document published by the Council of Europe, Flores (2013) pointed out that the notion of plurilingualism was promoted to support learning to communicate across borders (via various linguistic repertoires) and respect for linguistic diversity, language rights, freedom of expression, and democratic citizenship. This aligns with the neoliberal emphases on the development of individual competencies in service of economic growth: lifelong learning of communication skills to be developed as individual responsibility; flexible, pragmatic, and truncated language repertoires as essential competence for transcultural workers; and cultural competence that facilitates individual and national economic development.

These skills are indeed deemed important among transcultural workers, creating a predicament for contesting the dominance of English, which is also entrenched in neoliberal ideology ( Phillipson 2008 ). More precisely, the neoliberal preoccupation with learning English as an international language can be challenged by promoting plurilingualism beyond English, which ironically overlaps with neoliberal human capital ( Flores 2013 ; Kubota 2013 ). Here, it is important to recognize a duality between neoliberal pluralism and neoliberal desire for English for economic purposes, which resonates with a legacy of colonial discourse of the superiority of whiteness, modernity, and liberation ( Motha 2014 ). As in my opening episode, the multi/plural position that ignores the other side of the duality misses the bigger picture of hegemony, becoming complicit with the neoliberal celebration of difference.

A similar complicity is seen in the discussion of multiliteracies ( Cope and Kalantzis 2009 ). In the era of neoliberal human capital in the new economy, increased multimodality in everyday literacy is sharply contrasted by a persistent emphasis on back-to-basics literacy instruction. To counter this conservative pedagogy, Cope and Kalantzis (2009) support new literacy instruction that highlights flexibility, creativity, multimodality, and innovation in meaning-making processes—skills promoted since the progressive education movement in the early 20th century but discursively realigned with neoliberal human capital—with a critical awareness of power relations. The authors argue that this transformative pedagogy can support either realistic demands or emancipatory purposes and that it is up to the learner to decide which view to take; this is essentially a neoliberal solution of individual choice.

These cases demonstrate a paradox; conservative educational policies (e.g. the teaching of English only as an international language or back-to-basics instruction) appear to support neoliberal practical skills. When applied linguists critique such policies and propose alternatives, they often endorse equally neoliberal ideology of multiplicity, thus becoming complicit with neoliberal discourse. A possible solution will be discussed in the conclusion.

Neoliberal multiculturalism

As discussed above, a neoliberal and global capitalism that expands beyond national borders requires workers, citizens, and institutions to successfully navigate and negotiate cultural differences. Multicultural competence is part of human capital. Neoliberal multiculturalism is built upon ‘an ethos of self-reliance, individualism, and competition, while simultaneously (and conveniently) undermining discourses and social practices that call for collective social action and fundamental structural change’ ( Darder 2012 : 417). The multi/plural turn thus parallels the underlying ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism—that is, individualism, difference-blindness, and elitist cosmopolitanism rather than critical acknowledgement of power.

Neoliberal multiculturalism in the context of the United States inherited previous racial liberalism, which sutured the anti-racism of the civil rights movement to Cold War nationalism for establishing the legitimacy of the United States as a global power of democracy, human rights, and transnational capitalism ( Melamed 2006 ). Replacing socialist ideology, neoliberal multiculturalism also underscores individual accountability to legitimate the distinction between the privileged and the stigmatized. In post-racial discourse, racism is given a label of pastness in light of the success of Barack Obama and other minorities. In this color-blindness, individuals are to enjoy their freedom and opportunities but are ultimately responsible for their own socioeconomic standings regardless of their background, which leads to ‘privatizing racism’ ( Lentin and Titley 2011 : 168). This meritocratic justification legitimates racial and other inequalities.

Not only does neoliberal multiculturalism legitimate the difference between the privileged and the stigmatized, it also distinguishes the forms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diversity as in the case of banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women ( Lentin and Titley 2011 : 176). This indicates that ‘monoculturalism becomes a category of stigma’, recreating ‘ “multicultural” and “monocultural” as new privileged and stigmatized racial formations’ ( Melamed 2006 : 16). Furthermore, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diversity among immigrants is distinguished along the class line under neoliberalism. In the case of Australia, desirable immigrants are those from middle-class backgrounds who will make economic contributions, whereas undesirable immigrants are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in need of social services, causing a burden for the neoliberal state ( Shiobara 2010 ). We can see that although neoliberal multiculturalism promotes respect for diversity, sensitivity to difference, official antiracism, open societies, and individual (economic) freedom, it reproduces the existing racial, gender, and class hierarchies of power.

An ideal neoliberal subject is cosmopolitan. However, critics argue that cosmopolitanism reflects individualism and an elite worldview of people with wealth, mobility, and hybridity in global capitalism, while undermining the potentially positive role of the nation, which could provide opportunities for workers and other groups to form solidarity. Critiquing cosmopolitanism, Calhoun (2002) states: ‘Cosmopolitanism is not responsible for empire or capitalism or fascism or communism, but neither is it an adequate defense.’ (p. 887)

It is clear that the multi/plural approaches are complicit in neoliberal multiculturalism in that both focus on the individual rather than group solidarity, assume color-blindness, and support diversity—but only the kind of diversity that privileges the multicultural/hybrid/cosmopolitan (rising) middle class over the monocultural/non-hybrid/parochial working class. Although creating a binary between middle class and working class may seem inappropriate, it is also problematic to claim the universality of hybridity/cosmopolitanism across the class line, since it justifies difference-blindness and undermines situated politics. It is important to note that the multi/plural focus does not necessarily take into account how racial and other relations of power might affect the ways people use, learn, and teach language. As Motha ( 2014 : 79) notes, ‘Optimism about new hybrid language practices therefore needs to be tempered by a consciousness of the role being played by race in our constructions’. Scholars need to pay greater attention to the role that power dynamics play in linguistic hybridity, fluidity, and plurality.

Earlier, I discussed a theory/practice divide in the critiques of postcolonial theory and scholars. The free-market economy and neoliberal policies also regulate the academic activities of intellectuals, further proliferating the multi/plural turn as a favored intellectual trend. Below, I focus on the impact of neoliberalism on our scholarly activities.

Scholars in neoliberal academic institutions and their complicity with neoliberalism

Neoliberalism in higher education can be characterized by privatization, marketization, corporatization, increased student fees, emphasis on obtaining grants, a two-tiered employment and institutional system, curriculum for developing human capital, English-medium education, and documentation for accountability ( Mok 2007 ; Holborow 2013 ). These measures aim to increase institutions’ global competitiveness for financial gains. Competition is promoted by university rankings, which are based largely on research productivity as measured by citation analysis and research funding ( Altbach 2013 ). However, not all research counts as legitimate; ‘the topics and the methodologies of the research must be appealing to editors and reviewers in the central academic powers’ ( Altbach 2013 : 79). Pressure to publish and obtain funding compels academics and graduate students to try to ‘position themselves competitively within the knowledge of marketplace’ and ‘as a good fit within the institution’s neoliberal purpose’ ( Darder 2012 : 414). Academic writing practices are also situated in the economic interest of the publishing industry as well as a competitive model for individual and institutional accountability. Academic journals are ranked according to impact factors based on citation frequencies and other measures. Researchers are often rewarded by how many times their works were cited. The basic principle is indeed the more the merrier! This implies that popular theories and concepts proposed by prominent scholars tend to get cited, recycled, and propagated incessantly, while opposing or deviant ideas are likely to be relegated to a form of inadequate diversity. In this way, the multi/plural trend becomes a fashionable commodity to be consumed but not necessarily to fix real-life problems.

One of the real-life issues is the global dominance of English. In neoliberal academic institutions in the world, English dominates and regulates many scholars’ academic careers ( Mok 2007 ; Altbach 2013 ). Referring to the increased pressure for scholars in Asia to publish in English-medium high-impact journals, Mok (2007) comments:

Ironically, publications in local languages or national venues, which might be read by a wider audience and might have significant effects or impacts on local policy formation or socioeconomic developments, would not be counted as internationally important. If such a situation proves to be a valid one, we certainly need to address the fundamental problems resulting from the quest for internationalization of universities. (p. 446)

Altbach (2013) also reports: ‘Norwegian academics who publish in English and in recognized journals are paid fees for their accomplishments, while their colleagues who publish in Norwegian are paid less or not at all’ (p. 3). International and domestic graduate students in English-speaking countries are taught to write in acceptable academic discourse in English, but are rarely encouraged to learn to write and publish in their native or other languages. Far from the perception that multilingualism is now the norm, English indeed dominates as a global academic language, reinforcing the hegemony of English monolingualism.

Furthermore, not all contexts allow hybrid and creative language use. Take high-stakes academic writing, including writing for tests, publishing, and proposals for funding, for example. While advocacy for multi/plural approaches is essential in these contexts, jumping on a multi/plural bandwagon in teaching will likely repeat the same problem with the process writing approach in the past ( Heng Hartse and Kubota 2014 ).

The dominance of English and standard varieties of English is intact both globally and within English-speaking countries, marginalizing and disadvantaging non–English-speaking or nonnative–English-speaking populations, as McNamara (2011) pointed out. This inequality is not just about language but also about race ( Motha 2014 ) and class ( Block 2013 ; O’Regan 2014 ). In many parts of the world, the dominant language is imposed on minority populations, while race and class index positive or negative meanings attached to being plurilingual ( Lo and Kim 2012 ). Although one impulse of the multi/plural turn is to challenge this monolingual and standardization-based approach to research and language teaching, the discourse that underscores plurality and hybridity sidesteps the hegemonic ideologies and social practices. This is demonstrated in the opening episode in which the rhetoric of multilingualism was favored.

It is also significant to note that applied linguists, including myself, who publish on multi/plural topics benefit from this activity in advancing our own careers, just as postcolonial scholars do from publishing their work. Many of us, applied linguists, native or nonnative speakers of English, are privileged plurilingual scholars who can afford to use hybrid modes of expression or advocate what we wish to see, while people for whom we ostensibly advocate often do not have the power to do so. As postcolonial scholars were criticized as complicit with colonial hegemony, Eurocentrism, and elitism, applied linguists who embrace the multi/plural turn perhaps cannot escape a similar charge.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The progressive ideas of the multi/plural turn, which has an intellectual affiliation with postcolonial/poststructuralist thought, provide an important shift in our understanding of language use and language teaching. They originally aimed to transform hegemonic monolingual and English-only ideology. However, critical reflections on postcolonial/poststructuralist theory in the 1990s as well as recent criticisms of neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism indicate that the multi/plural turn should not be embraced with unqualified optimism.

While notions such as hybridity, fluidity, and multiplicity are potentially liberating, they can obscure actual struggles and inequalities, just as postcolonial theory tends to ignore ‘the contemporary actuality of global politics within a capitalist world-system’ ( Parry 1994 : 7). Using the multi/plural frame of reference with insufficient critical reflection makes us complicit with a neoliberalism that exacerbates economic and educational gaps and with a neoliberal multiculturalism that evades racism and other injustices. Thus, in considering linguistic plurality and hybridity in our research, more explicit attention should be paid to issues of asymmetrical relations of power and inequalities that privilege or stigmatize individuals and groups due to their plurilingualism, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity on the one hand, or their monolingualism and monoculturalism on the other.

It is also important to critically reflect on our own hybrid plurilingual status of privilege within neoliberal academic institutions, in which we further accrue cultural, economic, and symbolic capital from presenting and publishing while moving further away from real-world problems. Concrete measures to resist academic neoliberalism will require the applied linguistics community to raise our concerns and begin to seek alternatives. Professional associations may recommend guidelines for tenure and promotion focusing more on quality of research (e.g. originality, social relevance, and critical reflexivity), practical impact (e.g. community-based inquiry and improvement of practice), and diverse venues and methods for knowledge mobilization (e.g. equal weight given to research output in languages other than English or alternative formats that have a greater social impact) than on quantity of output, prestige of journals or publishers, or uncritical alignment with popular approaches. Such guidelines will influence the ways in which we advise graduate students and review various academic work, such as manuscripts for publications, external tenure reviews, and grant applications. With regard to academic writing, promoting multi/plural approaches (e.g. translanguaging) should coincide with advocacy for broadening the current textual conventions by communicating to publishers, editors, and other gatekeepers ( Heng Hartse and Kubota 2014 ). In addition, bi/multilingual students and scholars should be given more encouragement and opportunities to engage in academic writing in languages other than English. Language testing is another area where advocacy for allowing greater linguistic diversity can make real impact for change.

One difficulty for change is the close conceptual alignment between constructs of neoliberal multiculturalism (e.g. flexibility, diversity, mobility) and critical approaches to applied linguistics ( Pennycook 2010 ). As I mentioned earlier, this creates a challenge for us to critique neoliberal-like conservative policies (e.g. English-only instruction) without becoming complicit with neoliberalism. One strategy might be to appropriate the discourse of neoliberalism to promote critical awareness of diversity without endorsing capitalist domination ( Kubota 2013 ). In fact, this strategy might more easily convince practitioners and policymakers about alternative views than asking them to drastically change their ideological position would.

It is time for us to critically reflect on the multi/plural turn and pay more attention to the systems of power that produce racial, economic, and other inequalities related to plural and hybrid linguistic practices. It is equally necessary to resist the neoliberal academic culture that compels us to ignore social problems and instead celebrate plurality and hybridity for our own cause. Increased attention to places where real problems exist can make our professional activities more socially meaningful and transformative.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Alastair Pennycook for his insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. I also thank Joel Heng Hartse for providing suggestions for increasing readability. My appreciation also goes to the editor for his support and guidance.