Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html

The oil slick as seen from space (Source: Wikipedia)

The British decision to exit the European Union (EU) in 2016 came as a surprise to many. In the lead up to the referendum, nationalist discourses were successfully mobilized to promote a vote for the anti-globalisation campaign. Nationalism proved to have an ongoing appeal in our global world.

But these nationalist discourses did not come out of nowhere in 2016 nor were they solely emanating from the sphere of politics.

In a recently published paper, “‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem”, I examine the relationship between discourses of corporate responsibility and nationalism in the media coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Surprisingly, nationalist discourses featured heavily in reports about that disaster.

The media play a powerful role in shaping our perceptions of global issues, including environmental disasters. The media may obstruct or support interests of various stakeholders, and do not necessarily educate us in an uninterested way.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the worst industrial disaster in US history and 4.9 million barrel crude were released into the environment. In addition to the huge immediate damage, long-term effects are as yet unknown but are likely to include oil remaining in the food chain for generations to come.

The disaster was the fault of BP (short for “British Petroleum”), a multinational corporation headquartered in the UK operating the oil well, who was found to be “primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct.”

So how did the media represent corporate responsibility in their coverage of the event?

From perpetrator to victim

Comparing UK and US media, I found that the former were less concerned with the environmental impact than the consequences for British interests and even cast BP in the role of victim rather than perpetrator. The Telegraph, for instance, headlined: “Barack Obama’s attacks on BP hurting British pensioners.” The article continued:

Barack Obama has been accused of holding “his boot on the throat” of British pensioners after his attacks on BP were blamed for wiping billions off the company’s value.

The corporation was metaphorically described as a person and depicted as vulnerable and in need of protection:

We need to ensure that BP is not unfairly treated – it is not some bloodless corporation.

It is not unusual for corporate responsibility to be obscured in the media, particularly if no individuals can be clearly identified as “bad guys”. However, British media went beyond that by casting BP as victim rather than perpetrator, and making it stand for a particularly vulnerable segment of the population, namely “British pensioners”.

As a consequence, solidarity was not rallied with the victims of the disaster but the perpetrator:

I want to see the UK government defend the company while it is under this attack.

This blame-shifting where the perpetrator turned victim meant that another scapegoat had to be found to fit the conventional narrative. In this case the head of another state, US president Barack Obama, was cast in that role. This further enhanced the economic and nationalist framing of the environmental disaster:

Although fund managers accept that BP must pay compensation for the oil spill and the damage it is doing to parts of America’s coastline, they argue that the cost to the company’s market value from the president’s criticism is far outweighing the clean-up costs.

In sum, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was told in some UK media as a national-economic problem for Britain rather than a global environmental disaster. In the process, corporate responsibility was obscured and readers were led to see the issue as one of national threat to themselves. Reporting the news in this way aligns the readers with corporate economic interests by framing these as national interests.

This framing was then available to be mobilized in the Brexit campaign five years later.

Beyond the British case, my study is also relevant to the revival of nationalist and separatist discourses in other contexts, which similarly obscure that nationalism is entirely irrelevant to the big issues of our time as they pose existential threats to life on this planet. Like an oil spill, these do, after all, not stop at national borders …

Reference

Cramer, R. (2017) ‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem. Discourse & Communication, 0(0), n/a-n/a. doi:10.1177/1750481317745744

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany

Have you recently seen a “welcome” sign? They constitute a strange genre: ever more ubiquitous on the one hand, yet utterly false and insincere – how can you be “greeted” by a piece of stuff? – on the other.

Whenever I see one of these “welcome” signs, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who had travelled in Japan in the 1970s: he had visited Japan for an academic conference and added a few days of sightseeing. For the latter, he had rented a car to drive around the countryside. It was the days before GPS and mobile phones and satellite tracking; all he had was an old-fashioned paper map. The map had all the place names in the Latin script while the signs he saw next to the road were all in Japanese. Illiterate in Japanese, he had no way of matching a name on the map with a name on a sign.

Sure enough, he got lost. Because some signs had the place name in both Japanese and Latin scripts, he just kept on driving in the hope of finding such a bilingual sign to regain his bearings. To his mounting frustration, the only non-Japanese signs he encountered for a long time said: “Welcome!” He knew he was “welcome” but he didn’t know where – or even what – it was he was welcomed to …

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a heritage village in Abu Dhabi, UAE

A similar story is unlikely to happen today. Not only because of the advent of GPS and Google maps but also because directional signage outside the Anglophone world and particularly in countries that do not use the Latin script has become bilingual and largely follows the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Article 14 stipulates that “The inscription of words on informative signs […] in countries not using the Latin alphabet shall be both in the national language and in the form of a transliteration into the Latin alphabet reproducing as closely as possible the pronunciation in the national language.” As more and more countries have become signatories mono-script directional signage outside the Latin-script world have largely become a thing of the past.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Los Angeles, California

In fact, it is not only directional signage that has become bi- or multilingual but the same is true of “welcome” signs, which must be one of the most multilingual genres on the planet.

Any self-respecting institution today says “welcome” multilingually in a show of banal cosmopolitanism.

“Banal cosmopolitanism” is based off the much better-known concept of “banal nationalism”, a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Banal nationalism refers to the mundane discourses – flags, maps, national references, etc. – that enact national belonging in everyday life. Similarly, banal cosmopolitanism refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life. Banal cosmopolitanism is apparent in the “mediatization and consumption of spatially distant places, signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons” (Jaworski, 2015, p. 220).

One linguistic form that banal cosmopolitanism may take is the excessive use of new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles, as Adam Jaworski shows in a 2015 paper entitled “Globalese.” Their use, particularly in brand and shop names, serves to create “novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their ‘original’ ethno-national languages” (p. 217). Detached from their national and local linguistic context, they point to somewhere else, somewhere in the realm of the global.

English “Welcome” graffiti in Ramsar, Iran

Multilingual “welcome” signs are another such mundane index of globalization and banal cosmopolitanism. Multilingual “welcome” signs feature prominently in consumption spaces – as the examples from shopping malls show and tourist destinations show. However, they are not exclusive to those and are increasingly popular also in universities and similar institutional spaces that want to mark themselves as internationalized, diverse and inclusive.

That all this indexing of cosmopolitanism is indeed “banal” and only runs skin deep is best exemplified by those multilingual “welcome” signs that get one or more of their versions wrong. And I don’t mean home-made signs in developing countries that get their English spelling wrong. What I mean are huge signs professionally produced on durable materials that scream “welcome” in dozens of languages – certainly more languages than the designers of the sign could master or could be bothered to verify the translation for.

The versions that go wrong most frequently are those that use right-to-left scripts.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign, University of Limerick, Ireland

If a designer gets the Arabic and Persian translation of “Welcome” from Google Translate and then copies and pastes it into a selection of other translations, their word processor is likely to re-order the letters from left to right; as happened in this sign at the University of Limerick.

As a result of this linguistically-uninformed process, the Persian version, for instance, which should be “خوش آمدید” is scrambled to read something like the equivalent of “emoclew”; a line later (2^nd before last), half of the word, “آمدید” has been repeated, leaving a truncated version similar to “come”; again scrambled to actually spell something like “emoc”.

Examples such as these are not at all rare: in a previous post, we featured an apron that combines both banal nationalism and banal cosmopolitanism in one item and where the Arabic version of “Australia” is spelled backwards.

So who are the recipients of these multilingual “welcome” signs? The signs are intended to send a message of cosmopolitanism, internationalization, diversity and inclusion – but it’s a message that is intended for the dominant population so that they can feel good about themselves. If a reader were not to speak English, the multilingual “welcome” featured here are just as useful as they were to the driver lost in the Japan. And if you are a reader of one of the languages that come in the garbled version, it’s adding insult to injury.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the University of Limerick’s “Welcome” sign was intended to welcome members of an international conference devoted to multilingualism. That was incorrect. Attendees of that conference posed beneath the banner and shared it on social media – that’s how I came across the image – but the banner was not associated with the conference.

Reference

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2015.1010317

The national character stereotypes of intercultural communication advice are completely mono-dimensional and not inflected by any other aspects of their identities. They are presented as free of class, gender, ethnicity, regional background, personal traits or any other individuating aspects of their being. Much intercultural communication advice is so obviously lacking in common sense – people obviously are rarely, if ever, stick figure representatives of national stereotypes – that it is intriguing to consider why the genre is so successful and continues to flourish.

I suspect it is due to a mismatch between what intercultural communication advice says it does and what it actually does. Ostensibly, intercultural communication advice aims to teach readers better communication skills and to make them more aware of difference and diversity. However, the genre actually does a lot of additional discursive work: it sustains the nation as a key category, presents national belonging as overriding any other aspects of identity, and, consequently, renders other aspects of identity invisible – in short, intercultural communication advice constitutes a prime example of banal nationalism.

The term ‘banal nationalism’ was introduced by the social psychologist Michael Billig ‘to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced’ (Billig, 1995, p. 6).

Many people think of nationalism as extremism. However, Billig points out that nationalism is the endemic condition of established nation states, that it is enacted and re-enacted daily in many mundane, almost unnoticeable, hence ‘banal’, ways. It is these banal forms of nationalism that lead people to identify with a nation. Examples of banal nationalism are everywhere although they often go unnoticed. Typically, the discourses of banal nationalism emanate directly from state institutions. They are then taken up by non-state actors and become enmeshed with a range of discourses that at first glance have nothing to do with nationalism at all, such as intercultural communication advice.

Page from Persian primer: reading passage ‘We are the children of Iran’

The discourses of banal nationalism are often embedded in the practices of state institutions. Schooling is a prime example of the way in which children are socialised into a national identity. It is school where we become members of the nation and where we are taught to think of ourselves as nationals. The Pledge of Allegiance in many public schools in the USA is an oft-quoted example. On the other side of the world, in Australia, many public schools hold a weekly assembly, where the school community comes together to listen to a speech, watch a performance or be part of an award ceremony. The joint singing of the national anthem plays a central part in the school assembly. In yet another example, Indonesian public schools conduct a flag-raising event every Monday morning and also on every 17th of the month (in commemoration of the national Independence Day, which is celebrated on 17 August).

In addition to ceremonial activities such as these, the socialisation into the nation is also part of teaching content in many schools around the world: there are the lyrics of national poems that are used to teach students how to read and write, the national anthem that is taught in music and recital lessons, the focus of much history teaching on national history, or the valorisation of the national language as the only legitimate medium of educational activities.

Banal nationalism on a cornflakes box

Schooling is widely controlled by the state and the fact that it is used as a vehicle to socialise students into the nation is maybe not particularly surprising. However, the discourses of banal nationalism also emanate from less likely sources. Billig’s (1995) example of the daily weather forecast on TV is a particularly convincing one: the daily weather forecast is usually presented against an image of the national map – as if national borders were meaningful to weather patterns. Banal nationalism in sports has also been widely studied: sporting competitions are typically framed as national competitions and most spectators are more likely to support co-national competitors on the basis of their nationality rather than using criteria such as sportsmanship or elegance of the game.

Yet another domain of banal nationalism can be found in consumer advertising, where national imagery is used to create positive associations with a product or service or consumption in general. At the same time, the use of national imagery in consumer advertising increases the presence of national imagery in the mundane spaces of everyday life and thereby continually reinforces the message of national belonging. The discourses of banal nationalism that come associated with consumer advertising have come to pervade our private lives.

Associating products with national imagery is a widely used marketing strategy in Australia, just as it is in many other countries (click here for examples of a car painted in the Union Jack, French on cookies or UAE-themed coffee and cake). Through everyday items such as the cornflakes box in the image, national symbols enter mundane everyday spaces such as supermarket shelves and the breakfast table in our homes. They keep circulating in those spaces as constant small reminders of national identity.

National identity is a discursive construction – a highly pervasive one but a construction nonetheless. This point is basic to most of the contemporary social sciences but it continues to elude the literature on intercultural communication, where national identity tends to be treated as a given. In the end, intercultural communication advice is nothing but yet another instance of banal nationalism, a discourse that reinforces readers’ sense of national belonging rather than one that leads them to genuinely engage with difference and diversity.

References
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Heinrich Zille, “Die Original Australier” auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

One of the central arguments of my book Intercultural Communication is that, even today, much intercultural communication is approached from an orientalist perspective, i.e. a Eurocentric and colonial way of seeing people from other countries as stereotypes. Orientalism finds expression in a myriad of discourses and one way in which it is reproduced is through presenting “foreigners” as weird spectacles.

During the ages of European exploration and colonial expansion, the west delighted in viewing the wonders of the “new” world by collecting specimens of exotic animals, plants and cultural artefacts for display in zoos, botanical gardens and museums. The desire to collect and display “the exotic” did not stop at humans, either. For instance, in the 1830s a French merchant snatched the body of a young African man and stuffed it in the way animals are sometimes stuffed and prepared for display. The body was then shipped to Europe and displayed for almost two centuries in various museums. The body was removed from public display only in 2000, when the remains were repatriated to Botswana. If you are interested in learning more about the man behind the body, you will find this BBC article about “the man stuffed and displayed like a wild animal” as informative as it is disturbing.

Heinrich Zille, Sioux-Indianer auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

Another way to turn foreign people into spectacles for the western gaze was to put actual people on display. For instance, in the collections of Heinrich Zille, an illustrator and photographer who documented the lives of Berlin’s poor in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, there is a series of photographs of an amusement park festival, a “Rummel.” The photographs are ethnographic in the sense that Zille’s aim was to capture the perspectives of the common people who attended the festival. Many of the spectacles on display for the amusement of Berlin’s poor relate to “fremde Völker” (“foreign peoples”). Browsing through the photos, one notices an “Indian Pavilion”, one that displays “Roses from the South” (women in costumes), or another one that features “Sioux-Indians from the Island of [illegible].” In the displays, anthropological accuracy is obviously completely beside the point. While the name of the island, where the Sioux on display are supposed to come from, is illegible in the image, it obviously does not matter because the basic mistake is the claim to island residence. Furthermore, the painted image of a “Sioux” on the front of the tent is of a black person.

The image I find most haunting in the collection is of a tent displaying “Die Original Australier” (“the original Australians”). In front of the tent, three Aboriginal (or South Pacific?) men stand on display. They are wearing long white robes in the manner of Christian monks or possibly traditional Arabs. The headdress of two of them includes some feathers and the third wears a headdress that includes the horns of cattle. Again, accuracy is completely beside the point – do I even need to point out that cattle are not native to Australia and so could not have been part of traditional dress? One cannot but wonder what the three costumed men who are being gawked at make of their position. Their facial expressions seem withdrawn. How did these men from the Southern Hemisphere end up as display objects in a Berlin amusement park in 1900? What did they make of life in Wilhelmine Germany? Where did they die?

In addition to displaying real bodies and people as specimens of the “weird” Other, books, newspaper and paintings equally contributed to the exoticization of non-Europeans. The stalls photographed by Zille all also display painted images of and short slogans about the featured group. A vivid example of “textual display” comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection of children’s verses “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” First published in 1885, the collection continues to be in circulation today. Wikipedia informs us that the collection “contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics ‘Foreign Children,’ ‘The Lamplighter,’ ‘The Land of Counterpane,’ ‘Bed in Summer,’ ‘My Shadow’ and ‘The Swing.’”

It is the “cherished classic” poem “Foreign Children” that positions the non-European Other as weird spectacles – objects of a mixture of pity and amusement:

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Foreign Children” (first published in 1885; a “cherished classic” in 2016)

Collectible card character “Lani” representing Papua New Guinea, 2016

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

Country “fact” about Papua New Guinea on collectible card, 2016

Whether the poem presents any facts about “foreign children” is completely beside the point. That there are no lions or ostriches where the exemplars of “foreign children” in the poem live is beside the point. What the poem does – in the same way as the displays mentioned above – is to set the foreign Other up as weird spectacle. Ultimately, the point of the poem is not even about the Other but about the Self: the British child who reads the poem – or has the poem read to them – can feel reassured that they are safe, normal and proper – in contrast to all the imagined foreign weirdos out there.

The examples I have shared so far are over a century old and one might be tempted to dismiss them as the benighted ways of our forebears. We have certainly largely lost the appetite for putting real humans – whether alive or dead – on display. However, the proliferation of images of the cultural other as stereotypical spectacle continues unabated. Not only do texts such as the “Foreign children” poem continue to circulate but new texts presenting people as stereotypical representatives of a country and weird spectacle appear all the time.

For instance, the Australian supermarket chain Woolworths is currently running a marketing campaign aimed at children called “World Explorers.” The campaign is a collectibles program where shoppers can collect card sets. The front of each card is dominated by a cartoon character, who is clearly identified as a representative of a particular country. The back of each card contains two sections. One is titled “Have a go …” and consists of a one-sentence activity suggestion and the other is titled “Weird but true” and contains some random country fact. The cards can be flipped over and their insides reveals further sections, including “Did you know?”, which features another random country fact, “Food for thought”, which describes a national dish or food item, and a little section, where the character introduces him- or herself.

What is the lesson of this 2016 collectible cards wrapper? That white boys always take center stage?

The character for Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a little girl who introduces herself as follows:

Gude! I’m Lani and I’m from the town of Tari, Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the few places in my country where we still regularly wear traditional dress.

The card also features an image of two tribal men, accompanied by this “Did you know?” explanation:

The Huli Wigmen, where I live, grow their hair long to make helmet-like wigs. They often paint their faces yellow too.

The purpose of the campaign is supposedly “to educate kids about the world and different cultures,” as the campaign website states. “Education” supposedly also was the aim of the exotic people displays from an earlier period. As I showed above, this was an “education” not in facts, knowledge, understanding and empathy but an “education” into a particular way of viewing the world: one where the foreign Other is always defined by their national identity and destined to offer a stereotypical spectacle for the western viewer. This spectacle of the “weird but true” Other may cause amusement, pity or disgust in the viewer but, above all, it is designed to bring home to the viewer their own essential difference from, if not superiority to, those exotic foreigners.

References

Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A revised 2nd edition of the book is scheduled to appear in 2017 – watch this space!

Flügge, M. (Ed.). (1984). Heinrich Zille: Fotografien Von Berlin Um 1900. Leipzig: VEB Fotokinoverlag.

Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran

When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our interviewees, artist Mayu Kanamori, asked to conduct the interview in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, where she wanted to show us the final resting place of the first known Japanese settler in Australia. Mayu raised a number of questions about the spiritual belonging of transnationals and about ‘death on the move.’ I was reminded of that conversation with Mayu during my visit to Tehran’s Christian Doulab Cemetery.

Death far from home

The Polish section occupies about three quarters of the Catholic cemetery and constitutes the final resting place of almost 2,000 men, women and children who died in Tehran between 1942-1945.

The story of the Poles lying in Iranian soil is one of the less well-known tragedies of World War II. As part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact what was then Eastern Poland (and is today part of Belarus and Ukraine) was annexed by the Soviets in 1939. Around 1.5 million Poles were deported from the area to camps in Siberia. The vast majority of these died in the following months under horrific circumstances. Only around 250,000 of the deported Poles are known to have survived in Siberia. The survivors were released in 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union so that they could join in the war effort against the Nazis. However, many of these survivors chose to flee instead and around 115,000 managed to reach Allied-occupied Iran.

Two of the headstones in the Polish refugee section

Making it to Iran was like reaching the Promised Land for the evacuees, as one of them recalls in her memoirs:

Exhausted by hard labor, disease and starvation – barely recognizable as human beings – we disembarked at the port of Pahlavi [present-day Bandar-e Anzali]. There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for Promised Land. (quoted from Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

For a few years, the Polish community flourished in Tehran:

Something more than food and clothing are necessary for the human spirit to survive and grow. Art and Culture are antibodies to feelings of despondency and decay, and within a few months of their arrival, the exiles had set up their own theatres, art galleries, study circles, and radio stations all over the city. Artists and craftsmen began to give exhibitions. Polish newspapers began to spring up; and restaurants began to display Polish flags on the streets.

Among the organizations formed to care for the educational and cultural needs of the exiles was the influential Institute of Iranian Studies begun by a small group of Polish academicians. In three years from 1943 to 1945 this group published three scholarly volumes and scores of other articles on Polish-Iranian affairs. (Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

Memorial stone at the center of the Polish refugee section: French-Persian plaque (the Polish version is on the other side of the monument)

However, death was ever-present in this group of weakened survivors, as the Catholic cemetery in Doulab vividly demonstrates. Each of the small 1,869 refugee graves (see here for a map of the cemetery) has an identical headstone inscribed with a number, the Polish abbreviation ‘S.P.’ (‘swietej pamieci,’ ‘in memory of’), a name, the year of birth and the year of death, and the Latin abbreviation ‘R.I.P.’ (‘requiescat in pace,’ ‘may s/he rest in peace’).

In the center of the Polish refugee section are two memorial stones, one with a trilingual inscription in Polish, French and Persian and the other bilingual in Polish and English. The trilingual one is roughly similar in the three languages and the Polish version reads as follows:

PAMIECI /WYGNANCOW/POLSKICH /KTORZY /W DRODZE DO OJCZYZNY /W BOGU SPOCZELI /NA WIEKI. 1942-1944

To the memory of the Polish exiles who, on their return journey to their homeland, found the peace of God, 1942-1944 (my translation from the French and Persian inscriptions)

The English version of the bilingual memorial stone, which looks more recent than the trilingual one, is similar in content but provides more detail and reads as follows:

IN COMMEMORATION /OF THOUSANDS /OF POLES THE SOLDIERS /OF THE POLISH ARMY /IN THE EAST /OF GENERAL /WLADYSLAW ANDERS /AND CIVILIANS /THE FORMER /PRISONERS OF WAR /AND CAPTIVES /OF THE SOVIET CAMPS /WHO DIED IN 1942 /ON THE WAY /TO THEIR HOMELAND /PEACE TO THEIR MEMORY

As it so happens, the inscriptions on both these monuments are historically incorrect: the Polish refugees were not on their way “to their homeland” because – also in Tehran in 1943 but worlds away from the refugees – Churchill and Roosevelt conceded what had been Eastern Poland to Stalin’s USSR and the remainder of Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence.

Death in a new home

One of the tombstones of the Poles who settled in Tehran. The mixed name shows that Yanina Kaganowska married into a Persian family

For the majority of the survivors, their stay in Iran was temporary and they later resettled in the UK, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. However, some also chose to stay and to rebuild their shattered lives in Iran as is evidenced by the graves in the far corner of the Polish section. There, a number of larger and personalized tombstones have been erected to the memory of people born in Poland who died in Tehran as recently as 2002. Most of these commemorate women who married Iranian men as is evidenced by their Persian surnames.

I looked at these graves with mixed feelings: on the one hand, their personalized details, the fact that they were commemorating much older people than the refugee graves, and the names in which Polish and Persian have become mixed speak of lives lived fully in a new home. On the other hand, they are all single graves and the Iranian husbands and families of these women thus must lie elsewhere (maybe in Tehran’s huge Behest-e Zahra Cemetery, where the city’s Muslims find their final resting place). The fact that none of these graves are family graves – despite the fact that the women obviously had new families in Iran – speaks to the fact that faith and nation continue to divide in death those who were joined in life.

Parceling up the dead

French flag marking a little girl as French national

The divisions of faith are made concrete in the architecture of the Doulab cemetery complex, a feature that is, of course, not unique to Iran’s cemeteries. To begin with, Tehran’s dead Christians are physically separated from the city’s Muslims and Jews, who have their own cemeteries elsewhere. Second, even within the Christian complex the various denominations are divided into their own separate compounds: the Catholic cemetery is separated by large walls from the adjoining Armenian and Russian cemeteries (the so-called ‘Russian’ cemetery seems to house all non-Armenian and/or non-Iranian Orthodox Christians).

Divisions of nation of origin also continue to persist within the Catholic cemetery. Although widely known as ‘Polish cemetery’ because such a large number of Poles are lying there, the cemetery was started in 1855 with a mausoleum for Dr. Louis André Ernest Cloquet, a Frenchman who died prematurely while serving as personal physician to the Shah. The memorial to this Catholic was placed close to – but outside of – the Armenian cemetery. Since then Catholics from most European countries have also found their final resting place there and the cemetery’s sections are more or less clearly divided into national sections.

The banal nationalism of death is most obvious in the cases of the French and Italian dead who lie in Doulab: their embassies have taken the trouble of placing little metal French or Italian flags at the foot of each French or Italian grave.

This tombstone could be located anywhere in Germany. There is nothing in the inscription that suggests that Franz Sänger actually lies in Tehran

While such flags are absent from the graves of other nationals lying in Doulab, the language of the tombstones is in most cases the language of the country of birth. None of the German graves I visited, for instance, shows any sign that the person lying there must have lived a transnational life and must, to a smaller or larger degree, have been part of the fabric not only of German but also Iranian society during their lives. The inscriptions on the tombstones bear no traces of a life partly lived in Iran: for all that the inscriptions suggest, the graves might have been located in Germany.

How could a tombstone inscription suggest a transnational life? At the Doulab cemetery, I saw two options: a multilingual inscription or a lingua franca inscription.

A multilingual inscription is exemplified by the Polish, French and Persian trilingual memorial discussed above. On individual tombstones in the Catholic section multilingual inscriptions are rare and, unless I overlooked something, absent from the graves of Europeans. The few that I noticed are bilingual in various combinations of Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, French, Persian and Russian. In some cases, it was impossible to identify the languages other than to say that the inscriptions were both in the Latin and Arabic scripts.

A bilingual tombstone in French and Assyrian is suggestive of the complex life that Paul Sarmas must have led

While monolingual tombstones predominate in the Catholic section, over in the Orthodox section the situation is different and tombstones inscribed in multiple languages and scripts – Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Russian – are more frequent there.

As regards lingua franca inscriptions, I consider an inscription as lingua franca if the tombstone is inscribed in a language other than a/the language of the country of origin of the deceased or a language of Iran (in practice, in this case, that means Armenian, Assyrian and Persian). The most frequent lingua franca by far is French and one final surprise was the absence of English in this international space: other than in the Polish-English bilingual memorial mentioned above, there was only one single tombstone inscribed in English:

ANNA MARIA VAN /DEN BRINK-LECKE /BORN HOLLAND 19.10.1914 /DIED TEHERAN 13.9.1970 /MAY GOD REJOICE HER SOUL

The nationality of the deceased is listed as German in the cemetery’s registry, a country where she was neither born nor died, further illustrating the complexity of transnational life and death.

Where the spirit rests

Keeping the dead within the boundaries imagined by the living: the gate to the walled-in Catholic section of the Doulab Cemetery Complex

Dying away from ‘home’ is often invested with special sadness. According to an overview of Polish cemeteries in Iran, a number of the commemorative plaques in other Polish burial sites in Iran stress the fact that these people died “on foreign soil.” There is indeed a deep sense of sadness and loss emanating from the refugee graves. However, that is because of the evil that cut short the lives of the people who lie there and that made the circumstances of their final years so horrific.

By contrast, the graves of those Poles who had decided to stay on in Tehran after the war and to rebuild their lives there and those of the other foreign-born lying there did not move me in this way. What is striking about those is the desire of the living to inscribe the boundaries of faith, nation and language even on those who obviously led lives that transcended those very boundaries.

Promoting the University of Bolton’s Ras Al-Khaimah branch campus on the streets of Ajman

The other day I was stuck in traffic in Ajman, one of the smaller of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one that has to do without Abu Dhabi’s and Dubai’s global glitz. Imagine my surprise when a car painted in the Union Jack came into view! I’ve been stuck in traffic in many parts of the world and I’ve got a sizable collection of pictures of cars decorated with flag stickers, images of flags or actual flags. This car, however, is, I think, the only one I’ve ever seen that was completely painted as a flag. The status of the little car as an island of Britishness moving in a sea of mundane Middle Eastern traffic was further enhanced by the fact that it had its steering wheel on the right-hand side: just like in Britain, but unlike every other car in the UAE.

So what do you think this car was advertising? Surely, the British state is not desperate enough for some good PR to send little cars painted with the Union Jack out onto the streets of the Middle East?

Well, the mystery was revealed when the car’s rear window came into view. The car was an ad for higher education! Specifically, it was advertising for the University of Bolton and the slogan on the rear window reads “Get a UK degree/At The First British University/in Ras Al Khaimah, U.A.E.”

Never heard of the University of Bolton? Well, it’s an institution in the Manchester metropolitan region and its main claim to fame is that it has consistently ranked last in league tables of British universities.

In 2008, the University of Bolton opened a branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah, the northern-most and least-developed emirate. Initially, the university’s low ranking at home caused some raised eyebrows but the branch campus now seems to be doing well and enrollment rose from an initial 100 students to 300 in 2010.

Not favored with oil wealth nor tourist attractions, Ras Al-Khaimah has tried to turn itself into a higher education hub in the last couple of years by “enticing and luring” American and British colleges and institutions into opening branch campuses in their free trade zone. However, since the spectacular failure of George Mason University’s branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah after only three years in 2009, the enticing and luring may have become a bit more difficult.

Despite the fact that many international branch campuses have ended in a fiasco (in addition to the George Mason University withdrawal from Ras Al-Khaimah, Australian readers will be familiar with the debacles of the University of New South Wales in Singapore or the University of Southern Queensland in Dubai), branch campuses continue to be a popular internationalization strategy and the number of international branch campuses reached 200 in 2012, up from only 82 in 2006; a remarkable growth figure of around 150% in little more than half a decade.

According to a 2012 report, the largest number of international branch campuses originate from the UK and about a quarter of all international branch campuses are located in the UAE. However, the scene is quickly diversifying. In addition to the UK, Australia and the USA have long tried to be big players in franchising their higher education institutions overseas. They are now joined by other European countries, particularly France and Germany, as well as emerging source countries, particularly India, Iran and Malaysia.

The destination countries of international branch campuses, too, are diversifying away from the Gulf States with the largest growth now in Asia, particularly China and Thailand. Africa, too, is starting to attract international branch campuses, with some already set up such as the Iranian Islamic Azad University in Tanzania and many others, originating particularly from China and Malaysia, in the planning stage.

Preston University campus in Ajman

So, what drives the extraordinary growth of international branch campuses? Sadly, it’s not the search for knowledge nor the desire to provide more equitable access to higher education. According to Altbach and Knight (2007) the primary motivation to establish an international branch campus is the desire to make a profit. This is particularly obvious with for-profit universities and includes a fair number of shady degree mills such as Preston University originating from Pakistan.

Making money is, of course, also attractive to traditional not-for-profit universities starved of public funding and that’s obviously where institutions such as the University of Bolton come in.

As far as non-financial motives for the establishment of international branch campuses are concerned, Altbach and Knight (2007) identify access provision and demand absorption as more and more young people want to attend higher education, particularly in countries that may be ill-equipped to meet that demand. Additionally, they note that internationalization is in itself highly valued in higher education. Indeed, an international orientation has long been a central aspect of the academic habitus (see also my recent discussion here) and university rankings have recently served as an additional incentive to internationalize.

Students, by contrast, are attracted to branch campuses for reasons of convenience, as Wilkins et al. (2012) argue. Based on a survey of students studying at an international branch campus in the UAE, they found that students chose to study on the branch campus rather than the main campus because it was cheaper and closer to home and because they preferred the life-style of the UAE over that in Australia, the UK or USA.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai

Wilkins et al.’s (2012) research questions did not include any that related to the motivation to study at a branch campus rather than a local university but a significant number of respondents mentioned that “foreign universities have best reputation in UAE” (p. 426). Indeed, country reputation is the unique selling proposition evident in the University-of-Bolton advertising car. Advertising for other international branch campuses in the UAE also relies heavily on the reputation of the Western country where the university is headquartered, as is evident in this magazine ad for the Dubai campus of the Australian University of Wollongong.

Like many others, I find the subjection of education to the profit motif objectionable. Indeed, senior administrators of not-for-profit British universities are loath to admit a profit motive underlying their institution’s establishment of international branch campuses, as Healey (2013) discovered. The administrators this researcher interviewed preferred to talk about their non-commercial motives such as the desire to internationalize and to contribute to global development through education, etc.

However, even if profit were not the main motivation why universities set up international branch campuses, I’m still troubled by the vexing association between quality higher education and the franchised university. Isn’t higher education diminished for all of us if the university becomes nothing more than yet another expression of banal nationalism and neocolonial imagery?

Altbach, P., & Knight, J. (2007). The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities Journal of Studies in International Education, 11 (3-4), 290-305 DOI: 10.1177/1028315307303542
Healey, N. (2013). “Why do English Universities really Franchise Degrees to Overseas Providers?” Higher Education Quarterly: n/a-n/a.
Wilkins, S., Balakrishnan, M., & Huisman, J. (2011). Student Choice in Higher Education: Motivations for Choosing to Study at an International Branch Campus Journal of Studies in International Education, 16 (5), 413-433 DOI: 10.1177/1028315311429002

Professor Adam Jaworski and intercultural communication students at the University of Hong Kong

It is one of the joys of having written a book like Intercultural Communication that readers like to meet the author and last week I had the opportunity to meet a group of undergraduate students at the University of Hong Kong who had been using the book in Professor Adam Jaworski’s class on intercultural communication. The students had prepared a list of questions they wanted to ask me and I learnt as much as they did.

The question I enjoyed the most started with the observation that my book was very different from what the students had expected in an intercultural communication text. Therefore, they wanted to know why my book is so different from other titles in intercultural communication.

There are many ways to answer this question and one of the most obvious is that my book is written from a different position than most other textbooks in intercultural communication, most of which emanate from communication and management studies at US universities. It’s written by a linguist and thus pays more attention to the role of language in intercultural communication and it’s written by a multilingual migrant who doesn’t find value in reproducing cultural stereotypes but examining their functions in context. Readers of the book will recall that my main point throughout is that much research in the field needs to be reconceptualised to address the fundamental research question “Who makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?”

In the book I’ve been critical of some of the existing literatures in intercultural communication, which – with their reproduction of widely-held stereotypes about particular national cultures – often seem to be nothing more than yet another exercise in banal nationalism. Thus, banal nationalism figured heavily in the questions, too, and one of them was whether I thought patriotic education was a form of banal or “hot” nationalism?

At that point, I had to turn the tables and ask questions myself because I had only the vaguest idea what “patriotic education” might mean. It turned out that patriotic education was a hot topic for the students because of the planned introduction of a new curriculum of civic studies in primary schools. That plan had drawn mass protests in September this year because the curriculum was widely perceived as undemocratic and as telling history only from the point of view of the People’s Republic of China. Following the protests, the plan was suspended and the new patriotic education curriculum is now voluntary rather than compulsory.

After the explanation, the question was back to me: What did I think of patriotic education? Well, history if always told from a particular standpoint and it’s usually the position of those in power. Under British rule, history lessons in Hong Kong apparently ended in the early 1800s, conveniently before the Opium Wars and the annexation of the island.

As an outsider, it’s not my place to comment on a particular version of history. However, as a global citizen it strikes me that all nationalist education poorly prepares young people for the challenges they are facing today: the big issues of our time, particularly environmental destruction in all its forms, are not national but global. As the slogan goes: Think globally, act locally!

With many thanks to all the students and colleagues I met in Hong Kong for all the local yet global conversations we had! I’ll be looking forward to coming back, particularly to conduct the workshop I had to cancel because Cathay Pacific left me stranded in Wuhan for 24 hours.

Eurovision Baku 2012 (Source: i3.mirror.co.uk)

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest has come and gone with Sweden crowned the winner for 2012, also taking the title of Australia’s unofficial winner (over 130,000 people in Australia visited the SBS Eurovision websiteto vote). Until recently, I did not take much interest in Eurovision, regarding it as lame, embarrassing and a lightweight media exercise in banal nationalism.

But a few years ago my daughter, who was on an exchange trip to Norway, said she was attending an actual, live Eurovision Grand Final! The idea that she would be somewhere in the crowd prompted me to tune in and since then I have joined the throng of avid Eurovision fans. Over the years the contest seems to be taking itself less seriously and, lord knows, we could do with some frivolity in these times of political crisis and economic austerity.

Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang’s hilarious commentaries are an added bonus! They epitomise the fun of being young, transnational, multicultural, irreverent and quintessentially Australian:  “The UK’s youth policy does not seem to be working,” quipped Sam drily as crooner Engelbert Humperdinck (now well into his seventies) bombed to the bottom of the Eurovision league table! UK nul points!

Let me first recount a little of Eurovision’s fascinating history: The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) was formed in 1950 by 23 broadcasting organisations from Europe and the Mediterranean. First conceived as an international experiment in live television, the Eurovision Song Contest has been a focus for Pan-Europeanism since long before the days of satellite TV, digital broadcasting and high definition TV.  In 1954, the Narcissus Festival procession was relayed across the Eurovision network and was watched by four million viewers across Germany, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In 1955, the EBU proposed the idea of an international song contest whereby countries could participate in one television show, to be transmitted simultaneously in all represented nations. The Eurovision Song Contest has been broadcast every year since 1956, which makes it one of the longest-running television programs in the world.  In response to the setting up of the Eurovision network, Eastern European television stations set up their own network called Intervision, which started its own song contest, presumably in an effort to prevent viewers being too bedazzled by cultures not approved of by the Politburo!  The two networks merged in 1993, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.

Today the Eurovision Song Contest is broadcast throughout Europe and also in Australia, Canada, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Korea, New Zealand and the United States, even though these countries do not participate. These days, with the entry of former Soviet Bloc and Warsaw Pact nations and those that lie within the European Broadcasting Area or are member states of the Council of Europe, the contest has become increasingly diverse and acts as a social barometer of changing international relations in the region.

But there is another side to Eurovision that is extremely interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view.  The contest has always managed to combine a comforting picture of harmony-in-diversity with the shameless promotion of national chauvinism. Today some 43 states vie for the title of best song in Europe and when one looks at the voting trends among the competitors, they often appear to be along political and nationalistic lines with nothing at all to do with the merits of the music! Voting is the most hotly contested aspect of the contest; geography, history, culture, religion and other socio-cultural affiliations certainly do seem to influence how countries vote. The more dominant countries pack the kind of clout others command in the United Nations: The so-called Big Five countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy) get automatic spots in the final regardless of their positions on the scoreboard. Indeed, on a number of occasions the contest and its voting practices have sparked patriotic indignation and withdrawals for political reasons.

Changing Eurovision Song Contest language policies and practices also make for interesting reading. According to Wikipedia, from 1956 to 1965 songs could be sung in any language. In 1966 a new rule stipulated that songs must be performed in one of the official languages of the participating country. This rule was abolished in 1973 and performers were allowed to sing in any language they chose. Several contestants in the mid-1970s took advantage of this relaxation, including Abba in 1974. In 1977, the EBU decided to revert to the national language rule, with special dispensations to Germany and Belgium who had already been selected and whose songs were in English.

By 1999 the hegemony of English in Europe was already well on the rise. At the 1999 contest, the language restriction was again lifted and today songs may be performed in any language. As a result, many of the songs are performed either partly or completely in English. Entries are often performed in English to reach a wider audience but at the same time this practice is often regarded as being unpatriotic. In 2003, Belgium found an alternative solution, entering a song, entitled Sanomi, in an artificial language developed especially for the song. This strategy proved successful as Belgium finished second, only two points behind Turkey (but in the eyes of many it was a sympathy vote. Belgium and France had opposed the British-American proposal to put NATO anti-aircraft guns into Turkey as defence against the threat of Iraqi retaliation in the event of a U.S. invasion of Iraq). In 2006 the Dutch entry was sung partly in an artificial language but it did far less well, coming 17^th out of 23 contestants; the contest was won by the Finns, singing a hard rock song in English.

Songs have been performed in a minority language in only 19 out of 53 contests.  Much like the Olympics, French is used by the contest presenters but it appears to play a largely symbolic role. The presenters announce the scores both in English and in French, a practice which has given rise to the famous exclamation “douze points” when the host repeats the top score in French.

This year the Buranovskiye Babushki, a.k.a the Russian Grannies, took hybridity to a new level in their song Party for Everybody performed in Udmur and English.

What can I say? Eurovision may be trivial and may gloss over political tensions but nobody can deny that it is fun. On a final and uncritical note, whatever you might think about the essentialised, commodified identities promoted by the Eurovision Song Contest, for me nothing will ever surpass the sheer kitsch fabulousness of the unbeatable Abba!

Displaying the flag on Australia Day

Many things have changed in Australia since I first came here in the mid-1990s. One of these is a noticeable increase in displays of national ardour: for instance, there is the ever-expanding flag-waving and display of the national colours on Australia Day; or there is the fact that there has been a resurgence in ANZAC Day ceremonies since the 1990s after decades of decline; another example can be found in the introduction of citizenship testing for prospective citizens in 2007. I often discuss these changes with my students as we try to understand why Australia has become a more nationalistic place in the past two decades. The best argument is usually put forward by those who argue that nationalism is a reaction to globalisation and increased immigration, where the national flag becomes a symbol of stability in times of rapid change.

Indeed, the debate around the relationship between globalisation and nationalism is wide open. While increasing nationalism can be read as a reaction to globalisation, a diametrically opposed argument is also put forward. Two new studies (Ariely 2012; Machida 2012), for instance, have found that people in more globalised nations such as Australia are less ethnocentric, less patriotic and less inclined to fight for their countries than their counterparts in less globalised nations. These researchers suggest that nationalism is not a reaction to globalisation but that globalisation actually serves to reduce nationalism. Globalisation will eventually be the end of nationalism – or so this line of argument goes.

Both globalisation and nationalism are notoriously broad concepts and the contradiction between claims that globalisation increases or decreases nationalism must be sought somewhere in how the concepts are understood. If we define globalisation as the latest phase of capitalist expansion under the ideological banner of neoliberalism, a convincing case can be made that globalisation is likely to lead to an increase in state-sponsored nationalism, as Blad and Koçer (2012) do. Blad and Koçer (2012) provide a case study of the rise of Islamism as a political legitimation strategy in Turkey over the past decades. Specifically, they argue that

[…] contrary to analyses that point to political Islam as a cultural reaction to modernity or Western imperialism and facilitated by an ever-weakening state in the globalization era, we argue that the rise of political Islam in Turkey is tied to strategies to bring the state more in line with neoliberal, modernist governance and is a function of sustained state authority. (p. 370)

For Blad and Koçer (2012), the story goes like this: neoliberal economic globalisation has meant that states are increasingly losing their economic legitimacy. For most of the 20^th century, the legitimacy of the Turkish state had rested in the fact that it was seen to protect its population from the negative effects of economic inequality. It offered state-led development and with it social security. However, in the 1970s its foreign debt began to catch up with Turkey and it needed to turn to the IMF for a bailout. In exchange it was forced to devalue its currency and accept a range of austerity measures, which were intended to bolster production for export and to curb public spending. The latter in particular meant that the Turkish state largely lost its ability to ensure social stability through the remediation of economic inequality. Initially, the 1980 military coup ensured stability at gunpoint but then the problem for the state became how to return to democratic governance after having lost the ability to offer economic protection. And that is where “culture” comes in:

The neoliberal Turkish state clearly required authority to maintain stability if its economic reforms were to have any efficacy. However, it also needed to remove the state from its position of protectionist authority. The solution was an integration of cultural—that is, Islamist—legitimation strategies in two exemplary areas. The first was the Islamization of Turkish labor through the state advocacy of cultural, rather than the traditional class-based, trade union organizations. The second was the reduction of state-managed social service provision and the privatization of these services under Islamist patronage. (p. 45)

Blad and Koçer (2012) thus argue that the Turkish state wilfully adopted Islamism as a means to maintain state legitimacy while allowing for state withdrawal from the economic sphere. The latter is a direct requirement of the imposition of neoliberalism as a global ideology that requires the state to give up its economic regulatory capacity while still maintaining social stability.

Of course, there are as many differences between the Australian and Turkish cases as there are similarities. However, as our public transport, healthcare and education decline, it is obvious that the legitimacy of the state as a system to ensure social security is under threat. At the same time, cultural legitimacy comes cheap (in contrast to the provision of welfare).

The political economy of language and culture in neoliberal times will be a research problem for generations of students and I would recommend reading Blad and Koçer (2012) to all of them.

Ariely, G. (2012). Globalisation and the decline of national identity? An exploration across sixty-three countries Nations and Nationalism DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00532.x
Blad, C., & Koçer, B. (2012). Political Islam and State Legitimacy in Turkey: The Role of National Culture in Neoliberal State-Building International Political Sociology, 6 (1), 36-56 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00150.x
MACHIDA, S. (2012). Does Globalization Render People More Ethnocentric? Globalization and People’s Views on Cultures American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 71 (2), 436-469 DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2012.00835.x

“Women on the move: English, international romance and the global economy”
Presented at the 6th International Gender and Language Association Biennial Conference,
Tsuda College (Kodaira Campus), Tokyo, Japan, September 18-20, 2010 Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Part 4

Abstract: In this paper I draw on data from mail-order bride websites in order to explore the ways in which the global spread of English intersects with the promotion of traditional gender and Orientalist ideologies and serves to underpin global migration flows of women as romantic partners and as workers.

“Is there such a thing as a wrong question?: Reflections on intercultural communication research”
Presented as part of the COOLL Project at Tsuda College (Kodaira Campus), Tokyo, Japan, September 21, 2010: Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Part 4

Abstract: Intercultural communication research is often predicated on essentialist assumptions of what it means to “have a culture.” In this lecture, I will use examples from the intercultural communication advice literature on how to improve communication between Japanese and “Westerners” to make the point that “culture is a verb.” I will outline a new research agenda for intercultural communication that is relevant to contemporary social justice challenges in a globalized and transnational world.[tab:日本語]

昨年９月に行われたイングリッド・ピラー教授の基調講演（International Gender and Language Association 学会）のビデオがご覧頂ける様になりました。 また「Language on the Move ツアー」中に行われた招待講義も御覧ください。COOLLウェブサイトまたは下記のリンクからアクセス頂けます。

Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

from: Chaney & Martin, 2003, p. 57

“What is the secret to successful intercultural communication?” This was one of the questions I was asked after my lecture on “New directions in intercultural communication” at United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain. In my lecture I had been exploring the assumptions underlying the intercultural communication advice literature, particularly in the vein of Geert Hofstede’s work. Detailed arguments against the banal nationalism, monolithic and monodimensional views of culture, and the pseudo-objectivism undergirding that strand of the intercultural communication literature can be found here and here, and also in my new book. So, my response was about the importance of appreciating diversity and avoiding advice that closes the mind to other cultures rather than opens it to an appreciation of diversity. Ultimately, there is no golden bullet simply because intercultural communication per se does not exist.

Intercultural communication advice is based on the assumption that intercultural communication is intercultural communication is intercultural communication, as encapsulated in this diagram from the textbook Intercultural Business Communication by Chaney & Martin. The assumption is that the cultural value orientations of “collectivism” vs. “individualism” operate in all societies in the same manner. Not only does such a diagram reinforce and re-create the East-West dichotomy rather than explaining it, it also suggests that difference works along the same dimensions in different cultures. However, explicit instruction about how to think imparted by suit-and-tie-wearing fathers to their only son is without a doubt one of the most extraordinarily specific cultural practices one can think of. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone, from any background I am familiar with, who goes about teaching cultural values in this way. Not only are “Eastern” or “Western” fathers unlikely to be explicitly teaching their sons “to think for themselves” or “to do what is best for the family,” the inculcation of values, which in themselves are highly diverse, is subject to a wide range of practices. Diagrams such as these don’t teach about cultural difference; such literatures close the mind to cultural difference.

So, part of the secret to successful intercultural communication is to avoid advice that closes the mind! Even if it may sound intuitively right, as much intercultural communication advice literature does, because it is built on widely circulating stereotypes and reinforces them.

There is no magic bullet because we do not meet as representatives of national cultures unless we choose to see each other and engage each other as representatives of national cultures. It all depends on context. In the absence of useful advice from much of the literature that makes intercultural communication its business, I hold with the golden rule of all faiths and moral philosophies: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

What is your secret of successful intercultural communication?

The billboard is in fact an ad for Swiss Tourism – I know the characteristic red, the emblem with the Swiss Cross inside an edelweiss and the slogan “get natural” all too well from a research project into the linguistic and communicative challenges faced by the Swiss tourism industry I conducted a few years ago. The billboard is in Hakone because apparently the railway I was travelling on, Hakone Tozan Railway, is a sister railway of Rhätische Bahn.

No sooner had I got over my surprise of finding myself staring at the Swiss Alps instead of Mt Fuji, I found myself in front of the Cafe St Moritz. There is some serious devotion to Graubünden/Grischun in Hakone! The Cafe St Moritz was also liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on its tables. Banal nationalism again, of course, but with the imagery of another nation! The menu of the Cafe St Moritz, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be Swiss-inspired. Hot dogs must probably be considered un-Swiss

Advertising takes cultural symbols and images from one place and uses them in another to create authenticity. The use of national imagery from elsewhere in marketing coffee-shops, restaurants, food and drink (and all manner of other products and services) is a feature of contemporary symbolic landscapes the world over.

My first reaction to finding Switzerland in Hakone was one of dismay: I felt like I’d stumbled upon yet another non-space of globalization where globally circulating images make one place exactly like another and Hakone becomes Disentis/Mustér, and Disentis/Mustér becomes Hakone. However, on reflection and after reading up on gaikoku mura (“foreign villages”), country-themed theme parks, I have changed my mind: if local tourism can create an exotic tourism experience, then that is a much more sustainable way of travelling. Why would you make a long and tedious journey to travel all the way to Switzerland and create a huge carbon footprint if you can experience Switzerland 70 min outside downtown Tokyo? And considering that it’s entirely possible that in the meantime some marketeer has come up with a Japanese theme for St Moritz …

Eastwood is a suburb in the north of Sydney, famous for its large Chinese and Korean communities. According to the 2006 census, over 50% of residents were born overseas – if you walk on the bustling main streets on both sides of Eastwood station, you feel as if you are transported to an Asian country (I feel right at home ;-)! The markets are always busy, frequented by customers from all kinds of cultural and language backgrounds, who are after the amazing range of cheap and fresh produce available there. The shopkeepers themselves are as multicultural and multilingual as their customers, conversing with co-workers in one language and switching to another to address customers.

This Saturday there was an election campaign poster for John Alexander of the Australian Liberal Party (which in Australia means the conservative side of politics and currently the main opposition party) in front of one of the busiest grocery stores. I didn’t know who John Alexander was, so I got some campaign leaflets from one of the four campaign volunteers touting on the street. I found out that he is an ex-tennis-player-turned-into-TV commentator (aha, him!) and now politician and he’s the Liberal Party’s candidate in the electorate of Bennelong, which includes highly diverse suburbs such as Eastwood, Epping, North Ryde, Carlingford etc etc. According to the leaflet, John is “determined to protect our community’s quality of life”, and promises to be “a strong voice for the people of Bennelong.” A strong voice for the diverse people of Bennelong? Sounds good but, unfortunately, judging on the basis of his campaign leaflets he’s not quite there yet.

Firstly, there are two different types of leaflets. One was supposedly the main one, printed in English with a big photo of his smiley face on one side and the promotional pitch on the other. The other was trilingual in Korean, Chinese and English. A good effort to reach out to the Chinese and Korean speaking communities? After all, Bennelong is the electorate where in 2007 the then-first time Labour candidate and news-reader-turned-politician Maxine McKew famously beat the then-Prime Minister John Howard. And her success was in no small measure due to winning the support of the Chinese and Korean business communities and mobilising the youth from the electorate’s multilingual communities.

So, John Alexander is trying to do the same thing. Unfortunately, his heart obviously isn’t in it and the result is a cheap attempt to look multilingual. Unlike the main English leaflet which is professionally printed on glossy and high-quality paper, the trilingual leaflet was clearly home-printed, with Korean on one side and Chinese on the other on paper of inferior quality.

All the six photos on the trilingual leaflet feature John engaging in deep conversation with residents. Unfortunately, none of those interlocutors look like anyone on the main streets of Eastwood – all of them are white! Furthermore, if you bother to read the text, not even the usual politicians’ lip service to multiculturalism is there.

From John’s election leaflets to media reports, it’s really amazing how non-white voters are absent from this election. For example, the ABC claimed yesterday that they put together a ‘cross board of voters’ in their studio to comment on the live debate between the Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the opposition leader. Maybe they were kidding because all I could see was two white men and three white women. Have the ABC producers and the candidates of both major political parties never been shopping in Eastwood or any of Sydney’s other multilingual and multicultural suburbs?!