Sociocultural and Power-Relational Dimensions of Multilingual Writing

Reviews / Votes

Amir Kalan's participatory ethnographic research with three adult multilingual English writers reveals how monolingual language ideologies, formalist pedagogies, and industrialized assessment practices have kept Anglo-Americentric educational institutions oblivious to the richness and complexity of immigrants' cultural and discursive experience. Kalan's exemplary case studies show how this experience might be tapped as an intellectual catalyst, with writing re-figured as an emergent activity of hermeneutic design, semiotic dexterity, and rhetorical consciousness of language-power relations. * John Trimbur, Emerson College, USA * Kalan has written one of those rare scholarly texts in education which is theoretically rich while simultaneously offering concrete suggestions for practice and policy. Through eminently lucid and engaging prose, this book provides textured portraits of how multilingual writers draw upon their rich transnational cultural repertoires to navigate their social worlds. In doing so, it also prefigures a cosmopolitanism that is not naive to issues of power and inequity during this period of resurgent xenophobia. A hopeful gem of a book. * Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania, USA *