English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat is at stake for multilingual subjects when English becomes a site of conflicting emotions about being in/with the world? What does it mean to understand, negotiate with, and perform the meaning of English as a global curriculum, a lingua franca, a “thing” of the senses, and a desire awakened by narratives feeding into and being fed by discourses of power, appropriateness, globalization, and cosmopolitanism? In this performative auto/ethnography, I enact twenty years of data collected and organized in the feeling, teaching, studying, and experiencing of English through transnational encounters in classrooms, workplaces, immigration centers, and on the streets of the so-called “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations.