Strangerhood and intercultural subjectivity

Abstract

An increasingly salient justification for the study of foreign languages is the value of language learning for developing intercultural competence, and in particular for showing how interculturality meshes with widespread aims of equity and acceptance of the stranger in new contexts of global diversity. In this article I consider intercultural experience of language learning through the model of strangerhood, a concept first advanced by Simmel as a necessary marginality in society (the stranger as a social type) and later developed by Kristeva (drawing on Freud) as an internalised feature of late modern individuals which requires us to live with the ambivalence of different subject positions, each of us carrying strangerhood within us. A key but under-examined aspect in the development of intercultural competence is understanding our own (inter)subjective predispositions which we bring to intercultural encounters, and how these mediate our sense of belonging or, conversely, of alienation, a major trope of narratives of mobility and language learning. Presenting extracts from language learners' autobiographical data I examine how individuals position themselves as strangers, set apart from the mainstream, and how this trope constructs narrative worlds of outsiderness. Autobiographical narration offers a discursive space for developing our understanding of the social world, with the potential to take us beyond realist descriptions towards an enquiry into how language and place are symbolically appropriated in our lives. Sociological frames (e.g. as proposed by Bourdieu or Wenger) have extended our understanding of inequity and assumptions of power in intercultural settings and this paper contributes further by proposing strangerhood as a psychological disposition requiring language learners to observe beyond themselves while also apprehending one's own image as this refracts and changes shape through the lens of others.