guanxi

I’m struck by the similarities between the linguistic dynamics of the internet-based guanxi described by Hawisher and Selfe in “Globalization, Guanxi, and Agency” (in which “cross-cultural guanxi represent, we believe, a potent form of accumulating and deploying social capital in an increasingly globalized world” (63) and about which “it is a mistake to think that the global landscape of the Internet necessarily leads to a monologic global culture or language like English” (71)), and Trimbur’s discussion in “Linguistic Memory and the Uneasy Settlement of U.S. English” of the transatlantic networks created by the slave trade (an early – if inherently reprehensible – type of globalization?) in which cross-cultural relationships were also matter of capital (albeit bodily and economic), and “Languages other than English were recognized as important for commerce, diplomacy, and knowledge” (24).

A less convoluted way of verbalizing that might be simply to say that (surprise, surprise) here I am, thinking about linking again. Guanxi is a concept to add to my limited vocabulary of linking. It is a term that, I think, is more focused on the person-to-person aspect of linking than the term “link” itself (to my mind a rather sterile, impersonal signifier – albeit with personal implications – of textual motion through cyberspace) tends to evoke for me. Similarly, the slave ship is a surprising context in which to think about the physical linking of people and places in a linguistically productive way.

So not only does linking affect the written text itself and its processes of meaning-making (a la Queen), it also affects the linguistic contexts in which texts are written and produced and thought about in the first place (a la Hawisher and Selfe); and not only does linking affect the ways that meaning is derived from what we read and where we read it (again, Queen), but it also can impact (always in an act of subversion, I wonder? Not sure…) the power dynamics inherent in language—that is, linking people together results in the re-negotiation of the ways in which language can be used to “justify”, reinforce, and exert one person’s dominance over another.

That is what Trimbur is saying happened, right, when he asserts that
“although English was the lexifier or language of power, the linguistic motive, nonetheless, was not so much to acquire English wholesale as to pidginize it by eliminating features of English that were unusual or difficult for relevant language groups to learn and by interjecting into English ways of forming words and sentences that came from African languages.” (29)

…?

Mostly, this is all background rumination for what *really* interests me: the evolution of pidgin and creole languages, the role of the guanxi in the creation of them, and, broadly, the weird things that happen, power-wise, when the “standard” is messed with on such a broad scale. Like Lu, “I am particularly interested in scholarship that approaches the transrelations of nations, cultures, peoples, and language(s) in terms of transactions that transform, transfuse, translate, transport, transverse, transubstantiate, transvalue, transpose, and transplant established ways of doing things and in terms of multidirectional transactions—not merely top-down but also bottom-up and sideways” (49).