Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
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Bryan Meadows
Abstract
Despite the growing appeal of transnational perspectives in sociolinguistics, the bordered orderliness of nationalism remains unchallenged in language classrooms. Ethnographic Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is applied to the case of an English language classroom at the Mexico/US border in order to specify the how and why of nationalist border reproduction. Through the conceptual lens of nationalist border practices, analysis first accounts for how class participants organized classroom practice according to clear borders between inter-related and mutually-exclusive mexicano and americano nationalist categories. The classroom site raises the possibility of border transcendence by way of border reinforcement, however, the data available depict students as border crossers who are careful not to disrupt the nationalist borders that legitimize their social and economic privilege.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
