This paper sets out to rethink the ontology of literature, using Aotearoa New Zealander poet Hone Tuwhare’s classic anti-nuclear poem “No Ordinary Sun” (1959/1964) as a case study. It starts from the premise that the received academic models for studying poetry often fail to offer a critical language that does justice to the complex life worlds inhabited by many poets and the socio- and ecopolitics of their art, especially in postcolonial contexts.
This is not only a problem of (the portability of) language – in Tuwhare’s case, of his poetic English that does not always easily translate Māori or, more generally, Pacific Islander ways of being in and relating to the world. I argue that there is also something amiss in the ways many of us read (and teach) poetry in the Western academy, in the sense that the objectification and (neo)formalist dissection of literatures of the world can be very violent. My suggestion is to instead reconceptualise poetry – whether printed or performed – as events that may be investigated for the assemblages they potentially sustain and create, between and across human, yet also non-human and more-than-human presences. In the context of Oceanian poetry in particular, one starting point for such a project is to model the ways in which we read lite[1]rature on the conceptual frameworks which allowed Polynesian navigators to transport people, goods and value across the Pacific Ocean, long before Europeans could.
Global English for a Multilingual World In the course of the late 20th century, English developed from one of several competing world languages into the single dominant global language. The resulting unipolar World Language System (de Swaan) is taken for granted in a wide range of communicative domains – from the finance sector to global discourse on climate change and human rights – and we often tend to forget how recent this historically new and unique constellation actually is. In my talk, I will explore two challenges posed by global English in the 21st century:
1. The global-language paradox: English is a global language because it serves a multilingual world. In contrast to other world languages, such as Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, non-native users represent the largest group of habitual speakers in the case of English. In a world dominated by English, two groups of people are therefore in danger of being left behind: those who have no access to English, and those who remain monolingual in English.
2. The standardisation paradox: Global English is becoming more homogeneous and more heterogeneous at the same time.
By and large current models of World English assume a gradually expanding pluricentric constellation in which two global reference standards (BrE and AmE) are being complemented by more and more emerging national standard varieties. I will argue that this narrative of postcolonial emancipation is in need of revision because it does not account for the boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), currently clearly the most important booster in the spread of English, and the increasing presence of selected nonstandard varieties in public discourse. Moreover, both standardization and de-standardisation are no longer exclusively promoted by human agents, but partly outsourced to technologies and algorithms. On the one hand, language technologies, from simple grammar checkers to Large Language Models, promote further homogenisation and standardisation, usually along American English norms. On the other hand, they also facilitate diversification, giving public visibility to selected nonstandard varieties, especially if they happen to be associated with pop-cultural or subcultural trends. This standardisation paradox will be illustrated by the fact that Standard British English is being superseded by American English online (and to some extent even offline), whereas varieties such as African American English, Jamaican Creole or Nigerian Pidgin seem to be doing comparatively well in cyberspace.
