Nationalism informs our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and State--ideas that are being challenged by globalization and an emerging new economy. As language, culture, and identity are commodified, multilingualism becomes a factor in the mobility of people, ideas and goods--and in their value.
In Paths to Post-Nationalism, Monica Heller shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-State are destabilized under new political and economic conditions. These processes, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Applying a fine-grained ethnographic analysis to the notion of ""francophone Canada"" from the 1970s to the present, Heller examines sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, State agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe. Her work shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to re-imagine--or resist re-imagining--who we are.
Chapter 1: Sociolinguistics as social practice Chapter 2: Critical ethnographic sociolinguistics Chapter 3: La foi, la race, la langue : Catholic ethnonationalism in francophone Canada (1926-1965, with an interjection from 2000) Chapter 4: Brewing trouble: language, the State and modernity in industrial beer production (Montreal, 1978-1980) Chapter 5: From identity to commodity: schooling, social selection and social reproduction (Toronto, 1983-1996) Chapter 6: Neoliberalism and la cause: modernizing nationalism at its limits (Lelac, 1997-2004) Chapter 7: Saving the nation, making the market (all over the place, 2001-present) Chapter 8: Paths to post-nationalism Epilogue
Monica Heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Reviews for Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity
The book is not only rich in case studies: its author manages to create a connection to her readers. Linguist List
