Preliminaries (2)

Ideas for Hinglish project essay on class/expertise

English in India is characterized by gaps between speech and writing.

Such gaps open up sites for the construction and deployment of expertise, for class warfare, for cultural politics, for what A. Aneesh calls "algo-power" (perhaps, though look at book and read Upadhya article.)

Example 1. the Aarushi murder case and the fact that it pivoted around the (mis) interpretation of an SMS message.

Example 2. the free-market language classroom and its reinsertion of writing-driven pedagogy into classes that are aimed at cultivating facility in spoken English. (juxtapose this with the Delhi university English hons. admissions issue.)

Example 3. Slumdog millionaire and its adaptation from page to screen (issue of subitles, of Jamal's English speech, of unlikeliness of the villain ordering a sandwich, of the Cathedral School accent of Salim, etc.)

Example 4. Political speeches of the babalog

[not sure how many of these examples I'd need for the article]

Ideas/Theories to take into account:
-theory that English in India has been a modulect and that it has always been written or at least "entextualized"
-orality/literacy/entextualization
-continua of biliteracy (?)
-recognition of certain kinds of expertise (Boyer and Lomnitz) and assertion of other kinds of (non-validated) expertise as a challenge
-trans-idiomatic environments and spaces of multilingualism

Where does language ideology fit into all this?
Written sometime in April