Applied Linguistics Advance Access published August 14, 2014

Applied Linguistics 2014: 1–22 ß Oxford University Press 2014

doi:10.1093/applin/amu045

The Multi/Plural Turn, Postcolonial Theory,

and Neoliberal Multiculturalism:
Complicities and Implications
for Applied Linguistics

RYUKO KUBOTA

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Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, 2034
Lower Mall Rd, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
E-mail: ryuko.kubota@ubc.ca

In applied linguistics and language education, an increased focus has been

placed on plurality and hybridity to challenge monolingualism, the native
speaker norm, and the modernist view of language and language use as unitary
and bounded. The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they
both support hybridity and fluidity while problematizing the essentialist under-
standing of language and identity. However, postcolonial theory, which has
been influenced by poststructuralism, met criticisms in the 1990s in cultural
studies. The notion of hybridity has been especially criticized for its privileged
status, individual orientation, and disparity between theory and practice.
Furthermore, the conceptual features of the multi/plural turn overlap with neo-
liberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, which uncritically support diversity,
plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating
color-blindness and racism. The multi/plural turn also neglects the ways in
which neoliberal competition and the dominance of English affect scholars.
This article examines the multi/plural trend by drawing on some critiques of
postcolonial theory and neoliberal ideologies and proposes an increased atten-
tion to power and inequalities as well as collective efforts to resist the neoliberal
academic culture underlying the multi/plural turn.

INTRODUCTION
Recently, I proposed a colloquium for an applied linguistics conference on
plurilingualism and language teaching. In the proposal, my co-organizer and
I mentioned that the concept of plurilingualism often runs into conflict with
the current dominance of English in language teaching in many non-English–
dominant countries. We received a comment that the global dominance of
English is passé and it has been replaced by multilingualism—a more nuanced
and complex situation in which the market saturation of English has opened
up opportunities for other languages. This was surprising, and made me
wonder how the popular theoretical trend to highlight linguistic multiplicity
can or cannot adequately address challenges that exist in our society.
2 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

A recent prominent trend in applied linguistics is a multilingual or dynamic

turn (Flores 2013; May 2014), which focuses on the plurality, multiplicity, and
hybridity of language and language use to challenge a traditional paradigm of
understanding linguistic practices in various contexts. In this article, I will
focus on this turn and call it ‘multi/plural turn’. The multi/plural turn can
be observed in a large number of publications and conference presentations
on such inquiry foci as multilingualism (Martin-Jones et al. 2012; May 2014),
plurilingualism (Taylor and Snoddon 2013), world Englishes (WE) (Kachru
et al. 2006), English as a lingua franca (ELF) (Seidlhofer 2011), codemeshing
(Canagarajah 2006), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010), translin-

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gual approach (Horner et al. 2011), translanguaging (Blackledge and Creese
2010; Garcı́a and Sylvan 2011), multiliteracies (Cope and Kalantzis 2009), and
hybridity (Rubdy and Alsagoff 2013).
Although linguistic multiplicity is nothing new in human history (Cenoz
2013), the recent interest has been influenced by postmodern, poststructural-
ist, and postcolonial thought as seen in such notions as multiplicity, hetero-
geneity, fluidity, hybridity, and constructedness, which expand and blur the
fixed boundaries of the social and linguistic categories that are defined in an
essentialist binary logic in the previous modernist paradigm (Pennycook 2010).
However, as this ‘turn’ grows in popularity, it seems as though its critical
impetus has faded and its knowledge is becoming another canon—a canon
which is integrated into a neoliberal capitalist academic culture of incessant
knowledge production and competition for economic and symbolic capital,
and neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates individual cosmopolitanism
and plurilingualism for socioeconomic mobility. In bolstering neoliberal dis-
courses, the multi/plural approaches lose a transformative edge that seeks sig-
nificant changes in the sociopolitical and economic conditions of people who
are using, learning, and teaching language. Indeed, while our discipline en-
gages with multi/plural frameworks, we continue to see not only the domin-
ance of English and standard language ideology but also ethnic conflicts, civil
wars, racism, xenophobia, and growing economic gaps both nationally and
internationally. While applied linguistics alone will not cure these social
evils, some are within the purview of our discipline, and the gap between
our celebrated ‘multi/plural’ perspectives and real lives of many people con-
cerns me.
Similar concerns about a theory/practice divide were raised in the 1990s in
many publications critiquing postcolonial theory, to which our field has paid
little attention (cf. Kumaravadivelu 2008). Critiques of postcolonial theory are
useful in alerting us to the problematic ideological overlap between the multi/
plural turn and neoliberal multiculturalism. Drawing on some literature criti-
quing postcolonial theory and neoliberalism, this article demonstrates how
facets of postcolonial theory and neoliberal multiculturalism parallel the con-
ceptual foundations of the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics, and suggests
a shift in attention from individual plurality and hybridity to asymmetrical
 R. KUBOTA 3

power relations, social injustices, and resistance to neoliberalism in our aca-

demic community.
In critically examining the multi/plural turn, my focus is not specific argu-
ments made in applied linguistics literature but rather a macro discourse on
plurality and hybridity that has attracted so much attention. Neither is it my
intention to deny the significance and utility of the multi/plural turn in under-
standing linguistic forms and practices. In fact, these conceptualizations are
valuable as they challenge a broader political and educational discourse that
privileges a dominant language and culture. My aim is instead to encourage us
to critically reflect on ideological complicities that undermine the philosophical

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impetus of the multi/plural turn.
Below, I provide an overview of the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics,
followed by a review of relevant criticisms of postcolonial theory, neoliberal-
ism, and neoliberal multiculturalism and their implications for applied linguis-
tics. Finally, I suggest narrowing a gap between theory and practice by focusing
more on power and inequalities in research and on resistance to neoliberal
scholarly practices in our academic communities and institutions.

THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Some of the aforementioned inquiry areas constituting the multi/plural turn
describe linguistic forms and practices, while others inform language pedagogy.
In these discussions, two closely related orientations are observed: pluralism
and hybridity. The pluralist orientation focuses on using and learning multiple
languages or varieties of a language in social and educational contexts.
Frameworks such as WE, traditional foreign language pedagogies, and immer-
sion or maintenance bilingual education are pluralist in the sense that they
challenge previous linguistic norms—Anglocentric native speakerness or
monolingualism—and embrace linguistic pluralism and multilingual compe-
tence. However, they tend to support an atomistic view (Cenoz 2013) or segre-
gationist view of language (Harris 1998), which regards languages, language
varieties, and language use as autonomous entities with clear linguistic bound-
aries (Garcı́a and Flores 2012) and constitutes monoglossic instruction or what
Cummins (2007) called two-solitude pedagogies of bilingual education, in
which language mixing is discouraged.
In contrast, the hybrid orientation support the holistic view (Cenoz 2013) or
integrational view of language (Harris 1998), which regards multilingual lin-
guistic practices as products of language users’ multiple repertoires that are
employed in a contingent and flexible manner rather than an aggregate use of
languages that are separated along structural boundaries. In this sense, the
hybridity orientation is distinct from the pluralist one, even though they
both attempt to pluralize the traditional norms. In contrast to WE, for instance,
recent research on ELF focuses on the investigations of fluidity and hybridity as
observed in English users’ negotiation of meaning, expressions of their
4 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

identities, and multilingual interactions in fluid, contingent, and heteroge-

neous ways (Jenkins et al. 2011; Cogo 2012).
The hybrid orientation has also influenced pedagogy. Garcı́a and her col-
leagues proposed translanguaging as a communicative and pedagogical prin-
ciple of multilingual communities, in which multiple discursive practices
across languages, such as code-switching and translation, are performed by
language users to express their meanings in multilayered and multidirectional
processes (Garcı́a and Sylvan 2011). This is a heteroglossic, dynamic, multilin-
gual pedagogical approach as opposed to the traditional monoglossic view of
bilingualism or multilingualism as a manifestation of two (or more) separate

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competencies in one individual. From a similar perspective, Canagarajah
(2013) advocated the translingual practice of code-meshing (as opposed to
code-switching) in English writing. While code-switching presupposes switch-
ing between two or more separate semiotic systems, code-meshing views lan-
guages, symbols, and communicative modes as a single unified hybrid system
(Canagarajah 2006, 2013). Translanguaging and translingual practices under-
score plural and hybrid language use and identity as legitimate forms of
expression.
The rejection of the monoglossic and fixed view of bi/multilingualism is also
seen in the notion of metrolingualism. According to Otsuji and Pennycook
(2010: 264):
Metrolingualism describes the ways in which people of different
and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities
through language; it does not assume connections between lan-
guage, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather
seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied
or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages
as emergent from contexts of interaction.
Although Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) draw attention to metrolingualism as
hybrid expressions of language and identity, they problematize the notion of
hybridity as a fixed category of pluralization, a notion that reflects a modernist
view of language as a bounded and countable object (Makoni and Pennycook
2005, 2012), rather than complexification. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) also
reveal contradictions as manifested in the cultural and linguistic fixity
observed in metrolingual users who simultaneously demonstrated hybridity
in language and identity. Although metrolingualism problematizes hybridity as
superficial celebration, it is still grounded in the postmodern affirmation of
multiplicity and fluidity, which keeps it from critiquing how inequality is
often solidified or intensified within multiplicity and fluidity.
As implied thus far, there are some significant differences and disagreements
among scholars supporting multi/plural frameworks. One intriguing tension is
seen in the discussion of ELF and WE in the context of Singapore (Pakir 2009).
Although both frameworks support a pluricentric view of the form and use of
English, they differ in that ELF implies borderless hybrid uses of English by
 R. KUBOTA 5

nonnative speakers, whereas English in Singapore, though similarly used as a

lingua franca, is forming nativized uniqueness as seen in the emerging creative
literature and new canons that denote national linguistic identity. This exem-
plifies a tension between hybridity and rootedness as discussed later.
In sum, the inquiry foci and concepts of pluralism and hybridity problem-
atize the previous view of language as a bounded system with one-to-one
relationships between the signified and the signifier, between language and
the nation state, culture, or ethnicity, and between language and language
user. They underscore the fluid, dynamic, multiple, flexible, and hybrid na-
tures of language, language learning, and language use, and call for transform-

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ing fixed monoglossic thinking which supports the native speaker norm, the
monolingual norm, and the superiority of standard language. Other areas of
inquiry, such as nonnative English speakers (Moussu and Llurda 2008) and
usage-based linguistics of second language acquisition, including complexity
theory (Larsen-Freeman 2012; Ortega 2014), share this skepticism of trad-
itional monoglossic approaches.
These multi/plural perspectives parallel aspects of poststructuralism and
postcolonial theory, which have been applied to various inquiry areas in
applied linguistics. As a critique of modernist ideas of objectivity and essen-
tialism, poststructuralism, which postcolonial theory significantly draws on,
pays attention to the dynamics, fluidity, and contingency of social, cultural,
and linguistic categories as well as power that circulates and constructs know-
ledge and subjectivities (Morgan 2007).
However, scholarly discussion on multilingualism has been critiqued from a
poststructuralist perspective as well. Drawing on poststructuralist tenets of
critiquing social, political, and cultural systems and raising critical awareness
of ‘the irrational, of violence within social structure’, McNamara (2011: 431)
critiqued the multilingual turn in a special issue of The Modern Language Journal
entitled ‘Toward a multilingual approach in the study of multilingualism in
school contexts’. McNamara cautions against assuming that ‘multilingualism
in itself is simply a cause for celebration’ (p. 432) and calls for a more critical
and complex understanding by examining monolingual ideologies. These
ideologies are seen in Africa, where learning English rather than local lan-
guages is promoted for economic and political causes, and in Europe, where
multilingualism is promoted for speakers of majority languages but not for
immigrants. The denial of multilingualism for marginalized populations indi-
cates how power produces and justifies social violence, a problem to be scru-
tinized (McNamara 2011). Also from Marxist, globalization, and
poststructuralist perspectives, O’Regan (2014) critiqued the ELF movement
as idealist hypostatization that obscures ideology, discourse, and power that
underlie racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities of English learners/
users around the world.
Although McNamara (2011) and O’Regan (2014) draw on poststructuralism
to challenge the celebratory trend of multilingualism or ELF, the multi/plural
turn can also be theoretically scrutinized by the criticisms of postcolonial
6 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

theory that were published in the 1990s in cultural studies. Paradoxically, such
criticisms challenge poststructuralist and postmodernist thought underlying
the influential works by postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Homi
Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Below, I present some criticisms of hybridity, a
major concept underlying both postcolonial theory and the multi/plural trend,
and related issues. These criticisms offer alternative conceptual lenses to chal-
lenge the multi/plural turn, as shown briefly in the next section and in more
detail in the subsequent one.

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CRITICISM OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Hybridity has been theorized by Bhabha (1994) and discussed widely as a key
concept of postcolonial theory. Whereas Edward Said focused on binary rep-
resentations of the colonizer and the colonized and critiqued how colonial
power was exercised in their discursive construction, Bhabha proposed hybrid-
ity as a space for enunciating and translating cultural difference, in which
culture is never understood as primordially fixed or universal and cultural
purity is untenable. As the Third Space of enunciation, hybridity is a space
in which cultural meanings and signs ‘can be appropriated, translated, rehis-
toricized, and read anew’ (Bhabha 1994: 55). Resistance can be articulated in
the Third Space, where ‘it is possible to return the colonial gaze and subvert
the ambivalent construction of cultural supremacy itself, where colonial rule
and the relational construction of colonizer and colonized can be destabilized
from within’ (Andreotti 2011: 31). Hybridity is performed via translation,
mimicry, and appropriation; colonized people’s use of the colonizer’s cultural
and linguistic codes destabilizes power hierarchy and has subversive effects of
resistance.
Although hybridity aims to provide the colonized with a new identity and
possibility for liberation, the notion has been critiqued. First, it has been
argued that the notion of hybridity is predicated on the existence of non-
hybrid cultures. Moore-Gilbert (1997) argues that the Center, and to a lesser
extent the Periphery, tends to be described with such non-hybridity, leading to
cultural homogenization. This problem appears to be solved by the argument
that ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity’, forming the
‘third space’ rather than a mixture of ‘two original moments from which the
third emerges’ (Rutherford 1990: 211). However, if all cultures are hybrid
and in-between, a postcolonial critique conflicts with its original impetus to
recreate a distinct agency and identity of the colonized (Moore-Gilbert 1997).
Here, hybridity can become a fixed categorization (cf. Otsuji and Pennycook
2010), either existing in a binary of hybrid or non-hybrid or referring to the
all-encompassing. In applied linguistics, this problem is exemplified by the
recent contradictory advocacy for rhetorical hybridity to be achieved by
mixing culturally essentialized rhetorical styles in academic writing for
unique self-expression (Li in press).
 R. KUBOTA 7

Secondly, critics argue that hybridity can be exploited for the benefit of the
dominant in various ways to create and legitimate hierarchies. In the case of
India, Moore-Gilbert (1997) argues that hybridity of the colonized was histor-
ically used to legitimate the imposition of the power of the colonizer as a
unifying force. Furthermore, ‘cultural hybridity became a means of securing
colonial control through the production of complicit ‘‘mimic men’’ ’—‘the na-
tional bourgeoisie . . . to which control was relinquished at the beginning of the
(neo)-colonial period’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 195). Another example is Imperial
Japan from the late 19th century to the end of World War II, in which a
dominant discourse about national identity was hybrid ethnicity rather than

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monoethnic purity, as it conveniently legitimated Japan’s colonial control over
East and Southeast Asian nations which consisted of diverse ethnic groups
(Oguma 1995). Far from being liberatory or celebratory, hybridity, when as-
signed a superior status, can become oppressive. The promotion of hybridity by
dominant groups corresponds to the neoliberal ideology of plurilingualism
(Flores 2013) and neoliberal multiculturalism, as discussed later.
Thirdly, hybridity disregards the significance of cultural nationalism or col-
lective politics. It is necessary to remember that it was cultural nationalism, the
separatist politics of identity and resistance, rather than hybridity that first
prompted decolonization. Cohesive forces continue to exist. As May (2009)
notes, many governments confront demands from ethnic and religious groups
who present themselves in collective terms rather than from hybrid positions.
The postcolonial or poststructuralist stance of anti-essentialism and a denial of
rootedness demonstrates a shift in attention ‘from national origin to subject-
position’ (Dirlik 1994: 335) or from group identity to individual subjectivity.
However, by doing so, it endorses the colonial civilizing mission in which
individualism (but not freedom) was introduced to the colonized along with
the ideas of modernity and enlightenment (Chakrabarty 2000). In the context
of capitalist globalization of the Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), the nation-
state no longer appears to exert its political and economic power. In this sense,
the perceived decline of cultural nationalism and the rise of hybridity consti-
tute an idea aligned with capitalist globalization. Despite, or because of, the
‘decline in sovereignty of nation-states’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xi), the nation-
state ‘might be the only political formation able to mitigate the unprecedented
poverty and discrimination, violence, and civil strife, that are results of global-
ization and of the geo-political interventions of the west’ (Sethi 2011: 123).
Likewise, group solidarity can challenge hegemonic forces of racism, sexism,
and homophobia, although solidarity can also obscure various differences and
inequalities within each group. A tension between collective politics and
hybridity or individual difference can be observed in indigenous language
revitalization and maintenance, as discussed in the next section.
Fourthly, hybridity typically refers to relations between the postcolonial and
the First World, rather than between two postcolonial subjects, indicating that
it overlooks the politics of location as ideological and institutional structures
(Dirlik 1994). This leads to a contentious point: the notion of hybridity and
8 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

in-betweenness, when applied to postcolonial scholars’ professional status and

theoretical stances, demonstrates a privileged elitist position of power located
in the First World, which is not shared by subalterns who are forced to take a
marginalized status or location. Referring to postcolonial scholars of Third
World origin, Dirlik (1994) states:
However much postcolonial intellectuals may insist on hybridity
and the transposability of locations, not all positions are equal in
power. . . . To insist on hybridity against one’s own language, it
seems to me, is to disguise not only ideological location but also
the differences of power that go with different locations.

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Postcolonial intellectuals in their First World institutional locations
are ensconced in positions of power not only vis-à-vis the ‘native’
intellectuals back at home but also vis-à-vis their First World neigh-
bors here. My neighbors in Farmville, Virginia, are no match in
power for the highly paid, highly prestigious postcolonial intellec-
tuals at Columbia, Princeton, or Duke; (p. 343)
Postcolonial theory, which favors Eurocentric textual analysis and European
theorists but overlooks social, economic, and political struggles experienced by
the underprivileged, creates a privileged location, in which ‘the identity of the
postcolonial is no longer structural but discursive’ (Dirlik 1994: 332). As a
caveat, it is important not to totalize European knowledge as antithesis to
the (post)colonial but to view it as a complex and contradictory construct
that was adopted and resisted by the colonized in the establishment of bour-
geois individualism and modernism even in decolonization (Chakrabarty
2000). In applied linguistics, our academic status as scholars corresponds to
the privileged position of postcolonial academics that Dirlik (1994) critiques.
Finally, the power and privilege attached to postcolonial scholars and the
location of theorization further indicate a gap between theory and practice
(Sethi 2011). Comparing Bhabha’s texts imbued with words from Foucault,
Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss with the people in the Third World, Ahmad (1992)
states, ‘Those who live . . . in places where a majority of the population has
been denied access to such benefits of ‘‘modernity’’ as hospitals or better
health insurance or even basic literacy; can hardly afford the terms of such
thought’ (pp. 68–9). Similarly, referring to poverty and violence in many de-
veloping countries, Miyoshi (1995) notes, ‘As we talk about postcoloniality
and postindustrialism in the metropolitan academia, we ignore those billions
outside our ongoing discourse for whom life has nothing ‘‘post’’ about it’
(p. 71). Relying on Western intellectual canons such as poststructuralism as
well as such notions as hybridity, syncretism, and multiplicity, postcolonial
theory champions Eurocentric rational thought, though appropriated and re-
sisted in ambivalent ways, endorsing rather than reversing the colonial rela-
tions of power. A similar theory–practice divide of the multi/plural turn is seen
in the examples discussed by McNamara (2011). The criticisms reviewed so far
raise the following implications for the multi/plural turn in applied linguistics.
 R. KUBOTA 9

IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Hybridity and related notions are neither neutral nor apolitical; they involve
contextual and relational arrangements of power. Without addressing power
and ideology, advocacy of multi/plural approaches and hybridity in language
use can become complicit with domination and will fail to solve real problems.
Furthermore, when our intellectual engagement becomes entrenched in the
popularity of the multi/plural turn, we may lose sight of the persistent demand
for monolingualism and linguistic purism in various locations as well as
Anglocentrism and English-only ideologies in many non-English–dominant

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neoliberal societies. It is important to keep in mind that, as Shohat (1992)
mentions, ‘A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated
in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations,
runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence’
(p. 109).
An awareness of the hegemony and ideology behind postcolonial concepts
requires contextual understandings. Hybridity carries many political meanings
and consequences in different locations. It is necessary to examine hybridity
not in universal but contextual terms within the current neocolonial hegemo-
nies. To cite Shohat (1992):
As a descriptive catch-all term, ‘hybridity’ per se fails to discriminate
between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced
assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political cooptation, social
conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence. (p. 110)
This implies that hybridity or the Third Space between a dominant group and a
subordinate group may either support or hinder cultural and linguistic revi-
talization of indigenous groups.

Tension between hybridity and rootedness

Studies on indigenous language maintenance and revitalization reveal a com-
plex web of power. While postcolonial theory challenges cultural/linguistic
essentialism and purism as violence of colonial discourse, authentication of
linguistic and cultural resources and identities often constitutes a key strategy
for revitalization. Contrary to the postmodern sociolinguistic idea that lan-
guage is no longer fixed at a certain location (Blommaert 2010), claiming to
belong to ancestral land constitutes important means for language preservation
or revitalization and for resistance in indigenous communities. Although the
mobility of people, including indigenous populations, shifts linguistic practices
(Patrick 2007), there is a conflict between the idea of deterritorialized language
use built upon individualism and an indigenous epistemology of land. The
claim for linguistic belonging in the context of Singapore expressed by Pakir
(2009) similarly indicates how rootedness constitutes linguistic identity.
Concepts such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism can undermine the positive
10 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

effects of rootedness to form local solidarity among minoritized groups, and

instead promote neoliberal capitalism, as discussed later in more detail.
Conversely, such fixed authentication creates a feeling of shame and reluc-
tance to learn or use a heritage language among indigenous youths, who lack
the ability to use a correct form of the language (Lee 2009; McCarty et al. 2009).
This shows a dilemma between authentication and postcolonial plurality.
Although authentication of premodern indigeneity is paradoxically founded
upon the modernist definitions of language and language rights (Patrick 2007),
postcolonial hybridity that challenges such modernist definitions will under-
mine traditional indigeneity. Indeed, it is difficult to negotiate two opposing

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poles: political efforts to seek collective rights to identity and attempts to sup-
port indigenous youths who negotiate their hybrid identity. This raises several
questions: ‘Who defines what counts as language? Who defines what language
should be revitalized? How does one avoid alienating speakers of other lan-
guage varieties (e.g. younger, mixed-language speakers)?’ (Donna Patrick, per-
sonal communication). Additionally, who proposes either hybridity or
authentication as a goal to be sought on what grounds? Significantly, both
cultural hybridity and authenticity may work to undermine cultural and pol-
itical identities and rights of indigenous peoples (Franklin and Lyons 2004).
As Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) point out, hybridity coexists with fixity in
plurilingual individuals’ linguistic expressions and cultural identity. Blackledge
and Creese (2010) also reveal how national belonging to a heritage culture was
insisted on in heritage language classrooms in the United Kingdom, which was
shaped within a more powerful discourse of national belonging to the domin-
ant language and culture. Here, the authors stress duality, rather than hybrid-
ity, of identity.

Hybridity as a privileged position

The complexity of power relations also implies that hybridity can become a
privileged position as seen in the politics of location that privileges postcolonial
theory and its scholars. Although some individuals, who are socially, politic-
ally, and economically disadvantaged or displaced, become linguistically
hybrid, as in the case of an African asylum seeker described in Blommaert
(2010), hybridity can also signify cultural capital. In global capitalism and
neoliberalism, linguistically hybrid plurilingual English-speaking subjects are
transnational elites who are considered to be superior to monolingual users of
a single national language (Flores 2013). Given that assimilationist monolin-
gual ideology continues to predominate in many countries, economically pri-
vileged and ethnically dominant students who employ translanguaging,
codemeshing, and plurilingualism become more privileged than those who
are trained to become monoglossic. It is important to ask whether all language
users regardless of their racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other background
equally transgress linguistic boundaries and engage in hybrid and fluid linguis-
tic practices. As mentioned earlier, hybridity tends to be more focused on
 R. KUBOTA 11

individual subject positions than on group identity. However, access to certain

linguistic competencies or performativities is unequally distributed among not
only individuals but also groups. So the question to ask is, among different
groups, ‘who is included and excluded in the celebration of hybridity?’
(Lorente and Tupas 2013: 70).
The availability of hybrid positioning is also relevant to scholars. Just as
postcolonial scholars of the Third World or any other origin who work in
the First World can enjoy privilege without actually transforming the lives of
the people in the Third World, it is owing to our privilege that we applied
linguists, including myself, can discuss and even model hybridity and multi-

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plicity of linguistic practices. Of course, oppressive policies and ideologies that
marginalize certain populations should indeed be challenged, and hybrid and
multiple identities of marginalized people who are excluded by monolingual/
monoethnic ideology need to be protected. However, our scholarly promotion
of the multi/plural turn may primarily function as a way to legitimate and
reaffirm our own hybrid and plural subjectivities rather than as an aid to
transforming the lives of the people we refer to. These people include those
who are linguistically, racially, and economically marginalized, for whom hy-
bridity may be a site of struggle rather than celebration, or students and scho-
lars who are expected to conform to the conventions of academic writing and
standard language ideology. Applied linguistics will perhaps more meaning-
fully mobilize its academic knowledge for social transformation not simply by
promoting multi/plural concepts but also by examining their political, eco-
nomic, and ideological underpinnings.

A gap between theory and real-world needs

The gap between theory and practice or the fallacy of pedagogical practice
deemed progressive was discussed extensively in the 1990s in relation to the
process-oriented teaching of literacy. It was argued that the liberal construct-
ivist approach of student-centeredness with a focus on meaning and free ex-
pression rather than form and accuracy worked for middle-class students who
were already equipped with cultural capital, but not for working-class racially
minority students. An alternative approach proposed was to appropriate the
language of power—the teaching of the dominant code via form-focused in-
struction without devaluing the cultural and linguistic identity of minority
students (Reyes 1992; Delpit 1995). Successful implementation of this peda-
gogical idea is to provide these students with an opportunity to gain cultural
capital, and eventually economic and symbolic capital, for socioeconomic
success.
Will hybridity-oriented ideas also have the same effect? While appropriation
of the dominant code alone is unlikely to destabilize its power, neither are
hybridity-oriented ideas since they address individual students’ expressions
but not broader sociopolitical constraints that limit more fluid, multiple, and
hybrid expressions. In this sense, scholarly discussion on hybridity and
12 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

multiplicity more likely becomes self-serving academic activity than social

impact. The relationship between applied linguistics scholars and practi-
tioners/students seems to parallel that between the First World scholars and
the Third world populations which constructs ‘a division of labour in which
the Third World acts, while the First thinks (or, even worse, in which the First
World speaks, while the Third dumbly acts)’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 164).
Academics’ privileged status and the politics of multi/plural turn are impli-
cated in multiculturalism in a neoliberal era. Many published critiques of
postcolonial theory in the 1990s pointed out its complicity with neoliberal
world order. I now examine how notions of plurality, flexibility, hybridity

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and so on used in applied linguistics today are located in neoliberal ideology.

THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN AND NEOLIBERALISM

Neoliberalism and plurilingualism
Critics have pointed out the complicity of postcolonial theory/scholars in neo-
liberal global capitalism. Neoliberalism, a topic of growing interest in applied
linguistics (e.g. Kubota 2011; Park 2011; Block et al. 2012; Park and Lo 2012;
Flores 2013; Holborow 2013), is an ideological and structural apparatus that
promotes a free-market economy by privatizing public services, creating a
flexible workforce, and increasing individual and institutional accountability
for economic success, while reducing social services and producing disparities
between the rich and the poor. With global capitalism, neoliberalism supports
economic activities across national borders. Theorizing the realignment of
global power in late capitalism, Hardt and Negri (2000) argue:
Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists
find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate
capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has
always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse
par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its
very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and
the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations,
cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world
market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed bound-
aries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multipli-
cities. (p. 150)
As increased numbers of multinational corporations and smaller businesses
cross-national borders, successful management of diversity—recognition of
multiplicity and negotiation with cultural and linguistic difference among di-
verse employees and clients—has become a key to economic success.
A link between neoliberalism and the multi/plural trend of language studies,
especially the pluralist orientation, is found in the discourse of plurilingualism
promoted by transnational organizations such as the Council of Europe and
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Flores 2013).
 R. KUBOTA 13

Based on the key neoliberal concept of human capital, plurilingualism has

been promoted essential for working in global capitalism. Critically reviewing
a document published by the Council of Europe, Flores (2013) pointed out that
the notion of plurilingualism was promoted to support learning to communi-
cate across borders (via various linguistic repertoires) and respect for linguistic
diversity, language rights, freedom of expression, and democratic citizenship.
This aligns with the neoliberal emphases on the development of individual
competencies in service of economic growth: lifelong learning of communica-
tion skills to be developed as individual responsibility; flexible, pragmatic, and
truncated language repertoires as essential competence for transcultural work-

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ers; and cultural competence that facilitates individual and national economic
development.
These skills are indeed deemed important among transcultural workers,
creating a predicament for contesting the dominance of English, which is
also entrenched in neoliberal ideology (Phillipson 2008). More precisely, the
neoliberal preoccupation with learning English as an international language
can be challenged by promoting plurilingualism beyond English, which iron-
ically overlaps with neoliberal human capital (Flores 2013; Kubota 2013).
Here, it is important to recognize a duality between neoliberal pluralism
and neoliberal desire for English for economic purposes, which resonates
with a legacy of colonial discourse of the superiority of whiteness, modernity,
and liberation (Motha 2014). As in my opening episode, the multi/plural
position that ignores the other side of the duality misses the bigger
picture of hegemony, becoming complicit with the neoliberal celebration of
difference.
A similar complicity is seen in the discussion of multiliteracies (Cope and
Kalantzis 2009). In the era of neoliberal human capital in the new economy,
increased multimodality in everyday literacy is sharply contrasted by a persist-
ent emphasis on back-to-basics literacy instruction. To counter this conserva-
tive pedagogy, Cope and Kalantzis (2009) support new literacy instruction that
highlights flexibility, creativity, multimodality, and innovation in meaning-
making processes—skills promoted since the progressive education movement
in the early 20th century but discursively realigned with neoliberal human
capital—with a critical awareness of power relations. The authors argue that
this transformative pedagogy can support either realistic demands or emanci-
patory purposes and that it is up to the learner to decide which view to take;
this is essentially a neoliberal solution of individual choice.
These cases demonstrate a paradox; conservative educational policies
(e.g. the teaching of English only as an international language or back-
to-basics instruction) appear to support neoliberal practical skills. When
applied linguists critique such policies and propose alternatives, they often
endorse equally neoliberal ideology of multiplicity, thus becoming complicit
with neoliberal discourse. A possible solution will be discussed in the
conclusion.
14 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Neoliberal multiculturalism
As discussed above, a neoliberal and global capitalism that expands beyond
national borders requires workers, citizens, and institutions to successfully
navigate and negotiate cultural differences. Multicultural competence is part
of human capital. Neoliberal multiculturalism is built upon ‘an ethos of self-
reliance, individualism, and competition, while simultaneously (and conveni-
ently) undermining discourses and social practices that call for collective social
action and fundamental structural change’ (Darder 2012: 417). The multi/
plural turn thus parallels the underlying ideology of neoliberal multicultural-
ism—that is, individualism, difference-blindness, and elitist cosmopolitanism

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rather than critical acknowledgement of power.
Neoliberal multiculturalism in the context of the United States inherited
previous racial liberalism, which sutured the anti-racism of the civil rights
movement to Cold War nationalism for establishing the legitimacy of the
United States as a global power of democracy, human rights, and transnational
capitalism (Melamed 2006). Replacing socialist ideology, neoliberal multicul-
turalism also underscores individual accountability to legitimate the distinction
between the privileged and the stigmatized. In post-racial discourse, racism is
given a label of pastness in light of the success of Barack Obama and other
minorities. In this color-blindness, individuals are to enjoy their freedom and
opportunities but are ultimately responsible for their own socioeconomic
standings regardless of their background, which leads to ‘privatizing racism’
(Lentin and Titley 2011: 168). This meritocratic justification legitimates racial
and other inequalities.
Not only does neoliberal multiculturalism legitimate the difference between
the privileged and the stigmatized, it also distinguishes the forms of ‘good’ and
‘bad’ diversity as in the case of banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women
(Lentin and Titley 2011: 176). This indicates that ‘monoculturalism becomes a
category of stigma’, recreating ‘ ‘‘multicultural’’ and ‘‘monocultural’’ as new
privileged and stigmatized racial formations’ (Melamed 2006: 16).
Furthermore, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diversity among immigrants is distinguished
along the class line under neoliberalism. In the case of Australia, desirable
immigrants are those from middle-class backgrounds who will make economic
contributions, whereas undesirable immigrants are from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds in need of social services, causing a burden for the neoliberal state
(Shiobara 2010). We can see that although neoliberal multiculturalism pro-
motes respect for diversity, sensitivity to difference, official antiracism, open
societies, and individual (economic) freedom, it reproduces the existing racial,
gender, and class hierarchies of power.
An ideal neoliberal subject is cosmopolitan. However, critics argue that
cosmopolitanism reflects individualism and an elite worldview of people
with wealth, mobility, and hybridity in global capitalism, while undermining
the potentially positive role of the nation, which could provide opportunities
for workers and other groups to form solidarity. Critiquing cosmopolitanism,
 R. KUBOTA 15

Calhoun (2002) states: ‘Cosmopolitanism is not responsible for empire or

capitalism or fascism or communism, but neither is it an adequate defense.’
(p. 887)
It is clear that the multi/plural approaches are complicit in neoliberal multi-
culturalism in that both focus on the individual rather than group solidarity,
assume color-blindness, and support diversity—but only the kind of diversity
that privileges the multicultural/hybrid/cosmopolitan (rising) middle class over
the monocultural/non-hybrid/parochial working class. Although creating a
binary between middle class and working class may seem inappropriate, it is
also problematic to claim the universality of hybridity/cosmopolitanism across

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the class line, since it justifies difference-blindness and undermines situated
politics. It is important to note that the multi/plural focus does not necessarily
take into account how racial and other relations of power might affect the
ways people use, learn, and teach language. As Motha (2014: 79) notes,
‘Optimism about new hybrid language practices therefore needs to be tem-
pered by a consciousness of the role being played by race in our constructions’.
Scholars need to pay greater attention to the role that power dynamics play in
linguistic hybridity, fluidity, and plurality.
Earlier, I discussed a theory/practice divide in the critiques of postcolonial
theory and scholars. The free-market economy and neoliberal policies also
regulate the academic activities of intellectuals, further proliferating the
multi/plural turn as a favored intellectual trend. Below, I focus on the
impact of neoliberalism on our scholarly activities.

Scholars in neoliberal academic institutions and their

complicity with neoliberalism
Neoliberalism in higher education can be characterized by privatization,
marketization, corporatization, increased student fees, emphasis on obtaining
grants, a two-tiered employment and institutional system, curriculum for de-
veloping human capital, English-medium education, and documentation for
accountability (Mok 2007; Holborow 2013). These measures aim to increase
institutions’ global competitiveness for financial gains. Competition is pro-
moted by university rankings, which are based largely on research productivity
as measured by citation analysis and research funding (Altbach 2013).
However, not all research counts as legitimate; ‘the topics and the methodol-
ogies of the research must be appealing to editors and reviewers in the central
academic powers’ (Altbach 2013: 79). Pressure to publish and obtain funding
compels academics and graduate students to try to ‘position themselves com-
petitively within the knowledge of marketplace’ and ‘as a good fit within the
institution’s neoliberal purpose’ (Darder 2012: 414). Academic writing prac-
tices are also situated in the economic interest of the publishing industry as
well as a competitive model for individual and institutional accountability.
Academic journals are ranked according to impact factors based on citation
frequencies and other measures. Researchers are often rewarded by how many
16 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

times their works were cited. The basic principle is indeed the more the mer-
rier! This implies that popular theories and concepts proposed by prominent
scholars tend to get cited, recycled, and propagated incessantly, while opposing
or deviant ideas are likely to be relegated to a form of inadequate diversity.
In this way, the multi/plural trend becomes a fashionable commodity to be
consumed but not necessarily to fix real-life problems.
One of the real-life issues is the global dominance of English. In neoliberal
academic institutions in the world, English dominates and regulates many
scholars’ academic careers (Mok 2007; Altbach 2013). Referring to the
increased pressure for scholars in Asia to publish in English-medium high-

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impact journals, Mok (2007) comments:
Ironically, publications in local languages or national venues, which
might be read by a wider audience and might have significant
effects or impacts on local policy formation or socioeconomic devel-
opments, would not be counted as internationally important.
If such a situation proves to be a valid one, we certainly need to
address the fundamental problems resulting from the quest for
internationalization of universities. (p. 446)
Altbach (2013) also reports: ‘Norwegian academics who publish in English and
in recognized journals are paid fees for their accomplishments, while their
colleagues who publish in Norwegian are paid less or not at all’ (p. 3).
International and domestic graduate students in English-speaking countries
are taught to write in acceptable academic discourse in English, but are
rarely encouraged to learn to write and publish in their native or other lan-
guages. Far from the perception that multilingualism is now the norm, English
indeed dominates as a global academic language, reinforcing the hegemony of
English monolingualism.
Furthermore, not all contexts allow hybrid and creative language use. Take
high-stakes academic writing, including writing for tests, publishing, and pro-
posals for funding, for example. While advocacy for multi/plural approaches is
essential in these contexts, jumping on a multi/plural bandwagon in teaching
will likely repeat the same problem with the process writing approach in the
past (Heng Hartse and Kubota 2014).
The dominance of English and standard varieties of English is intact both
globally and within English-speaking countries, marginalizing and disadvanta-
ging non–English-speaking or nonnative–English-speaking populations, as
McNamara (2011) pointed out. This inequality is not just about language
but also about race (Motha 2014) and class (Block 2013; O’Regan 2014). In
many parts of the world, the dominant language is imposed on minority popu-
lations, while race and class index positive or negative meanings attached to
being plurilingual (Lo and Kim 2012). Although one impulse of the multi/
plural turn is to challenge this monolingual and standardization-based
approach to research and language teaching, the discourse that underscores
plurality and hybridity sidesteps the hegemonic ideologies and social practices.
 R. KUBOTA 17

This is demonstrated in the opening episode in which the rhetoric of multilin-

gualism was favored.
It is also significant to note that applied linguists, including myself, who
publish on multi/plural topics benefit from this activity in advancing our
own careers, just as postcolonial scholars do from publishing their work.
Many of us, applied linguists, native or nonnative speakers of English, are
privileged plurilingual scholars who can afford to use hybrid modes of expres-
sion or advocate what we wish to see, while people for whom we ostensibly
advocate often do not have the power to do so. As postcolonial scholars were
criticized as complicit with colonial hegemony, Eurocentrism, and elitism,

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applied linguists who embrace the multi/plural turn perhaps cannot escape a
similar charge.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The progressive ideas of the multi/plural turn, which has an intellectual affili-
ation with postcolonial/poststructuralist thought, provide an important shift in
our understanding of language use and language teaching. They originally
aimed to transform hegemonic monolingual and English-only ideology.
However, critical reflections on postcolonial/poststructuralist theory in the
1990s as well as recent criticisms of neoliberalism and neoliberal multicultur-
alism indicate that the multi/plural turn should not be embraced with unquali-
fied optimism.
While notions such as hybridity, fluidity, and multiplicity are potentially
liberating, they can obscure actual struggles and inequalities, just as postcolo-
nial theory tends to ignore ‘the contemporary actuality of global politics within
a capitalist world-system’ (Parry 1994: 7). Using the multi/plural frame of
reference with insufficient critical reflection makes us complicit with a neo-
liberalism that exacerbates economic and educational gaps and with a neo-
liberal multiculturalism that evades racism and other injustices. Thus, in
considering linguistic plurality and hybridity in our research, more explicit
attention should be paid to issues of asymmetrical relations of power and
inequalities that privilege or stigmatize individuals and groups due to their
plurilingualism, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity on the one hand, or their
monolingualism and monoculturalism on the other.
It is also important to critically reflect on our own hybrid plurilingual status
of privilege within neoliberal academic institutions, in which we further
accrue cultural, economic, and symbolic capital from presenting and publish-
ing while moving further away from real-world problems. Concrete measures
to resist academic neoliberalism will require the applied linguistics community
to raise our concerns and begin to seek alternatives. Professional associations
may recommend guidelines for tenure and promotion focusing more on qual-
ity of research (e.g. originality, social relevance, and critical reflexivity), prac-
tical impact (e.g. community-based inquiry and improvement of practice), and
diverse venues and methods for knowledge mobilization (e.g. equal weight
18 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

given to research output in languages other than English or alternative formats

that have a greater social impact) than on quantity of output, prestige of jour-
nals or publishers, or uncritical alignment with popular approaches. Such
guidelines will influence the ways in which we advise graduate students and
review various academic work, such as manuscripts for publications, external
tenure reviews, and grant applications. With regard to academic writing, pro-
moting multi/plural approaches (e.g. translanguaging) should coincide with
advocacy for broadening the current textual conventions by communicating
to publishers, editors, and other gatekeepers (Heng Hartse and Kubota 2014).
In addition, bi/multilingual students and scholars should be given more en-

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couragement and opportunities to engage in academic writing in languages
other than English. Language testing is another area where advocacy for
allowing greater linguistic diversity can make real impact for change.
One difficulty for change is the close conceptual alignment between con-
structs of neoliberal multiculturalism (e.g. flexibility, diversity, mobility) and
critical approaches to applied linguistics (Pennycook 2010). As I mentioned
earlier, this creates a challenge for us to critique neoliberal-like conservative
policies (e.g. English-only instruction) without becoming complicit with neo-
liberalism. One strategy might be to appropriate the discourse of neoliberalism
to promote critical awareness of diversity without endorsing capitalist domin-
ation (Kubota 2013). In fact, this strategy might more easily convince practi-
tioners and policymakers about alternative views than asking them to
drastically change their ideological position would.
It is time for us to critically reflect on the multi/plural turn and pay more
attention to the systems of power that produce racial, economic, and other
inequalities related to plural and hybrid linguistic practices. It is equally ne-
cessary to resist the neoliberal academic culture that compels us to ignore
social problems and instead celebrate plurality and hybridity for our own
cause. Increased attention to places where real problems exist can make our
professional activities more socially meaningful and transformative.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Alastair Pennycook for his insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier
draft. I also thank Joel Heng Hartse for providing suggestions for increasing readability. My ap-
preciation also goes to the editor for his support and guidance.

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22 THE MULTI/PLURAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Ryuko Kubota is Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at
University of British Columbia. Her research interests include critical applied linguistics,
critical race theory, and second language writing. She has published in such journals as
Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Linguistics and Education, and TESOL Quarterly. Address
for correspondence: Ryuko Kubota, Department of Language and Literacy Education,
University of British Columbia, 2034 Lower Mall Rd, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T
1Z2. <ryuko.kubota@ubc.ca>

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