Academic Literacy in Post-colonial times: Hegemonic Norms and Transcultural Possibilities

In this paper, I argue that it is important to bring proficiency in written English language into the frame of a critical pedagogy for academic literacy. This may at first seem a counter-intuitive goal with connotations of constraint and convergence rather than opening up and diversity. However, what is often not taken into account in the notion of opening up new spaces of critique or new 'languages' is that those new critical 'languages' operate in a dominant materially concrete, linguistic language, namely English. The opportunity to manipulate the representational resources of English therefore is a necessary pedagogical goal if one wants to open up participation in academic literacy practices to a wider selection of people than is currently the case. By on the one hand, raising awareness of subjectification into the rhetorical norms of academic writing by pointing up their historical construction, and on the other, looking at an example of a Korean PhD student working with the theoretical discourses of post-colonialism and psychoanalysis in English, I hope to refigure the prevailing assumptions on attention to form in written English.