Keynote speech 1: Identity and subjectivity in the era of globalization

In his little book Fear of small numbers (2006), the social critic Arjun Appadurai reflects on the reasons why identity has become such a hot topic in studies of globalization. He sees a link “between minorities within the modern nation-state and the marginalization of the nation-state by the forces of globalization. ” (33). While immigrants are called upon to ‘reconstruct ’ their identities upon arrival in a new country (Pavlenko & Lantolf 2000), nations themselves are under pressure to define what it means to be French, German or American when nation states are slowly losing much of their economic and political sovereignty. Appadurai notes that “the mysterious roamings of finance capital are matched by new kinds of migration, both elite and proletarian, which create unprecedented tensions between identities of origin, identities of residence, and identities of aspiration for many migrants in the world labor market. ” (Appadurai 2006:37) The current focus of intercultural communication research on the identities of learners and speakers of other languages can be seen as a response to this new anxiety “about foreign goods... foreign languages, foreign migrants, or foreign investments ” in a global economy (22). The efforts of some applied linguists to view an individual’s identity as multiple, changing and conflictual (Norton 2000) have aimed at making bilingual and bicultural minorities less threatening by helping them reconstruct themselve