Affective banalities of unequal Englishes: a critical autoethnography

Abstract In this piece, I return to an old paper from college and rewrite it to confront my fraught relationship with the English language. I trace back the fears, the shame, the tiny victories, the silent joys. I look back on the people who influenced my learning, the awkward situations I had to endure, the spaces where I struggled to fit in. And in all of these residual memories, I begin to see the embodied textures of “Unequal Englishes” – the lived reality that there are many Englishes, each shaped by different histories and sociopolitical dynamics, but not all are valued equally. I grapple with the following questions: What do unequal Englishes look like on the ground? How do we feel these inequalities, carry them in our bodies, and live through them under our breath? In the awkward pauses? The swallowed words? In the ways we try to sound ‘right’? In the end, the paper mobilizes a modest proposal, which I call the “affective banalities of unequal Englishes,” to bring front and center – to visibilize – the ordinary, seemingly harmless, often taken-for-granted moments of daily life where inequities among Englishes and their users quietly emerge and take root, yet are also easily dismissed.