(Re) Constructing Identities: South African Domestic Workers, English Language Learning, and Power

Abstract

Domestic workers have played an essential role in the history of South Africa; and yet, current research neither explores the educational experiences of these women nor examines the ways in which national discourses surrounding English language learning influence their educational motivations. This dissertation aims to ameliorate this dearth of research while simultaneously broadening global conceptions of adult language learners by focusing on the English language learning of older, Black, female, South African domestic workers. Utilizing Critical Ethnographic Narrative Analysis (CENA), in which I draw from the histories, narratives, and HERstories of 28 female domestic workers over three-year span, I explore the complex reasons and motivations for South African domestic workers to learn English in a multilingual linguascape. Framed in poststructural theories of language, identity, and power in connection with postcolonial theories of English language learning, I make three main arguments. First, I contend that the terms “education” and “literacy” have become metonyms for “English language education” and “English literacy” that undeniably affect these women’s educational and linguistic motivations. Second, I find that these women are living in a three-fold state of domination in which they incur symbolic violence from the neo-colonial importance placed on English leading to their linguistic vulnerability. Third, I find that despite metonymic discourses purporting the essential nature of English in post-apartheid South Africa, and notwithstanding the numerous forms of violence enacted upon these women in their past and present lives, South African domestic workers live within interstices in which they are showcasing aspects of agency and autonomy in their work, home, and educational spaces while concurrently remaining within the boundaries of metonymic discourse that binds them to these spaces.