Contesting Grand Narratives of the Intercultural uses an auto-ethnographic account of the author's experience of living in Iran in the 1970s to demonstrate the constant struggle to prevent the intercultural from being dominated by essentialist grand narratives.
As an authoritative interpreter of the intercultural, Holliday has made yet another significant contribution, this time by autoethnographically interrogating the grand narrative of Orientalism juxtaposing it with native-speakerism. Cautioning against replacing one Othering with another, he opens up creative diversity beyond large-culture fixity. He has done so by combining the personal, the professional and the political, and more commendably, by de-centering himself as a researcher and intercultural traveler
Professor-Emeritus B. Kumaravadivelu, San Jose State University, California, USA.
Holliday provides a brilliantly honest and acutely observed intercultural auto-ethnography based on his journal of Iran in the 70's. The careful weaving of the personal with the theoretical traces the 'splintering' of grand narratives into the contingency and detail of everyday experience beautifully
Cristina Ros i Sole, Goldsmiths, University of London.
As an authoritative interpreter of the intercultural, Holliday has made yet another significant contribution, this time by autoethnographically interrogating the grand narrative of Orientalism juxtaposing it with native-speakerism. Cautioning against replacing one Othering with another, he opens up creative diversity beyond large-culture fixity. He has done so by combining the personal, the professional and the political, and more commendably, by de-centering himself as a researcher and intercultural traveler.
Professor-Emeritus B. Kumaravadivelu, San Jose State University, California, USA
Holliday provides a brilliantly honest and acutely observed intercultural auto-ethnography based on his journal of Iran in the 70's. The careful weaving of the personal with the theoretical traces the 'splintering' of grand narratives into the contingency and detail of everyday experience beautifully.
Cristina Ros i Sole, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Contesting Grand Narratives of the Intercultural offers timely and significant contributions that seek to unthink grant narratives through deCentred perspectives. Utilising a third-space methodology, Holliday foregrounds the politics of looking, the techniques of the body, the way in which we are perceived, and the attacks of cultural blocks that blind us to see threads of hybridity and takes us on a journey through thoughts, observations, reconstructed narratives, and deep personal reflections to demonstrate the (re)construction of culture on the go. We need this approach to un-learn, re-learn and co-learn so that we may develop open engagements and become responsive to unexpected hybridities.
Khawla Badwan, Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Through an inventive autoethnography of spending years in Iran, Adrian Holliday develops an important argument about how the grand narratives of nation and civilization prevent us from seeing so much hybridity within and flow between the supposedly disparate bounded cultures. This is a delightful and perceptive read.
Asef Bayat, Catherin & Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Employing a thoughtful, balanced blend of theory and rich autoethnographic data, Holliday reflects on and analyzes his experiences during his years in Iran. His detailed observations are illuminating, his writing is engaging, and his analysis firmly counters the stereotypes and Othering embedded in essentialist grand narratives. This book is an important contribution to the study of the intercultural.
Stephanie Vandrick, Professor, University of San Francisco, USA
Adrian Holliday is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.