Recontextualizing Language : Indian Activists and the Recasting of English

The article examines how English is used by four well-known women activists within the framework of the Indian no global movement. In a post-colonial context the former colonialists' language, appropriated by people who have inherited it as an alien idiom and now use it as their own, usually recontextualizes its notions and categories to adapt them to the local culture. These activists, however, go much beyond in their emblematic appropriation of English, which is recontextualized into the praxis of no global activism for subversive purposes, questioning the assumptions of neo-liberal globalization.