The dissemination of the english language as an instrument of power: an analysis under the geopolitics of knowledge

Abstract

This article addresses the dissemination of the English language as an instrument of power from the perspective of geopolitics. To this end, the objective was to establish a relationship between the geopolitics of knowledge and the coloniality of knowledge with the diffusion of the English language in the production of academic texts. With this in mind, there was an effort to debate and reflect on the naturalization of English as a lingua franca disseminated through power strategies. With that, through bibliographic reviews that pervade the theme and through the systematic review of the decolonial literature, it was possible to present the main theoretical approaches of the geopolitics of knowledge and to contrast them with power policies of an English-speaking country. In this bias, the article presents the following problem question: In what way, from a geopolitics of knowledge production strategy, English-speaking States, in particular the United States, used the language as an instrument of power to incorporate the production of academic texts written in countries that do not have English as an official language. In view of this, an attempt was made to investigate the place of central and universal knowledge and how it travels through subaltern spatialities once it implies the relationship between power and knowledge.