Pragmatics - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2007

Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating one’s verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to “diss” his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participant’s performance generally consists of “freestyle” or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponent’s appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called “Eyedea.” I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, “R.K.” and “Shells”, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like “nigga” (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedea’s Whiteness largely in discursive ways – by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.

This paper analyzes service encounters between African American customers and Korean immigrant shopkeepers. It is based on ethnographic data of tape-recorded interactions, interviews, and observations made at a Korean immigrant-owned store. The study focuses on analyzing the ways in which the participants constructed various social as well as cultural identities within the situational frames evoked. A close analysis of the talk reveals that the participants’ differing cultural backgrounds was not the most dominant interactional factor governing participants’ talk in their routinized service encounters. Instead, the majority of service encounters revolved around the various types of situated identities of participants (e.g. shopkeepers and customers) rather than their cultural/ethnic identities as African American or Korean. Based on the view of interculturality as a locally managed and situationally bound entity, this study describes the intricate ways in which the participants’ cultural (ethnic) identities were made relevant or irrelevant in the course of their interactions. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the ways that the participants came to achieve practical ends in their interactions. It specifically shows how interculturality was not a debilitating factor that hindered the communication between the participants, but rather, that it played a positive role in helping participants to achieve multiple interactional goals.

This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists co-construct their identities as members of the same culture by producing talk that aligns them with several shared membership categories (Sacks 1972, 1979, 1992). The speakers propose and subsequently reaffirm, resist, or transform the categories ‘Westernized’ and ‘ethnically marked’ in order to align or realign themselves as co-members of the same group of white collar workers. In the first excerpt, the participants critique Tanzanian youth who dress like rap singers, providing turn-by-turn slots for co-affiliation, thereby establishing an intercultural difference between themselves and their fellow Tanzanians who adopt Western ways uncritically. In this excerpt, the participants employ interculturality for affiliative positioning by drawing a boundary between themselves and those Tanzanians whom they identify as ‘outsiders’ through their talk. The disjunction between the two groups is accomplished through codeswitching, shared humor, and pronoun usage. The second excerpt demonstrates how the recently-established shared insider identity is re-analyzed by the group when one of the participants in the office is constructed as uncooperative, and his ethnicity is named as the source of his inability to work with his colleagues in a suitable manner. Thus, his status as an ‘outsider’ becomes made real through explicit categorization of him as a non-member due to the interculturality of ethnic difference. This participant resists the ethnification (Day 1998) he receives, however, and through this resistance, he succeeds in reintegrating himself into the group. This reintegration is accomplished through affiliative language structures including codeswitching, teasing, and the nomination of new shared categories by the ethnified participant. My analysis provides further documentation that interculturality is a continuously dynamic production of identities-in-practice (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), rather than a consequence of fixed social characteristics.

This article investigates how participants accomplish interculturality (Nishizaka 1995, 1999; Mori 2003) when they engage in talk about Korean cultural practices involving labels and descriptions which construct one another’s national/ethnic identity. Within the framework of Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1972, 1979, 1992), three segments of conversation were analyzed between Korean users of Japanese attending a Japanese university and their Japanese work colleagues or college friends. The analysis challenges key assumptions about intercultural conversation in several ways: 1) by demonstrating that interculturality is not always achieved in talk among speakers from different nations who have different first languages; 2) through illustrating how cultural expertise is often claimed by ‘non-members’ of the culture; and 3) by showing how presumed cultural experts do not always enact their cultural memberships, even in the face of cultural critique. The study reveals that the various membership categorizations that occur are contingent on how the participants respond to the assessment of various cultural practices. The findings of this study provide further awareness of how cross-cultural identity construction and interculturality are accomplished in talk.

This paper takes a critical interactional sociolinguistic approach to examine the construction of interculturality (e.g., Nishizaka 1995; Mori 2003) through the use of vocatives in the discourse of a multi-cultural graduate student project group at a large American university. Interviews and descriptive information contextualize the analysis to demonstrate that the use of vocatives achieves a tight linking of inclusion but also inequality in the group talk that involves the Japanese member. The group’s vocatives show a shared interest in bringing the Japanese member into the interaction, but they also construct unequal rights to the floor. They contribute to an interculturality of subordination and an artificial sense of intimacy, characteristics consistent with the institutional setting of the group and attitudes members held about each other. In this environment, the status quo of power identities and a deficit view of the Japanese member goes largely uncontested and limits the ability of American members to learn from their Japanese partner.

This commentary reviews the five studies of intercultural communication in this special issue by comparing the nature of data analyzed and analytical procedures adopted. The data span from Africa, Asia, to North America, where different cultural, national, or ethnic groups were engaged in different types of social activities; their diversity illustrates how the participants’ ascription of, and resistance towards, their cultural, national, or ethnic identities reflect unique features of the sociohistorical contexts and the nature of their activities. In order to investigate such distinct treatments of interculturality, the researchers seek an analytical lens in the frameworks of ‘interactional sociolinguistics’ (Goffman 1974, 1981; Gumperz 1982, 1992) and ‘membership categorization analysis’ (Sacks 1972, 1992). The metamethodological reflection considers the selection of focal phenomena as well as the use of ethnographic information and the researchers’ own membership knowledge in the process of interpretation, and addresses the issues concerning how to attain an “emic” perspective of cultural difference and sameness.