Language, Culture and Society - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the mundane nastiness of language. Drawing on Arendt’s (1963) banality of evil and Briggs’s (2005) notion of infectious communicability, the article highlights the moral dimensions of political and media discourses that spread a communicable image of Sweden as a country in disarray. I demonstrate that this image is made of two discursive ingredients: the spatial trope of the no-go zone, and the truthiness of its discursive elements, which, through a web of communicable intertextual links, create the illusion of an accurate and coherent account of society. Each of the discursive devices and links are like mycelia in a growing fungus of evil that encourages us not “think from the standpoint of somebody else” (Arendt, 1963: 49), that concomitantly normalise a problematic subjectivity of the threatening migrant, a barbarian at the gates that needs to be excluded from the Swedish future.

Abstract

In the current context of a globalized economy, bilingualism is increasingly portrayed as a resource for corporations and for workers competing for jobs in today’s slim market. In this paper we analyze the economic value of languages other than English in the US, Spanish in particular. Working from a political economy perspective and drawing from current theoretical approaches to language and labor under neoliberalism, we examine the reproduction of the discursive trope of language profit in the corporate world and educational spaces, and then analyze the narratives and trajectories of young Latinx workers in New York. The marginalized position of Latinxs in the social structure and the racialization of their linguistic practices result in a linguistic exploitation that remains unchallenged in the US. We conclude that today’s celebrations of bilingualism, which follow a capitalist logic, perpetuate a hierarchy of languages and speakers that is detrimental to racialized minorities.

Abstract

This article explores metalinguistic discourses of black African immigrants (BAIs) in Johannesburg on how they mobilize multilingual and multimodal resources in their communicative practices to pass as South Africans (SAs), concealing their identities as non-SAs to avert violent xenophobic attacks. Drawing data from semi-structured interviews and group discussions with BAIs, the article investigates how BAIs report on creatively, strategically using translanguaging and multimodality in performance of ingroup membership as local black SAs, blurring the boundaries between “outsiders” and “insiders.” BAIs use passing as a social identity management strategy, to negotiate their putative identity and resist ascription of the foreigner-outsider categorization and attendant social meanings. Besides language(s), BAIs use modes of corporeal practice (embodiment, clothing semiosis, skin-bleaching) as legitimating markers of belonging. The article argues that using passing unsettles the distinction between local/insider/citizen and migrant/outsider/non-citizen – concepts framed around a nation-state – revealing tensions, contradictions, and complexities in the politics of identity in Johannesburg.

This article reviews Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation and Cultural Activism