Dignity in diversity: Turbulent approaches to linguistic citzenship (original) (raw)
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Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking
The European Journal of Humour Research, 2021
This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that ...
Routledge Books, 2022
What performative strategies do stand-up comics engage in when inviting audiences to consider them as subjects whose race is coded differently when performing in different countries? How do these performative strategies assist comics in translating their comic material across borders, wherein exists the inevitable, fluctuating demarcations and delineations of racial construction? The stand-up comics I explore in this chapter: Tehran Von Ghasri, Trevor Noah, Gina Yashere, and Aamer Rahman, are all comics whose work constitutes critical race humor as a "form of public pedagogy…[providing] people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality" (Rossing 16). The defiance of "dominant practices and ideologies that promote the erasure of material realities of race," through comic performance, coupled with a transnational self-awareness on the part of the performer, is the current which flows underneath the work of the comics discussed here (Rossing 17). A transnational origin for these comics is not merely embodied as an intersection of their own identities, but additionally, a matter of how they adapt their performative strategies in response to their racial legibility when moving across national borders. To borrow from Mary Louise Pratt, I define this space as a comedy contact zone (1991); a place in which the colonizers and the colonized meet, and within which the performer, a "conquered subject [uses] the conqueror's language to construct a parodic, oppositional representation of the conqueror's own speech" (Pratt 35). What becomes evident from analysis of these comics' performances is the reliance on their ability to create multiple vocal qualities, manifesting a parody of whiteness for audiences and affecting the "conqueror's language." These comics, performing from the U.S., Kuwait, Israel, UK, to Germany, UAE, Australia, etc., utilize a global awareness of the ways in which color, ethnicity, class, and nationality integrate to produce various readings of their bodies; their performative strategies then capitalize on the voice as a key instrument, capable of challenging these raced views of their identity. Book: Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy Speaking Truth to Power Edited By Rashi Bhargava, Richa Chilana Copyright 2023 Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy explores the new forms, voices and venues of stand-up comedy in different parts of the world and its potential role as a counterhegemonic tool for satire, commentary and expression of identity especially for the disempowered or marginalised. The title brings together essays and perspectives on stand-up and satire from different cultural and political contexts across the world which raise pertinent issues regarding its role in contemporary times, especially with the increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form. It examines the theoretical understanding of the different aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand-up comedy, as well as the exploration of race, gender, politics and conflicts, urban culture and LGBTQ+ identities in countries such as Indonesia, Finland, France, Iran, Italy, Morocco, India and the USA. It also asks the question whether, along with contesting and destabilising existing discursive frameworks and identities, a stand-up comic can open up a space for envisaging a new social, cultural and political order? This book will appeal to people interested in performance studies, media, popular culture, digital culture, sociology, digital sociology and anthropology, and English literature. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Helsinki.
2020
The end of the apartheid era in South Africa inaugurated an increased mobility and accessibility to previously prohibited spaces. Although African migrant populations are still highly regulated in South Africa, their presence has also profoundly transformed the country’s present-day sociolinguistic and cultural landscape. The textual construction of the literary text in this study draws attention to the post-structuralist perspective which argues that languages are not closed entities but rather open systems utilised for expressive purposes in specific social contexts. Most significantly, recent sociolinguistic studies show that languages are no longer regarded as discrete systems in communication because they form expansive linguistic repertoires in contact spaces. Such an understanding of multilingual use facilitates communication across cultural, linguistic and national borders, thereby subverting exclusionary normative practices. The present article draws from translingual persp...
“It wasn’t like we were serious”: laughter in the mediated action of race talk
2013
Classrooms tend to be theorized as serious spaces (Lensmire, 2011), and in them, laughter represents an occasional break from learning or an off-task moment that disrupts it altogether (Hansen, 2012). While a growing number of studies have re-imagined critical literacy to include embodied reactions to texts, few have examined laughter in critical classrooms as possible embodied and critical engagement. This study takes up that challenge. Using the theory and method of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001a), this work draws attention to laughter as young people negotiated identities and texts in a critical classroom and explores, specifically, how three male students from different races engaged in what they called "racist joking" during a three-month collaboration on a documentary film about immigration. By focusing analysis on moment-to-moment interactions, MDA seeks to explain the mediational means (in this case, laughter) by which social actors carry out mediated actions (in this case, race talk) within sites of engagement (Scollon, 2001a). Mediated actions are also framed by a broader nexus of practice that includes the historical bodies of participants, interaction order, and discourses at work within a social space (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). In this way, MDA affords an analysis of moment-to-moment interactions embedded within larger timescales and histories as it seeks to understand the production and reproduction of social identities in interaction (Norris, 2011).
Everyday Encounters with Diversity
2016
Communicating Beyond Language offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires—resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about—not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass-media references we make—and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. The book also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the course of a lifetime, as well as how a repertoire perspective can lead to a rethinking of cultural diversity and human interaction, from categorizing people’s differences to understanding how our repertoires can expand and overlap with others’, thereby helping us to find common ground and communicate in increasingly multicultural schools, workplaces, markets, and social spheres. This b...
Language and Race Constructing the Self and Imagining the Other in the U.S. and Beyond
“No, no, no, no. You gotta listen to the way people talk! You don't say "affirmative", or some crap like that. You say "no problemo". […]. And if you want to shine them on it's "hasta la vista, baby". In this famous exchange from the 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2, the young hero of the film was teaching his cyborg friend (Arnold Schwarzenegger), how to speak like a “real person”. These famous lines epitomize what has become the rather common conversational practice of interspersing English with Spanish (or Spanish sounding words). In a similar fashion, the rising popularity of hip-hop culture contributed to spread among US urban youth linguistic practices that were once considered to be a prerogative of the African American Speech Community. Standard American English has gradually incorporated lexical items and expressions traditionally belonging to linguistic minorities. But what is the semiotic and cultural logic underlying these habits? What are the implications of these conversational practices for the reproduction of certain cultural representations of historically Spanish-speaking populations in the US? How does the appropriation of African American Vernacular English by white upper middle class American teenagers participate in the production of certain forms of youth identities? How can we interpret these forms of cultural mimicry and appropriation? How does language operate as an index of distance, solidarity, and power among social groups? How do social actors use language to craft racialized representations of individual and collective “selves” in colonial and post-colonial contexts? This course explores the varied and sometimes surprising interconnections between language and race. The aim will be to show how language is a primary locus for the production of stereotypes, the performance of identity, the presentation of the self, and the reproduction (or the challenge) of social inequalities. We will scrutinize the role of linguistic ideologies in the colonial encounter, explore the interplay between language and the construction of hegemonic power, and examine the connection between communicative practices and the reproduction of racial discourse and racial stereotypes. This course explores the interplay of language and race in the communicative practices of social actors. Race and racism will not be investigated as dimensions of the individual’s moral consciousness. Indeed, rather than focusing on people’s minds and intentions, we will concentrate on what people do when they interact with one another. Moving away from the idea that racism is a phenomenon of the past or a prerogative of conservatives and uneducated others, this course constitutes a reading (and hopefully an experiential) journey through the interplay between language and race. This course will not offer a history of the evolution and transformation of racist discourse in the United States. It will not provide a thorough overview of the controversy over biological and cultural ideas of race. It does not aim at charting out the sociology of racial groups in America, nor does it plan on investigating quantitative data about the interplay among race, class, and social inequality in institutional settings.
Multilingualism as utopia Fashioning non-racial selves
The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguistically to offer a space for interrupting colonial relationships. Furthermore, we argue that multilingualism should be approached as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out.
Loudness registers: Normalizing cosmopolitan identities in a narrative of ethnic othering
Journal of Sociolinguistics , 2020
An analysis of one narrative shows how loudness of voice acquires indexical meaning in interaction and becomes a resource for the narrator to position himself along an axis of social differentiation defined in terms of morality. The narrative was collected among young, male, migrant hip hop artists in Delhi who experienced ethnic othering. In the narrative, loudness registers are used to establish voice contrasts between two antagonistic characters: the racist people of Delhi and the cosmopolitan hip hop self. The racist people speak in soft (piano) and loud (forte) registers, while the cosmopolitan self speaks in normal‐volume registers. The prosodic normalization of the self allows the narrator to differentiate himself from racist others, take moral stances on global solidarity, and construct his cosmopolitan identity.
Multilingualism in Transformative Spaces: Contact and Conviviality
2013. Language Policy, Vol. 12. No. 4. pp. 289 to 311
South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing aspirations of mobility, is part of people’s daily experience that often takes place on the margins of conventional politics. A politics of conviviality is one such form of politics of the popular that emerges in contexts of rapid change, diversity, mobility, and the negotiation and mediation of complex affiliations and attachments. The questions in focus for this paper thus pertain to how forms of talk, born out of displacement, anomie and contact in the superdiverse contexts of South Africa, allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical faultlines of social and racial oppression. We first expand upon the idea of (marginal) linguistic practices as powerful mediations of political voice and agency, an idea that can ...