Polish shop(ping) as Translanguaging Space (original) (raw)
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The Translocal Street: Shop signs and local multi-culture along the Walworth Road, south London
City, Culture and Society, 2010
In this paper, we look at the different ways that visual signscapes along an inner London street produces particular types of translocal connections to different spaces and places that are physically distanciated yet symbolically proximate. We are particularly interested in examining these signscapes for the ways that they evoke particular connections between migrant entrepreneurs and a diverse clientele, between the colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, between the ordinary and the global city, and between everyday livelihoods and economic exchanges. We suggest that these signscapes are translocal since they evoke material and embodied links between the street and its neighbourhoods, while at the same time connecting the street to a wider spatial network of routes/roots which the migrant entrepreneurs have taken to establish their livelihoods on the street. Thus the Walworth Road, a place where a multiplicity of connections are made between different places through these signs, becomes the node or location of particular types of mobility and migration undertaken by migrants and their clients. It becomes a translocal street as it situates mobile actors and identities within the physical and social forms of economic exchange, shop front displays and signage. The local ‘multi-culture’ on this street is made and remade through these particular connections which are material, embodied, everyday and ordinary.► Expressions of ’situated mobilities’ are explored through the visual medium of communication; specifically the shop front displays on a south London street. ► Streets in local neighbourhoods can be understood not simply as bounded territories but sites where mobile identities are materialised and embodied. ► A production of a translocal visuality can be grounded in and therefor analysed through the subtle and complex ways that individuals actually make places and spaces in the city. Although this paper highlights translocal visuality, the diverse ways in which individuals and groups actually engage or disengage with one another, should necessarily complemented by ethnographic research.
“Because here we live in the Netherlands”: Languagecultural politics of belonging in a supermarket
This article unravels how people construct belonging to places through languagecultural practices (Cornips et al. 2012). The tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004) serve as analytical tools to explain how people justify their belonging through languagecultural ideologies while challenging other people’s belonging. Furthermore, the article scrutinises how nativeness and new speakerness (O’Rourke and Pujolar 2013) manifest themselves within daily practices. Rather than focusing on “old” and “new” speakers, this article perceives nativeness and new speakerness as constructs that can be given meaning by anyone. In this article, I analyse an interaction in a small supermarket that is illustrative of the construction of belonging to places and which in turn exemplifies the dynamicity of new speakerness.
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 ...
'Localness' has gained currency as a source of authenticity and distinction in the niche marketing of the globalised new economy. This has created opportunities for peripheral minority language sites to capitalise on their geographically and culturally peripheral location, and has lifted tourism and handicraft industries to key sites of socioeconomic development in these regions. Although 'localness' may seem like a ready source of economic gain in cultural production in such sites, it does not come without consequences for the cultural entrepreneurs. This paper explores what is at stake for cultural entrepreneurs in the promotion of localness as a source of authenticity. The study focuses on two ceramic artists working in two peripheral minority language contexts, Sámiland in northern Lapland, and the Dingle Peninsula in the West of Ireland. Drawing on a nexus analytical approach combining multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches, the study investigates how the two artists draw and struggle to draw on the idea of localness in their work, examines the practices and semiotic resources they utilise, and explores the conditions and consequences of these discursive and material investments. The examination draws attention to how authenticities are always political, and, although discursively produced, have very material consequences for the actors involved in their production. On a broader plane, the study provides insight into how discourse 'matters' (in both senses of the expression) in contemporary conditions, in which identity, culture and creativity have become major economic resources.