Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: These papers provide an embarrassment of riches for the commentator.The cases are described with a wealth of ethnographic and textual detail.The analyses rightly attend to phenomena at quite different scales: We learn about linguistic utterances and their immediate co-texts of talk, but there is also evidence about broader and broader contexts.The papers discuss the speech events in which talk occurs, the genres represented, the responses of listeners, the institutional sites at which the talk occurred, the ethnic categories invoked and the discursive field of other social categories within which the they gain their meanings, as well as the political economic positions of the speakers."Asian American" is never analyzed in isolation from contrasting identitylabels to which it is culturally opposed.Indeed, each of these three papers succeeds in describing a complex, regionally and institutionally specific configuration of ethnic, gender and occupational categories.The "relationality" and localism of ethnic categories is admirably demonstrated.Furthermore, Chun, Labrador and Shankar nicely complicate the usual sociolinguistic paradigm that assumes linguistic forms to be indexical of speakers' identities.Indexicality is fundamental, to be sure.But in the cases presented here, there is no simple relationship between the demographic category to which speakers might be taken to belong (e.g. in a census) and the forms of speech they deploy.Rather, cultural categories of identity and the linguistic forms that index them are seen to be performed, enacted, evoked, sometimes by speakers who claim them as their "own" and sometimes by others.Bakhtin called these the "stylizations" or "typifications" through which speakers regularly and necessarily "ventriloquate" their own social positions and that of others.Moreover, linguistic forms are differentially keyed or voiced as serious or ironic, parodic, or playful.The linguistic skills required vary a great deal.The authors imply that, depending on the linguistic ideologies in play, a single phonological feature can function to evoke the ethnolinguistic stereotype, or the evocation may require a combination of cues, or even some ability to reproduce and understand whole interactional scenes.Chun, Labrador and Shankar also take up the possible social consequences of enacting or voicing ethnolinguistic stereotypes in particular ways.This is a more complex notion of "performativity."It is not the same as simply performing an identity, but rather ritually creates -in somewhat the same way as the making of a promise does -some new social reality.So, one might ask, when does the use of stereotyped linguistic forms create solidarity?When does it homogenize or denigrate its objects?How might it hide racist attitudes beneath claims of multiculturalism?Rather than further reiterating the many fine arguments made by the papers, I would like to use my role as commentator to extend the conversation by considering
Author: Susan Gal
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2052870548