Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities



Yüklə 458,51 Kb.
Pdf görüntüsü
səhifə1/22
tarix21.06.2018
ölçüsü458,51 Kb.
#50860
  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   22


 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Paper   



 

 

Enoughness, accent and light communities: 



Essays on contemporary identities 

 

 



by 

 

 



 

Jan Blommaert

©

 & Piia Varis

©

 

(Tilburg University)

 

 



j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu 

p.k.varis@tilburguniversity.edu  

 

 

 



June 2015

 

This work is licensed under a  



Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.  

To view a copy of this license, visit

 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/



  


 



Table of contents 

 

Preface – p.3 



 

1. Enough is enough: the heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity – p.4 

 

2. Culture as accent – p.16 



 

3. How to ‘how to’? The prescriptive micropolitics of Hijabista – p.30 

 

4. Life projects and light communities – p.49 



 

5. Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes and new social 

structures – p.58 



 



Preface 

 

The five essays gathered in this collection were written between 2011 and 2014 



and circulated until now only as individual working papers. A much abbreviated 

and altered blend of chapters 2 and 3 appeared as Blommaert & Varis (2015); 

chapter 5 will be published in 2015 as part of a special issue (edited by both 

authors) on “the importance of unimportant language” in Multilingual Margins

The papers are presented here in chronological order and thus represent a joint 

quest for more accurate and realistic forms of analysis of what is commonly 

called identity – in turn something embedded in notions such as culture, group, 

community or society. This quest was prompted by frequent encounters in our 

research on online and offline aspects of superdiversity with forms of behavioral 

patterning suggesting a growing preference for “small” identities – identities 

grounded in patterned and carefully dosed details of behavior – and “light” 

groups – groups not tied together by the vast amount of backgrounds, shared 

space and cultural assumptions imagined since Durkheim as the real stuff of 

social life and structure. These encounters compelled us to devise a small 

descriptive vocabulary – “enoughness”, “microhegemonies”, (chapter 1), 

identities as “accent”, (chapter 2), “life projects” and “light communities” 

(chapter 4) – capable of capturing these phenomena and doing justice to their 

importance as identity processes worthy of independent examination, but seen 

as operating in conjunction with – as a set of layers on top of, so to speak –better 

known “big” identities. 

The individual working papers drew the attention of several scholars, and part of 

the vocabulary we designed is currently circulating in new scholarly work – 

which is gratifying. By bringing the separate papers together, however, we hope 

to achieve slightly more, showing our readers the coherence and gradual 

construction of a theoretical and analytical approach capable of accurately 

identifying and examining contemporary forms of identity processes, their 

complexities and impact. Our ongoing research, we hope, will soon add 

substance and detail to some of the more speculative statements presented here. 

Tilburg, June 2015 

Jan Blommaert & Piia Varis 

 

Reference and acknowledgment 

Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis (2015) Culture as accent: The cultural logic of 

Hijabistas. Semiotica 203: 153-177 

Most illustrations in this book are in the public domain, did not convey clear 

authorship and were gathered through simple Google Image searches. We use 

them here under the conditions of “fair use” (Article 107, US copyright law).




 



Chapter 1: 



Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in 

superdiversity 

 

Introduction 

This short paper intends to sketch an empirical theory of identity in a context of 

superdiversity.

1

 It adds to the development of new approaches to language and 



semiotics in superdiverse environments (Blommaert & Rampton 2011), and 

intends to offer a realistic, yet generalizable, approach to inquiries into the 

complexities of contemporary identity practices. Such practices now evolve in 

real-life as well as in virtual contexts, and connections between both social 

universes are of major importance for our understanding of what superdiverse 

society is about. 

These complexities are baffling, yet perhaps not entirely new; what is new is the 

awareness of such complexities among academic and lay observers. Late 

Modernity – the stage of Modernity in which the emergence of superdiversity is 

to be situated – has been described as an era of hybridized, fragmented and 

polymorph identities (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari 2001; Zizek 1994), often also 

subject to conscious practices of ‘styling’ (Rampton 1995; Bucholtz & Trechter 

2001; Coupland 2007). Prima facie evidence appears to confirm this: people do 

orient towards entirely different logics in different segments of life – one’s 

political views may not entirely correspond to stances taken in domains such as 

consumption, education or property.  So here is a first point to be made about 

contemporary identities: they are organized as a patchwork of different specific 

objects and directions of action. 



 

Micro-hegemonies 

It is perfectly acceptable these days to, for instance, have strong and outspoken 

preferences for a Green party and participate actively in electoral campaigns 

underscoring the importance of environmental issues and the value of 

sociocultural diversity, while also driving a diesel car and sending one’s children 

to a school with low numbers of immigrant learners. The robust hegemonies that 

appeared to characterize Modernity have been traded for a blending within one 

individual life-project of several micro-hegemonies valid in specific segments of 

life and behavior, and providing the ‘most logical’ solution (or the ‘truth’) within 

these segments. Thus, our Green party supporter can ‘logically’ drive a diesel car 

when s/he has a job that involves frequent and long journeys by car, since diesel 

                                                        

1

 This paper emerged in the context of the HERA project “



Investigating discourses of inheritance and 

identity in four multilingual European settings”

, and was first discussed during a meeting in 

Birmingham, May 2011. We are grateful to the participants of that meeting, and in particular to 

Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese, Jens-Normann Jörgensen, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Ben 

Rampton for stimulating reflections on that occasion.  




Yüklə 458,51 Kb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   22




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©www.genderi.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

    Ana səhifə