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/
2
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
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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).
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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.