Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices (Encounters): 7 - Softcover

Karel Arnaut

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783096780 ISBN 13: 9781783096787

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2016

Synopsis

This book is the fruition of five years' work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.

About this title

About the Author

Karel Arnaut is Associate Professor and Research Coordinator at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC), Leuven University, Belgium. Martha Sif Karrebaek is Associate Professor in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Massimiliano Spotti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Deputy Director of Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Jan Blommaert is Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Director of Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Engaging Superdiversity

Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices

By Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebęk, Massimiliano Spotti, Jan Blommaert

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2017 Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebęk, Massimiliano Potti, Jan Blommaert and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-678-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Contributors, 
Introduction, 
1 Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebęk and Massimiliano Spotti, 
2 Superdiverse Times and Places: Media, Mobility, Conjunctures and Structures of Feeling Piia Varis, 
3 Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society Jan Blommaert, 
Classrooms and Schools, 
4 'Taking up Speech' in an Endangered Language: Bilingual Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom Robert Moore, 
5 Rye Bread for Lunch, Lasagne for Breakfast: Enregisterment, Classrooms and National Food Norms in Superdiversity Martha Sif Karrebęk, 
Youth Contact Zones, 
6 'You Black Black': Polycentric Norms for the Use of Terms Associated with Ethnicity Janus Spindler Mųller, 
7 Social Status Relations and Enregisterment: Integrated Speech in Copenhagen Lian Malai Madsen, 
8 Languaging and Normativity on Facebook Andreas Stęhr, 
Mercantile Spaces, 
9 Magic Marketing: Performing Grassroots Literacy Cécile Vigouroux, 
10 Superdiversity and a London Multilingual Call Centre Johanna Woydack, 
Nation-states, 
11 Superdiversity From Within: The Case of Ethnicity in Indonesia Zane Goebel, 
12 'Designer Immigrant' Students in Singapore: Challenges for Linguistic Human Rights in a Globalising World Lu Jiqun Luke, 
13 Citizenship, Securitization and Suspicion in UK ESOL Policy Kamran Khan, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces

Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebęk and Massimiliano Spotti

This book bears the fruit of a group of sociolinguists who, over the last five years, have been exploring the notion of superdiversity. This introduction aims to report and reflect on these engagements, as well as to explore how the latter can trigger future engagements also from other social and human sciences. We argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. In order for this to happen, sociolinguistic superdiversity needs to be properly conceptualized. We argue that engaging the notions of 'poiesis' and 'infrastructure', recombined in the 'poiesis-infrastructures nexus' could constitute a first step in this process of exposing the sociolinguistically-enriched notion of superdiversity. The poiesis-infrastructures nexus is an attempt to rebuild the agency-structure equation by embedding it in a materialist ontology of creative production and the environments in which they take place. The poiesis side of the equation covers social and cultural praxis, iterations and transformations. Infrastructures comprise the normativities, ecologies and affordances that enable and constraint this social and cultural production.

The vantage point is a short, informal note on superdiversity by the late Gerd Baumann (personal communication, spring 2012). Writing when 'super-diversity' – hyphenated at that time – was beginning to boom, Baumann hailed its heuristic prospects and ethnographic challenges while rejecting its usefulness as a summary term. This introduction will largely take the same stance, happily building further on the hasty notes that bear witness to Baumann's tempestuous acumen. His nascent ideas undergird our introduction of the different chapters in this volume whose authors took on the task of engaging the notion of superdiversity during the same booming period (2011 to 2014) when Baumann was jotting down his views.

Looking back on the time when Vertovec (2005) coined the term superdiversity, it is evident that the latter hinged on a flourishing post-1989 anthropology of transnationalism that was trying to break free from its sedentarism and methodological nationalism (Malkki, 1992; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) and searching out the contours of an anthropology that explored simultaneity and heterogeneity among and within migrating groups (Grillo, 2001; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Portes et al., 1999; Werbner, 2002) in an increasingly interconnected world (Das & Poole, 2004; Ferguson & Gupta, 2002). Despite its potential pertinence and timeliness, it was not until 2010 that superdiversity began to show up regularly in the academic literature – including in the writings of those who were about to form the working group now known as the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (InCoLaS) (Arnaut, 2011; Blommaert, 2010: 6; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Jųrgensen et al., 2016; Rampton, 2010).

The initial intellectual dynamic of InCoLaS largely revolved around the 'Language and Superdiversity'manifesto co-authored by Blommaert and Rampton (2011, also 2016). This position paper was a major achievement. Apart from explaining superdiversity to sociolinguists and indicating how to 'apply' it to the benefit of sociolinguistic analysis, it demonstrated how a range of both established and more innovative notions and tools from contemporary sociolinguistics, (linguistic) anthropology and sociology were generating data and insights amounting to an emergent 'superdiversity of language' research programme capable of 'seeing', describing and analysing how people are shaping their lives within ever more pervasive interconnectivity and newly emerging forms of commonality. In hindsight, Blommaert and Rampton's position paper heralded the 'voyage in' of superdiversity into large sections of sociolinguistics. In these introductory notes, we re-visit the notion by tracing its past journey while trying to prepare its future itinerary by making suggestions for its partial reconceptualising. The main concern here is to organise superdiversity's 'voyage out' from sociolinguistics to the human and social sciences. So far, the sociolinguistics of superdiversity are leaving only minimal traces in the anthropological or sociological superdiversity literature; see, e.g. the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies38 (4); Stringer (2014), Phillips and Webber (2014) and Aspinall (2012) are other examples. The issue may well be one of translating insights and findings. 'Poiesis' in combination with 'infrastructure', we argue, may act as intermediary or bridging concepts because they grasp the current academic imagination in matters of diversity and mobility.

Whether they were presented as work-in-progress papers during InCoLaS meetings several years ago or added more recently, each in their own way, the chapters in this volume can be seen as constituting moments in superdiversity's 'voyage in'. Over a period of five years (and counting), small-scale InCoLaS meetings were hosted by the consortium's main institutional members: the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen (2011, 2012), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2011, 2013), the Babylon Centre (since 2013: Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity) in Tilburg (2012, 2014, 2015), and the Centre for Language Discourse & Communication at King's College in London (2012, 2015). The papers presented and sometimes specifically written for these meetings, do what Blommaert and Rampton did in 2011: bring their sociolinguistic case studies to bear on superdiversity. This may seem an odd reversal of the standard way in which concepts are said to fuel, frame or inspire analysis, but that is not what happened in these presentations. Instead, researchers presented their work and explored ways in which their findings and insights could enrich, substantiate or otherwise challenge superdiversity. This process of alignment is referred to in the title as 'engaging superdiversity'.

The question now is: how can we understand the outcome of these engagements? We believe that the chapters in this volume demonstrate that superdiversity, as a notion, fared well, and has been empirically enriched and conceptually strengthened. This introduction tries to extend the initial success beyond the disciplinary borders of sociolinguistics by subsuming the chapters' findings and insights in terms that increasingly appeal to scholars of diversity and inequality in globalization. In brief, this introduction is a proleptic gesture towards the other social and human sciences in order to engage with the sociolinguistics of superdiversity. The starting point of this desired dialogue is an anthropologist's unprompted statement skilfully eliciting the entangled processes of multiscalar creation and emergent normativity which has inspired much of the sociolinguists of globalization (see, e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Jacquemet, 2005; Jųrgensen, 2010; Pennycook, 2010).

Another 'Superdiversity' is Possible

In the informal note on superdiversity mentioned above, Gerd Baumann rejects its use as a summary term. Instead, he suggests that it can serve as a lens which allows us to discern and conceptualise social cultural processes. Both stances are worth exploring further.

Baumann's argument against unequivocally associating superdiversity with the alleged diversity boom of the 1990s is mainly historical, conjecturing that 'the vast array of migrations in the 1950s were, for the standards of the time, super-diverse: multi-regional, multi-class, multi-caste, multi-generational, multi-legal to -illicit to -illegal, multi-everything' (Baumann s.d.; italics ours). More recently, De Bock (2014) made a similar historical observation concerning the Belgian city of Ghent. Arguing that superdiversity deserves to be dissociated from the post-1989 era and to be looked for in other times and places, she is led to explore the erstwhile neglected heterogeneity of the labour migrations of the 1960s and 1970s into Ghent. De Bock, like Baumann, stresses the fact that 'diversity' both in 'quantity' and in its different facets needs to be considered within its local and historical context. That, we now realise, was a point Vertovec (2006) largely missed out on. For instance, when pointing out that migrants' diverse legal status had to be taken into account, it is absolutely crucial to realise that such 'differentiation of diversity' was not due to the changing 'nature' of the migrant cohorts as such. The multiplication of legal statuses is better understood as a Foucauldian 'instrument-effect' of the biopolitical regulation of post-Cold War immigration flows across and into Europe – through diversification if not, through 'abjectification' (Lazaridis, 2015; see also: De Genova, 2013).

This brings us to another but related point about superdiversity as a summary term, namely that categorisations of diversity in whichever form can never constitute a neutral/objective grid for counting differences or for measuring the magnitudes of divergences. Rather, diversity categories are 'local' and historical, and thus ideological and political ways for marking and controlling distinction, inequality and deviation. In line with these observations, contemporary sociolinguists have been arguing convincingly that the same goes for 'languages' which cannot, and never should have been, seen as bounded 'objects' which can be counted (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Precisely because the established categories of language diversity need to be seen as 'second-order cultural and ideological constructs', Deumert (2014: 117) claims that using superdiversity in adjectival form in order to qualify or, worse even, quantify the degree of (language) diversity of neighbourhoods or cities, migrant cohorts or communicative situations, is a 'theoretical cul-de sac' (2014: 118).

Rather than legitimizing such diversity positivism, superdiversity can serve as a heuristic tool ('a lens') or a working hypothesis ('a perspective') impelling and guiding us to better understand the global condition of interconnectivity which recently Jacquemet (2015: 73) evoked so eloquently:

The world is now full of settings where deterritorialized speakers use a mixture of languages in interacting with family, friends, and co-workers; read English and other 'global' languages on their computer screens; watch local, regional, or global broadcasts; and access popular culture in a variety of languages. Such settings will become ever more widespread in the future and superdiversity will become the standard modality.

Baumann's second point in his short note deals with two dimensions of superdiversity that contemporary sociolinguistics and anthropology have deep affinities with: practices and normativities on the one hand, and identification and group formation on the other hand. Concerning the latter, Baumann suggests we pay attention to the formation of two types of communities: super- and meta-communities.

(a) Super-communities, for Baumann, are relatively large-scale recombinations ('coagulations') of smaller-scale communities with which people identify in ways they did not or did less before. Well-established super-communities are Asian-Americans or 'Latino' in the United States and the emergent category of 'Balkanites' among people from the region between the Black and the Adrian sea living in Western Europe (Buchanan, 2007). Such super-communities resemble rather traditional forms of albeit newly globalised speech communities which accommodate otherwise very diverse national, religious, etc. constituencies (see e.g. Silverstein, 2013).

(b) More challenging are Baumann's 'meta-communities' which are being shaped through new cultural, religious or linguistic forms. Referring to Guadeloupe (2008), Baumann characterises the superdiversity of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten as 'coagulating', this time, 'around a new, but integrated combination of DJs as the pivots of civil society, pop music as integrating but culturally multi-inscribed putty, and religious re-landscaping'. From the looks of it, such meta- constellations resemble Alim's 'transnational style communities' (2009) or Blommaert's 'supergroups' (2011).

Finally, potentially more important but (sadly forever) under-theorized is Baumann's ultimate turn to practices that are co-constituted by the reinforced interconnectivity and producing the new-fangled 'super-' and 'meta-' socialities. These practices he calls, without any further explanation, 'polymorphic action sets' which further along the road of routinization morph into action networks and action structures. Arguably, sociolinguists have been reaching out to such 'polymorphic action sets' when putting forward '(poly)languaging' (Jųrgensen et al., 2016), heteroglossia (Blackledge & Creese, 2014; Leppänen et al., 2009) and concomitant sedimentation processes such as enregisterment (Agha, 2005), and the ever-changing almost evanescent 'products' of these in the form of 'repertoires' (Blommaert & Backus, 2013) or 'contemporary urban vernaculars' (Rampton, 2011), just to name these.

Following Baumann's preliminary thoughts on superdiversity as a perspective helps us to realise that, if superdiversity is meant to become 'a theoretical perspective on language and social life' (and see: Arnaut & Spotti, 2015; Deumert, 2014: 118; Karrebęk et al., 2016), it may require handling at least three things: (a) the further conceptualisation of superdiversity as 'super-connectivity', doubling our ethnographic interest in (b) the production of new or emerging cultural (religious, communicative, semiotic, social, ...) forms and practices and (c) the formation of new socialities which add to people's potential for subjectification. Let us look into each of these three and consider how the chapters in this volume engage with them.

Envisaging Convergences

In retrospect, superdiversity (Vertovec, 2006) could be taken as one of a range of new, post-1990 terms dealing with entanglements or convergences of people, the amassing of material and 'immaterial' resources, the heterogeneity of interactions and the multiplicity of representations about the processes and objects of convergence, if not about the convergence itself. Among the latter, multiculturalism and multilingualism were perhaps the most popular at some stage, besides a set of terms envisaging homogenisation or fuzzy processes of creolisation and hybridization, following 'earlier' notions such as syncretism.

A relatively new set of concepts could be said to have tried to 'overcome some of the limitations of current social science discourse on globalization and arrive at a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social and cultural change under conditions of worldwide interconnectedness' (Wimmer, 2001: 410). One of the terms capturing this better than others is Latour's compositionism, allowing for the processes in which ' ... things have to be put together [...] while retaining their heterogeneity' (Latour, 2010: 473–474). While compositionism and actor-network theory in general have remained largely outside the conceptual ambit of superdiversity, three other 'metaphors of convergence' have entered it profusely, namely conviviality (Gilroy, 2006; Heil, 2012; Padilla et al., 2014; Williams & Stroud, 2013), intersectionality (Berg & Sigona, 2013; Boccagni, 2014; Yuval-Davis, 2006), and to some extent also cosmopolitanism(s) – Wessendorf (2010: 17) coins the term 'corner-shop cosmopolitanism' to indicate 'the localised and everyday nature of intercultural skills' and 'the existence of a certain openness towards people perceived as "different"'.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783096780
• ISBN 13: 9781783096787
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebaek, Massimiliano Spotti, Jan Blommaert