Translinguistics

Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness

Jerry Lee, Sender Dovchin, Jerry Won Lee, Sender Dovchin, Jerry Lee, Jerry Won Lee, Sender Dovchin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138326330
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429832109
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translinguistics represents a powerful alternative to conventional paradigms of language such as bilingualism and code-switching, which assume the compartmentalization of different 'languages' into fixed and arbitrary boundaries. Translinguistics more accurately reflects the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities.

This ground-breaking volume showcases work from leading as well as emerging scholars in sociolinguistics and other language-oriented disciplines and collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between 'innovation' and 'ordinariness' in translinguistics. Features of this book include:

• 18 chapters from 28 scholars, representing a range of academic disciplines and institutions from 11 countries around the world;
• research on understudied communities and geographic contexts, including those of Latin America, South Asia, and Central Asia;
• several chapters devoted to the diversity of communication in digital contexts.

Edited by two of the most innovative scholars in the field, Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the question of multilingualism across a variety of subject areas.

PART I
Translinguistics, space, and time

1

THE MUNDANITY OF METROLINGUAL PRACTICES

Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji

Introduction

This chapter addresses two particular aspects of spatiotemporal entanglements: everydayness and simultaneity. This is in part a response to the challenge posed by the editors of this volume to readdress questions of ordinariness and diversity. This is also a response to Kramsch’s (2018) warning that the contemporary focus on space that has emerged in translingual metaphors and ideas such as spatial repertoires (Canagarajah, 2018; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2014, 2015a) runs the danger of omitting time, history, and subjectivity from our understanding: ‘in any trans-perspective on language theories and practices, a post-structuralist focus on Space must be supplemented by a post-modern concern with Time’ (Kramsch, 2018, p. 114). It is to bring time and space—everydayness and worldliness—together and to show how time and space are entangled in everyday simultaneous activities that we have here adopted the term mundane metrolingualism, drawing, on the one hand, on our prior work on metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015a) and, on the other, a focus on ordinariness. Alongside its slightly negative implications—not just ordinary but also tedious, prosaic, and repetitive—the term mundane carries (via its historical connections to contemporary le monde) a sense of worldliness, or terrestrial and material relations. It is these two senses that we wish to convey here: the quotidian and the worldly. Worldliness itself has been used (Pennycook, 1994; Said, 1983) to steer a path between notions of language as an idealized abstract system disconnected from its surroundings, and a materialist view of language that reduces it to circumstantial determinations. For us the challenge was how to describe everyday urban multilingualism as part of the fabric of ordinary lives in the city.

A focus on the ‘ordinariness of diversity’ derives from Higgins¹ and Coen’s (2000) argument that what humans have in common are differences: ‘diversity is the given reality of human social action’ (p. 15). From ‘the drag queens, who sought tolerance for their lifestyles’ to the discapacitados (disabled) ‘who were seeking new opportunities’, their ‘expressions of agency and transgression were geared to the very specific details of their everyday lives … They wanted people to know how ordinary they were, at least in their own context’ (Higgins & Coen, 2000, p. 18). Wessendorf (2014) makes a related point in her study of Hackney, London, arguing that ‘visible differences along ethnic, racial and religious lines do not matter in the daily doings of a super-diverse neighbourhood’ and ‘these differences have become commonplace’ (p. 173). By proposing notions such as corner-shop cosmopolitanism, banal cosmopolitanism, pragmatic-being-together, or unpanicked multiculturalism, Noble (2009) similarly draws attention to the ordinariness of diversity in everyday life.

The notion of the ordinariness of diversity, therefore, is important from several standpoints: it is a political statement that insists that in order for there to be a ‘world in which the ordinariness of diversity is the “normative” reality, the vast inequalities in the material wealth’ of the world must be challenged and changed (Higgins & Coen, 2000, p. 276). Ethnographic praxis, from this point of view, is about understanding how difference is lived in particular contexts, and how that difference can be changed from marginalized practice only by addressing broader forms of social and economic inequality. It is also an epistemological statement aimed at the narrow and normative understandings of life on which much of the social sciences have been based: the ways in which linguistic diversity has been understood, for example, has been premised on assumptions of normative homogeneity derived from particular class, educational, and ethnic backgrounds. It is also a statement about human experience: difference—social, cultural, sexual, economic, racial—rather than commonality is the core experience of human life; diversity is not exotic or something that others have, but key to all experience.

The political and the epistemological come together in many related ways of considering the ordinariness of diversity. The cluster of terms that have been variously used to address these concerns—everyday, unremarkable, mundane, grassroots, from below—all seek to raise similar questions, though from slightly different perspectives. An emphasis on the everyday, as Semi et al. (2009) note, directs attention toward ‘the situated character of social relations and practices’ as a ‘set of ordinary, banal, constitutive, incorporated practices’ (p. 69). The idea of practices invokes repeated social and linguistic activities (Pennycook, 2010) as well as the ways in which social activity is organized and embodied (Bourdieu, 1977). As de Certeau (1984) argued in The practice of everyday life, ‘everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things’ should no longer ‘appear as merely the obscure background of social activity’ but rather should be seen as a key to understanding social and cultural relations (p. xi). This is not, he insists, a return to the individual, but a focus on how everyday practices such as walking, talking, reading, writing, dwelling, or cooking are organized. Similarly, Schatzki (2002) points to the key understanding that social life is ‘plied by a range of such practices as negotiation practices, political practices, cooking practices, banking practices, recreation practices, religious practices, and educational practices’ (p. 70). For Wise and Velayutham (2009), everyday multiculturalism is understood as ‘a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter’ (p. 3).

A focus on the everyday is by no means, therefore, a celebration of everydayness; any critical project—and this is evidently part of Bourdieu’s focus on habitus—also involves a critical analysis of the ways in which social structure is not just an abstract structuring of inequality but a lived and embodied experience of social difference. Everyday diversity is not only, therefore, concerned with temporal dimensions as part of repeated everyday practice but also with the non-elite world of struggle for recognition. The notion ‘from below’, for example, has been used in various domains, including linguistic landscapes (Coupland, 2010) to distinguish between official, state-sanctioned signage (from above) and signs put up by ordinary people (from below). Although the above/below distinction is a considerably simplified approach to social order, it draws attention to everyday or ordinary linguistic practices that are often different from, if not overtly in opposition to, state-sanctioned language policies. This framing has also been used to distinguish between ‘English from above’—‘the promotion of English by the hegemonic culture for purposes of “international communication”’—and ‘English from below’—‘the informal—active or passive—use of English as an expression of subcultural identity and style’ (Preisler, 1999, p. 259). The distinction further occurs in work that attempts to capture the difference between the dominant and homogenizing forces of globalization ‘from above’ and globalization ‘from below’, which is ‘structured by flows of people, goods, information, and capital among different production centres and marketplaces which, in turn, are the nodes of the non-hegemonic world-system’ (Ribeiro, 2012, p. 223).

This focus is echoed in work on grassroots language and literacy. Khubchandani (1983) draws our attention to the distinction between officially regulated and described modes of plurilingualism (mandatory bilingualism) as they occur in educational and legislative frameworks and the ordinary plurilingualism of everyday language use (grassroots pluralism). Mohanty (2013) maintains this distinction between ‘grassroots multilingualism’—the use of ‘multiple languages in daily life transactions’ (p. 307)—and the language policies of Indian education. Blommaert’s (2008) grassroots literacy is similarly concerned with ‘writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language and literacy’ (p. 7). These terms all draw attention to everyday social practices compared to mandated, regulated, and standardized visions (Pennycook, 2016). This is about the material, the ordinary, and the tangible. It is also about the counter-hegemonic, about resistance, struggle for recognition, and opposition to dominant or normative indications of language.

All these terms—grassroots, from below, everyday, ordinary—draw attention to repeated social practices that are frequently not in accordance with, and often in opposition to, the sanctioned, top-down, hegemonic world of normative action and beliefs. Drawing on prior work (Pennycook, 2007) that developed the notion of worldliness in relation to Mignolo’s (2000) understanding of mundialización/mondialisation (as opposed to globalización/globalisation) as ‘local histories in which global histories are enacted or where they have to be adapted, adopted, transformed, and rearticulated’ (p. 278), we here take up the notion of mundanity to emphasize local contexts of everyday diversity. This is akin to Santos’ (2018) understanding of ‘bottom-up subaltern cosmopolitanism’ with its focus on decolonization and ‘intercultural translation’ (p. 8). Our own interests in the everyday entanglements of language, people, place, and objects have, thus, brought us to the notion of mundane metrolingualism as a way of dealing with the ordinary assemblages of people, objects, and linguistic resources in a Bangladeshi-owned corner store in Tokyo.

Comings and goings in Isuramu Yokochō

The Bangladeshi-owned corner shop we focus on in this chapter is located in Isuramu Yokochō (Islamic alley) in Hyakunin-chō in Shinjuku (Tokyo). As we have argued elsewhere (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017), Bangladeshi-run stores in different parts of the world may contain similar goods, from imported riverine fish, spice, and rice to locally grown (and slightly different) vegetables (onions and bitter melon), as well as items such as phone and SIM cards. Yet, when these objects encounter the variable affordances of these different shops, they enter into new and momentary sets of relationships that we call semiotic assemblages (Pennycook, 2017; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017). The notion of assemblages as ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 23) allows for an understanding of how different trajectories of people, semiotic resources, and objects meet at particular moments and places. To this understanding of the vibrancy of matter, the importance of things (goat meat, phone and SIM cards, Henna hair coloring products), and the significance of place as the geographical context for the entanglement of physical, social, and economic processes, we can then reintroduce our interest in the key question of ordinary diversity.

Varis (2017) challenges the idea of diversity based on a normative reaction to the unexpected and proposes making diversity a default position in order to ‘un-exoticise at least some of what is considered institutionally as “unusual”’ (p. 37). While at first glance the focus on an ‘unusual’ shop in Tokyo may appear to exoticize diversity, our interest by contrast is in the ordinariness of the available and sedimented human and non-human resources (linguistic, material, sensory, and other semiotic resources that make up the spatial repertoire) that have emerged from the repeated practices related to this particular place. Everydayness we therefore see in spatiotemporal terms formed by a ‘set of ordinary, banal, constitutive, incorporated practices’ (Semi et al., 2009, p. 69). For customers, halal matters, familiar foods such as plain paratha (flatbread) and shaki (cow stomach) matter, the price matters, and the location matters (especially being on the next block from the local mosque). These are crucial elements for their ordinary lives and activities. While such linguistic and multimodal landscapes, smellscapes (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015b) or activities occurring in the shop might generally be seen as foreign, unfamiliar, and exotic from certain Japanese or other viewpoints, they are not unusual from the viewpoint of diversity from below, from the everyday perspectives of the particip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: negotiating innovation and ordinariness
• PART I Translinguistics, space, and time
• PART II The in/visibility of translinguistics
• PART III Translinguistics for whom?
• Index