- Email: [email protected]
Discursive struggles over migration
Language & Communication xxx (2017) 1–3
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Discursive struggles over migration
While talk about migration has often been contentious, in the United States as elsewhere, this topic has recently become even more salient in everyday discourse. This intensified after President Trump issued a global ban against migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries in January 2017, a ban that triggered protests across the globe and sparked public discussion of issues that have generally been tacit and even tabooed (Fleming and Lempert, 2011; Hill, 1995, 2008). Given recent political developments in Europe and in the United States, struggles over migration have become more visible not only in policy but also in everyday discourse. Our Special Issue, “Discursive Struggles over Migration,” explores everyday talk about migration, showing how discursive practices position migrants and longstanding residents in complex ways. Our contributors propose new approaches to analyzing talk about migration. All of the articles take more processual, heterogeneous and by-degrees approaches to analyzing face-to-face encounters (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham; Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes; Perrino) and online discursive practices (De Fina). They explore how boundaries are created and dissolved, using both a stance-taking (Perrino) and a scalar approach in which temporal and spatial scales are key analytical tools (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham). The articles address the theoretical and methodological challenges that linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists face when they analyze discursive struggles over migration. Before describing each contribution, we first offer an overview of the main theories and analytical tools used across the articles. A commentary by Susan Gal concludes the volume and draws together these themes. In recent years, many linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have explored the discursive production of inclusion and exclusion in everyday lives. They have attended to explicit and implicit processes of boundary making and unmaking, emphasizing boundaries’ fluidity more than their rigidity. This work suggests that classic dichotomies such as outsider/insider, exclusion/inclusion and public/privatedwhich have long preoccupied social scientistsdare no longer useful analytical tools. It has become clear that outsiderness and insiderness are not dichotomous, but are instead heterogeneous and blurred, with porous boundaries (Dick and Arnold; De Fina; Nichols and Wortham; Perrino). States of in-betweenness (Dick and Arnold; Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes) are more common than rigid categorizations. Someone who is considered an “outsider” can also be partly an “insider,” depending on the configuration of resources that participants mobilize in a particular speech event. When applied to migratory processes and to the discursive practices associated with migration, these new analytical tools can unveil subtle, sometimes disconcerting dynamics in which migrants are positioned in various ways and in which racialized language might emerge more or less tacitly (Nichols and Wortham; Perrino). The articles address questions such as: How do social actors discursively position self and others as different kinds of participants in events where racialized remarks about migrants are made (Nichols and Wortham; Perrino)? How do these positionings change over the course of an interaction and how are they discursively negotiated by social actors who seek to overcome them (Dick and Arnold; De Fina; Nichols and Wortham; Perrino)? These and similar questions have occupied scholars working on issues related to language and migration, and the challenge for analysts has been to develop better analytical tools to study exclusionary and inclusionary processes as they actually occur in everyday discursive practices. A more processual perspective to studying these issues is essential for understanding the discursive dynamics that otherwise would remain “covert” (Hill, 2008). The articles make important contributions in this direction. Over the past decade, linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic research has convincingly demonstrated that analyses of everyday discursive practices must take into account both the “denotational text,” the content of what is being said, and the “interactional text,” the ongoing social action among speech participants (Silverstein, 1998; Wortham, 2000, 2001). Only through such analyses can we appreciate the emergence and complexity of participation frameworks and discursive action. Participant roles in interactional texts are not routinely stable, but are instead often dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. This research thus requires an approach that departs both from classic notions of speech communities (Gumperz, 1968) and from
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.03.002 0271-5309/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002
2
Editorial / Language & Communication xxx (2017) 1–3
sociological principles in which migrants are imagined as part of generalizable and undifferentiated groupings. The articles in this issue take such an approach in exploring the complex, shifting positions taken in discourse about migration. This Special Issue is also inspired by Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, in which social identification is seen as a product of heterogeneous networks of resources that come together in contingent configurations (Nichols and Wortham). From a Latourian perspective, researchers can follow social actors and objects across temporal and spatial scales (Blommaert, 2007; Carr and Lempert, 2016b), as some of the articles in this Special Issue demonstrate (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham). From this perspective, heterogeneity, states of in-betweenness, and porous boundaries are more suitable analytical tools for studying discursive practices about migration. Some of the authors explore their case studies through a scalar approach, instead of the more familiar and restrictive micro- vs. macro-framework. As some of the articles demonstrate (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham), scalar distinctions are not ideologically neutral (Carr and Lempert, 2016a), especially given the complex and shifting politics of migration. In their research in Beijing, for example, Dong and Blommaert emphasize the significance of scaling processes in migration studies by arguing that “[t] heories of spatial analysis, identity construction, scaling processes and centre-periphery models play key roles in understanding how migrants organize their linguistic repertoires” (Dong and Blommaert, 2009: 45; see also Blommaert, 2015). This recent research makes salient the various ways in which speakers navigate spatial and temporal scales as they participate in everyday discursive practicesdsuch as narratives about “imagined town trajectories” in a heterogeneous community in the United States (Nichols and Wortham) and the co-construction of “close distance” as it emerges in interactions involving Mexican and Salvadorian migrants (Dick and Arnold). The articles in this Special Issue adopt the following advances as they analyze discursive struggles about migration: 1) adopting a more processual, heterogeneous, and by-degrees perspective on positioning about migration in both face-to-face and online discursive practices; 2) tracing how speakers’ stances change across spatial and temporal scales; and 3) using innovative methodological and analytical tools to investigate discursive practices around migration as they emerge in particular contexts. We now turn to a brief overview of each article and show how these themes appear in each. Nichols and Wortham adopt a scalar approach, using the concept of spatialization (De Fina, 2009) to explore stories that circulate in an American town that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past two decades. Many residents tell stories about community renewal after the arrival of Mexican migrants, about how the immigrants have revitalized the town. At the same time, however, Black residents tell stories about “Black flight” in response to a sense of community disintegration that accompanied the growth of the Mexican community. The authors explore how Marshall residents draw on resources from across spatial and temporal scales (Blommaert, 2007; Carr and Lempert, 2016b) to narrate “imagined town trajectories.” Using Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, Nichols and Wortham explore social identification and “othering” as processes that draw on heterogeneous resources from various scales. The authors explore how various social actors represent past, present, and future spaces, and how their accounts vary when told by members of different ethnic groups and different generations. By exploring these narratives and the various alignments and evaluations communicated by their narrators, the authors are able to describe unfamiliar “othering” processes that more often remain “covert.” Nichols and Wortham demonstrate that “othering” is not a unidirectional process, but is instead heterogeneous, multifaceted, and multidirectional. Through an analysis of interactions between Mexican and Salvadoran migrants and the researcher, Dick and Arnold examine discursive practices about migration as a window on how social actors align with notions of “North” and “South.” Drawing on Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of “fractal recursivity,” the authors develop a theoretical framework that allows for states of inbetweenness in which outsiderness and insiderness become hybrid. Using a spatial and temporal scalar approach, Dick and Arnold describe cases of what they call “close distance” to show how North/South frameworks, and thus proximal and distant domains, can produce both difference and resemblance. Such cases of “close distance” yield nuanced, by degree forms of inclusion and exclusion across spatial and temporal scales (Carr and Lempert, 2016b). This discursive pattern emerges in both their sets of data: Interviews between Mexican migrants and the researcher and phone conversations between Salvadoran migrants residing in the United States and their family members in El Salvador. Dick and Arnold demonstrate that North/South differentiations are discursively reconfigured as participants take up hybrid, heterogeneous positions. Perrino also explores porous boundaries and heterogeneous stances taken on migrants and migration issues in Europe, describing what she calls “exclusionary intimacies.” Focusing on the Veneto region in Northern Italy, she examines speakers’ discursive struggles over migration with respect to three key interrelated developments. First, she describes how new exclusionary restrictions on migrants in Northern Italy are connected to local initiatives to revitalize local languages and folk traditions. Second, she shows how exclusionary restrictions and language revitalization initiatives have been influenced by the strong anti-immigrant agenda of the political party Lega Nord, the “Northern League” (Cavanaugh, 2012; Perrino, 2013, 2015). Third, she explores how practices of exclusion, inclusion, and various blends of the two play out in discursive interaction about migrants and migratory issues in Northern Italy. In particular, she shows how veiled exclusionary intimacies emerge in everyday discursive practices such as joke-telling. In joking performances called barzellette (‘short funny stories’), racialized language (Dick and Wirtz, 2011; Alim and Reyes, 2011; Reyes, 2011; Alim et al., 2016; Rosa, 2016) is enacted by Northern Italians in ways that at least partially exclude migrants, while including Northern Italians. By codeswitching from Standard Italian to Venetan, the local code of the Veneto region, when making racialized remarks in joke-telling events, for example, narrators exclude migrants while creating more intimate spaces of inclusion with an imagined audience that shares the local code. Through an analysis of these exclusionary dynamics, Perrino emphasizes the role of circulating ideologies around migrants and migration issues in Italy, at a historical moment in which migration crises in Europe (Albahari, 2015) and elsewhere have attracted wide international attention. Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002
Editorial / Language & Communication xxx (2017) 1–3
3
The inclusion and exclusion of migrants happens not only in face-to-face interaction but also in the digital realm, as De Fina demonstrates in her article about narratives from the online Dreamers Movement based in the United States. The young migrants who belong to this movement tell migration stories about their ambiguous lives. The ambiguity comes from the fact that, although they are included in American society because they live in the United States, they are at the same time partially excluded because of their undocumented status. They “strategically” construct their stories and their various identities with the aim of winning political battles. Using a theoretical framework in which identity is seen as a dynamic process, not as static label attached to individuals (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012; De Fina, 2012), De Fina studies the social identification Dreamers do in online storytelling events. She shows how they create plural, contradictory and polyphonic identities. She describes social identification processes in which ambiguity and porous boundaries are created. De Fina’s focus on narratives as contextualized discursive practices allows her to study the Dreamers’ moral stances when they align or disalign with political ideologies. Through a close analysis of these virtual participants’ lexical choices and uses of modality, she shows how they subtly align with circulating ideologies and reinforce them. Exploring stances toward identity and difference on college campuses in the US, Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes analyze linguistic diversity among students from different cultural backgrounds in order to counter processes of “erasure” (Irvine and Gal, 2000) or “lumping.” The authors use a three-phase method to collect “metacommentary” (Rymes, 2014) on language and communication. They examine discursive struggles over migration and diversity on US campuses, exploring less visible linguistic diversity at a large East Coast university. Like the other articles in this issue, the authors show how processes of inclusion and exclusion on college campuses have a “slippery nature” that affords flexible group boundaries and affiliations. They adopt a more processual approach, analyzing the complex stances taken toward migrants. As the authors demonstrate through these persuasive ethnographic examples, talk about migration is pervasive and potentially powerful. We must not analyze it by applying classic dichotomies or static approaches to social identification. Using a more processual approach to analyze discursive practices about migration reveals complex positioning and ideologies that would remain unobserved otherwise. We hope that the authors’ analyses will advance debates about language and migration and provide useful directions for future research. References Albahari, M., 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Alim, H.S., Rickford, J.R., Ball, A.F., 2016. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race. Oxford University Press, New York. Alim, S.H., Reyes, A., 2011. Introduction: complicating race: articulating race across multiple social dimensions. Discourse Soc. 22 (4), 379–384. Blommaert, J., 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercult. Pragmat. 4 (1), 1–19. Blommaert, J., 2015. Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 44 (1), 105–116. Carr, E.S., Lempert, M., 2016a. Introduction: pragmatics of scale. In: Carr, E.S., Lempert, M. (Eds.), Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. University of California Press, Oakland, CA, pp. 1–24. Carr, E.S., Lempert, M., 2016b. Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. University of California Press, Oakland, California. Cavanaugh, J.R., 2012. Entering into politics: interdiscursivity, register, stance, and vernacular in Northern Italy. Lang. Soc. 41 (01), 73–95. De Fina, A., 2012. Narratives as practices: Negotiating identities through storytelling. Narrat. Res. Appl. Linguist., 154–175. De Fina, A., 2009. From space to spatialization in narrative studies. In: Collins, J., Slembrouck, S., Baynham, M. (Eds.), Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration and Communicative Practices. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, NY, pp. 109–129. De Fina, A., Georgakopoulou, A., 2012. Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, New York. Dick, H., Wirtz, K., 2011. Racializing discourses. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 21, 2–10. Dong, J., Blommaert, J., 2009. Space, scale and accents: constructing migrant identity in Beijing. In: Collins, J., Slembrouck, S., Baynham, M. (Eds.), Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration and Communicative Practices. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, NY, pp. 42–61. Fleming, L., Lempert, M., 2011. Introduction: beyond bad words. Anthropol. Q. 84 (1), 0–24. Gumperz, J.J., 1968. The speech community. In: Sills, D.L. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Macmillan, New York, pp. 381–386. Hill, J., 1995. Junk Spanish, covert racism, and the (Leaky) boundary between public and private spheres. Pragmatics 5 (2), 197–212. Hill, J., 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA. Irvine, J.T., Gal, S., 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Kroskrity, P. (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp. 35–84. Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, New York. Perrino, S., 2013. Veneto out of Italy? Dialect, migration, and transnational identity. Appl. Linguist. 34 (5), 574–591. Perrino, S., 2015. Performing extracomunitari: mocking migrants in Veneto barzellette. Lang. Soc. 44 (2), 141–160. Reyes, A., 2011. ‘Racist!’: metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse by Asian American Youth. Discourse Soc. 22 (4), 458–473. Rosa, J.D., 2016. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 26 (2), 162–183. Rymes, B., 2014. Marking communicative repertoire through metacommentary. Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy, 1–17. Silverstein, M., 1998. Improvisational performance of culture in realtime discursive practice. In: Sawyer, K. (Ed.), Creativity in Performance. Ablex Publishing Corp., Greenwich, CT, pp. 265–312. Wortham, S., 2001. Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research Analysis. Teachers College Press, New York. Wortham, S., 2000. Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction. Narrat. Inq. 10 (1), 157–184.
Sabina Perrino * Binghamton University (SUNY), USA Stanton Wortham Boston College, USA Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Discursive struggles over migration
While talk about migration has often been contentious, in the United States as elsewhere, this topic has recently become even more salient in everyday discourse. This intensified after President Trump issued a global ban against migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries in January 2017, a ban that triggered protests across the globe and sparked public discussion of issues that have generally been tacit and even tabooed (Fleming and Lempert, 2011; Hill, 1995, 2008). Given recent political developments in Europe and in the United States, struggles over migration have become more visible not only in policy but also in everyday discourse. Our Special Issue, “Discursive Struggles over Migration,” explores everyday talk about migration, showing how discursive practices position migrants and longstanding residents in complex ways. Our contributors propose new approaches to analyzing talk about migration. All of the articles take more processual, heterogeneous and by-degrees approaches to analyzing face-to-face encounters (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham; Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes; Perrino) and online discursive practices (De Fina). They explore how boundaries are created and dissolved, using both a stance-taking (Perrino) and a scalar approach in which temporal and spatial scales are key analytical tools (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham). The articles address the theoretical and methodological challenges that linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists face when they analyze discursive struggles over migration. Before describing each contribution, we first offer an overview of the main theories and analytical tools used across the articles. A commentary by Susan Gal concludes the volume and draws together these themes. In recent years, many linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have explored the discursive production of inclusion and exclusion in everyday lives. They have attended to explicit and implicit processes of boundary making and unmaking, emphasizing boundaries’ fluidity more than their rigidity. This work suggests that classic dichotomies such as outsider/insider, exclusion/inclusion and public/privatedwhich have long preoccupied social scientistsdare no longer useful analytical tools. It has become clear that outsiderness and insiderness are not dichotomous, but are instead heterogeneous and blurred, with porous boundaries (Dick and Arnold; De Fina; Nichols and Wortham; Perrino). States of in-betweenness (Dick and Arnold; Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes) are more common than rigid categorizations. Someone who is considered an “outsider” can also be partly an “insider,” depending on the configuration of resources that participants mobilize in a particular speech event. When applied to migratory processes and to the discursive practices associated with migration, these new analytical tools can unveil subtle, sometimes disconcerting dynamics in which migrants are positioned in various ways and in which racialized language might emerge more or less tacitly (Nichols and Wortham; Perrino). The articles address questions such as: How do social actors discursively position self and others as different kinds of participants in events where racialized remarks about migrants are made (Nichols and Wortham; Perrino)? How do these positionings change over the course of an interaction and how are they discursively negotiated by social actors who seek to overcome them (Dick and Arnold; De Fina; Nichols and Wortham; Perrino)? These and similar questions have occupied scholars working on issues related to language and migration, and the challenge for analysts has been to develop better analytical tools to study exclusionary and inclusionary processes as they actually occur in everyday discursive practices. A more processual perspective to studying these issues is essential for understanding the discursive dynamics that otherwise would remain “covert” (Hill, 2008). The articles make important contributions in this direction. Over the past decade, linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic research has convincingly demonstrated that analyses of everyday discursive practices must take into account both the “denotational text,” the content of what is being said, and the “interactional text,” the ongoing social action among speech participants (Silverstein, 1998; Wortham, 2000, 2001). Only through such analyses can we appreciate the emergence and complexity of participation frameworks and discursive action. Participant roles in interactional texts are not routinely stable, but are instead often dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. This research thus requires an approach that departs both from classic notions of speech communities (Gumperz, 1968) and from
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.03.002 0271-5309/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002
2
Editorial / Language & Communication xxx (2017) 1–3
sociological principles in which migrants are imagined as part of generalizable and undifferentiated groupings. The articles in this issue take such an approach in exploring the complex, shifting positions taken in discourse about migration. This Special Issue is also inspired by Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, in which social identification is seen as a product of heterogeneous networks of resources that come together in contingent configurations (Nichols and Wortham). From a Latourian perspective, researchers can follow social actors and objects across temporal and spatial scales (Blommaert, 2007; Carr and Lempert, 2016b), as some of the articles in this Special Issue demonstrate (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham). From this perspective, heterogeneity, states of in-betweenness, and porous boundaries are more suitable analytical tools for studying discursive practices about migration. Some of the authors explore their case studies through a scalar approach, instead of the more familiar and restrictive micro- vs. macro-framework. As some of the articles demonstrate (Dick and Arnold; Nichols and Wortham), scalar distinctions are not ideologically neutral (Carr and Lempert, 2016a), especially given the complex and shifting politics of migration. In their research in Beijing, for example, Dong and Blommaert emphasize the significance of scaling processes in migration studies by arguing that “[t] heories of spatial analysis, identity construction, scaling processes and centre-periphery models play key roles in understanding how migrants organize their linguistic repertoires” (Dong and Blommaert, 2009: 45; see also Blommaert, 2015). This recent research makes salient the various ways in which speakers navigate spatial and temporal scales as they participate in everyday discursive practicesdsuch as narratives about “imagined town trajectories” in a heterogeneous community in the United States (Nichols and Wortham) and the co-construction of “close distance” as it emerges in interactions involving Mexican and Salvadorian migrants (Dick and Arnold). The articles in this Special Issue adopt the following advances as they analyze discursive struggles about migration: 1) adopting a more processual, heterogeneous, and by-degrees perspective on positioning about migration in both face-to-face and online discursive practices; 2) tracing how speakers’ stances change across spatial and temporal scales; and 3) using innovative methodological and analytical tools to investigate discursive practices around migration as they emerge in particular contexts. We now turn to a brief overview of each article and show how these themes appear in each. Nichols and Wortham adopt a scalar approach, using the concept of spatialization (De Fina, 2009) to explore stories that circulate in an American town that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past two decades. Many residents tell stories about community renewal after the arrival of Mexican migrants, about how the immigrants have revitalized the town. At the same time, however, Black residents tell stories about “Black flight” in response to a sense of community disintegration that accompanied the growth of the Mexican community. The authors explore how Marshall residents draw on resources from across spatial and temporal scales (Blommaert, 2007; Carr and Lempert, 2016b) to narrate “imagined town trajectories.” Using Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, Nichols and Wortham explore social identification and “othering” as processes that draw on heterogeneous resources from various scales. The authors explore how various social actors represent past, present, and future spaces, and how their accounts vary when told by members of different ethnic groups and different generations. By exploring these narratives and the various alignments and evaluations communicated by their narrators, the authors are able to describe unfamiliar “othering” processes that more often remain “covert.” Nichols and Wortham demonstrate that “othering” is not a unidirectional process, but is instead heterogeneous, multifaceted, and multidirectional. Through an analysis of interactions between Mexican and Salvadoran migrants and the researcher, Dick and Arnold examine discursive practices about migration as a window on how social actors align with notions of “North” and “South.” Drawing on Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of “fractal recursivity,” the authors develop a theoretical framework that allows for states of inbetweenness in which outsiderness and insiderness become hybrid. Using a spatial and temporal scalar approach, Dick and Arnold describe cases of what they call “close distance” to show how North/South frameworks, and thus proximal and distant domains, can produce both difference and resemblance. Such cases of “close distance” yield nuanced, by degree forms of inclusion and exclusion across spatial and temporal scales (Carr and Lempert, 2016b). This discursive pattern emerges in both their sets of data: Interviews between Mexican migrants and the researcher and phone conversations between Salvadoran migrants residing in the United States and their family members in El Salvador. Dick and Arnold demonstrate that North/South differentiations are discursively reconfigured as participants take up hybrid, heterogeneous positions. Perrino also explores porous boundaries and heterogeneous stances taken on migrants and migration issues in Europe, describing what she calls “exclusionary intimacies.” Focusing on the Veneto region in Northern Italy, she examines speakers’ discursive struggles over migration with respect to three key interrelated developments. First, she describes how new exclusionary restrictions on migrants in Northern Italy are connected to local initiatives to revitalize local languages and folk traditions. Second, she shows how exclusionary restrictions and language revitalization initiatives have been influenced by the strong anti-immigrant agenda of the political party Lega Nord, the “Northern League” (Cavanaugh, 2012; Perrino, 2013, 2015). Third, she explores how practices of exclusion, inclusion, and various blends of the two play out in discursive interaction about migrants and migratory issues in Northern Italy. In particular, she shows how veiled exclusionary intimacies emerge in everyday discursive practices such as joke-telling. In joking performances called barzellette (‘short funny stories’), racialized language (Dick and Wirtz, 2011; Alim and Reyes, 2011; Reyes, 2011; Alim et al., 2016; Rosa, 2016) is enacted by Northern Italians in ways that at least partially exclude migrants, while including Northern Italians. By codeswitching from Standard Italian to Venetan, the local code of the Veneto region, when making racialized remarks in joke-telling events, for example, narrators exclude migrants while creating more intimate spaces of inclusion with an imagined audience that shares the local code. Through an analysis of these exclusionary dynamics, Perrino emphasizes the role of circulating ideologies around migrants and migration issues in Italy, at a historical moment in which migration crises in Europe (Albahari, 2015) and elsewhere have attracted wide international attention. Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002
Editorial / Language & Communication xxx (2017) 1–3
3
The inclusion and exclusion of migrants happens not only in face-to-face interaction but also in the digital realm, as De Fina demonstrates in her article about narratives from the online Dreamers Movement based in the United States. The young migrants who belong to this movement tell migration stories about their ambiguous lives. The ambiguity comes from the fact that, although they are included in American society because they live in the United States, they are at the same time partially excluded because of their undocumented status. They “strategically” construct their stories and their various identities with the aim of winning political battles. Using a theoretical framework in which identity is seen as a dynamic process, not as static label attached to individuals (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012; De Fina, 2012), De Fina studies the social identification Dreamers do in online storytelling events. She shows how they create plural, contradictory and polyphonic identities. She describes social identification processes in which ambiguity and porous boundaries are created. De Fina’s focus on narratives as contextualized discursive practices allows her to study the Dreamers’ moral stances when they align or disalign with political ideologies. Through a close analysis of these virtual participants’ lexical choices and uses of modality, she shows how they subtly align with circulating ideologies and reinforce them. Exploring stances toward identity and difference on college campuses in the US, Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes analyze linguistic diversity among students from different cultural backgrounds in order to counter processes of “erasure” (Irvine and Gal, 2000) or “lumping.” The authors use a three-phase method to collect “metacommentary” (Rymes, 2014) on language and communication. They examine discursive struggles over migration and diversity on US campuses, exploring less visible linguistic diversity at a large East Coast university. Like the other articles in this issue, the authors show how processes of inclusion and exclusion on college campuses have a “slippery nature” that affords flexible group boundaries and affiliations. They adopt a more processual approach, analyzing the complex stances taken toward migrants. As the authors demonstrate through these persuasive ethnographic examples, talk about migration is pervasive and potentially powerful. We must not analyze it by applying classic dichotomies or static approaches to social identification. Using a more processual approach to analyze discursive practices about migration reveals complex positioning and ideologies that would remain unobserved otherwise. We hope that the authors’ analyses will advance debates about language and migration and provide useful directions for future research. References Albahari, M., 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. 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De Fina, A., 2012. Narratives as practices: Negotiating identities through storytelling. Narrat. Res. Appl. Linguist., 154–175. De Fina, A., 2009. From space to spatialization in narrative studies. In: Collins, J., Slembrouck, S., Baynham, M. (Eds.), Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration and Communicative Practices. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, NY, pp. 109–129. De Fina, A., Georgakopoulou, A., 2012. Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, New York. Dick, H., Wirtz, K., 2011. Racializing discourses. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 21, 2–10. Dong, J., Blommaert, J., 2009. Space, scale and accents: constructing migrant identity in Beijing. In: Collins, J., Slembrouck, S., Baynham, M. (Eds.), Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration and Communicative Practices. Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, NY, pp. 42–61. Fleming, L., Lempert, M., 2011. Introduction: beyond bad words. 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Sabina Perrino * Binghamton University (SUNY), USA Stanton Wortham Boston College, USA Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] Please cite this article in press as: Perrino, S., Wortham, S., Discursive struggles over migration, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langcom.2017.03.002