• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1058

Part of Session 192: Margins vs Megapoles (Other abstracts in this session)

Exploring the construction of supervernacularised semiotic products at the margins

Authors: Spotti, Massimiliano (1); Juffermans, Kasper (2); Wang, Xuan (3)
Submitted by: Spotti, Massimiliano (Tilburg University, Netherlands, The)

Globalisation has generated social, cultural and linguistic superdiversity: an increasing fragmentation and diversification of patterns of previously existing diversities. Although the implications of superdiversity are mostly studied in urban agglomerates, the present contribution proposes three case studies that deal with the implications of superdiversity at the margins (Vertovec 2006) where the margins are not interpreted  as  spaces characterised by geographical remoteness alone - but as socio-semiotic spaces that are not default destinations of Appaduraian (1996) flows (of people, images, technologies, money and ideas).

In the first case, we illustrate how we can read new and old scales of globalisation in a small telephone booklet encountered in a West African village. The booklet, manufactured in French by Nescafé, but belonging to a rural dweller in predominantly Mandephone and official Anglographic Gambia, contains entries in various handwritings, mainly in roman script, but in a predominant Arabographic right-to-left order, suggesting that literacy is inherently heterographic and polycentric here. In the second case, we illustrate the cultural significance of hip-hop in rural China (the Enshi region in Hubei province). It features highly hybrid multilingual practices in Enshi dialect, standard Chinese Putonghua, and English, and creates a new poetics of Enshi rap via intense and innovative language mixing. Meanwhile, it relies on the technology of the internet for production and circulation, reaching its audience in diverse places. In the third case, we illustrate how the global tourism industry and a locally run business build upon truncated multilingualism. Taking as example a supermarket in Samiland (Northern Finland), we show how ‘language display’, although going against a normative view of language, helps to mobilise a series of indexes that allow for branding and upscaling this supermarket beyond the local economy in which it is inserted.

These three case studies, we suggest, stand as pars pro toto of a larger theoretical exercise that invites us to critically examine objects, artefacts, interactions as well as processes of happening at the margins as semiotic products of supervernacularisation (Blommaert & Rampton 2011). That is, semiotic products that although finely grained in their (marginal) localities, contain a grasp of the, at times divergent, multi-directional processes of globalisation, de-globalisation, and re-globalisation (Ikuta 2010).