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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 658

Part of Session 127: Language outside of the city (Other abstracts in this session)

Poeticizing the economy: Market forces, heteroglossic performances and language on the French island of Corsica

Authors: Jaffe, Alexandra Mystra
Submitted by: Jaffe, Alexandra Mystra (California State University Long Beach, France)

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between language, performance and power in the heteroglossic space of tourist texts and interactions on the French island of Corsica. These texts include written, graphic and multimodal publications directed at tourists (or located in spaces central to the tourist view), displays, demonstrations and informal oral interactions between tourists and Corsican tourist professionals offering culturally oriented tourist products (tours, crafts, food, musical or other expressive cultural forms), and representations of tourists and tourist interactions in sites or performances targeting an "inside" (Corsican) audience. The focus is the mise en scène (or staging) of language(s) as a focal point for the negotiation of meanings and identities, and the embedding of language and language practices in economic/commercial practice. The meanings of these performances are shaped by a dynamic process of production and reception; they index, draw their meanings from, take up a position towards and potentially transform collective experiences of "center" and "periphery". For speakers of a minority language (Corsican) on an island "periphery" of France, these experiences include heteroglossia/diversity itself, as well as dominant discourses and stereotypes about Corsica and Corsican that are inevitably brought into play in the way that the island is imagined and represented to and by tourists and potential tourists. These stereotypical discourses and representations of Corsica and Corsican as commodified "alterities" in a tourist market constitute a set of stance objects that are mobilized in tourist performances. The analysis focuses on two idealized types of performance that constitute the poles of a continuum of specific ethnographic examples. In the first, dominant linguistic and cultural categories and boundaries remain more or less fixed, and languages are recruited primarily as market tools. In the second, these stance objects are creatively manipulated, recontextualized and reentextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Agha 2007). The result, to use a term coined by Tony Casalonga, a key cultural figure in Corsica who has been a driving force behind the successful marketing (to Corsicans and tourists) of musical and material culture in the village of Pigna, is the "poeticization of the economy." (Casalonga 2010). This poeticization recruits (often heterogenous) language practices (rather than languages) in the service of exchanges which create or presuppose relationships between languages, people and places that blur center:periphery/dominant:minority distinctions. In doing so, it offers the potential for social actors who are often subject to representations of themselves by others to exercise control over the way they, and their languages, are mediated and mediatized (Jaffe 2011).