• 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: 882

Part of Session 158: Language biographies and migration experiences in urban contexts (Other abstracts in this session)

Language, biography, and performance: Staging the Spanish migrant experience in Paris

Authors: Divita, David
Submitted by: Divita, David (Pomona College, United States of America)

Scholars in applied and sociolinguistics have turned in recent years to language (auto)biographies as a source for understanding the subjective dimension of language acquisition and multilingual experience (Benson and Nunan 2004; Kramsch 2009; Pavlenko 2007; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000). Focusing on narratives produced in institutional and professional contexts—that is, by foreign language students and writers of literary memoirs—this body of research has provided insight into the relationships among an individual’s experience of language learning, the role that language plays in her biographical trajectory and the narratives through which she constructs it.

In this paper, I seek to expand this pool of data by examining an act of collaborative storytelling among a group of immigrants at a day center for Spanish seniors in a suburb north of Paris. The majority of Spaniards who attend the center participated in a wave of migration to Paris in the 1960s, pursuing possibilities of social mobility that were not available to them in Spain. They arrived in France as monolingual Spanish speakers; over time and in naturalistic settings, however, they acquired French to varying degrees of proficiency and now make use of their multilingual repertoires in ways that partly reflect their experience of the sociohistorical conditions in which this acquisition occurred.

With the historical particularities of this community in mind, I draw on ethnographic data that I collected in the Centro’s weekly theater workshop, examining over 20 hours of audio and video recordings made as students created and rehearsed a performance for the annual Día Mundial del Libro celebration—a series of sketches that explore a woman’s conflicted decision to return to her pueblo from Paris. Through anthropological accounts of performativity (Bauman and Briggs 1990), I analyze the theatrical texts alongside the interactions through which they were produced, focusing on moments of disagreement among individuals about what this representation of their past should or should not include. My data not only highlight the variation that must be resolved in order for a community to construct a coherent narrative about itself, but they also reveal how local systems of value—here, between France and Spain, city and country, monolingualism and multilingualism—provide a scaffold in relation to which community members articulate individual narratives of migration.

References:

Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59-88.

Benson, P., & Nunan, D. (2004). Learners' Stories: Difference and Diversity in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kramsch, C. (2009). The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163-188.

Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.