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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 912

Part of Session 129: Multilingualism and emotions in urban settings (Other abstracts in this session)

Emotions, Mobility and Boundaries: How Affect Constructs Social Difference and Sameness in (Trans)national Discourses

Authors: Bolonyai, Agnes
Submitted by: Bolonyai, Agnes (North Carolina State University, United States of America)

Contemporary sociolinguistics of global mobility and multilingualism has explored some of the ways in which transnational processes restructure time-space relations and people’s linguistic repertoires, while generating new identities, new social practices, and new patterns and domains of social differentiation and affiliation. A major focus has been on the increasingly complex and fluid links between language and identity—mediated by notions such as nation, culture, ideologies, boundaries, place and belonging—and how they are both constituted and constitutive of lived experiences of multilingual and transnational subjects (Baynham and De Fina 2005).  Although emotions have been tied to culture, identity, and language (Pavlenko 2005), and emotion management has been seen integral to navigating tensions and opportunities associated with mobility (McElhinny 2010), there has been little research that specifically addressed how affect as a situated socio-cultural practice becomes a resource for meaning making in multilingual transnational contexts. The goal of this paper is to investigate how affect is organized by mobility and displacement, through examining the discursive construction of emotions and its co-articulation with processes of social categorization and identification in personal identity narratives of transnational bilinguals. How does affect, and (un)available affective repertoires, figure in particular ways of knowing and ‘imagining’ self/other, especially in constituting boundaries and spaces of (un)belonging? What kind of discursive resources are used to display emotions and index affective stances and social voices in narrative accounts of transnational encounters?

This paper explores these questions by analyzing bilingual interactional data from a corpus of 70 hours of recorded informal interviews with 50 first and second generation Hungarian-American immigrants. The interviews were organized as small-group dinner-table conversations during which participants reflected on their life-experiences as migrants and gave perspectivized accounts of who they are, who others are, and where they belong. 

Drawing largely on notions of interactional sociolinguistics (voice, positioning, footing, role, stance, indexicality, emotion words, evaluative devices, deixis, code-switching), the analysis demonstrates how affect and emotion discourses are mobilized to (a) make sense of geographical/spatial (un)belongings and perform ‘boundary practices’ that create cultural difference/sameness; (b) enact and evaluate culturally privileged emotions, authentic and ‘misrecognized’ social personae, and durable language ideologies; (c) articulate subjectivities and voices anchored to the 'super-diverse', emotionally bounded identity positions (hybrid, homeless, cosmopolitan) in which transmigrants variably find themselves. It is argued that affective practices and repertoires, similarly to linguistic and other social practices, can be seen as part of ‘indexical biographies’ (Blommaert and Backus 2011) that provide a way of tracking the effects of mobility and multilingualism in people’s lives.

References:

Baynham, M. and A. De Fina. (eds.) (2005). Dislocations/Relocations. Narratives of Displacement. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Blommaert, J. and A. Backus. (2011). Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in Superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 67.

McElhinny, B. (2000). The audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of legitimacy and belonging. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 309-328.

Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge, UK: CUP.

Word count: 485