This article examines how so-called ordinary
or casual conversational practices in the contemporary United
States are constrained and structured in terms of where, when,
how, and with whom people choose and are able to interact socially.
The focus of analysis is the middle-class sociolinguistic practice
of “coffeetalk” – a term borrowed from U.S.
popular culture to signal the naturalized conflation of
conversation with the commercialized consumption of coffee,
space, and other commodities. The discussion of coffeetalk involves
research methods including critical analyses of the marketing
rhetoric of coffeehouse corporations; informal interviews with
coffeehouse owners, employees and patrons; and the author's
observations as a “native” participant in coffeetalk
and other commodified modes of middle-class social interaction.
By situating coffeetalk within its spatial, temporal and social
contexts, this analysis challenges the claim of some sociolinguists
that conversation is a “naturally occurring” phenomenon
that is ontologically prior to other speech genres. A systematic
investigation of the material and social dimensions of seemingly
ordinary conversational practices demonstrates that these are
inextricably implicated in the political, economic, and
cultural-ideological processes of global capitalism, as symbolized
by the increasingly ubiquitous Starbucks Coffee Company.
Inspired by Jane Hill's analyses of the racial and national implications of Mock Spanish and other forms of linguistic appropriation, this paper analyzes the use and nonuse of Nigerian Pidgin (NP) by Nigerian popular singers. Their performances combine elements of coastal west African musical styles with hip hop and/or reggae, and their lyrics variably juxtapose NP and various Nigerian languages with African American English and occasionally Jamaican Creole. By aligning Nigerians' cultural and political experiences with those of African Americans and Jamaicans—whose languages have also been stigmatized as “broken English”—these artists engage a Black Atlantic cultural tradition while simultaneously indexing a distinctly Nigerian public within that imagined transnational space. The formation of this public is complicated, however, by (among other things) the fact that Hausa‐speaking Muslims from northern Nigeria are less likely than other Nigerians to use and affiliate with NP. [Nigeria, creole, nation, music, race]
This article explores how, in talk about sex, Nigerian Hausa men who self-identify as homosexual or womanlike and a Euro-American gay male ethnographer reified racially distinct sexualities against a backdrop of perceived sexual similarity. These discursive transformations indexed and (reconstructed prototypes of ethnic, racial and national identities, and articulated speakers' claims to, or denials of, those identities. Such claims are connected to the global workings of wealth and power, and the discourses of desire and difference that inform and sustain them.
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