Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

Abstract

In this special issue, we 1 build on Bauman's seminal observation about performance, that 'the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surrounding and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience ' (2000:1). More recently, scholars have moved to examining the performative role of heteroglossia, that is, the use of multiply sourced, semiotic (verbal and nonverbal) forms. 2 In particular, this line of research has shown how attention to heteroglossic performances and their local interpretations can illuminate the subtle politics of dominant and nondominant identities in different ethnographic contexts. This is particularly true of what Coupland (2007) calls 'high performances', which, as Bell & Gibson (2011:558) write, are privileged sites for allowing participants to indexically associate expressive forms with social personae. Thus, while all performances are inherently reflexive, heteroglossic performances particularly amplify that reflexivity with respect to their multiple frames, voices, and stances that they presuppose and establish.The articles in this special issue thus investigate the diversity of heteroglossic resources, associated processes of social identification, participation frameworks, and political implications at stake in performance. The articles examine how performers evoke, stage and implicitly evaluate recognizable voices from the larger social world, and how audiences respond to and display their recognition of performers' aesthetically and politically charged stagings of those voices. As a collection, the articles then also explore how people use sets of semiotic resources to gradiently challenge and/or reinscribe normative ideologies and locally recognized, hierarchically organized identity categories.

Airing Ethnic and Linguistic Identities Through Public Media Comic Performances: Challenging and Reinscribing Normative Ideologies

“…Degrading because these marginalized people, languages and identities are still seen as objects worth laughing at" (May 17, 2015). As Jaffe et al (2015b) once again summarize: the act of putting a heteroglossic performance on stage is itself resistant, insofar as it presents as legitimate forms of linguistic, and by extension, cultural hybridity. At the same time, the hu morous key of all of these performances may mitigate those claims on legitimacy, because comedy can be bracketed off fro m the 'real' and the 'serious'.…”

Parodies of whiteness: Die Antwoord and the politics of race, gender, and class in South Africa

“…PERFORMANCE, VOICING, AND (META)PARODY Bauman (2004:9) describes (staged) performance as an act of cultural display, in which the 'act of expression itself is … objectified, lifted out to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened up to interpretive and evaluative scrutiny by an audience.' Objectifying culture in this way serves a number of purposes, notable among them the transmission of local knowledge and customs and the re-articulation of a community's values and norms (e.g., Jaffe 2000Jaffe , 2015. Yet performance does more than simply transmit already existing cultural practices; it can also challenge those practices and be the impetus for cultural change.…”

“…We then turn to an outline of our framework for the study of staged performance (Bell & Gibson 2011). We focus here on the tactics available for dis/aligning with the voices present in polyphonic performance and the ways in which these dis/alignments relate to the construction of both parodic and metaparodic stances (e.g., Morson 1989;Dentith 2000;Chun 2004Chun , 2007Coupland 2007;Jaffe 2015). We go on to apply this framework to a detailed analysis of the music video for Die Antwoord's 2012 song 'Baby's on Fire', where we identify a variety of relevant personae that are evoked and positioned throughout the performance.…”

Stereotypes and chronotopes: The peasant and the cosmopolitan in narratives about migration*

“…People rely on “chunks of history” in the identity work they perform in the interactional present (Blommaert, 2015: 12). Analysis typically identifies the “pivotal reflexive role of the dynamic relations between time and space” (Jaffe, Koven, Perrino, & Vigouroux, 2015: 138) in identity performance. An earlier tradition also drawing on the chronotope in sociolinguistics comes from those working at the intersection of ideology and interaction.…”