Manufacturing citizenship: Metapragmatic framings of language competencies in media images of mixed race men in South Korea

Abstract

This article examines how discourses of linguistic (in)competency regiment productions of citizenship in the South Korean popular media. Through an analysis of newspaper articles and television programs, we investigate how depictions of language competency become key resources for locating individuals within genealogies of kinship and chronotopic figures of personhood. In some cases, the speech of these celebrities associates them with imaginings of their backwards, low-class Korean kin, the Japanese colonial period, and American military presence, while in other cases, their language is associated with the 21st-century ideal of the modern, elite, globetrotting neoliberal subject. This analysis demonstrates how competence is read in relation to changing notions of citizenship in the new ‘multicultural’ Korea as these men are differentially positioned between multiple raced, classed, and gendered imaginings of Whiteness and Koreanness. More generally, we argue that understandings of linguistic competence are social productions, rather than reflections of language ability.

Speaking French in Portugal: An analysis of contested models of emigrant personhood in narratives about return migration and language use

“…Despite the rising interest in transnationalism among cultural anthropologists (Appadurai ; Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc ; Borneman and Fowler ; Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc ; Kearny ; Rouse , ), language scholars have only recently adopted more transnational approaches to how migrants' sociolinguistic lives transcend borders of single nation states (Blommaert ; Dick , ; Koven ). A handful address how migrants orient not only to ‘receiving,’ but to ‘sending societies’ (Blommaert ; Dick , in press; Duranti ; Gal ; Haugen ; Koven ; Lo and Kim ; Mendoza‐Denton ; Park ; Tsuda ; Wagner ; Zentella ). This article contributes to this growing literature about how transnationals understand the links between language and identity categories polycentrically , relative to multiple sociolinguistic ‘centers’ (Blommaert ), including their societies of origin.…”

Life here beyond now: Chronotopes of the ideal life among Iranian transnationals

“…Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc ; Kearney ; Vertovec ), scholarship on language and migration has also adopted more transnational approaches to the study of migrants’ sociolinguistic behaviors in recent years (e.g. Blommaert ; Dick , ; Duranti ; Gal ; Koven , , , ; Lo and Kim ; Mendoza‐Denton ; Park ). These scholars focus on the created link between sending and receiving societies and study how transnationals orient simultaneously to these two different centers ‘participating in multiple nationally defined sociolinguistic contexts’ (Koven : 325–326).…”

The role of the descriptor ‘broken English’ in ideologies about nonnative speech

“…Investigation of how such varieties are socially constructed can shed light on power relations among various social groups, as well as on how such relations may be maintained through everyday talk about speakers. In situations where a particular nonnative variety may be relevant, researchers have examined how listeners categorize and actively socially construct somewhat more specific varieties such as ‘Chinglish’ (Henry 2010), or even identities of individual speakers (Lo & Kim 2011). However, in the US, varieties of nonnative 1 speech may not be distinguished clearly in monolingual speakers’ minds, so more general categories of ‘native’ vs. ‘nonnative’ may be the primary distinction (Lindemann 2003, 2005).…”