Unmarked Racializing Discourse, Facework, and Identity in Talk about Immigrants in Italy

Abstract

Drawing from research on racial formation processes in discourse concerning immigrants to Italy, this article argues that when racializing discourses are introduced as unmarked in a conversation, the coparticipant is put in a position of having to readily agree or openly disagree—with the second option endangering face. Racializing discourses introduced as unmarked thus tend to obtain acquiescence from the coparticipant. At the same time, they work at constructing shared identities around racist and racializing stances, where the unmarking becomes indexical of such shared identities. Instead of seeing racism as a stable belief in the mind of the individual, my analysis suggests that we should consider it as something the person does in interaction. The requirements of conversational rules of engagement, the needs of face, the relationship among the interactants, as well as their moral view, influence the participants' response to racializing discourses in interaction, and whether they might coconstruct or oppose them. [racialization, markedness theory, facework, racism, immigration, Italy]

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

“…Exclusionary practices towards migrants have been emerging as well at various levels, not only explicitly, but also tacitly and subtly, sometimes by just avoiding certain topics. As Pagliai (2011) has demonstrated in her research on migrants' narratives in Prato, Tuscany, when the topics of the conversation turn toward migrants and migration issues, Italians sometimes prefer to avoid taking a stance to defend migrants in order to save face with their Italian interlocutors. This discursive practice is common in other Italian regions as well.…”

“…Alignment and disalignment have been recently explored through the concept of stance, which has been defined by Du Bois (2007) as a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field. (Du Bois, 2007: 163) The fact that stance is achieved "dialogically" through alignments and disalignments has recently made it a useful analytical tool for linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists both in research on face-to-face interaction (Lempert, 2008;Jaffe, 2009Jaffe, , 2015Kiesling, 2011;Pagliai, 2011) and in studies focused on the digital world such as the blogosphere (Jaffe and Walton, 2011) or YouTube (Chun and Walters, 2011;Rymes, 2012;Chun, 2013Chun, , 2016Koven and Simões Marques, 2015;Mendoza-Denton, 2016). Stancetaking also has the potential to be a valuable tool to study the subtle moves interactants make to include or exclude speech participants in settings where migrants are present or topics around migration are brought up.…”

Non-alignment in footing, intentionality and dissent in talk about immigrants in Italy

“…14 The co-participants can also force the speaker to ''come out'' and state their position in less ambiguous terms. 15 As I show elsewhere (Pagliai, 2011), people may find themselves in contexts where they feel pressured to agree with racist views that they do not share. In these cases, they may experience notable stress both in acquiescing and in disagreeing.…”

Translanguaging within Enactments of Quotidian Interpreter‐Mediated Interactions

“…In a previous study (Reynolds and Orellana ), we noted that interpreter‐mediated encounters comprise an especially marked subset of these practices, one in which additional situational and, especially, institutional norms impact how language brokering takes place and is experienced. This is especially true in the current social and political‐economic era—an era in which, due to a conservative backlash concerning immigration (Dick ; Pagliai ; Santa Ana , , ), child language brokers, in some high‐stakes exchanges, may experience either their own or their parents' racialization as well as the hidden injuries of class (Kwon ).…”