Constructing invisibility : An immigrant learner in South Africa

• This paper aims to contribute to an epistemology of the global South (Santos 2012) by pointing to invisibilized processes of social production as a necessary starting point for greater ethical engagement and mutual intelligibility. It builds on research on the co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social categories to analyse the gradual invisibilisation of the linguistic and epistemic resources of a 13-year-old Cameroonian immigrant in diasporic and educational sites in Cape Town, South Africa. Invisibilisation is understood as an interdiscursive process achieved through a set of indexical phenomena including the operation of dual indexicality (Kulick 2003), tied into circulating discourses of belonging and constrained by institutional frameworks. Drawing on a four year linguistic ethnography, the chapter draws attention to the ways in which discursive processes construct orders of visibility, both momentary and of longer duration, which in turn rework local orders of indexicality and associated hierarchies of ‘race’, language, and ethnicity.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

multilingualism

immigrant children

identity

ethnicity

race

stance

linguistic ethnography

visibility

erasure

socialization

Bilingualism

tvåspråkighet

Linguistics

lingvistik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

rap (ämneskategori)